The Decadent by Ralph Adams Cram

The 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 Romanee Conti, which he himself could not have told from Macon. "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.