The Elixir of Life | Page 7

I mean," said the old noble, summoning
all his strength to sit up in bed; for a thrill of doubt ran through him,
one of those suspicions that come into being under a dying man's
pillow. "Listen, my son," he went on, in a voice grown weak with that

last effort, "I have no more wish to give up life than you to give up
wine and mistresses, horses and hounds, and hawks and gold----"
"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.
Suddenly the silence was broken by a shrill sound like the creaking of a
rusty spring. It startled Don Juan; he all but dropped the phial. A sweat,
colder than the blade of a dagger, issued through every pore. It was
only a piece of clockwork, a wooden cock that sprang out and crowed
three times, an ingenious contrivance by which the learned of that
epoch were wont to be awakened at the appointed hour to begin the
labors of the day. Through the windows there came already a flush of
dawn. The thing, composed of wood, and cords, and wheels, and
pulleys, was more faithful in its service than he in his duty to
Bartolommeo-- he, a man with that peculiar piece of human mechanism
within him that we call a heart.
Don Juan the sceptic shut the flask again in the secret drawer in the
Gothic table--he meant to run no