The Last Days of a Rake

reprisals. It would have become a business transaction. The Baileys were wealthy and had quite a bit of social power as well. Shame had not worked on his heart, but the vivid threat of being cut by society may have. Susan was too tender-hearted to wish him such ill, though. He lived for convivial society. She would do nothing to cause him to be turned away from it.
    His landlady had enough, and when she found the young lady alone, one day, flatly told her she was as stupid as any whore. Susan, finally accepting that Edgar Lankin did not love her enough to change his ways, retreated to her home and those who loved her.
    Lankin gave his landlady a generous tip for cleansing his room of the taint of perfidy and shame, as ripe a stink as ten-day-old fish.
    Susan was shuffled off to the country and did not show her face again in London that season, nor the next, to his knowledge. She was gone, and some said that she had left England altogether. Lankin never saw her again. But the cruelty that began that night in Lankin’s darkening heart grew like a malignant canker, fed with generous helpings of conceit and flattery, and his own sense that he was entitled to all that life could offer, while he owed nothing in return.

Part 6 - Nightfall
    “You were right, Lankin, that is not a pretty story,” John Hamilton said, as his friend lay gasping for air. “Why behave thus? What did it gain you?”
    One long and shuddering breath, another drink of cool water for his parched throat, and the man found his voice again. “I can only say, John, that what began as youthful arrogance led to further debauchery and an attitude of languid immorality. I just did not care for anyone but myself.”
    Hamilton appeared troubled, his face drawn and gray with emotion, as he trimmed the wick on the candle and lit another against the approach of the darkest hours of night. “I find it painful to picture you thus, my friend. You were an open-hearted lad, and in these last few months I have seen not only your regret for your past transgressions, but also the real steps you have taken to make up for them. How could the fine mind the Creator gave you be so misled and misused as you are telling me?”
    “You’re kind, John, as always, but you’re forgetting, in your compassion, how I mistreated your friendship when we were lads.” He turned his head and gazed toward the other man, reaching out one bony hand. “The lies I told you, the blame I misdirected on your shoulders, the beatings you took from the headmaster for my sake. You would forget it all, but I haven’t.”
    “Youthful folly,” Hamilton gently said, taking Lankin’s hand, letting their clasped hands lay on the bedclothes.
    “But an accurate barometer indicating the storm of reprehensible deeds to come.”
    Another coughing fit seized Lankin as a pretty maid came in and drew the curtains against the gloom outside the window. Hamilton helped him sit up, gave him a drink of water and then lowered him back to the bed, letting him recover his gasping breath. Finally he lay still and calm, as rain pattered and a changeable wind rattled the sash. The two men were silent until the maid was gone.
    “I know you had many years of dissolution, my friend,” Hamilton said. “Was there a point at which you could have changed, if you had been sufficiently motivated?”
    “Do you mean if I had been sufficiently intelligent?” Lankin asked, with a ghost of a smile. “Oh, yes, there was, John. Shall I tell you about it?”
    “If it doesn’t tire you too much. Are you sure you should not be better for some sleep?”
    “Sleep, when it comes, will be eternal,” Lankin said. “Let me talk. It occupies the time.”
    “Tell me, then.”

Part 7 - The Descent
    Life can be viewed as a body of water; either it is a still pond fed only by rainwater, and therefore stagnant in time, or it moves and refreshes itself as it goes, like a river or stream. Think of that stagnant pond, never changing except in the addition of foul detritus from the animals that live near it. That was Lankin’s life for the next ten years, as he strove to live on as he had in that first heady year of his adulthood. He drank, gambled, stayed out all night, led gangs of young men who boxed the watch and joined the Four-in-Hand club, spending his days careening about London on his yellow barouche, wearing his many-caped coat and driving his matched set of bays.
    He found, though, that every season fewer and fewer of his