The Elixir of Life | Page 9

dart fire at Don Juan; he saw it thinking, upbraiding,
condemning, uttering accusations, threatening doom; it cried aloud, and
gnashed upon him. All anguish that shakes human souls was gathered
there; supplications the most tender, the wrath of kings, the love in a
girl's heart pleading with the headsman; then, and after all these, the
deeply searching glance a man turns on his fellows as he mounts the
last step of the scaffold. Life so dilated in this fragment of life that Don
Juan shrank back; he walked up and down the room, he dared not meet
that gaze, but he saw nothing else. The ceiling and the hangings, the

whole room was sown with living points of fire and intelligence.
Everywhere those gleaming eyes haunted him.
"He might very likely have lived another hundred years!" he cried
involuntarily. Some diabolical influence had drawn him to his father,
and again he gazed at that luminous spark. The eyelid closed and
opened again abruptly; it was like a woman's sign of assent. It was an
intelligent movement. If a voice had cried "Yes!" Don Juan could not
have been more startled.
"What is to be done?" he thought.
He nerved himself to try to close the white eyelid. In vain.
"Kill it? That would perhaps be parricide," he debated with himself.
"Yes," the eye said, with a strange sardonic quiver of the lid.
"Aha!" said Don Juan to himself, "here is witchcraft at work!" And he
went closer to crush the thing. A great tear trickled over the hollow
cheeks, and fell on Don Juan's hand.
"It is scalding!" he cried. He sat down. The struggle exhausted him; it
was as if, like Jacob of old, he was wrestling with an angel.
At last he rose. "So long as there is no blood----" he muttered.
Then, summoning all the courage needed for a coward's crime, he
extinguished the eye, pressing it with the linen cloth, turning his head
away. A terrible groan startled him. It was the poor poodle, who died
with a long-drawn howl.
"Could the brute have been in the secret?" thought Don Juan, looking
down at the faithful creature.
Don Juan Belvidero was looked upon as a dutiful son. He reared a
white marble monument on his father's tomb, and employed the
greatest sculptors of the time upon it. He did not recover perfect ease of
mind till the day when his father knelt in marble before Religion, and
the heavy weight of the stone had sealed the mouth of the grave in
which he had laid the one feeling of remorse that sometimes flitted
through his soul in moments of physical weariness.
He had drawn up a list of the wealth heaped up by the old merchant in
the East, and he became a miser: had he not to provide for a second
lifetime? His views of life were the more profound and penetrating; he
grasped its significance, as a whole, the better, because he saw it across
a grave. All men, all things, he analyzed once and for all; he summed
up the Past, represented by its records; the Present in the law, its

crystallized form; the Future, revealed by religion. He took spirit and
matter, and flung them into his crucible, and found-- Nothing.
Thenceforward he became DON JUAN.
At the outset of his life, in the prime of youth and the beauty of youth,
he knew the illusions of life for what they were; he despised the world,
and made the utmost of the world. His felicity could not have been of
the bourgeois kind, rejoicing in periodically recurrent bouilli, in the
comforts of a warming-pan, a lamp of a night, and a new pair of
slippers once a quarter. Nay, rather he seized upon existence as a
monkey snatches a nut, and after no long toying with it, proceeds deftly
to strip off the mere husks to reach the savory kernel within.
Poetry and the sublime transports of passion scarcely reached
ankle-depth with him now. He in nowise fell into the error of strong
natures who flatter themselves now and again that little souls will
believe in a great soul, and are willing to barter their own lofty thoughts
of the future for the small change of our life-annuity ideas. He, even as
they, had he chosen, might well have walked with his feet on the earth
and his head in the skies; but he liked better to sit on earth, to wither
the soft, fresh, fragrant lips of a woman with kisses, for like Death, he
devoured everything without scruple as he passed; he would have full
fruition; he was an Oriental lover, seeking prolonged pleasures easily
obtained. He sought nothing but a woman in women, and cultivated
cynicism, until it became with him