Trotaconventos: Come, come, brave bull! And has Love, the bandillero, maddened you with his darts? Old Trotaconventos must turn bull-fighter! Ah! I know the human heart! Dog in the manger, like all men! Too nice yourself for Sister Assumcion, but too greedy to let another enjoy her!
Don Manuel de Lara: A key!
Trotaconventos: No, no, Sir knight. You are not St. Ferdinand and I am not the Moorish king that I should yield up the keys of Seville to you without a parley. Why do you want the key?
Don Manuel de Lara (suddenly growing quiet and eyeing her ironically): What if I have been on pilgrimage to Jerusalem and found the sun too hot? I have strange fancies. They say the founder of our house wed with a heathen witch who danced on the hills. (Persuasively) Hearken, I know you love rich fabrics; I have silk coverlets from Malaga that are ballads for the eye instead of for the ear, silk-threaded heathen ballads of Mahound and the doves and Almanzor and his Christian concubine. I have curtains from Almeric—Doña Maria has none to rival them in the Alcazar—and so fresh-coloured are the flowers that are embroidered on them, that when I was a child I thought that I could smell them, and my mother, to coax me to eat when a dry, hot wind was parching the Vega, would tell me the bees had culled the honey spread on my bread from the flowers embroidered on these curtains. I have necklets of gold, beaten thin like autumn beech-leaves, taken by my grandsire from the harems of Cordova when he stormed the city with St. Ferdinand; ere they were necklets they were ciboriums of the Goths, rifled by impious Tarik. Precious stones? I have rubies like beakers with the red wine trembling to their very lip ... one almost fears to lift them except with a steady hand for fear they spill and stain one’s garments red, and like to wine, the gifts they bring are health and a merry heart. I have Scythian sapphires that once lay in the bed of the river of Paradise, while to win them Arimaspians were fighting Gryphons; they are the gage of the life to come, they are blue and cold like English ladies’ eyes who go on pilgrimage. And I have emeralds to catch from them a blue shadow like that of a kingfisher on green waters. He who has store of precious stones need fear neither plague nor fever, nor fiends, nor the terrors by night, and with that store I will endow you if you but give me the key. The key, good mother, the key!
Trotaconventos: Very pretty ... but ... well ... I know a certain king, a mighty ugly one, who laughs at the virtues of precious stones.... Aye ... but come, Don Manuel, we are but playing with each other. With your own eyes you saw me give the key of the Convent of San Miguel to the French trovar. Think you I have two?
Don Manuel de Lara (as if stunned): Not two? To the French trovar?
Trotaconventos: Why, yes, Sir knight. Your wits are wool-gathering.
Don Manuel de Lara (in great excitement): My cloak? Where is my cloak? Away! the key!
Exit.