Demás comes back, calls up his merrymen, and has a battle-royal with the enraged legionaries, which puts the critics of the gallery into a frenzy of delight and assures the success of the spectacle. The curtain falls in a gust of applause, is stormed up again, Demás comes forward and makes a neat speech, announcing the author. Que salga! roar the gods,--"Trot him out!" A shabby young cripple hobbles to the front, leaning upon a crutch, his sallow face flushed with a hectic glow of pride and pleasure. He also makes a glib speech,--I have never seen a Spaniard who could not,--disclaiming all credit for himself, but lauding the sublimity of the acting and the perfection of the scene-painting, and saying that the memory of this unmerited applause will be forever engraved upon his humble heart.
Act third, the Lost Child, or Christ in the Temple. The scene is before the Temple on a festival day, plenty of chorus-girls, music, and flowers. Demás and the impenitent Gestas and Barabbas, who, I was pleased to see, was after all a very
A MIRACLE PLAY 285
good sort of fellow, with no more malice than you or I, were down in the city on a sort of lark, their leopard skins left in the mountains and their daggers hid under the natty costume of the Judaean dandy of the period. Demás and Gestas have a quarrel, in which Gestas is rather roughly handled, and goes off growling like every villain, qui se respecte,--"I will have r-revenge." Barabbas proposes to go around to the cider-cellars, but Demás confides to him that he is enslaved by a dream of a child, who said to him, "Follow me--to Paradise;" that he had come down to Jerusalem to seek and find the mysterious infant of his vision. The jovial Barabbas seems imperfectly impressed by these transcendental fancies, and at this moment Mary comes in dressed like a Madonna of Guido Reni, and soon after St. Joseph and his staff. They ask each other where is the Child,--a scene of alarm and bustle, which ends by the door of the Temple flying open and discovering, shrined in ineffable light, Jesus teaching the doctors.
In the fourth act, Demás meets a beautiful woman by the city gate, in the loose, graceful dress of the Hetairai, and the most wonderful luxuriance
286
CASTILIAN DAYS
of black curls I have ever seen falling in dense masses to her knees. After a conversation of amorous banter, he gives her a golden chain, which she assumes, well pleased, and gives him her name, La Magdalena. A motley crowd of street loafers here rushed upon the scene, and I am sure there was no one of Northern blood in the theatre that did not shudder for an instant at the startling apparition that formed the central figure of the group. The world has long ago agreed upon a typical face and figure for the Saviour of men; it has been repeated on myriads of canvases and reproduced in thousands of statues, till there is scarcely a man living that does not have the same image of the Redeemer in his mind. Well, that image walked quietly upon the stage, so perfect in make-up that you longed for some error to break the terrible vraisemblance. I was really relieved when the august appearance spoke, and I recognized the voice of a young actor named Morales, a clever light comedian of the Bressant type.