“Are you going to listen to me?” cried the dying man, gnashing his toothless jaws.

Don Juan held his peace.  A horrible silence reigned.  Through the dull wail of the snowstorm came again the melody of the viol and the heavenly voice, faint as the dawning day.

The dying man smiled.

“I thank you for having brought singers and music!  A banquet, young and beautiful women, with dark locks, all the pleasures of life.  Let them remain.  I am about to be born again.”

“The delirium is at its height,” said Don Juan to himself.

“I have discovered a means of resuscitation.  There, look in the drawer of the table—­you open it by pressing a hidden spring near the griffin.”

“I have it, father.”

“Good!  Now take out a little flask of rock crystal.”

“Here it is.”

“I have spent twenty years in——­”

At this point the old man felt his end approaching, and collected all his energy to say: 

“As soon as I have drawn my last breath rub me with this water and I shall come to life again.”

“There is very little of it,” replied the young man.

Bartholomeo was no longer able to speak, but he could still hear and see.  At these words he turned his head toward Don Juan with a violent wrench.  His neck remained twisted like that of a marble statue doomed by the sculptor’s whim to look forever sideways, his staring eyes assumed a hideous fixity.  He was dead, dead in the act of losing his only, his last illusion.  In seeking a shelter in his son’s heart he had found a tomb more hollow than those which men dig for their dead.  His hair, too, had risen with horror and his tense gaze seemed still to speak.  It was a father rising in wrath from his sepulchre to demand vengeance of God.

“There, the good man is done for!” exclaimed Don Juan.

Intent upon taking the magic crystal to the light of the lamp, as a drinker examines his bottle at the end of a repast, he had not seen his father’s eye pale.  The cowering dog looked alternately at his dead master and at the elixir, as Don Juan regarded by turns his father and the phial.  The lamp threw out fitful waves of light.  The silence was profound, the viol was mute.  Belvidero thought he saw his father move, and he trembled.  Frightened by the tense expression of the accusing eyes, he closed them, just as he would have pushed down a window-blind on an autumn night.  He stood motionless, lost in a world of thought.

Suddenly a sharp creak, like that of a rusty spring, broke the silence.  Don Juan, in his surprise, almost dropped the flask.  A perspiration, colder than the steel of a dagger, oozed out from his pores.  A cock of painted wood came forth from a clock and crowed three times.  It was one of those ingenious inventions by which the savants of that time were awakened at the hour fixed for their work.  Already the daybreak reddened the casement.  The old timepiece was more faithful in its master’s service than Don Juan had been in his duty to Bartholomeo.  This instrument was composed of wood, pulleys, cords and wheels, while he had that mechanism peculiar to man, called a heart.