In the evening I read and meditated on the happiness of my lot.
The years of school drudgery have already lost their sharp edge
of remembered definition, and sometimes I wonder whether it is I
who lived through them. I had not a care in the world, not a
want that I could not gratify. I thought of Judith. I thought
of Sebastian Pasquale. I amused myself by seeking a Renaissance
type of which he must be the reincarnation. I fixed upon young
Olgiati, one of the assassins of Gian Galeazzo Sforza. Of the
many hundreds of British youths who passed before my eyes during
my slavery, he is the only one who has sought me out in his
manhood. And strange to say we had only a few months together,
during my first year's apprenticeship to the dismal craft, he
being in the sixth form, and but three or four years younger than
I. He was the maddest, oddest, most diabolical and most
unpopular boy in the school. The staff, to whom the conventional
must of necessity be always the Divine, loathed him. I alone
took to the creature. I think now that my quaint passion for the
cinquecento Italian must have had something to do with my
attraction. In externals he is as English as I am, having been
brought up in England by an English mother, but there are
thousands of Hindoos who are more British than he. The McMurrays
were telling me dreadful stories about him this afternoon.
Sighing after an obdurate Viennese dancer, he had lured her
coachman into helpless intoxication, had invested himself in the
domestic's livery, and had driven off with the lady in the
darkness after the performance to the outskirts of the town.
What happened exactly, the McMurrays did not know; but there was
the devil to pay in Vienna. And yet this inconsequent libertine
did the following before my own eyes. We were walking down