Shadows of Flames Part 55

Pharmacy.... Whatever-you-call-it...?" he asked.

"_Pharmacia? He?_"

"Yes; the other one."

"Caccia? All right, I go at Caccia."

He turned round and drove to another chemist's, this time in a farther Piazza. It took about four minutes. Chesney got out and entered the shop. The keen, medicinal smell of the place brought the past in a gust upon him. He took the old prescription again from his pocketbook. It was stamped with the names of various chemists where it had been filled before.

"I am suffering severely with sciatica," he said, in a casual tone, to the clerk who took the prescription from him. "I need sleep very badly.

I only want enough morphia for two doses--well, perhaps three would be better, as the pain might not yield easily."

The clerk said: "_Si, Signore_," and went to consult a senior member of the firm. He returned and said respectfully:

"I am sorry, Signore. We do not keep _Sulfato di Morphia_ in this form."

Chesney flushed and paled rapidly as he had done in the cab outside.

"Do you mean you refuse to sell me even one or two doses?" he asked haughtily.

The clerk looked admiringly and a little timidly at his immense, angry customer.

"_Prego, Signore_--but not at all," he said. "We will sell it to you.

This is a good prescription--good firms have filled it before. It is only that we have not the morphia in tablets--but in solution. And we have it not with the atropia."

"Ah!" said Chesney. His face relaxed. "Well, show me the kind you have,"

he said curtly, but not uncivilly.

The clerk brought a little cardboard box divided into cells. These cells, which were lined with cotton-wool, each held a small gla.s.s globule filled with a solution of morphia and sealed at one end with wax.

"It is safer so, Signore. One escapes to infect oneself. One breaks the seal and fills the hypodermic _siringa_ direct from these little globules."

Chesney was silent for a second, gazing at the little transparent amphorae that held Nepenthe. Then he said:

"Do you keep hypodermic syringes? I have broken mine."

He winced as the unnecessary lie escaped him. It made things more plausible, but need not have been uttered. Untruth seemed somehow the inevitable attendant of morphia, even when innocently indulged in as he was now about to do. Yet all this time his pulse was racing. The clang of the little bell attached to the door of the pharmacy, that rang when customers went in or out, made him start and glance round each time that it sounded....

He went out and got again into the _carrozzella_. In his pocket were three of the little globules and a shining new hypodermic syringe in a black Morocco case.

"Villa Bianca!" he said.

The vetturino glanced up, struck by the new, firm ring in his voice.

"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.

x.x.xVIII

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 etre_ 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 a.s.sociated 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 sc.r.a.ped 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 sc.r.a.ps 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.

Then he took off his coat, spread a fresh towel on the bed, and laid out the hypodermic syringe and one of the gla.s.s globules upon it. There was one instant when, as he stood with the syringe poised above the opened capsule, a strange impulse came over him. He thought: "What if I throw all this stuff into the fire? Just go to bed, take the salicylate--'grin and bear it'?" His heart beat violently. Then, with a sudden gesture, he thrust the nose of the syringe into the capsule, and drew the piston up till the cylinder was filled with the colourless liquid. Each dose of the solution held half a grain of morphia. He screwed the needle into place--pushed up his shirt-sleeve.... Another instant and the needle was home in his flesh. He pressed the piston gently down--withdrew the needle, and rubbed the puncture with a bit of cotton soaked in spirit.

Then he cleaned the syringe, put a wire through the needle, locked all away into his travelling-bag, and, after setting the door slightly ajar, undressed and got into bed. In two minutes the little clutch at his midriff told him that the morphia was at its work.... Then he called to Sophy. And as he lay there with slow bliss stealing over him, and heard her light step coming up the stair, he justified his action to himself with persistent and plausible reiteration. The pain was already lessening--he felt tender and affectionate towards Sophy--longed to talk to her. But he kept saying to himself: "No, no--I must not. I must not, on any account." So he only smiled at her and moved his head against the pillow in a.s.sent, when she asked if he felt easier, warm in bed like this. When she sat down in a low chair beside the bed and began to read, he reached out and took her free hand, holding it, playing with her rings--that vague smile still on his face.

The rain fell faster and faster--it became a heavy downpour, rattling on the magnolia leaves outside and veiling the more distant trees. Sophy read until he seemed dozing--then went down to her lonely dinner in the ugly little dining-room. Somehow she felt strangely depressed. The _Mareng_ seemed to have soaked into her very soul.

Chesney stayed in bed three days. He took all the morphia, but he also took the salicylate prescribed by Camenis. He suffered a good deal from nausea; but when he got up again, on the morning of the fourth day, his attack of sciatica was entirely over. He felt abominably weak, though.

On the second day, he had sent Luigi to Pallanza to buy some good Cognac--a small gla.s.s of this revived him. He scrupulously avoided taking more than a small quant.i.ty at a time. He did not for a moment intend to lapse into his old habits.

But after he had been about for two days, back came the sciatic pains.

He grumbled savagely. The _Mareng_ had ceased. The Maggiore seemed kindling the heavens with its clear, fierce blast. The sun would have been hot as in August but for the wind. There seemed no earthly reason for the return of the sciatica. He must get rid of this nuisance before the races, by hook or by crook. He shrank from the idea of taking more morphia in its Italian form. The nausea had been too wearing. Besides, he did not wish to go to Caccia's a second time for it. It occurred to him to take the motor-boat and run over to Stresa. The first chemist there would probably have English or American preparations of the drug.

He succeeded in finding a little case of an American preparation of morphia and atropine. But he was still extremely cautious, not only in regard to others, but about himself. Such doses as he took were very small (he would cut the tablets in half with his penknife--carefully burning the blade first in a candle-flame). And he always took them at bedtime, so that by the next morning the extreme dryness of his mouth would have pa.s.sed. The pain kept nagging him. And in the intervals between the doses of morphia that hateful weakness came over him. He began to drink Cognac regularly with his meals. This worried Sophy--she could not think so much brandy good for him. At her suggestion he bought some Scotch whiskey in Pallanza. But the smooth, oily liquor, tempered by soda, was not what he wanted. It was even distasteful to him. What he craved was the keen bite of the raw brandy in his stomach and blood.

He grew very irritable at times, under the double stress of the intermittent pain, and the desire for larger doses of morphia than he dared take. His extreme caution would not let him continue drinking the Cognac at meals, since Sophy had objected to it. It might make her suspect something. So he fell into the way of taking a gla.s.s here and there, wherever he chanced to be, at some _cafe_ in Intra or Pallanza, or even in Ghiffa.

He did not find Amaldi so companionable, either, since he had been suffering in this way.

"Rather a wooden chap, that Amaldi, when one comes to see more of him,"

he said to Sophy.

One evening, when Amaldi chanced to be at Villa Bianca, Chesney again asked his wife to sing. She went at once to the piano. Amaldi sat leaning forward, looking down at his hands, which were clasped loosely between his knees. Chesney kept glancing towards him vexedly all the time that Sophy was singing. Amaldi's expression _was_ rather "wooden."

"Sing that Grieg thing," Chesney had said. She sang Solweg's song from the Peer Gynt series. It seemed to Amaldi that he could not bear it, when the voice of the woman he loved poured over him in that soft wave of heart-break. His face looked ever more and more "wooden" as she sang on. When she stopped and Chesney fixed his eyes on the other man with that sort of irritated challenge in them, Amaldi said in a cut-and-dried tone: "Thanks. It was most beautiful."

Chesney couldn't get over it for the rest of the evening. He mimicked Amaldi's tone and manner to Sophy again and again.

"d.a.m.ned constipated mind the fellow's got, by G.o.d!" he said. "He hears for the first time a great imperial-purple voice like yours, and all he says is: 'Thanks; most beautiful.' Why didn't he say: 'Very nice,' and have done with it!"

Sophy shivered at his ever-increasing irritability. Sometimes she thought the gentle Luigi would surely burst into flame under Cecil's fierce cursings and depart forthwith; but the little man merely looked stolid, as if slightly deaf, on these occasions. She thought that Lombards, whether n.o.ble or peasant, had singular self-control, for something in the little Milanese's manner under provocation reminded her vaguely of Amaldi. Then one day she heard him remark to Maria, the cook, who also seemed astonished at his patience:

"_Cosa te voeuret? L'e matt quel diavol d'un milord. E quella bella sciora l'e tanto bona._" (What'll you have? He's mad, this devil of a milord, and his lovely lady is so good!)

One afternoon Amaldi called to tell Chesney that _The Wind-Flower_ was in the water again. He found Sophy alone on the terrace. She was sewing on a little blouse for Bobby, who had worn out most of his wardrobe. She loved making his little fineries herself. Amaldi was more natural in his manner that afternoon. It was long since he had seen her alone. Sophy had recovered from the first shock of her husband's return; she also felt more natural. Before long she was talking to Amaldi almost eagerly.

She had been thinking of her far-away home in Virginia when he arrived.