Act 2 — SCENE II

The orchard of San Miguel the following evening at nine o’clock. Near the postern stands Don Manuel de Lara, motionless, his arms folded, his cloak drawn round the lower part of his face. Towards him hurries Sister Assumcion.

Sister Assumcion: Good evening, friar trovar ... and can you not come forward to meet me? I can tell you, sir, it needed all Trotaconventos’s eloquence to send me to the tryst. Never before has her pleading been so honeyed.... Why....

Don Manuel de Lara: I am not the trovar, lady.

Sister Assumcion (starting back): Holy saints defend me! Who, then, are you?... And yet your voice....

Don Manuel de Lara: But I bear a message to you from the trovar.

Sister Assumcion (sharply): Well?

Don Manuel de Lara: His words were these: ‘Tell her the dead grudge us our joys.’

Sister Assumcion: What meant he?

Don Manuel de Lara: I am a messenger, not a reader of riddles.

Sister Assumcion (crossing herself): Strange words! Where was it that you met him?

Don Manuel de Lara: In the streets of Seville ... at night.

Sister Assumcion: And what was he doing?

Don Manuel de Lara: He was standing by a niche in which was an image of Our Lady with a lamp burning before it, and by its light he was examining a key. And he was laughing.

Sister Assumcion: Well?

Don Manuel de Lara: That is all.

Sister Assumcion: All? (Shrilly): Who are you? (Plucks at his cloak which he allows to fall.)

Don Manuel de Lara: Well, and are you any the wiser?

Sister Assumcion: No, your face is unknown to me.

Don Manuel de Lara: And yours to me.

Sister Assumcion: And yet, your voice ... by Our Lady, you are an ominous, louring man. And this strange tale of the trovar ... why am I to credit it?

Don Manuel de Lara: Here is the key.

Sister Assumcion: And where is he?

Don Manuel de Lara: That I cannot say.

Sister Assumcion: Did he look sick?

Don Manuel de Lara: No, in the very bloom of health.

Sister Assumcion: And he was standing under a shrine laughing, and you approached, and he said, “Tell her the dead grudge us our joys”.... Pooh! It rings like a foolish ballad.

Don Manuel de Lara: It is true nevertheless.

Sister Assumcion: And how came you by the key?

Don Manuel de Lara (nonchalantly): The key? (holding it out in front of him and smiling teasingly). It is delicately wrought.

Sister Assumcion (stamping): A madman!

Don Manuel de Lara: So many have said. But now, in that I have borne a message to you, will you return the grace and bear one for me? I have a kinswoman in this sisterhood and I would fain speak with her.

Sister Assumcion (insolently): Have you in truth? We have no demon’s kinswomen here ... well, and what is her name?

Don Manuel de Lara: Sister Pilar.

Sister Assumcion: Aye, she might be ... sprung from the same still-born, white-blooded grandame.

Don Manuel de Lara: Ah! (with suppressed eagerness). You know Sister Pilar well?

Sister Assumcion (with a short laugh): Aye, that I do.

Don Manuel de Lara: And ... is ... is she well?

Sister Assumcion: She is never ailing.

Don Manuel de Lara (absently): Never ailing. You ... you know her well?

Sister Assumcion: Without doubt, a madman! I have told you that I know her but too well.

Don Manuel de Lara: On what does her talk turn?

Sister Assumcion: For the most part on our shortcomings. But her words are few.

Don Manuel de Lara (pulling himself together): Well, you would put me much in your debt if you would carry her this letter. It bears my credentials as her kinsman. I would speak with her at once, as I bear weighty news for her from her home.

Sister Assumcion: And why could you not come knocking at the porter’s lodge, as others do, and at some hour, too, before Compline, when ends the day of a religious?

Don Manuel de Lara: As to the porter’s lodge, I have my own key. And the news, I tell you, will not keep till morning. Handle that letter gingerly; it bears the king’s seal.

Sister Assumcion (awed): Don Pedro’s?

Don Manuel de Lara: Aye.

Sister Assumcion: Well ... as you will. I’ll take your message. Good-night ... Sir demon; are you not of Hell’s chivalry?

Don Manuel de Lara: No.

Sister Assumcion shrugs her shoulders, looks at him quizzically, and exit. A few minutes elapse, during which Don Manuel stands motionless; then Sister Pilar enters; she gives a slight bow and waits.

Don Manuel de Lara: You are Sister Pilar?

Sister Pilar: Yes.

Don Manuel de Lara: In the world the Lady Maria Guzman y Perez?

Sister Pilar: Yes.

Don Manuel de Lara: I am Don Pablo de Guzman, your father’s cousin’s son.

Sister Pilar (with interest): Ah! I have heard my father speak of yours.

Don Manuel de Lara: You have not lately, I think, visited your home?

Sister Pilar: Not since I was professed.... I obey the bull of Pope Boniface, that nuns should keep their cloister.

Don Manuel de Lara: Your sister, Violante, has lately been wed.

Sister Pilar (eagerly): Little Violante? She was but a child when I took the black veil. Whom has she wedded?

Don Manuel de Lara: Er ... er ... a comrade in arms of mine. A knight of Old Castille ... one Don Manuel de Lara.

Sister Pilar: And what manner of man is he? I should wish little Violante to be happy.

Don Manuel de Lara: He passes for a brave soldier. He has brought her the skulls of many Moors. She has filled them with earth and planted them with bulbs. Daffodils grow out of their eyes and nose.

Sister Pilar: A strange device!

Don Manuel de Lara: ’Twas Don Manuel showed her it; such are the whimsies of Old Castille. In that country we like to play with death.

Sister Pilar: Yet ... yet is it not a toy.

Don Manuel de Lara: We rarely play with love.

Sister Pilar: No.

Don Manuel de Lara: No.

Sister Pilar: I would fain learn more of this knight. He loves my sister?

Don Manuel de Lara: Ah! yes. His soul snatched the torch of love from his body, then gave it back again, then again snatched it. She is all twined round with his dreams; she smiles at him with his mother’s eyes; she is Belerma the Fair and Doña Alda of his childhood’s ballads. She is a fair ship charged with spices, she is all the flowers that have blossomed since the Third Day of the Creation, she is the bread not made with wheat, she ... she ... she is a key, like this one (holding up the key), but wrought in silver and ivory.

Sister Pilar: A key? Strange! (smiling a little). And what is he to her?

Don Manuel de Lara: He to her? I know not ... perhaps also a key.

(Pause.)

Sister Pilar: So you know my home? You have heard our slaves crooning Moorish melodies from their quarters on moonlight nights, perchance you have handled my father’s chessmen and the Portuguese pennon he won from a French count at Tables ... oh! he was so proud of that pennon! How is the Cid?

Don Manuel de Lara: The Cid? His bones still moulder in Cardeña.

Sister Pilar: No, no, my father’s greyhound ... the one that has one eye blue and the other brown.

Don Manuel de Lara: Ah! He still sleeps by day and bays at the moon o’ nights.

Sister Pilar: Oh! And how tall has my oak grown now?

Don Manuel de Lara: Your oak?

Sister Pilar: Ah, surely they cannot have forgot to show it you! It was the height of a daffodil when I took the veil. When we were children, you know, we were told an exemplum of a wise Moor who planted trees that under their shade his children’s children might call him blessed, so we—Sancho and Rodrigo and little Violante and me—we took acorns from the pigs’ trough and planted them beyond the orchard, near my mother’s bed of gillyflowers, and mine was the only one that sent forth shoots. Oh! And the bush of Granada roses ... they must have shown you them?

Don Manuel de Lara: To be sure! They are still fragrant.

Sister Pilar: You know, they were planted from seeds my grandsire got in the Alhambra when he was jousting in Granada. My father was wont to call them his harem of Moorish beauties, and there was a nightingale that would serenade them every evening from the Judas tree that shadows them. It was always to them he sang, he cared not a jot for the other roses in the garden.

Don Manuel de Lara: The rose-tree died of blight and the nightingale of a broken heart the year you took the veil.

Sister Pilar: You are jesting!

He smiles, and she gives a little smile back at him.

Don Manuel de Lara: And so it is of roses and nightingales that you ask tidings, and not of mother and father or brothers! Well, it is always thus with exiles. When I have lain fevered with my wounds very far from Old Castille, it has been for the river that flows at the foot of our orchard I have yearned, or for the green Vega dotted with brown villages and stretching away towards the Sierra.

Sister Pilar: I am not an exile.

Don Manuel de Lara: An exile is one who is far from home.

Sister Pilar: This is my home.

Don Manuel de Lara: And do you never yearn for your other one?

Sister Pilar: My other one? Ah, yes!

Don Manuel de Lara: By that you mean Paradise?

Sister Pilar: Yes.

Don Manuel de Lara: And so you long for Paradise?

Sister Pilar: With a great longing.

Don Manuel de Lara: I sometimes dream of Paradise.

Sister Pilar: And how does it show in your dreams?

Don Manuel de Lara (smiling a little): I fear it is mightily like what the trovares—not the monks—tell us of hell.

Sister Pilar (severely): Then it must be a dream sent you by a fiend of the Moorish Paradise, which is indeed hell.

Don Manuel de Lara: That may be. And how does it show in your dreams?

Sister Pilar: A great, cool, columned, empty hall, and I feel at once small and vast and shod with the wind. And all the while I am aware that the coolness and vastness and spaciousness of the hall and my body’s lightness is because there is no sin.

Don Manuel de Lara: But what can you know of sin in a nunnery?

Sister Pilar looks at him suspiciously, but his expression remains impenetrable.

Don Manuel de Lara: Well?

Sister Pilar: You must know ... ’tis the scandal of Christendom ... the empty vows of the religious. Yet when all’s said, ’tis better here than out in the world; we do live under rule, and mark the day by singing the Hours (gazing in front of her as if at some vision). Just over there, perhaps across that hill, or round that bend of the road, a cool, rain-washed world, trees, oxen, men, women, children, thin and transparent, as if made of crystal.... I always held I would suddenly come upon it. (Passionately) Oh, I am so weary of the glare and dust of sin! Everything is heavy and savourless and confined.

Don Manuel de Lara: Always?

Sister Pilar: Yes ... except when I eat Christ in the Eucharist.

Don Manuel de Lara: And then?

Sister Pilar: Then there is vastness and peace.

Don Manuel de Lara: That must be a nun’s communion. When I eat Our Lord I am filled with a great pity for His sufferings on Calvary which the Mass commemorates. There have been times when having eaten Him on the field of battle, my comrades and I, the tears have rained down our cheeks, and from our pity has sprung an exceeding great rage against the infidel dogs who deny His divinity, and in that day’s battle it goes ill with them. And when I eat Him in times of peace, I am filled with a longing to fall upon the Morería, a sword in one hand, a burning brand in the other.

(Pause.)

Sister Pilar: It is already very late ... for nuns. What is the weighty news you bring me?

Don Manuel de Lara: Why, the marriage of your sister Violante!

Sister Pilar (coldly): And was it for that I was dragged from the dorter?

Don Manuel de Lara: I had sworn to acquaint you with the news ... and to-morrow I leave Seville.

Sister Pilar (relenting): And you are well acquainted with Don Manuel de Lara?

Don Manuel de Lara (gives a start): Don Manuel de Lara? Ah, yes ... we are of the same country and the same age. We were suckled by one foster-mother, we yawned over one Latin primer, and gloated over the same tales of chivalry. We learned to ride the same horse, to fly the same hawk; we were dubbed knight by the same stroke of the sword—we love the same lady.

Sister Pilar (amazed): You love my sister Violante?

Don Manuel de Lara: Yes, I love your sister Violante ... and your mother that carried you in her womb, and your father that begat you. (Violently) By the rood, I am sick of mummery! I am Don Manuel de Lara.

Sister Pilar: You?

Don Manuel de Lara: Yes, I——

Sister Pilar: Then you are not the son of my father’s cousin?

Don Manuel de Lara: No.

Sister Pilar: I ... I am all dumbfounded ... I ...

Don Manuel de Lara: I will make it clear. On Tuesday night I heard your talk with Sister Assumcion.

Sister Pilar (in horror): Oh!...

Don Manuel de Lara: I was the man behind the wall whom you justly named the worst kind of would-be adulterer, and....

Sister Pilar: I have no further words for Sister Assumcion’s lover.

Don Manuel de Lara: I am not Sister Assumcion’s lover. The moon has already set and risen, the sun risen and set on his dead body.

Sister Pilar (haughtily): I am not an old peasant woman that you should seek to please me with riddles.

Don Manuel de Lara: I will read you the riddle. Some weeks ago I had business—sent from the Alcazar on a matter pertaining to some herbs—with that old hag Trotaconventos. And through what motive I cannot say, she waxed exceeding eloquent on the charms of Sister Assumcion. We are taught in the Catechism that the eyes, the nose, the mouth, the ears, are gates by which either fiends or angels may enter.... Well, her words entered my ears and set fire to a great, dry heap of old dreams, old memories, old hopes ... (strange! these are the trovar’s words!) piled high on my heart. I became a flame.... You are of the South, you have never seen a fire consuming a sun-parched vega in the North. Well, a fire must work its will, and, devouring all that blocks its path—flowers, towers, men—drive forward to its secret bourne. Who knows the bourne of fire? I obtained speech with Sister Assumcion; it takes many waters to quench a great fire, but the wind can alter its course. I heard a voice and strange, passionate words ... the course of the fire was altered, but still it drives on, still it consumes.

Sister Pilar (in a small, cold voice): Well?

Don Manuel de Lara: Well? And is it well? My God! Well, a trovar from France who had entered your convent disguised as a friar obtained from Trotaconventos this key, which I likewise desired, first because it opens this postern, secondly because ... toys are apt to take for me a vast significance and swell out with all the potencies of my happiness in this world, my salvation in the next, and thus it happened with this key; the fire rushed on, I killed the trovar and took the key!

Sister Pilar (horror-stricken): You killed him?

Don Manuel de Lara: Yes ... and would have killed a thousand such for the key ... a low, French jongleur! The world is all the better for his loss. The dog! Daring to think he could seduce the nuns of Spain!

Sister Pilar: Well?

Don Manuel de Lara: The rest is told in few words. My madness over (for that night I was mad) the key in my hands, counsel returned to me, and showed me that it was not only through the key I could win to your convent ... it is dreams that open only to this key; strange dreams I only know in fragments ... and I minded me of an exemplum told by the king Don Sancho, in his book, of a knight that craved to talk with a nun, and to affect the same, feigned to be her kinsman. The night I was the other side this wall and you were taunting Sister Assumcion, you named yourself a Guzman whose mother was a Perez. I had but to go to a herald and learn from him all the particulars pertaining to the family of Perez y Guzman.

Sister Pilar: You wished to have speech with me?

Don Manuel de Lara: Yes.

Sister Pilar: Why?

Don Manuel de Lara: I have already said that no one knows the bourne of fire.

Sister Pilar (scornfully): The bourne of fire! The bourne rather of ... I’ll not soil my lips with the word. Let me reduce your “fires,” and “lyres,” and “moons” to plain, cold words; having wearied of Sister Assumcion, you thought you’d sample another nun—one maybe taking a greater stretch of arm to reach; like children with figs—a bite out of one, then flung away, then scrambling for another on a higher branch, that in its turn it, too, may be bitten and thrown. Or, maybe, Sister Assumcion found the trovar more to her taste than you ... yes, I have it! I am to bring a little balm to Sister Assumcion’s discarded lover!

Don Manuel de Lara (eagerly): Oh, lady, very light of ... lady, it is not so. Maybe thus it shows, but in your heart of hearts you know right well it is not so. I am a grievous sinner, but my soul is not light nor is my heart shallow ... and I think already you know ’tis so. Listen; I could have continued feigning to be your kinsman and thus I could have come again to speak with you, and all would have gone well; but your presence gave me a loathing of my deceit, so I stripped me of my lies and stand naked at your mercy. As to Sister Assumcion ... the old hag’s words, when she spoke of her, mated with my dreams and engendered you in my heart, yes, you; and I had but to hear the other’s voice and hearken to her words to know that I had been duped and that she was not you. I swear by God Almighty, by the duty I owe to my liege-lord, by my order of chivalry, that I speak the truth.

Sister Pilar: Well, suppose it true, what then?

Don Manuel de Lara: What then? I have burned my boats and I shall go ... where? And you will to your dorter and be summoned by the cock to matins, and it will all be as a dream (in a voice of agony). No! No! By all the height and depth of God’s mercy it cannot be thus! The stars have never said that of all men I should be the most miserable. Can you see no pattern traced behind all this? Sin? Aye, sin.... But I verily believe that God loves sinners. But why do I speak of sin? You say sin is everywhere; tell me, do you see sin’s shadow lying between us two to-night? Speak! You do not answer. Who knows? It may be that for the first time we have stumbled on the track that leads to Paradise. Angels are abroad ... fiends, too, it may be ... but I am not a light man. Ex utero ante luciferum amavi te ... ’tis not thus the words run, but they came.

Sister Pilar: You speak wildly. What do you want of me?

Don Manuel de Lara: What do I want?... Magna opera Domini ... why does the psalter run in my head?... Great are the works of the Lord ... the sun is a great work, but so is shade from the sun; and the moon is a great work, giving coolness and dreams, and air to breathe is a great work, and so is water to lave our wounds and slake our throats ... I believe all the works of the Lord are found in you.... I could ... oh, God!... Where? Lady, remember I have the key, and every evening at sundown I shall be here ... waiting. It is a vow.

Sister Pilar slowly moves away.

Don Manuel de Lara: Lady Maria! Lady Maria!

Sister Pilar (stopping): She is dead. Do you speak to Sister Pilar?

Don Manuel de Lara: Yes, that is she, Sister Pilar. Listen: receive absolution; communicate; be very instant in prayer; make deep obeisance to the images of Our Lady. Say many Paters and Aves, and through the watches of the night, pray for the dead.

Sister Pilar (in a frightened voice): For the dead?

Don Manuel de Lara: Aye, the dead ... that defend virginity.

Sister Pilar (very coldly): All this has ever been my custom, as a nun, without your admonition.

Don Manuel de Lara: Good-night.

(Pause.)

Sister Pilar (almost inaudibly): Good-night.