Duke. Not sent by the King, did you say. He then had no design against my life?
Alumbrado. No, the King never had the least idea of such a deed.
Duke. Villainous! villainous! to deceive me thus!—And with what view did you devise that horrid fraud?
Alumbrado. I wanted to inflame your father’s mind with resentment against the King. Nay, I will tell you more. It was my work that the King treated you with so much coldness, and neglected to raise your family: for I had represented you and your father to him, by one of my agents, as persons who beheld his new dignity with envious eyes. Through these mutual exasperations, I gained the advantage of increasing your personal antipathy against the King, and of turning it, at length, into hatred that had all the appearance of just resentment.
Duke. Ah! I now begin to penetrate the whole atrocity of your artful wiles. Then it was you who has excited the King against me and my family, and formed the plots against his life?
Alumbrado. What would it avail me to deny the charge?
Duke. And yet it seemed as if you had not been concerned in the conspiracy. The design against the King had already been determined, and still you withheld your consent and assistance.
Alumbrado. And not without reason. I would not expose myself. The grand Inquisitor and the Primate took care to gain you to our purpose without your suspecting it, while I was directing the plot behind the curtain; I should have destroyed my own work if I had stepped forth too soon. My seeming backwardness spurred you on, and screened me from suspicion. However, after I had performed the last fictitious miracle, I thought myself sufficiently secured against all suspicion, and calculated that it would be reasonable to command you in the name of God to take an active part in the conspiracy.
Duke. After the last fictitious miracle? Do you mean that incident by which you showed yourself proof against ball and dagger?
Alumbrado. I do. The miracle will appear very natural to you when I tell you that I had filled the powder-horn, which I had conveyed secretly from your apartment, with a powder of my own invention, which could not carry the ball farther than five steps. Having placed myself seven steps distant from the gun, I was far enough out of harm’s way. I requested to be fired at twice, in order to empty the powder-horn of its contents, a precaution that prevented you from discovering, afterwards, the real nature of the powder. The dagger with which I stabbed myself, had also been previously made for that purpose, and could do me no harm. The blade of it, which was not much pointed, snapped back into the hollow handle on the smallest resistance, which made you believe that it had penetrated my breast. A spring which forced it again into its former situation, rendered it entirely impossible for you to discover the fraud.