Cæsar. Then let my daughter drop her perverse humour; 'tis a more certain bar to marriage than ugliness or folly; and will send me to my grave, at last, without male heirs. [Crying.] How many have laid siege to her! But that humour of hers, like the works of Gibraltar, no Spaniard can find pregnable.
Gasp. Ay, well—Troy held out but ten years——Let her once tell over her beads, unmarried at five-and-twenty, and, my life upon it, she ends the rosary, with a hearty prayer for a good husband.
Cæsar. What, d'ye expect me to wait till the horrors of old maidenism frighten her into civility? no, no;—I'll shut her up in a convent, marry myself, and have heirs in spite of her. There's my neighbour Don Vasquez's daughter, she is but nineteen——
Gasp. The very step I was going to recommend, sir. You are but a young gentleman of sixty-three, I take it; and a husband of sixty-three, who marries a wife of nineteen, will never want heirs, take my word for it.
Cæsar. What! do you joke, sirrah?
Gasp. Oh no, sir—not if you are serious. I think it would be one of the pleasantest things in the world—Madam would throw a new life into the family; and when you are above stairs in the gout, sir, the music of her concerts, and the spirit of her converzationes, would reach your sick bed, and be a thousand times more comforting than flannels and panada.
Cæsar. Come, come, I understand ye.—But this daughter of mine—I shall give her but two chances more.——Don Garcia and Don Vincentio will both be here to-day, and if she plays over the old game, I'll marry to-morrow morning, if I hang myself the next.
Gasp. You decide right, signor; at sixty-three the marriage noose and the hempen noose should always go together.
Cæsar. Why, you dog you, do you suppose—There's Don Garcia—there he is coming through the portico. Run to my daughter, and bid her remember what I have said to her. [Exit Gasper, r.] She has had her lesson—but another memento mayn't be amiss—a young slut! pretty, and witty, and rich—a match for a prince, and yet—but hist!——Not a word to my young man; if I can but keep him in ignorance till he is married, he must make the best of his bargain afterwards, as other honest men have done before him.
Enter Garcia, l.