s 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 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 t