"They must have given him some devil of a good medicine in there," he thought. "He's another man, per Bacco!"
This time the patient screw shambled on to the gates of Villa Bianca without check.
XXXVIII
He was very cautious about this dose of morphia. He felt that he must guard in every possible way against the nausea that might follow it, thus taken without atropine. Sophy was pleased and surprised to hear that he had seen Camenis, and still more surprised when he said that he was going to bed at once, and would she be a dear girl and read aloud to him. He was looking forward with a half-shamed excitement to the luxury of relief and stimulation which he knew the morphia, so long refrained from, would give him to a superlative degree. But he knew also that it would be apt to make him garrulous. He did not want to talk. He was afraid of "giving himself away" somehow. So he asked Sophy to read aloud because he did not want to be alone either. It would intensify that sensation of blissful bien être which lay just ahead of him to have some one near. This feeling was akin to that with which a child, cosily in bed, regards its nurse sewing beside a shaded lamp.
Yes; he would go to bed, take the morphia, and then, later, the salicylate of soda. Two days of it would knock out the sciatica, that old doctor had said. Well—the morphia would keep him from being bored, in addition to easing his pain. One was never bored while under the effects of morphia. He would take one dose now, sleep off the bad effects. Then, next day, take the other in the same way. The third—well, it depended on how he would be feeling whether he took the third dose or not.
Sophy sent Luigi to kindle a fire in his bedroom before she would let him undress there. The Mareng, as the Scirocco is called on Lago Maggiore, had been blowing all day. Now a fine drizzle had begun to fall. As she went to find the book that Cecil had asked her to read aloud, she thought of how odd it was that his illnesses should always be associated in her mind with rainy weather. And the weather had been so glorious nearly all the time, until now. Some splendid Temporali—the crashing thunderstorms of that region—had come in July and August. But there had been no steady, sullen rain such as was now falling.
As for Chesney, he congratulated himself on having this acute attack just at this time. The Mareng, Luigi told him, would not last more than two or three days. The Wind-Flower was at Taroni's having her bottom scraped for the races.
As soon as he was rid of this deuced pain, he would go and look up a rowboat. He needed exercise. There were good boats, cheaper than elsewhere, Amaldi had said, at a little village called Cerro, on the other side of the Lake.
When Luigi had kindled the fire, he went up to his bedroom and closed and locked the door. The blaze from dried roots and scraps of wood looked very jolly tucked away in the corner like that. He glanced at the fine strands of rain outside his window, and the soggy brown of the balcony beyond, and thought the contrast only made the fire seem jollier.