'Are you interested in old manuscripts?' said the duke. 'Come with me
and I will show you what I have.'
With a flourish of the hand he waved me out of the chapel, and, having
carefully locked the doors, accompanied me to his palace. He took me
into a Gothic chamber, furnished with worn French furniture, the walls
covered with cheap paper. Offering me a cigarette, he opened a drawer
and produced a faded manuscript.
'This is the document in question,' he said. 'Those crooked and
fantastic characters are terrible. I often wonder if the writers were
able to read them.'
'You are fortunate to be the possessor of such things,' I remarked.
He shrugged his shoulders.
'What good are they? I would sooner have fifty pesetas than this musty
parchment.'
An offer! I quickly reckoned it out into English money. He would
doubtless have taken less, but I felt a certain delicacy in bargaining
with a duke over his family secrets....
'Do you mean it? May I--er--'
He sprang towards me.
'Take it, my dear sir, take it. Shall I give you a receipt?'
And so, for thirty-one shillings and threepence, I obtained the only
authentic account of how the frailty of the illustrious Senora Dona
Sodina was indirectly the means of raising her husband to the highest
dignities in Spain.