At length, however, despite the prodigious care that the great magnifico, Don Juan Belvidero, took of himself, the days of decrepitude came upon him, and with those days the constant importunity of physical feebleness, an importunity all the more distressing by contrast with the wealth of memories of his impetuous youth and the sensual pleasures of middle age.  The unbeliever who in the height of his cynical humor had been wont to persuade others to believe in laws and principles at which he scoffed, must repose nightly upon a perhaps.  The great Duke, the pattern of good breeding, the champion of many a carouse, the proud ornament of Courts, the man of genius, the graceful winner of hearts that he had wrung as carelessly as a peasant twists an osier withe, was now the victim of a cough, of a ruthless sciatica, of an unmannerly gout.  His teeth gradually deserted him, as at the end of an evening the fairest and best-dressed women take their leave one by one till the room is left empty and desolate.  The active hands became palsy-stricken, the shapely legs tottered as he walked.  At last, one night, a stroke of apoplexy caught him by the throat in its icy clutch.  After that fatal day he grew morose and stern.

He would reproach his wife and son with their devotion, casting it in their teeth that the affecting and thoughtful care that they lavished so tenderly upon him was bestowed because they knew that his money was invested in a life annuity.  Then Elvira and Felipe would shed bitter tears and redouble their caresses, and the wicked old man’s insinuating voice would take an affectionate tone—­“Ah, you will forgive me, will you not, dear friends, dear wife?  I am rather a nuisance.  Alas, Lord in heaven, how canst Thou use me as the instrument by which Thou provest these two angelic creatures?  I who should be the joy of their lives am become their scourge . . .”

In this manner he kept them tethered to his pillow, blotting out the memory of whole months of fretfulness and unkindness in one short hour when he chose to display for them the ever-new treasures of his pinchbeck tenderness and charm of manner—­a system of paternity that yielded him an infinitely better return than his own father’s indulgence had formerly gained.  At length his bodily infirmities reached a point when the task of laying him in bed became as difficult as the navigation of a felucca in the perils of an intricate channel.  Then came the day of his death; and this brilliant sceptic, whose mental faculties alone had survived the most dreadful of all destructions, found himself between his two special antipathies—­the doctor and the confessor.  But he was jovial with them.  Did he not see a light gleaming in the future beyond the veil?  The pall that is like lead for other men was thin and translucent for him; the light-footed, irresistible delights of youth danced beyond it like shadows.