She panted, wordless, her frenzied eyes pouring loathing on him.

"Ay ... look at me as if I were a toad ... a horned toad." He grinned convulsively. "You've made me one ... you with your dirty little lover!"

Sophy got her breath. She was beside herself. She tore from his grasp, leaving some of the light tr.i.m.m.i.n.g of her blouse in his clenched hand.

"I wish he _were_ my lover!" she panted. "I wish _any_ one were my lover. Oh, if I could only tell you that I had a lover! If I only could!

Brute!... Coward!..."

She faced him quivering with detestation.

The dementia of hatred in her wild eyes sobered Chesney for an instant.

"Cut that!" he said sullenly. "What you've got to do is to swear to me, by all you hold sacred, that you'll never see that little skunk again.

Come--out with it!"

She laughed.

"Swear!" he cried furiously, "or I'll ... I'll...." He half-lifted his balled fist.

She went on laughing.

"Oh, you brute...." she whispered between the spasms of laughter. "You great, helpless brute!..."

He gazed at her villainously, out of sideward, blood-shot eyes.

"Swear!" he said. "Swear ... or it'll be worse for you!"

Her laughter renewed itself. Tears of laughter ran down her wild, working face.

"I laugh"--she stammered--"I laugh--because you think it could be--worse for me----"

He stood balked, humiliated before this fierce paroxysmal laughter. Then cunning flashed into his look of thwarted beast.

"_I'll_ tame you!" he said; and, laughing himself now, turned and rushed from the room. A throe of intuition gripped her. Bobby! He was going to wreak his spite against her on her boy. She was after him like the wind.

But not fast enough ... not fast enough.... Just before her ... just out of reach ... as in a nightmare ... he was leaping up the steps three at a time. She had a horrible illusion of not moving--of standing stock-still--of being fastened to the spot by heavy weights.

The nursery was on the third floor. She had put the child there because it was the sunniest room in the house. It had two large windows, each with a little balcony before it. Yes--it was the nursery he was making for. She was just in time to see him plunge in. The light door, swung to close of itself, as in most Italian houses, clapped to behind him without latching. She fell against it. As she did so she heard Rosa scream. The wild "dirling" sound of this scream checked her blood. At the same instant she saw. He was out on the light wooden balcony before the west window--with the child, grasped by its middle, in both hands.

Then the great arms straightened. He was holding the boy out in the blinding sunshine--out in the empty air, above a drop of thirty feet sheer to the gravel drive below. She saw this red as though bathed with blood. The Italian woman had cast herself p.r.o.ne on the ground--she tore at her hair in a sort of fit. Sophy stood congealed. Even her eyes seemed stiffening. Her breath stopped ... her heart.... She saw the boy begin to writhe--then her heart writhed in her; but she stood fast. Was the boy screaming? Deafness seemed to have smitten her. She could see the piteous round of the little mouth--wide open--but no sound reached her.

Over his shoulder the madman flung with a laugh:

"Perhaps _now_ you'll do as I tell you."

She heard a "Yes" go from her. It seemed like some faint, winged thing fluttering from her mouth towards him. She was afraid it would not reach him. She sent another--another. "Yes.... Yes...."

"You swear it?"

"Yes...."

"Never to see that little cur again?"

"Yes----"

"Then here's 'the pledge of love,'" he chuckled. He strode back and dropped the boy into her arms.

But the next instant his face sobered into a scared look. The child was in spasms. Like a little fish upon a bank, he jerked and twitched on his mother's breast.

"I say," muttered the frightened man; "I've gone it a bit too thick ...

eh?"

She was gazing with blind eyes at her boy. All her face looked blind.

She had sunk down on the floor with him. There was a dreadful, dulled, yet crazed, look in the very way she held the jerking body. She kept whispering: "A doctor!... A doctor!... A doctor!..." It was as if she were choking and this hoa.r.s.e word "doctor" were what she coughed up to keep from strangling. Neither she nor Chesney noticed the appalled group that had gathered at the nursery door, drawn there by Rosa's scream--Luigi, Maria, Tilda, the gardener's boy, Tibaldo. Rosa, now sitting up on the tiled floor, muttered and sobbed senselessly.

But when Sophy began her monotonous croak of, "Doctor!... Doctor!..."

this group vanished as by magic--all save Tilda, who came and crouched down by her mistress, helping her hold the struggling child. And all at once, Chesney, too, dashed from the room.

When he reached the terrace, he saw Luigi, like a little black hare, scudding towards the _banchetta_. At his heels ran Tibaldo and the two women. The huge man, in his day the fastest runner in England, overtook them in a few bounds. Now his head was clear. Now he knew what was needed and exactly how to get it. He leaped into the racer, Luigi after him. Within eight minutes they were at Intra. Claudio Mora, a young doctor from Turin, returned with them.

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 sh.e.l.l 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 _confrere_ 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 Sa.s.so di Ferro, that rose against a sky p.r.i.c.ked 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 G.o.d 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 ame, Mon ame helas maison d'ebene Ou s'est fendu sans bruit un soir Le grand miroir de mon espoir._"

And again:

"_Aurai-j'enfin l'atroce joie De voir nuit apres nuit comme une proie La demence attaquer mon cerveau, Et detraque, malade, sorti de la prison Et des travaux forces de sa raison D'appareiller vers un lointain nouveau?_"

He lay there thinking through the terrible, implacable mind of Verhaeren until midnight. Then a foot on the stair roused him. It was light and swift--a running step--Sophy's. Was the boy worse? Was he dying, perhaps? He leaped to the door, jerked it open. His haggard, drug-ravaged face stared out between the cheap yellow wood of the newel-post and the door. Sophy was coming down the stair opposite. She looked like a somnambule in her long white dressing-gown, with eyes fixed before her. He came out and stood facing her. She looked straight at him, but her face was blank of recognition.

"Sophy!" he muttered--there was anguish in his hoa.r.s.e voice: "Sophy!"

For all response, she leaned over the banister.