“Shall I crush it out? Perhaps that would be parricide?” he asked himself.
“Yes,” said the eye, by means of an ironical wink.
“Ah!” cried Don Juan, “there is sorcery in it!”
He approached the eye to crush it. A large tear rolled down the hollow cheek of the corpse and fell on Belvidéro’s hand.
“It is scalding!” he cried, sitting down.
This struggle had exhausted him, as if, like Jacob, he had battled with an angel.
At last he arose, saying: “So long as there is no blood—”
Then, collecting all the courage needed for the cowardly act, he crushed out the eye, pressing it in with the linen without looking at it. A deep moan, startling and terrible, was heard. It was the poor spaniel, who died with a howl.
“Could he have been in the secret?” Don Juan wondered, surveying the faithful animal.
Don Juan was considered a dutiful son. He raised a monument of white marble over his father’s tomb, and employed the most prominent artists of the time to carve the figures. He was not altogether at ease until the statue of his father, kneeling before Religion, imposed its enormous weight on the grave, in which he had buried the only regret that had ever touched his heart, and that only in moments of physical depression.