Steve, his eyes moving from Sharon to a newspaper reproduction of a National Gallery acquisition of the past year, seeing the extraordinary resemblance between the two, knew that this was additional proof of a conviction that actually needed no further proof. For in looking at “The American Venus” he looked at Psyche.
“There should be a medal struck in your honour, Wyn,” he said. “That case of Scotch will be delivered with a bunch of roses tied to it.”
“Is this a story that is going to stay off the record?”
“Consider it so until further notice.”
It was a story that he could break at once, if he wished; but for reasons that he did not stop to analyze too closely, he wanted to add to it anything he possibly could before doing so.
The following morning he left his downtown apartment early, and drove outside the city limits to circle the drive of a large stone house. Unchallenged, he briefly invaded a privacy hitherto unknown to him. From there he went back into town to enlarge further, through channels of his own, his knowledge of the people who lived in that house.
This part of his program completed, he made it his business to discover as much as could be readily known about the painter of “The American Venus.” Using every connection he had, seeing no need here for secrecy, he learned more about Nick in four hours than Psyche had learned in four months. And when, toward evening, he in his turn walked across the big field to the converted barn, he was well armed in advance for an interview that he foresaw might have its difficulties.
Their antagonism was immediate.
Nick, cleaning brushes at the end of a day's work, was caught completely off guard by a visitor as unexpected as he was undesirable. He had been equally surprised by Sharon's visit. On that occasion, however, he had realized at once that discretion was a mutual aim, and that in refusing to tell her what she wanted to know he might unnecessarily create an unpleasant situation. The purpose behind this tall, lazily moving newspaperman's presence in the studio seemed obscurely threatening; for Steve, after debating the advisability of doing so, had decided in favour of making his profession clear, while at the same time intimating that he would not necessarily use what he learned.
Given time, Nick would have been acute enough to see that he could keep his own counsel with impunity. As it was, he gave
ground steadily before subtle pressures well known to a man used to extracting information from those unwilling to part with it.
Steve, lounging against the model's stand on which Psyche had once posed, his back to the light, finally rose to his feet, satisfied that he had learned all he needed to know. But when he reached the head of the stairs, he turned to make a sudden stab at something that he neither needed nor really wanted to know.
“How long did she live here?”
Nick, who had not admitted in so many words that she had lived in the studio at all, replied easily, “A little over four months, but I would like it clearly understood that she did so alone. I myself, as you already know, do not live here.”
Grey eyes and hazel fought a last silent duel, but this time the brilliant hazel eyes were unrevealing, giving away nothing.
Steve, striding back across a field, now warm with sunset light, thought, “He's lying, damn his soul!”âand cursed himself for caring one way or the other.
In his car again, he did not turn back to the city, but took the road to the north, following at once the only lead that the artist had given him. And when he passed Oliver's close to nine in the evening, he refused to examine his own feelings. But he could not banish an image of Psyche that had gone with him through every step of his search. It was as if she were in the car with him, and all he would have to do to prove this would be to put out his hand and touch her. Both innocent and sophisticated, vulnerable and strong, as appealing in laughter as in tears, she could not be submerged in her story as he would have liked.
After a night spent in a second-rate motel, he spent the greater part of the following day at a shack that, following the artist's reluctant instructions, he found without difficulty.
It was one of his many gifts that he could adapt himself easily and unselfconsciously to almost any surroundings. Perceptive, sensitive to the embarrassments inherent in the mixing of different classes and conditions of humanity, he fitted himself briefly into Butch and Mag's primitive existence as if he had always been a part of it.
His shirt sleeves rolled up, his hands in his trousers pockets, he
was audience to Butch's Sunday ritual of garbage disposal. Perfectly seriously, he listened to Butch's somewhat improbable plans for retirement. Sharon and Dwight had made it quite possible for him to retire; but it would take Butch some years to get beyond the planning stage.
Apparently more than comfortable, Steve sat with Mag on the sagging red couch, and listened to the big woman talk on a subject obviously close to her heartâher kid. And as she talked, an ineradicable picture of a thin, lonely, tow-headed child was etched on his memory. A picture all the clearer because of the simplicity of the language with which it was evoked.
Butch and Mag, thinking him an emissary of the kid's parents âan idea he did nothing to contradictâwere both friendly and expansive. That they should have any other reason for being hospitable did not occur to him.
When, after having shared two meals with them, he prepared to leave, he was curiously reluctant to bid them what he considered to be a quite final good-bye. And he would, even then, have been torn between chagrin and amusement, if he could have heard the exchange between them after he had turned away from the shack.
Side by side, they watched him until he had disappeared amongst slag hills already merging with a night sky.
“That there's a real man, that is,” Butch said weightily.
Contentment was an almost visible mantle around Mag's shoulders. “He wasn't givin” nothin' away, but it was easy to see. The kid's got herself a good man. We'll be seein' the both of them together the next time.”
Needing time in which to think, Steve checked in for the night at a commercial hotel in the nearby townâthe same hotel, as it happened, where Nick had once paced a dreary room and rebelled against rain that kept him from painting.
Following almost the same trail over which Sharon had travelled three months earlier, he now knew a great deal more than she did, because he knew, as she did not, where the trail might properly be said to end. There were still gaps, it was true, but he no longer judged these to be of any real consequence. Whatever had happened
to her between leaving the artist and turning up outside Oliver's in the oil truck, she had profited rather than lost by it. He had, at the shack, been given a convincing portrait of a “good kid”. He himself had met a lovely girl. Not just pretty, or attractive, but lovely in every way. Between these two it was quite impossible to credit any aberration in her own pattern of personal behaviour.
His face deep-etched with fatigue, he mixed himself a drink, turned out the lights, and sat down in an old leather arm-chair by the window. Then, and only then, did he admit to himself what he must have known subconsciously through the whole of the preceding forty-eight hours.
He had pursued her back across the years not in order to expose her, but so that he could know how best to help and protect her. If she would let him, he would protect her to the best of his ability across all the years that lay ahead of her. But this was something that would have to be postponed, the pressing of any claim he might make on her. There were two others, who had apparently never given up an almost hopeless search, who must first be allowed to re-establish a prior claim.
Mag had said, “The kid was always dreamin' of her own folks.”
They, he now knew, had never stopped dreaming of her.
They would, those three, be able to make their own adjustments without any help from him or anyone else. Where they would need help would be in finding peace and privacy in which to do this.
Some publicity was unavoidable.
Knowing the newspaper business inside and out, concentrating in darkness that allowed no distractions, Steve outlined in his mind a story expressly designed to suppress rather than to invoke curiosity. It would have to be, he saw, a story that emphasized the original drama of the kidnapping while inferring that there had been no drama, as such, since. He could count on the co-operation of the miner and his wife because they loved her. He could count on Nick's co-operation because Nick loved himself. He could count on other newspapermen to let the thing drop on the basis of his own reputation for never failing to get a complete story.
Thank God, he had got in on the ground floor. With care, and there would be no lack of care on his part, it could be an overnight sensation, and that would be it.
“Psyche,” he said aloud. “Psyche.”
It was morning, and the sun was shining, and Psyche was again alone in the empty restaurant when he walked in. To Steve, it was as if the present time had stood still in order to allow the years to catch up with it. To be precise, seventeen years. He felt that he had known her, not briefly, but always.
He walked directly to the counter behind which she stood, and, without speaking, laid his hands palms upward on it.
For a moment Psyche did not move. Then, slowly, but without any hesitation, she placed her own hands in his.
“Would you trust me again?” he asked quietly.
“Yes, Steve.”
“Then go and get your purse, or whatever you think you might need for the balance of the day. Change your dress, if you like, but you don't need to. You look perfect just as you are. I'm taking you to see some people who are rather interested in you. I'll tell you about them after we are on our way.”
“But Ollieââ” Psyche began uncertainly.
“I called Ollie earlier this morning.”
This can only mean one thing. Psyche thought. He is taking me to see friends of his, perhaps even his family. And desperation, which had been steadily building up during two days in which she had begun to wonder if she would ever see him again, dissolved before overwhelming happiness. Happiness marred only by the desolate thought that no reciprocal gesture would ever be possible, that nowhere had she anyone of her own to whom she could introduce him.
“Theseâthese people,” she said. “Do they know we're coming?”
“Yes,” he told her. “They know we're coming.”
T
HE
chimes of the front door-bell sounded in the well of the circular staircase, musical but clear, their echoes fading softly against the thick, warm silence of the house.
A maid stepped through an archway under the stairs, to wait for a repetition of a sound she was not quite sure she had heard. And, as she stood there, a shaft of late afternoon sunlight, falling athwart the chandelier above her head, scattered a shower of prismatic colours over her black-and-white uniform, transforming it momentarily into motley out of place in time and locale.
Again the bell rang, still musical, but this time unmistakable in the prearranged pattern of a summons she had been told to expect.
Moving quietly away from beneath the soundless fall of colour, she crossed the hall diagonally and traversed a long living-room to French windows and a garden that dropped in terraced levels to a bed of delphiniums as blue in their fall flowering as the blue sky above.
Sharon, her hand in Dwight's, walking close to the delphiniums, saw the girl immediately, and walked swiftly to meet her.
“Is she here?” she asked, as soon as she was within earshot, and her husky voice broke a little on the simple words.
“Yes, ma'am, she's here. I did as you said. I didn't answer the door.”
With a smile more brilliant than her wheat-gold hair, Sharon
thanked the girl, dismissed her, and turned to Dwight who was now at her side.
“Dwightâdarling” she whispered, while she thought,
“He was right, the waiting has been easier here than it would have been inside. And nowâI must not, must not runââ”
Then she was running as she had never run before.