Manfred. Yes, I understand you. You have only loved Jaime.
Beatrix. So deeply have I loved you, Manfred, that I have forsaken Jaime, noble as he is, for you who are so base. I have given myself to you, drawn by the attraction of the abyss which is your love. And I thought that I could live and be happy under cover of my sin, but it may not be. For ever between my breast and your arms he interposes.
They try to persuade themselves upon insufficient evidence that Jaime is dead, but Beatrix, the more nervous and impressionable of the two, endures the conviction of her senses that her husband lives as the added torture of fear to insistent remorse. Every sound that disturbs the silence, as they sit together by the fire, carries menace of his approach. 'Why are we not happy since we love one another?' Manfred bitterly cries, interrupting her terrified listening. Here is the keynote of Echegaray's philosophy, whether he marshals the dead centuries before us, or treats of the modern conscience. Even in the less complex ages, when the world was younger and fresher, he will not hear of obedience to instinct unpunished before even the fruit has had time to turn to ashes.
We understand that we are commanded to contemplate unrelieved gloom of sentiment and situation upon the entrance of Don Jaime, back from the Roussillon wars in company with Don Pedro, king of Aragon. The guilty lovers have an enemy in one Juana, the duenna and wife of Roger, the squire, who, discovering Beatrix and Manfred in a passionate embrace, is set upon by the infuriated bastard and inadvertently driven upon the sword's point into the family vault, where the door slams upon him with a secret spring. When Manfred has excited the king's anger by scornful rejection of the favour of a name and title that shall give him equality with his brother, we realise that the hour is a favourable one for Juana's accusation. Whatever rights a sovereign may arrogate to himself in the matter of his own morals, he is usually a keen arbitrator of the limitations of those of his subjects. On this principle, Don Pedro shows himself merciless to the sinners, though one happens to be his hostess and the other his host's much-loved brother. A rational man would have preferred to blink and turn away, with the safe conclusion that it was, after all, none of his business. But monarchs are allowed so many other attributes, that even out of Spain they may be fitly dispensed with reason. In an interview with the culprits, when a saner man would have been touched with the generous strife between them as to which should bear the blame and punishment, he decides that both shall die. Upon Manfred's petition, he consents that Jaime shall live in ignorance of his wrong, but the poor fool, for all his crown, was not sufficiently master of events to contrive this rash promise. Spanish history may furnish a precedent of such a situation, but we are not taught that the lives of the monarchs of the land explain it adequately. When Jaime enters and remonstrates with Don Pedro:—'I am her owner, sir. All your power, your crown, your greatness, the glory of Sicily and of the entire world—what are they against Beatrix! But smoke and dust,'—the king commutes her sentence to perpetual imprisonment, and orders the execution of Manfred in Barcelona. Upon this Jaime threatens to carry both away with him, forswear his king and country, and cross the frontier. A violent quarrel ensues between him and the king, and in the midst of recriminations, Don Pedro casts his dishonour in the teeth of his angry subject. The unfortunate nobleman, dazed and incredulous, reads Roger's letter, given him by Don Pedro, and falls into a spiritless despair. He asks his sovereign's pardon, and they part reconciled friends. Left alone by the family vault at night, he bursts into a sonorous soliloquy. We remember a somewhat similar situation in Victor Hugo, and are irritated by the reminiscence. There is a natural note in his simple cry to Beatrix to speak to him before she dies—to lie, feign, accuse him,—only speak. Also in the speech to Manfred that follows, when he recalls the time they were playmates together, and then tells bitterly the roll of his wrongs: 'It were kinder to kill me at once,' Manfred cries impetuously. By a curious ineffectuality, a lack of skill, it however falls just short of real pathos. Echegaray is never simple enough to reach pathos. The climax has a false ring. Manfred dies by his own hand, and, following his example, Jaime stabs himself, and falls near him, in the shadow of the tomb.
D. Jaime. Manfred, too, lies dead, and you shortly will follow us. When you die, where will you fall?
Beatrix. By your side.
D. Jaime. Then come closer—'tis no lie? Answer. [Clasps her.]
Beatrix. No.
D. Jaime. And where will your tears flow?
Beatrix. Over your body.