The Silver Dragon (7 page)

If only I could remember,
she thought.
If only I had
some
idea about the past—how long we've been married and why we finally agreed to go our separate ways!

“I thought you’d gone to bed.”

She jumped to her feet as John came into the room, trembling foolishly as she turned to face him.

“I tried to sleep, but it was no use,” she confessed. “Have you just come in?”

“Yes.” He rubbed his hands together, holding them out to the fire. “It can be deucedly cold in these latitudes at night, as Cabot remarked,” he added, without looking around at her.

“Where did you go?” she asked. “Were
you ...
down on the shore?”

He straightened to regard her with a puzzled frown. “No. For some unknown reason I went the other
way. There’s a sheltered path going back along the headland. I noticed it on my way to Nice this morning and thought it might afford a circular tour back to the house, but it ended at another door in the wall leading to the main road. It wasn’t a lot of help,” he concluded.

“It didn’t reach the bay then?” Adele asked. “If it went back along the headland you wouldn’t be able to see the bay at all.”

“No.” He lit a cigarette, tossing the match into the fire. “Why all these questions?” he asked. “Have you remembered something?”

Unhappily she shook her head.

“No. John,” she added after a moment’s concentration, “if I had ever known the Morse code—ever learned to use it—would I have forgotten that, too?”

He smoked in silence for several seconds.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “It’s a delicate point, as a matter of fact Usually a skill is remembered. A person with your type of amnesia can generally perform the tasks he had learned beforehand, the sort of things that come naturally after a while and can be done without a great deal of concentration because they are more or less habitual. Like playing a card game, for instance, or painting, or carpentry. These things would come easily, so I suppose we could include a knowledge of Morse. Why?”

His eyes were suddenly probing hers. It was no longer possible to beat around the bush.

“While you were away a boat of some sort came into the bay and someone signaled from it to the house.”

He flung his half-finished cigarette into the fire, watching the little parabola of light it made before it reached the hearth.

“You’re sure of this?” he questioned. “How do you know it was Morse?”

“Dixon told me.”

He whistled softly.

“So he saw it, too? What explanation did he give you?”

A wave of hot color ran up into her cheeks.

“I don’t think he felt that he had to explain,” she said. “He just told me it was a signal and that he didn’t believe I could have forgotten the code.”

“I see.” He paced to the window and back, obviously considering her information solely from the medical angle. “Let’s try it,” he suggested. “Let’s see what you can make of it when we take it slowly, shall we?” Suddenly she didn’t want to try. She was so desperately tired and she didn’t think it would work. She owed it to him, however, to make the effort.

“What can we use?” she asked.

He strode around the room, coming back from a side table with a small lamp in his hand.

“This ought to do the trick,” he decided. “Now, lights out and come over here, away from the fire.” He suited the actions to the words, guiding her to a spot at the far side of the room while he went back to plug in the lamp. He had removed its silk shade and was trying the switch for effective control. “All in order now,” he told her. “Are we ready?”

“Ready to try,” she agreed.

It was ridiculous to feel so nervous, to be almost sure that she was about to fail at this first simple test. Yet if she did not fail, if she did recognize the code, it would serve to prove Dixon Cabot right. He had accused her of a barefaced pretense. More than that—he was thoroughly convinced that she had been ready and willing to receive the message he had decoded for her, waiting, in fact, to act on it.

Slowly she raised her eyes to the flickering bulb on the far side of the room. Like the distant light from across the bay, it flashed on and off, on and off for several seconds before John snapped it on permanently to ask.

“Well, any luck?”

“None. None at all.” She almost wept when she made the confession. “I just haven’t a clue.”

“Shall we try again?”

“What’s the use?” She wrung her hands together. “Let’s face it, John, I can’t even remember a simple thing like that.”

“Perhaps because the reason is obvious,” he said. “If you had never learned it you wouldn’t know the first thing about it.”

“But Dixon said I ought to know it!” The whole thing was too upsetting, her confusion too great. She pressed her fingers against her eyes as if she would force them to turn inward to that part of her weary brain that had rebelled so positively, placing her in a situation that was rapidly becoming intolerable. “It’s no use,” she repeated. “We’re in a blind alley.”

“Or on the wrong track.” Carefully he replaced the yellow silk shade, setting the lamp back on the side table where he had found it. “We’ll leave it for the present.” He came back to stand beside her. “I think you ought to go to bed.”

Without protest she allowed him to lead her from the room and across the hall to the foot of the staircase where, impulsively, he stooped and kissed her full on the lips.

“Don’t worry anymore,” he urged gently. “It’s not going to do the slightest bit of good.”

Hastily she turned away. Her eyes were full of tears. Running almost, she reached her own room, switching on the lights this time and drawing the long curtains securely across the windows. She sat down on the edge of her bed, easing off her shoes, and began to undress. Her actions were purely mechanical, her eyes dark with the effort at remembering.

Over and over again she reviewed the-events since her accident, trying to push her mind just that little bit further back each time. It was easy enough to recall the awful stillness that had clamped down on the valley after the avalanche had passed and the retarded echo of it coming slowly back from the mountain wall on the other side of the glacier, but it was the moment before the loose snow and rocks had started to come down that she had to recapture. Over and over again her mind offered her nothing but a blank gray wall of forgetfulness. It was like a blanket of fog pressing in on her from all directions.

For a long time she lay grappling with it in the silent room, realizing, at last, that it had turned intensely cold. Shivering, she got up to close her window, pulling the curtain aside a little to look out.

The world outside had changed. The sky was no longer starlit and the headlands had disappeared. The whole bay was wrapped in a thick curtain of fog, gray, dense, impenetrable, like the mist enveloping her own mind.

In the silence sound appeared magnified and she thought she heard a movement in the corridor outside her door. Standing rigidly beside the window, she listened, her breath held for a moment of panic, and then she was running across the floor and trying the door with the firm conviction that someone had been out there in the corridor, listening.

The door was locked.

The key had been turned from the outside. With a sense of being trapped, she rushed back to the window, pulling the curtain aside to peer out at the fog, but she could see no farther than the terrace edge. The whole world beyond the terrace seemed to drop away into a gray nebulous void that swallowed up sound and form and everything that she thought of as familiar.

She could have climbed down by the creeper, wrapping her dressing gown around her against the sudden c
o
ld. She would have the courage to do that, but what would it gain her? Where would she go once she was down there on the terrace? What would she do?

Soft mocking laughter seemed to drift up to her out of the fog, and mirthlessly she laughed in return. Although Dixon refused to believe it
,
her amnesia was real enough. She did not even know what she would be looking for if she did follow his tall gaunt figure into the secret night.

CHAPTER FIVE

By morning the fog h
ad cleared, blown away by a stiff breeze from the southwest. Not even a wisp of it hovered above the hills to remind Adele of the night before. The whole thing could so easily have been a fretful dream.

Rising swiftly, she crossed to the door, which gave easily to the turn of the handle. The key, however,
was
on the outside.

Could it have been a dream? All the panic and the nightmare quality of it might have been no more than a trick of her mind, the sick mind, which had already played her false by shutting her away from the past.

True, the window was firmly closed and her dressing gown discarded on the floor, but was that really any proof that she had been made prisoner during the night by someone who felt that she would be safer locked away?

She closed her eyes, but it was no use groping blindly into the past, or even hoping that she might be able to see a little way into the future. She shook herself momentarily free of them both and went down to breakfast.

The door leading to a small sun-drenched room on the east side of the villa stood invitingly open, and she could hear Maria chattering to someone inside. John, perhaps.

When she reached the open doorway she almost turned and fled. A round marble-topped table was pulled up close to the open window, and Dixon Cabot sat there alone.

He looked up when he heard her step on the tesselated floor of the hall, rising with a smile to pull out a chair for her.

“Breakfast in the sun,” he observed, “always helps the day off to a good start. Maria tells me that we’re in for a spell of warm weather, so she has opened the windows to clear the air of the staleness of last night.”

Where had he gone last night? And had his greeting been a warning to her not to interfere again?

Looking up at him, it was impossible to guess from his expression what he thought, and once again she knew herself at a loss in this man’s presence. He would be master of any situation, ruthless and intolerant of any interference with his plans.

This morning, however, she could not find fault with his courtesy. He waited while she selected the fruit she wanted from the big wicker bowl Maria placed before her, and then he poured coffee for her, refilling his own cup as he sat down.

“Dr. Ordley has gone out for a walk,” he said, selecting a yellow coin of butter from the dish between them. “He believes in whipping up an appetite before he eats.”

“He
...
went out last night, too,” Adele remarked before she could check the impulse. “He thought he would sleep better if he walked along the cliff for a while,” she added lamely.

“So I believe.” He finished buttering a croissant before he looked at her. “The cliff walk appears to be irresistible after dark, but it’s also dangerous. One false step on the stretch overlooking the bay could so easily precipitate an accident. The rocks fall away there sheer into the sea.”

“I noticed that,” she agreed. “I went through the orchard and came to a door in the wall. When I opened it the sea was there, right at my feet.”

He gave her a quick suspicious glance.

“I ought to have locked that door,” he said briefly. “It’s rarely in use unless the wind happens to be from the southeast, and the entrance to the bay is difficult.”

Mention of the unlocked door sent the color flooding into her cheeks. Had he locked her in last night?

Impulsively, she was about to ask him, point-blank, when Maria came back into the room with a telegram in her hand.

“This has come,” she said, hovering in the hope that the flimsy envelope might be opened in her presence. “The boy—he say will there be any reply?”

“We shall see.”

Her master slit the envelope with a handy fruit knife, amused by her curiosity. Adele watched him, seeing the smile fade slowly from his face. It was the first time she had ever seen him disconcerted.

For a moment or two he continued to gaze at the message and then he looked at Maria.

“There will be no answer. You may tell the messenger so.” He fished in his pocket for a coin. “And give him this.”

Maria withdrew with a frank look of disappointment in her dark eyes, and there was a small awkward silence in the room, which Adele did not attempt to fill. Dixon Cabot’s mouth was grim, his whole body taut as he announced, “My mother hopes to pay me a visit. She should be here before the end of the week.”

Realizing that John Ordley hoped to push on with his holiday before then, Adele did not know what to say, and John himself came in to breakfast at that moment, which seemed to be the signal for his host to excuse himself.

“I have quite a lot of work to get through,” he explained. “You will amuse yourselves, won’t you?”

Adele looked at John and quickly away again. She was quite unable to hide her distress.

“What now?” he asked, frowning. “Has anything gone wrong?”

She longed to tell him all about the night before, but she considered that she no longer had any right to burden him with her fears and doubts.

Suddenly he bent across the table toward her.

“I can’t bear to see you looking as unhappy as this,” he said fiercely. “Why don’t you just clear out?”

She looked aghast at the suggestion, shaking her head.

“I can’t,” she answered huskily. “That wouldn’t be any solution, John.”

He glared at her angrily.

“Don’t tell me you’re in love with Cabot!” he exclaimed. “I know you’re married to him, but I’ll never believe you’re in love with him.”

His words dropped into a tense silence, broken only by the sound of the wind in the pines outside the window. Adele felt shaken and suddenly insecure, knowing that somewhere beneath this impassioned confession of John’s lay the truth of her own feelings. “Don’t tell me you’re in love with Cabot!”

In love? How could she be in love with a man she hardly knew? Yet—once—she had been Dixon Cabot’s wife in the fullest sense of the word. She was still his wife.

A great tide of uncertainty and some other nameless emotion washed over her, and she all but begged John to take her with him, to let her escape to Italy under the cloak of his protective kindness.

It was something she could not do, however. He owed her nothing and she was already far too deeply indebted to him. His interest in her had started by being merely professional. She had no right to push it any further than that.

Instead, she went in search of her husband.

The study door was firmly closed, but she knocked and waited.

“Come in,” he commanded at once.

The long windows on either side of his desk stood wide open to the sun and the tang of the sea.

“I expected you to come,” he told her, drawing forward a chair and motioning her to sit down.

She preferred, however, to remain standing, but she found herself holding onto the carved back of the chair as she faced him in the brilliant morning light.

“I want to know
if ...
it was you who locked me in my, room last night,” she said.

“Yes.” He came around the end of his desk, feeling for his cigarette case in the roomy pocket of his tweed jacket. “I felt you would be safer there,” he added, flicking the flame of the silver dragon into life with the deft pressure of his thumb and watching her through the first wisp of blue smoke. “I had an odd sort of notion that there were prowlers around, and we have already had one burglary at Les Rochers Blanches. But you won’t remember that,” he suggested, “unless your memory serves you better now than it has done in the past?”