"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.
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