XL
Mora succeeded in checking the boy's spasms, but was much relieved when Sophy asked to have Cesare Camenis in consultation—there were things about the case that he could not understand. He said so frankly. That such a robust, sunburnt little fellow, past the age for teething, should have convulsions baffled him. Camenis arrived at five o'clock. To him Sophy told the whole truth. He was a quiet, grey man of about sixty, whose own life had been tragic. The comprehension of dominated sorrow was in his face. Sophy felt that she could trust him, and that he should know all if he was to save Bobby for her. She could not have spoken to Mora. He was too young—and he was still encased in the hard shell of happiness. She could not have laid the wound of her life bare to him, as she did to this quiet, sad-eyed man whose only son was a cripple born, and whose wife had left him for a singer.
After hearing her, Camenis released his young confrère from further responsibility. He would stay himself that night, he said, at Villa Bianca.
Bobby was very ill for some days. He had fever and was delirious. Sophy never left the nursery. Camenis stayed with her till the crisis was past—being taken to and fro between Stresa and the Villa during the day in the launch.
Chesney avoided being alone with the doctor. He had his meals served at different hours, also in his room, for the most part. When he could not avoid meeting Camenis, he would halt awkwardly for a moment, and say: "Little chap going on well?" or, "Don't let Mrs. Chesney break down, will you?" or some such commonplace. He did not like to feel those shrewd, sad eyes of the Genoese physician on his face. He had slipped into the way of taking morphia pretty regularly, ever since that fatal afternoon. To face the prospect of Bobby's possible death, with clear, undrugged mind, was too much for him. And Sophy would not see him—had sent him a sealed line as soon as she could command herself enough to write, saying that she would not.
"Do not try to see me," she had written. "It is all I ask of you."
It was the fourth day of Bobby's illness. The late September evening was still as warm as August. Chesney lay on his bed in the darkness, his hands under his head, staring out at the onyx wall of the Sasso di Ferro, that rose against a sky pricked with stars. The fronds of a big mimosa tree just outside his window, furled sensitively from the heavy dew, made a delicate pattern against the sombre stolidity of the mountain. Through them, as though winking with sardonic humour, the red eye of the Chaldee lime-kiln glowed intermittently. Chesney was not undressed, though he lay upon his bed. He lay there because he felt dead tired, soul and mind and body, and because he had just taken his evening dose of morphia. He was so tired that he was not even thinking his own thoughts. Emile Verhaeren was thinking for him—Verhaeren, the one poet that he had ever really cared for. The great Belgian's volcanic and almost demoniacally virile imagination had appealed to him from the first, as no other had ever done. His own tempestuous, rebellious, intolerant nature echoed to these trumpets of anguish and defiance and exultation. Spirit writhing in the blast-furnace of untempered and primordial sensuality, the distorted religious instinct easing its throes with supernal blasphemies, a dark Prometheus thrusting with his defiant torch at the eye-sockets of the God from whom he had filched it—these things stirred him to the very depths. And, to-night, it was as if Verhaeren had written for him and him alone. Who but he and Verhaeren had ever felt what these words expressed?—these words that thundered and howled through his mind translating himself to himself, with such appalling fitness:
"Dites suis-je seul avec mon âme,
Mon âme hélas maison d'ébène
Ou s'est fendu sans bruit un soir
Le grand miroir de mon espoir."
And again: