Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Weird Tales October 1937. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
[Sidenote: _A grim tale of torture, and the blind men who were chained to pillars in an underground cave_]
The man tried his best to sell me the house. He was confident that I would like it. Repeatedly he called my attention to the view.
There was something in what he said about the view. The villa on the top of a mountain commanded a vision of the valley, vine-clad and cottage-studded. It was an irregular bowl of green, dotted with stone houses which were whitewashed to almost painful brilliancy.
The valley was three and a third miles at its greatest width. Standing at the front door of the house, an expert marksman with telescopic sight could have placed a rifle bullet in each of the white marks of cottages. They nestled like little pearls amid a sea of green grape-vines.
"A wonderful view, _Signor_," the real-estate agent repeated. "That scene, at any time of the year, is worth twice what I am asking for the villa."
"But I can see all this without buying," I argued.
"But the place is old. It has no running water."
"Wrong!" and he smiled expansively, showing a row of gold-filled teeth. "Listen."
There came to us the sound of bubbling water. Turning, I traced the sound. I found a marble Cupid spurting water in a most peculiar way into a wall basin. I smiled and commented.
"There is one like that in Brussels and another in Madrid. But this is very fine. However, I referred to running water in a modern bathroom."
"But why bathe when you can sit here and enjoy the view?"
He was impossible. So, I wrote a check, took his bill of sale and became the owner of a mountain, topped by a stone house that seemed to be half ruin. But he did not know, and I did not tell him that I considered the fountain alone worth the price that I had paid. In fact, I had come to Italy to buy that fountain if I could; buy it and take it back to America with me. I knew all about that curious piece of marble. George Seabrook had written to me about it. Just one letter, and then he had gone on, goodness knows where. George was like that, always on the move. Now I owned the fountain and was already planning where I should place it in my New York home. Certainly not in the rose garden.