Shadows of Flames Part 53

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 ma.s.ses of Michaelmas daisies that she had brought in from a walk, and was arranging in one of the old apothecary jars from Intra.

It hurt Amaldi to look at Chesney as it hurts some people to look on blood--gave him just that faint, gone feeling. The very fact that he was so magnificent a man to look at hurt him that much more.

Chesney accepted this proposal about _The Wind-Flower_ with frank alacrity.

"What d'you say to an all-day sail to-morrow?" he asked. "You're as keen on sailing as I am, my wife tells me. If it's convenient...." he added; then said quickly, laughing: "I must say, I've landed rather plump on your offer, Marquis."

Amaldi murmured ba.n.a.l a.s.surances of the pleasure that it would afford him to sail all day with Mr. Chesney.

"Good!" Cecil exclaimed, much pleased. "And I say, suppose we drop the 'Mister' and the 'Marquis'--such rot, really--thanks. Well, Sophy--what d'you think? Will you come along, too--eh?"

"No.... I don't think I can to-morrow, Cecil."

"Why not?"

"I ... I don't think I care to sail all day. The glare gives me a headache if I'm out too long in it."

"Just as you like, of course. But I rather fancy 'twould do you good. A bit of sunburn wouldn't hurt--you're looking a bit pale, I find. What do you think, Amaldi? Don't you find Mrs. Chesney paler than she was in England?"

"I don't think so," said Amaldi. His throat seemed to close.

He and Chesney went for that sail and several others. With a sort of grim satisfaction Amaldi would tell himself on these occasions that the more Chesney was with him the less his wife would see of him. He felt in every fibre the relief it was to Sophy when her husband's towering figure stepped over the side of _The Wind-Flower_ and was gone for long hours together.

For the week following Chesney's arrival the weather had a crisp tang quite autumnal; then suddenly it changed, becoming summer-like and even sultry again. On the first day of this change Amaldi and Chesney were out in _The Wind-Flower_ together. It was noon. The Tramontana had died out. The Inverna had not yet risen. They had been running before the wind, and now, when it suddenly ceased, the heat was intense.

Though Amaldi's sailor, Peppin, was always aboard, Chesney loved handling the ropes himself when not at the tiller, which Amaldi insisted on his taking most of the time. He had been springing about at a great rate that morning, shifting the spinnaker. Now, all overheated and sweltering in the breathless pause between the breezes of morning and afternoon, he announced his intention of "going overboard for a swim."

Amaldi cautioned him that the September air played tricks on one, and that the Inverna would probably blow rather strong that day.

"I don't think I'd do it," he said. "We've no extra coats aboard. You might get badly chilled."

"'Chilled'?" echoed Chesney, with his most good-natured grin. "My dear chap, that's what I'm hoping...."

He was getting out of his flannels as he spoke.

"I really wouldn't, you know," repeated Amaldi.

But Chesney only whipped his shirt over his head for reply; his feet were already bare. And against the blazing mainsail, in the full glare of sunshine, he stood there naked--a magnificent, glistering shape of manhood that caused Peppin's eyes to shine.

And Amaldi, too, could not withhold his admiration. So superb was this huge, stripped man--so perfectly proportioned--so admirably free from the least ounce of unnecessary fat.

"_Accidenti! Che Marc Antoni!_" (Lord! What a Mark Antony of a man!) breathed Peppin, as the sunlit body flashed off into the water.

But its very splendour as of the supremacy of flesh sickened Amaldi.

Were they primitive men--men of the Stone Age--and should they grapple, man to man, what chance would he, Amaldi, have against those mighty thews and sinews?

Chesney swam a few strokes, his white body greenish under the clear water, like the silver belly of a fish; then dived beneath the yacht, came up the other side, swam on his side, his back, dived again; then swung himself aboard, gleaming with wet like a great mother-o'-pearl image. He took the towel that Peppin handed him with a "Ha!" of gusto.

"I feel like Jupiter!" he called, rubbing his sides, and back, standing on one foot to dry the other, his glossy skin all rosed in patches from his vigorous rubbing.

Getting quickly into his shirt and trousers, he announced that he was "hungry as ten hunters."

Peppin opened the luncheon hamper. There were sandwiches of salami and anchovies, purple and white figs, a fiasco of red wine from Solcio.

"By G.o.d! this is living! Eh? What?" asked Chesney, his lips fresh and ruddy with wine. He grinned with the sheer l.u.s.t of life, splitting a fig, and laying its seedy pulp against his tongue as Peppin had shown him how to eat them without getting the rough bite of the skin. "When you find rye-bread and fish and raw fruit better than pressed ducklings at Voisin's--you're jolly thoroughly alive, I take it. What are you peering at? Wind coming?"

"Yes," said Amaldi.

Chesney leaped up, still munching the other half of his fig. All about them the water lay in long, smooth fluctuations as of molten gla.s.s; but here and there a dark-blue patch spread widening like a stain on some shining fabric. The sails filled, though near by the water still shone clear and smooth as gla.s.s. Far out, beyond the point of the Fortino, there was a band of indigo, stretched right across the lake.

"The Inverna," said Amaldi, pointing. "Won't you take the tiller?" he added.

Chesney grasped it willingly. All his blood was beating in little pleasant hammer-strokes of exultant health and strength. Yet as the first chill breaths of the coming breeze played over him, he felt a shivery sensation not altogether agreeable.

"Going to be a bit of a blow--eh?" he asked, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up his eyes against the sun to watch the iron-blue band that was widening every second. "Think I'll just get my coat on in that case," he added.

Amaldi took the tiller while Chesney got into his coat. Now there came white flashes from the band of blue.

"_Un Invernung, Scior Marchese_," grinned Peppin.

"What's he say?" asked Chesney.

"That we're going to have an '_Invernung_'--'a big Inverna'--'a stiff breeze,'" translated Amaldi patiently.

And indeed the South Wind pounced on them in a few moments, blowing more than a capful. As the full gust struck her, the little _Wind-Flower_ heeled till her shrouds were under water. The spray came from her dipping bows in a silver sluice, drenching them even where they sat.

Against the wind they ran, and the sails bulged full and hard as though carved from marble--only a slight flutter near the mast showed how close to the wind Chesney was holding her. He shouted like a Viking with the fierce fun of it, as the spume slapped his face now and then with the topping of a bigger wave--exultant with that exultation in sheer health known only to the lately redeemed morphinomaniac. Amaldi thought him strangely effusive in his pleasure, for an Englishman. The more he saw of him the more distasteful he found Chesney. He sat balanced on the upper side of the c.o.c.k-pit, gazing steadily forward. Peppin lay flat on deck to windward. The whole lake was now one welter of white and indigo.

But though for a while his delight in this wild game with wind and water shut out lesser things, by the time that the Inverna had romped with him for half an hour, Chesney felt chilled to the bone. Pride kept him from admitting it. He was vexed to think that Amaldi's warning had been justified. Also, it annoyed him that he should not have sufficient vital force to resist getting chilled by a whiff of wind on a day so mild as this. Anne Harding had told him that he was not yet so "almighty strong as he thought himself, by a long shot."

He reached Villa Bianca two hours later, feeling rather moody, and with a nasty, teasing pain in his legs and the small of his back.

x.x.xVII

The pains in his back and legs persisted all that night, and in the morning he confessed to Sophy that he thought he'd "caught a d.a.m.ned cold somehow," that his legs felt like a pair of red-hot compa.s.ses, and could she suggest a remedy? Sophy brought him ten grains of phenacetine from her little travelling medicine-chest, and in an hour he was much relieved. These pains were all the more annoying, as he had heard lately of the yearly boat-races on Lago Maggiore, and was keen on having Amaldi enter _The Wind-Flower_ for these races.

"And if I get shelved with an attack of sciatica, there's the end of it!" he growled. "It nipped me once before, in Canada, so I know the strength of its cursed fangs."

Amaldi, finding that he would have to endure more than a good deal of Chesney's company, unless he devised some mitigation, had introduced him to several friends of his--keen yachtsmen, members of the R. V. Y. C.