"Sorry if I was rude, Sophy," he said; "but I've had just about as much doctoring as I can stand for the present."
This was the only allusion that he had made to his experience with Carfew since his arrival in Italy. Sophy thought it most natural. She could imagine the horror and loathing with which he looked back on those two months in the sanatorium.
Next day, however, he came to her quite meekly.
"Just give me that doctor chap's address in Stresa, will you?" he said. "This damnable leg is getting too much for me."
Dr. Camenis wanted Chesney to go to bed for forty-eight hours and take large doses of salicylate of soda. Chesney said that he would take the stuff, but refused to go to bed.
"In that case, Signore," said Camenis firmly, "I cannot prescribe salicylate of sodium. It produces heavy perspiration. You would probably increase this attack of sciatica."
Chesney said very well, to give him the prescription and he'd promise not to take it unless he went to bed for two days.
He had gone to Stresa that day by one of the Lake Steamers. By the time he returned to Intra, he was in severe pain. Camenis had said that he could suggest no palliative but opium in some form, and he was averse from prescribing anodynes except in extreme cases. As he came up the slant of the embarcadero, Chesney had actual difficulty in walking. His face was flushed with that drilling anguish in his sciatic nerve. He limped across to the Piazza. At once the vetturini waiting there on the boxes of their rusty little traps began to hail him. One red-faced, grey-eyed fellow shouted out:
"Hé! Meester! I drive you Villa Bianca—né?"
But Chesney, leaning heavily on his stick, had his eyes fixed on a sign that ran along the front of a shop just across the way. "Farmacia Lavatelli," it read. His heart was thumping hard with a bolt-like thought that had just struck him. He had set his teeth. The vetturino, his scampish grey eyes looking white like glass in his dark-red face, drove nearer.