“I can well believe it,” thought the son; and he knelt down by the bed and kissed Bartolommeo’s cold hands.  “But, father, my dear father,” he added aloud, “we must submit to the will of God.”

“I am God!” muttered the dying man.

“Do not blaspheme!” cried the other, as he saw the menacing expression on his father’s face.  “Beware what you say; you have received extreme unction, and I should be inconsolable if you were to die before my eyes in mortal sin.”

“Will you listen to me?” cried Bartolommeo, and his mouth twitched.

Don Juan held his peace; an ugly silence prevailed.  Yet above the muffled sound of the beating of the snow against the windows rose the sounds of the beautiful voice and the viol in unison, far off and faint as the dawn.  The dying man smiled.

“Thank you,” he said, “for bringing those singing voices and the music, a banquet, young and lovely women with fair faces and dark tresses, all the pleasure of life!  Bid them wait for me; for I am about to begin life anew.”

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

“I have found out a way of coming to life again,” the speaker went on.  “There, just look in that table drawer, press the spring hidden by the griffin, and it will fly open.”

“I have found it, father.”

“Well, then, now take out a little phial of rock crystal.”

“I have it.”

“I have spent twenty years in——­” but even as he spoke the old man felt how very near the end had come, and summoned all his dying strength to say, “As soon as the breath is out of me, rub me all over with that liquid, and I shall come to life again.”

“There is very little of it,” his son remarked.

Though Bartolommeo could no longer speak, he could still hear and see.  When those words dropped from Don Juan, his head turned with appalling quickness, his neck was twisted like the throat of some marble statue which the sculptor had condemned to remain stretched out for ever, the wide eyes had come to have a ghastly fixity.

He was dead, and in death he lost his last and sole illusion.

He had sought a shelter in his son’s heart, and it had proved to be a sepulchre, a pit deeper than men dig for their dead.  The hair on his head had risen and stiffened with horror, his agonized glance still spoke.  He was a father rising in just anger from his tomb, to demand vengeance at the throne of God.

“There! it is all over with the old man!” cried Don Juan.

He had been so interested in holding the mysterious phial to the lamp, as a drinker holds up the wine-bottle at the end of a meal, that he had not seen his father’s eyes fade.  The cowering poodle looked from his master to the elixir, just as Don Juan himself glanced again and again from his father to the flask.  The lamplight flickered.  There was a deep silence; the viol was mute.  Juan Belvidero thought that he saw his father stir, and trembled.  The changeless gaze of those accusing eyes frightened him; he closed them hastily, as he would have closed a loose shutter swayed by the wind of an autumn night.  He stood there motionless, lost in a world of thought.