The Captain, One Issachar,
Comes In, A Superbly Handsome Young Fellow, Named Mario, To My Thinking
The First Comedian In Spain, Dressed In A Flashy Suit Of Leopard Hides,
And Announces The Arrival Of A Stranger.
Enters Demas, who says he hates
the world and would fain drink its foul blood.
He is made politely
welcome. No! he will be captain or nothing. Issachar laughs scornfully
and says he is in the way of that modest aspiration. But Demas
speedily puts him out of the way with an Albacete knife, and becomes
captain, to the profound disgust of the impenitent Gestas, who exclaims,
just as the profane villains do nowadays on every well-conducted stage,
"Damnation! foiled again!"
The robbers pick up their idolized leader and pitch him into the tinsel
torrent. This is also extremely satisfactory to the wide-awake young
Arabs of the cock-loft. The bandits disperse, and Demas indulges in some
fifty lines of rhymed reflections, which are interrupted by the approach
of the Holy Family, hotly pursued by the soldiery of Herod. They stop
under a sycamore tree, which instantly, by very clever machinery, bends
down its spreading branches and miraculously hides them from the
bloodthirsty legionaries. These pass on, and Demas leads the saintly
trio by a secret pass over the torrent, - the Mother and Child mounted
upon an ass and St. Joseph trudging on behind with his lily-decked
staff, looking all as if they were on a short leave of absence from
Correggio's picture-frame.
Demas 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, Demas 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. Demas and the impenitent Gestas and Barabbas, who, I was
pleased to see, was after all a very 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. Demas 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
Demas 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.
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