Psyche (43 page)

If she had attempted to ape manners to which she was unaccustomed simply because she was self-conscious and ill at ease, she would in all probability have failed, or, at best, succeeded only in part. Motivated by a desire to please, and building on a firm basis of natural grace and poise, she was extraordinarily successful. Satisfied though she was with this success, it yet contained in itself some component of conditions which she found daily more oppressive.

Only in the evenings did the suffocating atmosphere within the glass cage lighten a little. Shut up in the library, partially mesmerized by Scarletti's forceful personality, she nevertheless regained a foothold on what to her was solid ground. The doctor's interest, because it was not sympathetic, because it was entirely clinical, steadied her, allowed her to see people and events outside the cage without distortion.

During dinner, the intensity of his regard, rarely releasing her for more than a minute at a time, was very close to unbearable. But as soon as they were alone together, like a judge retiring into the vested anonymity of wig and gown, the man as such became subservient to his purpose. And since that purpose was that she walk, with all the ease and naturalness possible, the familiar paths of her own yesterdays, she renewed herself in the course of increasingly long evening sessions. Like Penelope unraveling each day's work between sunset and the next sunrise, she was able to untangle the web of uncertainty and distress which Nora's subtle malice wove around her in the daytime, shaking herself free of invisible strands which, if they had been allowed to accumulate, would have dragged her down as they were intended to do.

Nora, on the other hand, found no relief for the suspicion, jealousy, and outraged vanity that, seeded together, were blossoming in her like some evil, hybrid fungus. If she had thought Psyche unattractive, she would still have fiercely resented her presence in the house. Sensing in her an attraction far more potent than that of mere good looks, her original objective animosity had turned into a vicious dislike that she had more and more difficulty in concealing. The seeking of amusement where and as she pleased, if done discreetly, was one of the rights she
had wrested from a marital bargain heavily weighted in her favour. To have freedom thrust upon her, however, was not what she wanted at all, and the soft click of the library door closed against her evening after evening was a fan for fires that scarcely needed fanning. A small, slim cat, its long nails symbolically bloodied, she held a wicked temper on the fraying leash of her own best interests.

It was a leash that snapped on the night when Dr. Scarletti, without thinking, not only closed but locked the library door.

5

T
HE
last friday in august was one of sultry heat that flowed across the day into an oppressive blue-purple twilight.

Sitting deep in a red leather arm-chair to whose contours she now adjusted herself automatically, Psyche looked beyond the desk and its pool of light, beyond the doctor's handsome mediaeval head, and out through open windows to the fountain, a pale wraith dying slowly, unevenly, in the silent grasp of evening. Listening intently, she sought to catch the echo of falling water, but it was a cool whisper too faint to reach her.

“I believe there is going to be a storm,” the doctor remarked.

Perversity claimed Psyche. “Do you? I don't.”

A long, spatulate finger placed on the book in front of him, Dr. Scarlatti continued as if she had not spoken. “It will break before midnight. And now, I think we are ready to begin.”

When you say it will storm, a storm is to be expected. Psyche thought with silent irony. When you are ready, we are ready.
Odd that I should be of such importance to you in one respect, and so completely unimportant in all others. I wonder what you would do if I were to get up, say I was weary of this, that as far as I could see it was leading me nowhere, and that what you were getting out of it was of as little interest to me as my concerns appear to be to you.

Looking up, she found Scarletti's brilliant eyes fixed on her, and, a little taken aback, knew by his next words that he had in this instance read her mind with extreme accuracy.

“You would perhaps like to know one of my most recent deductions,” he said smoothly. “It will undoubtedly please and startle you. Yours is, or was, a wealthy family.”

“That must be guesswork!”

“Conjecture, if you like. I do not indulge in guesswork.”

Neither her face nor her voice betraying how little this idea pleased her, Psyche asked evenly, “What makes you think so?”

“If you don't mind, we will not go into it in detail at present.”

And if I do mind? We will still not go into it. He must be guessing. I have told him nothing which could have led him to such a conclusion. Or have I? I cannot see the fountain any more. It must be night. And tomorrow will be another day, and then another night, and a day, and a night and—and I don't think I can stand much more of this.

The doctor, regarding her as he might have regarded a specimen on a dissecting table, knew now that if his conclusions were correct, she could only have been separated from her family in one of two ways, loss or kidnapping. He inclined toward the latter theory because loss without recovery would have been possible only if travelling had been involved, and nothing had turned up to indicate any gap between her hitherto subconscious memories, now shaping into a credible whole, and her known beginnings. He was even prepared to wager that her birthplace was in the same country in which she had been brought up, rather than across the nearby border as it might quite easily have been. With cold exultation, he realized that when his hypothesis was complete, he would in all probability be able to put his hand on immediate, tangible proof of its essential correctness. Another ten
days at most and he would be ready to put his theories to the test. A lesser man might have been tempted to jump the gun, but not Scarletti. As a student he had been contemptuous of those who looked up the answers in order to work both ends toward the middle, and he had not changed. To him a solution he could not produce himself was not worth having.

“To-night,” he said, “I intend to vary our procedure a little. I want you to look forward rather than backward. It will be useful at this juncture to know what your aims are, what you think you might do with your life.”

Psyche did not reply at once, and when she did, it was to say slowly, “I don't know.”

A shadow of impatience clouded the doctor's unwavering gaze. “That is not an answer. You have not fought an unfortunate environment for nothing.”

Lacing slender hands tightly together, Psyche said evenly, “I didn't think so—once. Now I do.”

“Now you do what?”

“Think it was for nothing.”

More than a little annoyed, Scarletti continued to question her for some time before he was forced to admit that his hitherto co-operative subject could neither be driven nor led in the particular direction he had chosen. That she was not being deliberately obstructive he knew, and yet at the same time there were elements in her refusal to think of the future that he felt she could have explained had she chosen to do so. Being thwarted in any way at all did not agree with him, and it was much earlier than usual, no more than ten o'clock, when he stood up abruptly, and said, “I think that will be enough for to-night.”

Psyche's small sigh of relief was very audible in the ensuing silence. “I can't” she began, and broke off. “What was that?”

The sound from the front hall had been very faint, but they had both heard it.

Muttering something unintelligible under his breath. Scarletti strode to the door, jerked at it, paused an instant in surprise when it did not give, and then unlocked and opened it. The hall, highly
polished woodwork gleaming softly in the light of a single wrought-iron lamp, was empty.

A moment before. Psyche had wanted nothing so much as to escape from the close seclusion of the library, but, as the doctor stood aside for her to pass, she moved forward into the hall with an unaccountable reluctance. She had reached the foot of the stairway, and her hand was already on the broad newel-post when Nora's voice, biting, malevolent, swung her around as suddenly as the lash of a whip might have done.

“Which was it, Maggie darling? Was I locked out—or were you locked in—or both?”

Her black dress melting into the darkness of the drawing-room behind her, emeralds flashing at her bare throat, Nora's head undulated like that of a cobra about to strike. “Was it an anatomy class to-night, Maggie—darling?”

Sick with shock, white to the lips, Psyche clung to the newel-post unable to move or speak, a frozen corner of a triangle completed by the doctor still standing at the entrance to the library.

Scarletti's voice was cold and emotionless, but it was the voice of wrath itself. “This time you have gone too far, Nora.”

The swaying figure in black shifted its focus of hate, and a soft hissing seemed to wrap itself around the sentences shaped by a thin red mouth. “I who have gone too far? Stop acting, you self-righteous hypocrite, if you haven't forgotten how! You think youare God, don't you? A little tin god before whom everyone must bow and scrape, and say yes and no as you dictate, and lick yourboots, and pay homage day and night in order to feed your insatiable vanity. You think”

Livid with anger, Scarletti cut in with such loathing in his voice and hooded eyes that, for a moment, Nora was silenced. “For this, my dear wife, I will see you stripped of all you possess, of every single thing you have taken from me, giving nothing in return. You are a parasite, a leech, from whom I will cut myself loose if it costs me all I have. You, and all your kind—useless, selfish, malice seeping from every over-perfumed pore—should be exterminated at birth. That you should be sterile is the only virtue you possess.”

Psyche, paralyzed by an ultimate and complete disillusionment, wished with every fibre of her being to run, and could not. What made her disillusion doubly terrible was the realization that these two had lived together feeling as they did, and might, for purely material reasons, conceivably continue to do so.

Her words no more than a hoarse whisper, she murmured, “No —no!”

Nora's green eyes flicked across her and then back to her husband. “You call yourself a doctor. I call you a vulture, savouring pickings from minds you render even more helpless than when they grope their way to you for succour. You feed on them, lordit over them, think yourself their superior——”

“Will you be quiet!”

“A little tin god with no soul,” Nora crooned, “in love with your own profile, stalking the corridors of your empty kingdom.”

Scarletti's hypnotic eyes blazed out of a smile that might have been modelled in old ivory. “A kingdom from which you are about to be exiled, my dear Nora. From the outside, looking in, you may think more highly of it. You are, I promise you, going to be poor, and therefore alone, your neuroses patterning your face daily with fresh lines.”

“While you become arthritic from kneeling at the altar of your own ego!” Nora flung at him. “And don't mislead yourself into thinking I won't be there to see it.
I
am not leaving, but your slum-reared patient is! And I tell you now that if you ever again try to bring any of your damned derelicts into this house, I will see you pilloried in every newspaper in the country. When I am through with you, you won't even be accepted as a veterinarian.”

Still smiling, Scarletti said softly, “I have evidence collected against such a contingency as this. Evidence on which I can, and will, secure an uncontested divorce, unpleasant though the proceedings will be. I am in a position to get rid of you, my dear Nora, without the necessity of gagging you with so much as a single dollar bill.”

Taking one cat-like step forward, Nora almost spat at him. “Uncontested! You fool! Do you imagine that the games you have
played here in this house with your—your bedraggled blondewon't provide”

Psyche, running up the stairs, nausea climbing her throat, stumbled as she reached the top. The silken pile of thick carpeting was against outflung hands, then she was up again, and a moment later reached the white and silver bedroom.

Working with feverish speed, she emptied the contents of cupboards and drawers on to a bed already turned down for the night. Her possessions were too few for their transference to her suitcase to take long, and it was no more than ten minutes after she had fled from a scene grown intolerable past bearing that, coat over her arm and suitcase in hand, she made her way noiselessly down the back stairs to the service entrance.

Out on the street, the summer night heavy and still around her, she did not hesitate, but turned at once toward the north in response to a homing instinct that would not be denied. Somewhere to the north lay the shack. She was not going back to it, but in facing in that direction she underlined her rejection of nearly everything she had known since leaving it.

Three-quarters of an hour later she walked away from the end of a street-car line toward the beginning of the highway she intended to follow.

Behind her she heard thunder, like a muffled roll of drums, and, looking back, saw rose-red lightning flash across the southern horizon. The storm had broken over the city, but overhead, and to the north, the sky was a clear, dark canopy emblazoned with stars.

F
OR
a time scattered dwellings bordered the highway, some already shrouded in a sleeping darkness, others showing yellow squares of light. Keeping to the shoulder of the road, walking neither slowly nor fast. psyche was as indifferent to them as she was to the occasional cars that, in passing, touched her with sharp gusts of air and traced her shadow, weirdly distorted, on dusty grass and hedgerows, across road signs and fence-posts.

Unoppressed by any necessity other than that of putting one foot in front of the other, she realized, to her surprise, that disgust and disillusion had given way to a light-hearted satisfaction in simply being alive and entirely on her own.