The young man went to the shelf where the thick green glasses stood, took one down and dipped it into the red-glazed pitcher that stood beneath. The bubble of the water sounded pleasantly; he raised the dripping glass and drank with a grateful air.
He was glad of the cool shadows and of the intense quiet; every one seemed abroad; it was autumn and he supposed they were at work in the vineyards.
There was an old rush-bottomed chair near the black-carved supports of the door; he seated himself with his back to the sunlight in the deserted street, and his eyes on the window the other side of the room that gave an exquisite glimpse of a fig-tree drooping in the shadowed garden, and beyond a glossy myrtle, glittering in distant sunbeams. The young man knew that he had not long to live, both from ordinary signs and fore-warnings and the sure inner instinct his keen intelligence was quick to notice and regard.
He was absolutely without fear; he had never had any credence in any religion or any belief, even vague, in a future state of existence, nor had, like many, tried to invent these feelings for himself or supply their place with superstitions and conventions.
He had never needed these lures to gild his life with promise, always he had found the moment sufficient, and whatever the moment demanded, in wealth, honour, talent, charm or health, he had given lavishly, not unthinkingly, for he had always known that a price would be demanded, as he had seen it demanded from others of his kind.
And he was prepared to pay.
A long life did not attract him; all the pleasures he valued were pleasures that could not with dignity be enjoyed when youth was past; his own sparkling wit had often made a butt of an old rake, or an elderly prodigal; he had never intended to join the ranks of those people who had outworn their enjoyments.
A poet whom he had patronised had called him “The scorn and wonder of the age;” but from his own point of view his life had been the very steady following of a very simple philosophy.
Caring for nothing but the world, that he regarded as the golden apple hung above the head of every youth to ignore or gain, he had bought the world, with money, with charm, with honour, with talent, with beauty and strength and exulted in it and sated himself–and he did not complain of the bargain. He never complained of anything; his sweet, good humour was held by many to condone his villainies as the grace with which he took his final fall almost justified the acts which had led to that fall. When his political levity, his social extravagances, his dissipations had finally left him without health or money, he had taken the verdict of the doctors, the curses of his creditors and the flight of his friends with the same gentle smile, and, urged by his ardent love of the world to make life an adventure to the last, had disappeared from London, where he was so dazzling and infamous a figure, to die abroad, in the sun and among scenes that by their freshness and simplicity disguised, at least to a stranger’s eyes, the sharpness of their poverty. So he, by birth an English Marquis, by patent of the Pretender a Duke, son of a famous man and himself the most renowned rake in London, even among a set that included Viscount Bolingbroke, stayed his obscure wanderings at a poor inn in an unknown Spanish village and prepared himself for death among the peasants of a strange land.