[III.]
HE night had grown old unnoticed, and now in the first dim twilight of coming dawn Aurelian and McCann were sitting on the wide terrace that stretched along the south side of the great house, smoking lazily and drinking the fine rare wines that Aurelian treasured as he treasured his precious books. Not far away the nightingales were singing in the thick wood; other sound there was none save the sweet rustle and stir of the awakening trees under the first thin wind of morning.
At first McCann had raged inwardly at everything,—at the crowded treasures of art that filled the castle-like house, at the dominant luxury, at the opium, the wine, at all the unfamiliar splendour that surrounded Aurelian. He sat now listening unappreciatively to Aurelian's quiet voice discoursing lovingly of the Romanée Conti, which he himself could not have told from Mâcon. "There are not two dozen of this vintage in America outside of my own cellars," Aurelian had said, and the poor agitator heard him miserably. He did remember, indeed, when a slim glass of amber Madeira was placed on the Indian table by his side and its name given him, that some one had once told him that Constitution Madeira was last quoted in New York at seventy dollars a bottle, and so he drank his glass with a kind of distant wonder, but without pleasure; he thought it musty, he would have chosen Bass. Yet, even as he lay in the long Indian chair, the subtle influence of Aurelian's Lattakhia and of his ancient wine worked slowly in his system, and already he began to think with something approaching tolerance of his pupil's apostasy. He lay full length looking out over the carved balustrade through the silvery jasmine flowers amid their black leaves, to where the sky of blazing stars, already paling before the advancing day, ceased at the edge of the dark hills; and as he lay thus dreamily, he even wondered if he had realised all that there was in life, in his career of feverish action.
Aurelian tossed the glowing end of his cigarette out through the jasmine leaves, watching it fall like a scarlet star. "Do you not see how it is?" he said; "I know to the full the grotesque hideousness of life as it is, and I long for revolution. But I have seen every man who is fired with desire to bring the change yield to the baleful influence of that which he would destroy until he has come to see no ideals save those of materialism. His ideal of life is a socialistic ideal of a dead, gross, physical ease and level uniformity; his ideal of government a democracy; his ideal of industry State factories with gigantic steam-engines,—his whole system but the present system with all its false ideals, deprived of its individualism. I have lived beyond this, I can see the futility of all these things. I believe only in art as the object of production,—art which shall glorify that which we eat, that wherewith we clothe ourselves, those things whereby we are sheltered; art which shall be this and more,—the ultimate expression of all that is spiritual, religious, and divine in the soul of man. I hate material prosperity, I refuse to justify machinery, I cannot pardon public opinion. I desire only absolute individuality and the triumph of idealism. I detest the republic, and long for the monarchy again."
"Aurelian," said McCann, "will you tell me straight what you mean when you say that, yet claim to be a socialist? I asked you once before that empty-headed Rip Van Winkle called Strafford Wentworth in the other room, and you made an evasive answer. Now, tell me, how do you reconcile the two?"
"Because I believe that political socialism will destroy society and clear the ground for a new life; because it will annihilate the Republic, and make monarchial government possible."
"It will destroy neither, but reform them both."
"It cannot reform either, for the principles of each are false."
"What do you fancy those principles to be?"