University of Virginia Library

Scene I.

[The chamber of an ancient castle in Toledo. This chamber is evidently stripped and dismantled. Pedestals where statues have stood, outlines upon the walls where old

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pictures have hung, certain figures in armour of Fernando's ancestors alone remain. Fernando is sitting with his wife by a dying fire. The time is deep midnight.]
Fernando.
O Marguerita, this dismantled room,
This old ancestral chamber stripped and bare,
A leafless forest ruined by the blast,
Strikes to my heart. Pictures and statues, blades,
Encrusted long ago with infidel blood,
And holy relics and memorials dear
Bequeathed through ages, sold or carried off!
The glory of our house is past away;
And, dearest, most for thee my heart is sore.
I took thee young from wealth and ease, and now
Though still but on the verge of womanhood,
Here have I pent thee in a house despoiled.
[She draws closer to the scanty fire as he rises excitedly and paces to and fro.]
Yet am I answerable, have I incurred
This ruin? ever thriftily I lived,
Drank not, nor gambled, yet each day, each hour
Some new misfortune bows me to the earth.
Some enemy remorselessly pursues me.

Marguerita.
An enemy! hark back into the past;
Canst thou remember any thou hast wronged
Who takes, though late, this vengeance? Had thy father
Some foe ancestral and still unappeased?

Fernando.
I know of none that ever I have wronged.

Marguerita.
Unconsciously, perhaps?

Fernando.
Nor did my father
Warn me of any such descended wrath.
This only have I found, that field on field,
And all this long inheritance hath past
Into the hands of one whose name is hid;
Who lunges at my breast behind a mask.
Vainly I seek this foe for evermore.

[His wife rises, shivering, as the first grey of the dawn appears.]
Marguerita.
Dawn peereth, I must go in to the child.

[She kisses Fernando and passes through the decayed arras into an inner room.]
Fernando.
[Turning to the armed ancestral statues.]
Ye armed ancestral figures of my house,
Ye statesmen dim, captains of long ago,
Declare to me doth any ancient wrong,
Committed in far years, at last on me
Evolve this dreadful consequence? Ah, thou,
Thou old Pizzaro of infamous memory,
Dark tales and legends grim are told of thee,
Thy rapes, thy rapines, and thy blasphemies.
Didst thou engender in a wilder day
A curse, which innocent I expiate?
Speak, one of you now glimmering in dawn.
[Dawn begins to touch the armed figures.]
All silent! Yet I cry again, invoke
The very dead for answer. Who is he,
That hath despoiled me thus and stripped me bare
And made me naked before all men?

The Figure.
[Appearing masked and muffled against the stained window.]
I. I.

Fernando.
[In slow horror.]
Thou? Who art thou? Art thou a breathing thing?
Or but the apparition of a brain
O'ercharged? Thy face is hid. Who art thou? Speak!

[As Fernando slowly approaches the figure, it vanishes as the curtain falls.]