And he rushed exuberantly to and fro, ordering a fast steam-launch from Taroni; sweeping Sophy off in it to Intra to choose a piano—it vexed him that she had no piano, had not been singing at all during her stay in Italy; spending hours in trying to find a small sailing yacht to his liking.
"That's a ripper your friend Amaldi's got," he said to Sophy. "The Wind-Flower. Jolly name, by the way. Perhaps he'd help me find a good 'un. Let's go over to their place this afternoon. I want to thank the old lady for being so decent to you and the little chap."
So they went tearing through the autumn-coloured water to Le Vigne, at a rate that would have made the little Fretta look like a water-snail. And this new, powerful, highly-polished mahogany launch, glittering with a sort of defiant grin of shining metal, hissing through the quiet lake like an Express, seemed symbolical to Sophy of the ruthless power which had suddenly seized her life and was hurling it blindly to some unknown goal. As she sat quiet in the new launch, so she sat quiet in the grasp of Chesney's will. So, she told herself, it was her duty to sit quiet. Where she was now, her own act had placed her—besides, she still felt affection for her husband, though love in its highest, divinest form was gone forever. If only he would not stun her with those fiery crashes of unshared passion! She felt like some sentient lyre, on which a giant without sense of music strums with a mighty plectrum. The fine chords of her nature snapped with the clashing shocks. She felt as though she had been through some wild fever of which the delirium left her brain dazed and numb.
What she now dreaded most was to see Amaldi. Not because of any feeling that she had or might have had for him, but because he was so vividly a part of something that was gone forever, and that had been so beautiful. Yes, that tranquil dream of which he had been a part was as utterly dispelled as the reflection in a quiet pool shattered by the crash of a boulder. She felt that numbness, that lack of acute pain which it is said a soldier experiences when in the heat of battle a limb is suddenly shot away. She was maimed for life, she felt, and she regretted it—but it was as if her mind rather than her heart suffered from this regret.
They found the Marchesa alone at Le Vigne. She was sorry, she said, that her son should miss the pleasure of seeing them. He had gone to Milan for a few days. The relief of hearing this was so great that Sophy paled with it. The elder woman thought she looked exhausted and oddly listless. She firmly believed in the "Vampirising" qualities of some people; taking in Chesney with her shrewd, lustrous eyes, she decided that he was probably a most "Vampirising" person. By this, the Marchesa did not mean that one actively plays the part of Vampire towards another, but that, whether or no, some natures suck the vitality from those with whom they are in contact. Yet Chesney attracted her in a way, while at the same time he repelled her. She was too completely the woman not to feel the force of his extraordinary vitality and superb physique, but she was herself of too imperious and dominating a temperament not to resist tacitly the stress of his somewhat overpowering personality. She made herself perfectly charming, however.
"What a gorgeous old lady!" exclaimed Chesney, as they rushed home again. "Amaldi must be a decent sort with a mater like that. Wish he'd come back from his damned Milan. I want that yacht."
Amaldi returned in three days, and came for a formal call to Villa Bianca. He had conquered the first well-nigh unbearable recoil from the idea of Chesney's presence, and realised that certain civil forms were obligatory, after the rather close relations that had grown up between his mother and Sophy.
Chesney took one of his violent fancies to the young Lombard, on this occasion. He had utterly forgotten the jealousy with which Amaldi had once inspired him, when morphia ruled his moods.
He and Amaldi began talking boats and boating. Amaldi was afraid that just then there was no such yacht as Chesney wished to hire on Lago Maggiore. He might find one, however, he thought, at Costaguta's, in Genoa. But Chesney didn't want to go such a long trip by rail. He looked disgruntled and his big shoulders hunched with a boyish petulance, rather engaging—had not his every gesture been salt on Amaldi's open wound.
"I should be very glad if you would come with me in The Wind-Flower whenever you like," said the latter. He had not once glanced towards Sophy since he and her husband began their talk; but he saw, without looking at her, the tall figure in its white serge gown, bending over the masses of Michaelmas daisies that she had brought in from a walk, and was arranging in one of the old apothecary jars from Intra.