There was a small awkward silence.
“I wish I knew what to do,” Adele said at last.
He paced to the far side of the room, knowing how impossible it was to do anything.
“Adele,” he asked, “would you consider going back to the clinic? Trying to force yourself to remember like this is no use. It will only retard a cure.”
“A cure?” she questioned bleakly. “Is there a cure?” Her eyes searched his and he could not lie to her.
“Time,” he was forced to admit, “is the only cure. A year, perhaps...”
“A year?” She felt shattered. “And probably not even then?”
He bent to throw a log on the fire. It was typical of Cabot, he thought, insisting on the luxury of an open hearth in the English tradition, even here in the south of France.
“I think, if you don’t mind,” Adele said, “I’ll go to bed. I feel as if this has been the longest day of my life.” It was nine o’clock and, if she went now, she would avoid another meeting with Dixon Cabot. It was a cowardly action, no doubt, but her distress was very real. His dominating personality was something that had to be met with assurance, and she was far from being assured.
In spite of John’s comforting presence, she sensed issues lying just beneath the surface that she would have to face alone.
“I think it might be a wise idea,” John agreed, following her to the door. “I’ll take a quick turn around the garden, I think, before I turn in for the night.” He looked at her directly for the first time. “Try to sleep, Adele,” he said. “There’s nothing we can do about this but wait.”
Swiftly she ran from him up the staircase, and when she had reached her room she heard the crunch of his footsteps on the gravel beneath her window. As the sound faded an overwhelming sense of panic took possession of her. Her tiredness seemed to weigh her down, dragging beneath her eyes, and the doctor’s retreating footsteps left her poised on the edge of a void. When he finally left Les Rochers Blanches she would be completely and utterly alone.
With a desperate sort of determination goading her forward, she opened her door and went back down the broad marble stairs. There was a light burning in the study and she knocked and went in.
Dixon Cabot was seated at his desk, writing, and he finished a sentence and blotted it before he stood up.
“I ... think I ought to go back to Switzerland,” Adele said breathlessly.
He came around the end of the desk, watching her closely.
“With Dr. Ordley?” he asked.
“No, alone. John would go on to Italy.”
“I see,” he said thinly. “To Brindisi, perhaps?”
She looked back at him, puzzled by a reference she could not hope to understand.
He took out a cigarette and lit it. As he slid the silver snuffer over the dragon’s jaws he said with mock admiration, “You’re an admirable actress. One might almost be tempted to trust you if it were not for the facts.”
Upset by his relentless antagonism and the coldness of his contempt, she rushed back to her room without even bidding him good-night and without knowing whether he would agree to her return to the clinic or not.
Desperately tired as she was, she knew that she would not sleep, but instead of switching on her light she walked to the window and drew the curtains back. The night was dark. There was no moon and very few stars. She could only see as far as the terrace and the headlands rising vaguely beyond it. The Mediterranean looked cold and forbidding now, in contrast with the warm friendly blue sea she had watched that morning, with the sun breaking its surface into a dazzle of joyous golden waves.
How long she stood looking out before she became aware of the light she did not know. It came in two short flashes—in, out; in, out—and she watched it curiously for a moment before she realized that it might be some sort of signal.
There was a short period of darkness before it started again, and this time the message was longer. The flashes were unevenly spaced, some short, some long, and they were punctuated by definite pauses.
The Morse code, she thought, but could make nothing of it. The short signal was repeated. The light must be somewhere near the base of the headland cliffs, she decided, on one side of the narrow sea passage into the bay. Yet there was nothing there, no house, not even a navigation buoy to mark the passage. She had noticed the fact earlier in the day, thinking how isolated they were.
The light flashed again, after a longer interval this time, and she opened the window and stepped out onto the balcony.
Here the night seemed to come closer, cutting her off from the villa. Everything was very still. She could hear the regular swish, swish of the waves as they broke over the pebbled beach, but there was no other sound. The whole universe seemed to be concentrating on the distant flashing light.
Once more it came. In, out; in, out. It flickered and she felt a movement in the room behind her.
“ ‘Tonight,’ ” a mocking voice decoded for her. “Don’t you know your Morse, or have you conveniently forgotten that, too?”
Dixon Cabot came out to stand on the balcony beside her. He had left the room behind them in darkness and she could just make out his tall figure silhouetted against the paler light of the sky as he leaned against the wrought iron balcony rail. For a moment he was no longer looking toward the distant flashing light. Although he could not have seen her expression clearly in the darkness, he was willing her to speak the truth.
Now that her own eyes had become accustomed to the gray light she could make out the hard line of his jaw and the strong mouth clamped firmly on his rising impatience.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she gasped. “I saw the light when I came out here. I suppose I opened the window because I wouldn’t be able to sleep right away.” She hesitated, and when he offered no comment she plunged on in an attempt at further explanation. “It seemed strange—a light being out there under the headland. I didn’t think there was a house or a buoy of any sort at that side of the bay.”
He turned his head to follow her puzzled gaze. The light had gone out. They waited in a tense silence for several minutes, but there was no repetition of the signal. Across the bay toward the headlands the night looked blacker than ever in consequence.
“You’re quite right,” he acknowledged stiffly. “There’s nothing over there. Nothing permanent. The light was coming from some craft or other. It was exactly in the middle of the entrance to the bay.”
She drew a deep breath.
“What do you think it was?” she asked.
He greeted her question with a short derisive laugh.
“Your guess would be as good as mine,” he said, “but it may not take me very long to find out.”
The sound of an engine starting up shattered the night’s calm, and instantly he had vaulted over the balcony rail into the darkness beneath them. She heard him letting himself down by the gnarled stem of the creeper, which clothed the villa wall beneath her window, and stood listening to the swift crunch of his heavy tread as he crossed the gravel to the path that spiraled down to the bay.
For several minutes she did not know what to do. Then the engine cut out, plunging the bay into silence. When it started again it seemed to throb like a distant drumbeat against the night, drawing farther and farther away.
Quickly she turned back into the room and ran down the stairs. There was really nothing she could do, of course, but she did not want to stay up there in the room alone.
The whole house had a deserted air now and she wondered where John had gone. He, too, was out there in the night, walking somewhere along the cliff, perhaps.
Crouching down before the fire, she raked the wood ash together and put on another log. It sparked and spat at her defiantly, but she held out her hands to its warmth, realizing for the first time how cold she was. She must have stood out there on the balcony for over ten minutes, watching the light that she now knew to be a signal. But a signal to whom? And for what purpose? Until her arriva
l the villa had been shut up and to all outward appearances deserted, yet someone had come into the bay in a boat and signaled from it under the impression that the message would be picked up and acted on in the right way.
Tonight! The decoded word spun back at her in the quiet room. That had been all. Yet someone had been waiting for that brief message, someone who could see it to the greatest advantage from the windows of Les Rochers Blanches.
Maria? Her brother-in-law, Annette’s husband, who, Maria had said, looked after the gardens? Dixon Cabot himself? Dixon’s anger when he had found her out there on the balcony could so easily have been feigned.
Vividly the stern face and searching blue eyes took shape before her. He had accused her of duplicity almost outright, but his own calm mastery of the situation could quite easily have hidden guilt.
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 try
ing 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 cold. 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 had 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.
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