The Silver Dragon

by Jean S. MacLeod

  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?”

  As ever, when she was brought face to face with her inability to recall the past, Adele felt a terrible confusion sweeping over her. How could she deny or confirm anything he said when she simply could not remember?

  “If you had warned me,” she said, “instead of just locking the door, it would have been less confusing.”

  “You could have been asleep when I came along the corridor,” he pointed out, but somehow she knew that he had been quite well aware of her lying there in the darkness with her mind too full of conflicting thoughts for sleep.

  She stood looking at him, trying to understand him as he crossed the room to find an ashtray. To an impartial observer, she realized, he would appear decidedly attractive. He had the lean sinewy body of an athlete, with the broad shoulders and narrow hips of an active man who rarely sits still; and the thin brown face with its eagle nose and direct penetrating blue eyes added its quota of intelligence and strength. Had it not been for a certain suggestion of cruelty around the firmly compressed lips, she might have thought him a generous man. And the eyes, too, could be disconcertingly cold.

  Yes, she decided, she must remember that about him. She had even considered him calculating in his cruelty when she had first met him.

  “This visit of my mother’s,” he said, coming back to his desk to look down at the telegram, “is untimely, to say the least, but she rarely stays for more than a few days whe
n she does decide to come. Her main pied-a-terre is Paris.”

  “She is French then?” Adele asked.

  He shook his head, an amused smile chasing the grimness from his face.

  “On the contrary, no one could be more English,” he answered. “She has very fixed ideas about everything and never wavers from a decision once it’s made.”

  In the face of this formidable description Adele decided that mother and son might be surprisingly alike, even in outward appearance. She could not imagine Mrs. Cabot marrying anyone other than one of her own countrymen, however.

  “You’re wondering about the name, of course,” he mused. “My grandfather was French. Armand Cabot settled in England after the 1914-18 war. His wife was English and they decided to remain in her country with their family of three sons and a daughter. My father was the second son.”

  “I see.”

  She seemed to be seeing him now in clearer perspective, with a background and a family, and she wondered what his life had been like before their marriage.

  Yet she had no real need to compute the past as far as he was concerned, for the row of books on one of the wall shelves behind him gave her ample proof of a full and vigorous life. He had written them all, and she gazed at them as if she would search out some clue to his personality from the gilt lettering on their slender spines. They were all travel books. John Ordley had called them “journeyings in the jungles.” The way in which Dixon Cabot had chosen to reach these remote corners of the globe seemed typical of the man. He had traveled alone, sailing a fifteen-ton yawl across the seven seas in search of the material he needed, and most of it had gone into his writing.

  There was only one title that differed from the others, she noticed. A slim volume on diamonds and diamond setting also bore his name, and her eyes traveled quickly to the foot of the spine. The publishers were different, and she supposed that this must be a hobby of his, a fancy to see his knowledge of an ancient art set down in print, perhaps, the sort of whim he could very well afford.

  “When, exactly, do you expect your mother?” she asked.

  He lifted his shoulders in a gesture so typically French and so incongruous in him that she was forced to smile.

  “Je ne sais pas! Today. Tomorrow, perhaps. She will arrive in her own good time and will not expect to be met.”

  “Dixon,” she asked because of a certain evasiveness in his tone, “would you rather I ... wasn’t here when your mother arrives?”

  His lips closed in a tight line.

  “Where would you go?” he asked.

  The question pierced to the most vulnerable spot in her heart.

  “I don’t know,” she confessed. “I expect I could find somewhere...”

  He turned to look at her.

  “At times,” he said slowly, “I find myself almost tempted to believe in the amnesia after all.”

  It was like shutting a door in her face, and she could have wept because a moment ago they had seemed to be getting somewhere, reaching a better understanding of one another. But how could she convince him of the truth if John had failed? She felt defeated and weak and alone. Desperately alone.

  “There is the possibility,” he added, “that my mother may only stay the night. She is on her way from Rome to Paris and she will expect me to join her there quite soon.”

  “Me”—not “us,” Adele noticed with an odd, cold feeling in her heart. Dixon’s wife was evidently not included in his mother’s scheme of things.

  “Does she know that you’re married?” she asked involuntarily.

  His mouth hardened again.

  “Yes,” he said, “she knows.”

  Adele longed to say, “Have I met her, Dixon? Does she like me? Will we be renewing a pleasant companionship?” But she could not ask him these things. Instinctively she knew that Mrs. Cabot had never met her son’s wife and would not have welcomed her if she had.

  It was madness, of course, to imagine these things, but she had not imagined Dixon’s reticence over his mother’s visit. He hoped that she would not stay for any length of time. He hoped that her visit to Les Rochers Blanches would be so fleeting that she might not spend even one night under his roof.

  Instantly she felt that she needed support, and it was the kind of help that only John Ordley could provide in the present circumstances.

  Selfishly she found herself begging him to postpone his departure when she met him on the terrace before lunch.

  “I feel so vulnerable,” she confessed. “Dixon’s mother knows that we’re married, but she seems unfriendly. She appears to be the type of woman who knows very decisively what she wants and has no hesitation about going out of her way to get it. Oh, am I imagining all this, John? Am I building up a sort of middle-aged ogre who will set out to destroy me just because I can’t remember and am afraid? I wish I knew. I wish I could look back and see what came between Dixon and me!”

  “You fancy there is something?” he questioned. Glancing toward the house and the open window of the study, she felt guilty and disinclined to answer.

  “I ... suppose I do,” she was forced to admit. “But it doesn’t really get us very far, does it?”

  “No,” he admitted, not pressing the point, which surprised her. “I guess it doesn’t. When does your ‘ogre’ arrive?”

  “We’re not sure. The telegram just said ‘arriving.’ They often do!”

  She was trying to make light of the situation, forcing the dual “we” into their conversation because she considered it to be the fairest way. Without undue conceit, she knew that John was already halfway to being in love with her, and she could not permit him to spoil his life. She must make him believe that she really was in love with the man she had married.

  How long ago, she wondered, had she and Dixon promised before God to love and cherish one another “till death us do part”? She could not imagine anyone dishonoring such a vow in a short space of time, but to think about it deeply only served to increase her desperation.

  Before Maria rang the bell for lunch a taxi came swiftly along the main headland road and turned into their private driveway. It pulled up opposite the front door and a tall elegantly dressed woman got out. She wore a close-fitting green suit collared in diadem mink, a small green hat, which shrieked Paris, and she carried an expensive-looking crocodile handbag. A leopardskin coat and a suitcase were taken from the front of the taxi and deposited on the wide marble step of the porch.

  “Cela sera combine?” She searched in her handbag for some loose change to pay the driver, dismissing him with an imperious wave of her hand. “Void quelque-chose pour vous. Au revoir!”

  Adele came through the hall, realizing at once that she was face to face with Dixon’s mother.

  Olivia Cabot regarded her with a mixture of curiosity and cold distaste.

  “Where is my son?’ she asked without any of the usual preliminaries. “I would have thought that noisy vehicle would have wakened the dead!”

  Adele hesitated. She wanted to go to Dixon’s mother and kiss her, welcoming her in her son’s absence, but she could not. This cold, beautifully dressed shell of a woman did not expect to be welcomed or to be kissed by her son’s wife. She had come to Les Rochers Blanches as a right, possibly because she had been mistress in Dixon’s home for so long that she had not even considered relinquishing the position to a younger woman.

  “I’ll tell him you’re here.” She was almost glad of the chance to escape. “He was in his study a moment ago.”

  “There’s no hurry.” Olivia Cabot drew off her gloves, her blue eyes missing nothing as she crossed the hall. “You’re his wife, I suppose?” she added, leading the way into the drawing room. “I must say I consider the whole thing was done far too hurriedly. You could quite easily have waited until I returned from New York.” She stood in the middle of the room. “You were his secretary, weren’t you?” she asked bluntly.

  Adele’s cheeks flamed. The implication was too strong to be ignored and it angered
her. Mrs. Cabot obviously considered that her son had been snared in a moment of weakness by a designing employee who had seized her opportunity when the coast had been clear. If she had not gone to America, her son would never have married, Olivia Cabot had said in effect, and the shaft had pierced as deeply as she could have wished. How could she tell this hard bitter woman that she had longed to meet her, Adele thought unhappily. How could she say that she had hoped they would be friends for Dixon’s sake?

  She felt that she could only tell Olivia Cabot the truth.

  “Mrs. Cabot,” she began, “I’ve just had a most unfortunate accident. I ... went to Switzerland on a climbing holiday and we were trapped by an avalanche.” She moistened her dry lips and hurried over the bit that she still could not bear to think about. “There were three others in the party. They were killed.”

  Olivia Cabot was looking at her with undisguised hostility now.

  “And you were spared?” she said briefly. “Why were you on such a trip without my son?” she demanded. “You couldn’t have been married more than a week, judging by the time I received the cable telling me the news.”

  “I don’t know why we were not together,” Adele said unhappily. “You see, I’ve lost my memory.”

  “Lost your memory?” Olivia repeated. “But this is fantastic! My son knows, of course?”

  Adele smiled wanly.

  “Of course,” she said.

  Olivia snapped open a jeweled cigarette case and took out a cigarette, which she fitted into a jade holder. Her hands were trembling.

  “As a result of your accident, I suppose?” she presumed. “What are you doing about it?”

  “There’s nothing I can do.”