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.
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