"Poor Endymion!"
"Don't be a fool, talking such classical stuff! I tell you I'm madly in love with her, and she won't have anything to do with me. Everything is against me. I'm poor, unloved and obscure. Life isn't worth living under such conditions."
He looked again at the sparkling wine, which seemed to invite him to try it as an anodyne for his pain. Everything seemed to his distorted imagination to be dull and dark. Wine would at least give him a few hours' respite from these torturing thoughts. He was master of himself now. He would drink one glass and no more. After all, seeing that everything was lost, what did it matter if he did fall once more? He had nothing to live for now. A wild despair took possession of his heart, and with a reckless laugh he seized the glass and finished the wine to the last drop.
"Evohé Bacchus," said Beaumont, draining his glass. "There's nothing like wine to cure a broken heart."
The insidious wine mounted rapidly to the excitable brain of the young man, and he no longer felt regret at breaking the pledge he had made five years before. The humdrum past of struggle and respectability was done with. Wine would solace him. Drink! Who cared for such a thing? Anacreon was the head of a glorious band of poets, and praised the wine. Wise Anacreon, he knew the true virtues of the grape. The past is dead, the future is uncertain. Live--live only in the present, with wine to make us as gods--Evohé Bacchus.
The stimulating wine had performed its work excellently, and the world hitherto so gloomy now appeared of a roseate tint.
"A broken heart!" he repeated, with a gay laugh. "Pish! hearts don't break so easily. A woman's no means yes. I'll ask again."
"Nothing like perseverance," said Basil, observing with infinite joy the flushed face and bright eyes of the young man. "Have some more wine?"
"Rather!" replied Nestley, holding out his glass, which Beaumont filled. "I was a fool to give up this for water. I'm sick of total abstainers--thin-blooded croakers. Here's confusion to them!" and he drank off the second glass.
Beaumont now saw that his victim was in that obstinate stage of recklessness which could not brook contradiction, so knew well how to proceed.