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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12041 ***
+
+THE SHADOW OF THE CATHEDRAL
+
+BY
+
+VICENTE BLASCO IBAÑEZ
+
+
+1919
+
+
+Translated From The Spanish By
+Mrs. W.A. Gillespie
+
+With A Critical Introduction By
+W.D. Howells
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+There are three cathedrals which I think will remain chief of the
+Spanish cathedrals in the remembrance of the traveller, namely the
+Cathedral at Burgos, the Cathedral at Toledo, and the Cathedral at
+Seville; and first of these for reasons hitherto of history and art,
+and now of fiction, will be the Cathedral at Toledo, which the most
+commanding talent among the contemporary Spanish novelists has made
+the protagonist of the romance following. I do not mean that Vincent
+Blasco Ibañez is greater than Perez Galdós, or Armando Palacio Valdés
+or even the Countess Pardo-Bazan; but he belongs to their realistic
+order of imagination, and he is easily the first of living European
+novelists outside of Spain, with the advantage of superior youth,
+freshness of invention and force of characterization. The Russians
+have ceased to be actively the masters, and there is no Frenchman,
+Englishman, or Scandinavian who counts with Ibañez, and of course no
+Italian, American, and, unspeakably, no German.
+
+I scarcely know whether to speak first of this book or the writer of
+it, but as I know less of him than of it I may more quickly dispatch
+that part of my introduction. He was born at Valencia in 1866, of
+Arragonese origin, and of a strictly middle class family. His father
+kept a shop, a dry-goods store in fact, but Ibañez, after fit
+preparation, studied law in the University of Valencia and was
+duly graduated in that science. Apparently he never practiced his
+profession, but became a journalist almost immediately. He was
+instinctively a revolutionist, and was imprisoned in Barcelona, the
+home of revolution, for some political offence, when he was eighteen.
+It does not appear whether he committed his popular offence in the
+Republican newspaper which he established in Valencia; but it is
+certain that he was elected a Republican deputy to the Cortes, where
+he became a leader of his party, while yet evidently of no great
+maturity.
+
+He began almost as soon to write fiction of the naturalistic type, and
+of a Zolaistic coloring which his Spanish critics find rather stronger
+than I have myself seen it. Every young writer forms himself upon some
+older writer; nobody begins master; but Ibañez became master while he
+was yet no doubt practicing a prentice hand; yet I do not feel very
+strongly the Zolaistic influence in his first novel, _La Barraca_,
+or The Cabin, which paints peasant life in the region of Valencia,
+studied at first hand and probably from personal knowledge. It is
+not a very spacious scheme, but in its narrow field it is strictly a
+_novela de costumbres_, or novel of manners, as we used to call the
+kind. Ibañez has in fact never written anything but novels of manners,
+and _La Barraca_ pictures a neighborhood where a stranger takes up a
+waste tract of land and tries to make a home for himself and family.
+This makes enemies of all his neighbors who after an interval of pity
+for the newcomer in the loss of one of his children return to their
+cruelty and render the place impossible to him. It is a tragedy such
+as naturalism alone can stage and give the effect of life. I have read
+few things so touching as this tale of commonest experience which
+seems as true to the suffering and defeat of the newcomers, as to the
+stupid inhumanity of the neighbors who join, under the lead of the
+evillest among them, in driving the strangers away; in fact I know
+nothing parallel to it, certainly nothing in English; perhaps _The
+House with the Green Shutters_ breathes as great an anguish.
+
+At just what interval or remove the novel which gave Ibañez worldwide
+reputation followed this little tale, I cannot say, and it is not
+important that I should try to say. But it is worth while to note here
+that he never flatters the vices or even the swoier virtues of his
+countrymen; and it is much to their honor that they have accepted him
+in the love of his art for the sincerity of his dealing with their
+conditions. In _Sangre y Arena_ his affair is with the cherished
+atrocity which keeps the Spaniards in the era of the gladiator
+shows of Rome. The hero, as the renowned _torrero_ whose career it
+celebrates, from his first boyish longing to be a bull-fighter, to
+his death, weakened by years and wounds, in the arena of Madrid, is
+something absolute in characterization. The whole book in fact is
+absolute in its fidelity to the general fact it deals with, and the
+persons of its powerful drama. Each in his or her place is realized
+with an art which leaves one in no doubt of their lifelikeness, and
+keeps each as vital as the _torrero_ himself. There is little of the
+humor which relieves the pathos of Valdés in the equal fidelity of his
+_Marta y Maria_ or the unsurpassable tragedy of Galdós in his _Doña
+Perfecta_. The _torrero's_ family who have dreaded his boyish ambition
+with the anxiety of good common people, and his devotedly gentle and
+beautiful wife,--even his bullying and then truckling brother-in-law
+who is ashamed of his profession and then proud of him when it has
+filled Spain with his fame,--are made to live in the spacious scene.
+But above all in her lust for him and her contempt for him the unique
+figure of Doña Sol astounds. She rules him as her brother the marquis
+would rule a mistress; even in the abandon of her passion she does not
+admit him to social equality; she will not let him speak to her in
+thee and thou, he must address her as ladyship; she is monstrous
+without ceasing to be a woman of her world, when he dies before her in
+the arena a broken and vanquished man. The _torrero_ is morally better
+than the aristocrat and he is none the less human though a mere
+incident of her wicked life,--her insulted and rejected worshipper,
+who yet deserves his fate.
+
+_Sangre y Arena_ is a book of unexampled force and in that sort must
+be reckoned the greatest novel of the author, who has neglected no
+phase of his varied scene. The _torrero's_ mortal disaster in the
+arena is no more important than the action behind the scenes where the
+gored horses have their dangling entrails sewed up by the primitive
+surgery of the place and are then ridden back into the amphitheatre to
+suffer a second agony. No color of the dreadful picture is spared; the
+whole thing passes as in the reader's presence before his sight and
+his other senses. The book is a masterpiece far in advance of that
+study of the common life which Ibañez calls _La Horda_; dealing with
+the horde of common poor and those accidents of beauty and talent
+as native to them as to the classes called the better. It has the
+attraction of the author's frank handling, and the power of the
+Spanish scene in which the action passes; but it could not hold me to
+the end.
+
+It is only in his latest book that he transcends the Spanish scene and
+peoples the wider range from South America to Paris, and from Paris to
+the invaded provinces of France with characters proper to the times
+and places. _The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse_ has not the rough
+textures and rank dyes of the wholly Spanish stories, but it is the
+strongest story of the great war known to me, and its loss in the
+Parisian figures is made more than good in the novelty and veracity of
+the Argentinos who supply that element of internationality which the
+North American novelists of a generation ago employed to give a fresh
+interest to their work. With the coming of the hero to study art and
+make love in the conventional Paris, and the repatriation of his
+father, a cattle millionaire of French birth from the pampas, with his
+wife and daughters, Ibañez achieves effects beyond the art of Henry
+James, below whom he nevertheless falls so far in subtlety and beauty.
+
+The book has moments of the pathos so rich in the work of Galdós and
+Valdés, and especially of Emilia Pardo-Bazan in her _Morriña_ or _Home
+Sickness_, the story of a peasant girl in Barcelona, but the grief of
+the Argentine family for the death of the son and brother in battle
+with the Germans, has the appeal of anguish beyond any moment in _La
+Catedral_. I do not know just the order of this last-mentioned novel
+among the stories of Ibañez, but it has a quality of imagination, of
+poetic feeling which surpasses the invention of any other that I have
+read, and makes me think it came before _Sangre y Arena_, and possibly
+before _La Horda_. I cannot recall any other novel of the author which
+is quite so psychological as this. It is in fact a sort of biography,
+a personal study, of the mighty fane at Toledo, as if the edifice were
+of human quality and could have its life expressed in human terms.
+There is nothing forced in the poetic conception, or mechanical in
+the execution. The Cathedral is not only a single life, it is a
+neighborhood, a city, a world in itself; and its complex character
+appears in the nature of the different souls which collectively
+animate it. The first of these is the sick and beaten native of it who
+comes back to the world which he has never loved or trusted, but in
+which he was born and reared. As a son of its faith, Gabriel Luna was
+to have been a priest; but before he became a minister of its faith,
+it meant almost the same that he should become a Carlist soldier, and
+fight on for that cause till it was hopeless. In his French captivity
+he loses the faith which was one with the Carlist cause, and in
+England he reads Darwin and becomes an evolutionist of the ardor which
+the evolutionists have now lost. He wanders over Europe with the
+English girl whom he worships with an intellectual rather than
+passionate ardor, and after her death he ends at Barcelona in time to
+share one of the habitual revolutions of the province and to spend
+several years in one of its prisons. When he comes out it is into a
+world which he is doomed to leave; he is sick to death and in hopeless
+poverty; he has lost the courage of his revolutionary faith if not his
+fealty to it; all that he asks of the world is leave to creep out of
+it and somewhere die in peace. He thinks of an elder brother who like
+himself was born in the precincts of the Cathedral where generations
+of their family have lived and died, and his brother does not deny
+him. In fact the kind, dull gardener welcomes him to a share of his
+poverty, and Gabriel begins dying where he began living. The kindness
+between the brothers is as simple in the broken adventurer whose wide
+world has failed him as in the aging peasant, pent from his birth in
+the Cathedral close, with no knowledge of anything beyond it. All
+their kindred who serve in their several sort the stepmother church,
+down to the gardener's son whose office is to keep dogs out of the
+Cathedral and has the title of _perrero_, are good to the returning
+exile. They do not well understand what and where he has been; the
+tradition of his gifted youth when he was dedicated to the church and
+forsook her service at the altar for her service in the field, remains
+unquestioned, and he is safe in the refuge of his family who can offer
+mainly their insignificance for his protection. The logic of the fact
+is perfect, and Gabriel's emergence from the quiet of his retreat
+inevitably follows from the nature of the agitator as the logic of
+his own past and has the approval at least of the _perrero_ and the
+allegiance of the rest. What is very important in the affair is that
+most of the inhabitants of this Cathedral-world, rich and poor, good,
+bad, and indifferent, mean and generous, are few of them wicked
+people, as wickedness is commonly understood; they all have their
+habitual or their occasional moments of good will.
+
+The refugee is tired of his past but he does not deny his faith in
+humanity; his doctrine only postpones to a time secularly remote the
+redemption of humanity from its secular suffering. He begins at once
+to do good; he rescues his kind elder brother from the repudiation of
+the daughter whom he has cast off because her seduction has condemned
+her to a life of shame; he wins back the poor prostitute to her home,
+and forces her father to tolerate her in it.
+
+Most of the Cathedral folk are of course miserably poor, but willing
+to be better than they are if they can keep from starving; the fierce
+and prepotent Cardinal who is over them all, has moments of the common
+good will, when he forgives all his enemies except the recalcitrant
+canons. He likes to escape from these, and talk with the elderly
+widow of the gardener whom he has known from his boyhood, and to pity
+himself in her presence and smoke himself free from, his rancor and
+trouble. He is such a prelate as we know historically in enough
+instances; but he is pathetic in that simplicity which survives in him
+and almost makes good the loss of innocence in Latin souls. He keeps
+with him the young girl who is the daughter of his youth, and whom
+it cuts him to the soul to have those opprobrious canons imagine his
+mistress. He is one out of the many figures that affirm their veracity
+in the strange world where they have their being; and he is only the
+more vivid as the head of a hierarchy which he rules rather violently
+though never ignobly.
+
+But the populace, the underpaid domestics and laborers of the strange
+ecclesiastical world in their wretched over-worked lives and hopeless
+deaths are what the author presents most vividly. There is the death
+of the cobbler's baby which starves at the starving mother's breast
+which the author makes us witness in its insupportable pathos, but his
+art is not chiefly shown in such extremes: his affair includes the
+whole tragical drama of the place, both its beauty and its squalor of
+fact, but he keeps central the character of the refugee, Gabriel Luna,
+in the allegiance to his past which he cannot throw off. When he
+begins to teach the simple denizens of the Cathedral, some of them
+hear him gladly, and some indifferently, and some unwillingly, but
+none intelligently. He fails with them in that doctrine of patience
+which was his failure, as an agitator, with the proletariat wherever
+he has been; they could not wait through geological epochs for the
+reign of mercy and justice which he could not reasonably promise the
+over-worked and underfed multitude to-morrow or the day after. His
+brother, who could not accept his teachings, warns him that the
+people of the Cathedral will not understand him and cannot accept
+his scientific gospel, and for a while he desists. In fact he takes
+service in the ceremonial of the Cathedral; he even plays a mechanical
+part in the procession of Corpus Christi, and finally he becomes one
+of the night-watchmen who guard the temple from the burglaries always
+threatening its treasures.
+
+The story is quite without the love-interest which is the prime
+attraction of our mostly silly fiction. Gabriel's association with the
+English girl who wanders over Europe with him is scarcely passionate
+if it is not altogether platonic; his affection for the poor girl for
+whom he has won her father's tolerance if not forgiveness becomes
+a tender affection, but not possibly more; and there is as little
+dramatic incident as love interest in the book. The extraordinary
+power of it lies in its fealty to the truth and its insight into
+human nature. The reader of course perceives that it is intensely
+anti-ecclesiastical, but he could make no greater mistake than to
+imagine it in any wise Protestant. The author shares this hate or
+slight of ecclesiasticism with all the Spanish novelists, so far as I
+know them; most notably with Perez Galdós in _Doña Perfecta_ and _Lean
+Rich_, with Pardo-Bazan in several of her stories, with Palacio
+Valdés in the less measure of _Marta y Maria_, and _La Hermana de San
+Sulpicio_ and even with the romanticist Valera in _Pepita Jimenez_.
+But it may be said that while Ibañez does not go any farther than
+Galdós, for instance, he is yet more intensively agnostic. He is the
+standard bearer of the scientific revolt in the terms of fiction which
+spares us no hope of relief in the religious notion of human life here
+or hereafter that the Hebraic or Christian theology has divined.
+
+It is right to say this plainly, but the reader who can suffer it from
+the author will find his book one of the fullest and richest in modern
+fiction, worthy to rank with the greatest Russian work and beyond
+anything yet done in English. It has not the topographical range of
+Tolstoy's _War and Peace_, or _Resurrection_; but in its climax it
+is as logically and ruthlessly tragical as anything that the Spanish
+spirit has yet imagined.
+
+Whoever can hold on to the end of it will find his reward in the full
+enjoyment of that "noble terror" which high tragedy alone can
+give. Nothing that happens in the solemn story--in which something
+significant is almost always happening--is of the supreme effect of
+the socialist agitator's death at the hands of the disciples whom he
+has taught to expect mercy and justice on earth, but forbidden to
+expect it within the reach of the longest life of any man or race of
+men. His rebellious followers come at night into the Cathedral where
+Gabriel is watching, to rob an especially rich Madonna, whom he has
+taught them to regard as a senseless and wasteful idol, and they
+will not hear him when he pleads with them against the theft. The
+inevitable irony of the event is awful, but it is not cruel, rather it
+is the supreme touch of that pathos which seems the crowning motive of
+the book.
+
+W.D. HOWELLS.
+
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+THE SHADOW OF THE CATHEDRAL
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+The dawn was just rising when Gabriel Luna arrived in front of the
+Cathedral, but in the narrow street of Toledo it was still night. The
+silvery morning light that had scarcely begun to touch the eaves and
+roofs, spread out more freely in the little Piazza del Ayuntamiento,
+bringing out of the shadows the ugly front of the Archbishop's Palace,
+and the towers of the municipal buildings capped with black slate, a
+sombre erection of the time of Charles V.
+
+Gabriel walked for some time up and down the deserted square, wrapping
+himself up to his eyes in the muffler of his cloak, while at intervals
+his hollow cough shook him painfully. Without daring to stop walking
+on account of the bitter cold, he looked at the great doorway called
+"del Perdon," the only part of the church able to present a really
+imposing aspect. He recalled other famous cathedrals, isolated,
+occupying commanding situations, showing themselves freely in the full
+pride of their beauty, and he compared them with this Cathedral
+of Toledo, the mother-church of Spain, smothered by the swarm of
+poverty-stricken buildings that surrounded it, clinging closely to its
+walls, permitting it to display none of its exterior beauties, beyond
+what could be seen from the narrow streets that closed it in on every
+side. Gabriel, who was acquainted with its interior magnificence,
+thought of the deceptive oriental houses, outwardly squalid and
+miserable, but inwardly rich in alabasters and traceries. Jews and
+Moors had not lived in Toledo for centuries in vain, their aversion to
+outward show seemed to have influenced the building of the Cathedral,
+now suffocated by the miserable hovels, pushed and piled up against
+it, as though seeking its protection.
+
+The little Piazza del Ayuntamiento was the only open space that
+allowed the Christian monument to display any of its grandeur; under
+this little patch of open sky the early morning light showed the three
+immense Gothic arches of its principal front, the hugely massive bell
+tower, with its salient angles, ornamented by the cap of the Alcuzon,
+a sort of black tiara, with three crowns, almost lost in the grey mist
+of the wintry dawn.
+
+Gabriel looked affectionately at the closed and silent fane, where his
+family lived, and where he himself had spent the happiest days of his
+life. How many years had passed since he had last seen it! And now he
+waited anxiously for the opening of its doorways.
+
+He had arrived in Toledo by train the previous night from Madrid.
+Before shutting himself up in his miserable little room in the Posada
+del Sangre (the ancient Messon del Sevillano, inhabited by Cervantes)
+he had felt a feverish desire to revisit the Cathedral, and had spent
+nearly an hour walking round it, listening to the barking of the
+Cathedral watch-dog, who growled suspiciously, hearing the sound of
+footsteps in the surrounding streets. He had been unable to sleep; the
+fact of returning to his native town after so many years of misery and
+adventures had taken from him all desire to rest, and, while it was
+still night, he again stole out to await near the Cathedral the moment
+that it should be opened.
+
+To while away the time he paced up and down the front, admiring again
+the beauties of the porch, and noting its defects aloud, as though he
+wished to call the stone benches of the Piazza and its wretched little
+trees as witnesses to his criticisms.
+
+An iron grating surmounted by urns of the seventeenth century ran in
+front of the porch, enclosing a wide, flagged space, where in former
+times the sumptuous processions of the Chapter had assembled, and
+where the multitude could admire the grotesque giants on high days and
+festivals.
+
+The first storey of the façade was broken in the centre by the great
+Puerta del Perdon, an enormous and very deeply-recessed Gothic arch,
+which narrowed as it receded by the gradations of its mouldings,
+adorned by statues of apostles, under open-worked canopies, and by
+shields emblazoned with lions and castles. On the pillar dividing the
+doorway stood Jesus in kingly crown and mantle, thin and drawn out,
+with the look of emaciation and misery that the imagination of
+the Middle Ages conceived necessary for the expression of Divine
+sublimity. In the tympanum a relievo represented the Virgin surrounded
+by angels, robed in the habit of St. Ildefonso, a pious legend
+repeated in various parts of the building as though it were one of its
+chief glories.
+
+On one side was the doorway called "de la Torre,"[1] on the other side
+that called "de los Escribanos,"[2] for by it entered in former days
+the guardians of public religion to take the oath to fulfil the duties
+of their office. Both were enriched with stone statues on the jambs,
+and by wreaths of little figures, foliage, and emblems that unrolled
+themselves among the mouldings till they met at the summit of the
+arch.
+
+[Footnote 1: Of the Tower.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Of the Scribes.]
+
+Above these three doorways with their exuberant Gothic rose the second
+storey of Greco-Romano and almost modern construction, causing Gabriel
+the same annoyance as would a discordant trumpet interrupting a
+symphony. Jesus and the twelve apostles, all life size, seated at the
+table, each under his own canopied niche, could be seen above the
+central porch, shut in by the two tower-like buttresses which divided
+the front into three parts. Beyond, two rows of arcades of inferior
+design, belonging to the Italian palace, extended as far as those
+under which Gabriel had so often played as a child when living in the
+house of the bell-ringer.
+
+The riches of the Church, thought Luna, were a misfortune for art; in
+a poorer church the uniformity of the ancient front would have been
+preserved. But, then, the Archbishop of Toledo had eleven millions of
+yearly revenue, and the Chapter as many more; they did not know what
+to do with their money, so started works and made reconstructions,
+and the decadent art produced monstrosities like that one of the Last
+Supper.
+
+Above, again, rose the third storey, two great arches that lighted the
+large rose of the central nave. The whole was crowned by a balustrade
+of open-worked stone following the sinuosities of the frontage, between
+the two salient masses that guarded it, the tower and the Musarabé
+chapel.
+
+Gabriel ceased his contemplation, seeing that he was no longer alone
+in front of the church. It was nearly daylight, and several women with
+bowed heads, their mantillas falling over their eyes, were passing in
+front of the iron grating. The crutches of a lame man rang out on the
+fine tiles of the pavement, and, out beyond the tower, under the
+great arch of communication between the archbishop's palace and the
+Cathedral, the beggars were gathering in order to take up their
+accustomed positions at the cloister door. The faithful and "God's
+creatures" [1] knew one another; every morning they were the first
+occupants of the church, and this daily meeting had established a kind
+of fraternity, and with much coughing and hoarseness they all lamented
+the cold of the morning and the lateness of the bell-ringer in coming
+down to open the doors.
+
+[Footnote 1: _Pordioseres_.]
+
+A door opened beyond the archbishop's arch, that of the tower and
+the staircase leading to the dwellings in the upper cloister. A man
+crossed the street rattling a huge bunch of keys, and, followed by the
+usual morning assemblage, he proceeded to open the door of the lower
+cloister, narrow and pointed as an arrow-head. Gabriel recognised him,
+it was Mariano, the bell-ringer. To avoid being noticed he remained
+motionless in the _Piazza_, allowing those to pass first through
+the Puerta del Mollete,[1] who seemed so anxious to hurry into the
+Metropolitan church, lest their usual places should be stolen from
+them and occupied by others.
+
+[Footnote 1: Door of the rolls, or loaves.]
+
+At last he decided to follow them, and slowly descended the same steps
+leading down into the cloister, for the Cathedral, being built in a
+hollow, is much lower than the adjacent streets.
+
+Everything appeared the same. There on the walls were the great
+frescoes of Bayan y Maella, representing the works and great deeds
+of Saint Eulogio, his preaching in the land of the Moors, and the
+cruelties of the infidels, who, with big turbans and enormous
+whiskers, were beating the saint. In the interior of the Mollete
+doorway was represented the horrible martyrdom of the Child de la
+Guardia; that legend born at the same time in so many Catholic towns
+during the heat of anti-Semitic hatred, the sacrifice of the Christian
+child, stolen from his home by Jews of grim countenance, who crucified
+him in order to tear out his heart and drink his blood.
+
+The damp was rapidly effacing this romantic fresco, that filled the
+sides of the archway like the frontispiece of a book, causing it to
+scale off; but Gabriel could still see the horrible face of the judge
+standing at the foot of the cross, and the ferocious gesture of the
+man, who with his knife in his mouth, was bending forward to tear out
+the heart of the little martyr; theatrical figures, but they had often
+disturbed his childish dreams.
+
+The garden in the midst of the cloister showed even in midwinter its
+southern vegetation of tall laurels and cypresses, stretching their
+branches through the grating of the arches that, five on each side,
+surrounded the square, and rising to the capitals of the pillars.
+Gabriel looked a long time at the garden, which was higher than the
+cloister; his face was on a level with the ground on which his father
+had laboured so many years ago; at last he saw again that charming
+corner of verdure--the Jews' market converted into a garden by the
+canons centuries before. The remembrance of it had followed him
+everywhere--in the Bois de Boulogne, in Hyde Park; for him the garden
+of the Toledan Cathedral was the most beautiful of all gardens, for it
+was the first he had even known in his life.
+
+The beggars seated on the doorsteps watched him curiously, without
+daring to stretch out their hands; they could not tell if this early
+morning visitor with the worn-out cloak, the shabby hat, and the old
+boots, was simply an inquisitive traveller, or whether he was one of
+their own order, choosing a position about the Cathedral from whence
+to beg alms.
+
+Annoyed by this curiosity, Luna walked down the cloister, passing
+by the two doors that opened into the church. The one called del
+Presentacion is a lovely example of Plateresque art, chiselled like a
+jewel, and adorned with fanciful and happy trifles. Going on further,
+he came to the back of the staircase by which the archbishops
+descended from their palace to the church; a wall covered with Gothic
+interlacings, and large escutcheons, and almost on the level of the
+ground was the famous "stone of light," a thin slice of marble as
+clear as glass, which gave light to the staircase, and was the
+admiration of all the countryfolk who came to visit the cloister. Then
+came the door of Santa Catalina, black and gold, with richly-carved
+polychrome foliage, mixed with lions and castles, and on the jambs two
+statues of prophets.
+
+Gabriel went on a few steps further as he saw that the wicket of the
+doorway was being opened from inside. It was the bell-ringer going
+his rounds and opening all the doors; first of all a dog came out,
+stretching his neck as though he was going to bark with hunger, then
+two men with their caps over their eyes, wrapped in brown cloaks; the
+bell-ringer held up the curtain to let them pass out.
+
+"Well, good-day, Mariano," said one of them by way of farewell.
+
+"Good-night to the caretakers of God.... May you sleep well."
+
+Gabriel recognised the nocturnal guardians of the Cathedral; locked
+into the church since the previous night, they were now going to their
+homes to sleep.
+
+The dog trotted off in the direction of the seminary to get his
+breakfast off the scraps left by the students, free till such time as
+the guardians came to look for him, to lock themselves in the church
+once more.
+
+Luna walked down the steps of the doorway into the Cathedral. His feet
+had scarcely touched the pavement before he felt on his face the cold
+touch of the clammy air, like an underground vault. In the church
+it was still dark, but above the stained glass of the hundreds of
+different-sized windows glowed in the early dawn, looking like magic
+flowers opening with the first splendours of day. Below, among the
+enormous pillars that looked like a forest of stone, all was darkness,
+broken here and there by the uncertain red spots of the lamps burning
+in the different chapels, wavering in the shadows. The bats flew in
+and out round the columns, wishing to prolong their possession of the
+fane, till the first rays of the sun shone through the windows; they
+fluttered over the heads of the devotees, who, kneeling before the
+altars, were praying loudly, as pleased to be in the Cathedral at that
+early hour as though it were their own house. Others chattered with
+the acolytes and other servants of the church, who were coming in by
+the different doors, sleepy and stretching themselves like workmen
+coming to their work. In the twilight, figures in black cloaks glided
+by on their way to the sacristy, stopping to make genuflections before
+each image; and in the distance, invisible in the darkness, you
+could still divine the presence of the bell-ringer, like a restless
+hobgoblin, by the rattle of his bunch of keys and the creaking of the
+doors he opened on his round.
+
+The Cathedral was awake. Echo repeated the banging of the doors from
+nave to nave; a large broom, making a saw-like noise, began to sweep
+in front of the sacristy; the church vibrated under the blows of
+certain acolytes engaged in removing the dust from the famous carved
+stalls in the choir; it seemed as though the Cathedral had awoke
+with its nerves irritated, and that the slightest touch produced
+complaints.
+
+The men's footsteps resounded with a tremendous echo, as though the
+tombs of all the kings, archbishops and warriors hidden under the
+tiled floor were being disturbed.
+
+The cold inside the church was even more intense than that outside;
+this, together with the damp of its soil traversed by underground
+water drains, and the leakage of subterranean and hidden tanks
+that stained the pavement, made the poor canons in the choir cough
+horribly, "shortening their lives," as they complainingly said.
+
+The morning light began to spread through the naves, bringing out of
+the darkness the spotless whiteness of the Toledan Cathedral, the
+purity of its stone making it the lightest and most beautiful of
+temples. One could now see all the elegant and daring beauty of the
+eighty-eight pillars soaring audaciously into space, white as frozen
+snow, and the delicate ribs interlacing to carry the vaulting. In the
+upper storey the sun shone through the large stained-glass windows,
+making them look like fairy gardens.
+
+Gabriel seated himself on the base of one of the pilasters between two
+columns; but he was soon obliged to rise and move on, the dampness
+of the stone, and the vault-like cold throughout the whole building
+penetrated to his very bones.
+
+He strolled through the naves, attracting the attention of the
+devotees, who stopped in their prayers to watch him. A stranger at
+that early hour, which belonged specially to the familiars of the
+Cathedral, excited their curiosity.
+
+The bell-ringer passed him several times, following him with uneasy
+glance, as though this unknown man, of poverty-stricken aspect, who
+wandered aimlessly about at an hour when the treasures of the church
+were, as a rule, not so strictly watched, inspired him with little
+confidence.
+
+Another man met him near the high altar. Luna recognised him also: it
+was Eusebio, the sacristan of the chapel of the Sagrario, "Azul de la
+Virgen,"[1] as he was called by the Cathedral staff, on account of the
+celestial colour of the cloak he wore on festival days.
+
+[Footnote 1: Virgin's blue.]
+
+Six years had passed since Gabriel had last seen him, but he had not
+forgotten his greasy carcase, his surly face with its narrow, wrinkled
+forehead fringed with bristly hair, his bull neck that scarcely
+allowed him to breathe, and that made every breath like the blast of a
+bellows. All the servants of the Cathedral envied him his post, which
+was the most lucrative of all, to say nothing of the favour he enjoyed
+with the archbishop and the canons.
+
+"Virgin's blue" considered the Cathedral as his own peculiar property,
+and he often came very near turning out those who inspired him with
+any antipathy.
+
+He fixed his bold eyes on the vagabond he saw walking about the
+church, making an effort to raise his overhanging brows. Where had he
+seen this strange fellow before? Gabriel noted the effort he made
+to recall his memory, and turned his back to examine with pretended
+interest a coloured panel hanging on a pillar.
+
+Flying from the curiosity excited by his presence in the fane, he went
+out into the cloister; there he felt more at his ease, quite alone.
+The beggars were chattering, seated on the doorsteps of the Mollete;
+many of the clergy passed through them, entering the church hurriedly
+by the door of the Presentacion; the beggars saluted them all by name,
+but without stretching out their hands. They knew them, they all
+belonged to the "household," and among friends one does not beg. They
+were there to fall on the strangers, and they waited patiently for the
+coming of the English; for, surely, all the strangers who came from
+Madrid by the early morning train could only be from England.
+
+Gabriel waited near the door, knowing that those coming from the
+cloister must enter by it. He crossed the archbishop's arch, and,
+following the open staircase of the palace, descended into the street,
+re-entering the church by the Mollete door. Luna, who knew all the
+history of the Cathedral, remembered the origin of its name. At first
+it was called "of justice," because under it the Vicar-General of
+the Archbishopric gave audience. Later it was called "del Mollete,"
+because every day after high mass the acolytes and vergers assembled
+there for the blessing of the half-pound loaves, or rolls of bread
+distributed to the poor. Six hundred bushels of wheat--as Luna
+remembered--were distributed yearly in this alms, but this was in the
+days when the yearly revenues of the Cathedral were more than eleven
+millions.
+
+Gabriel felt annoyed by the curious glances of the clergy, and of the
+devout entering the church. They were people accustomed to seeing each
+other daily at the same hour, and they felt their curiosity excited by
+seeing a stranger breaking in on the monotony of their lives.
+
+He drew back to the further end of the cloister, then some words from
+the beggars made him retrace his steps.
+
+"Ah! here comes old 'Vara de palo.'"[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Wooden staff.]
+
+"Good-day, Señor Esteban!"
+
+A small man dressed in black, and shaved like a cleric, came down the
+steps.
+
+"Esteban! Esteban!" cried Luna, placing himself between him and the
+door of the Presentacion.
+
+"Wooden Staff" looked at him with his clear eyes like amber, the quiet
+eyes of a man used to spending long hours in the Cathedral, with never
+a rebellious thought arising to disturb his immovable beatitude. He
+stood doubting for some time, as though he could scarcely credit the
+remote resemblance in this thin, pale face, to another that lived in
+his memory, but at last, with a pained surprise, he became convinced
+of its identity.
+
+"Gabriel! my brother! is it really you?"
+
+And the rigidly set face of the Cathedral servant, which seemed to
+have acquired the immobility of its pillars and statues, relaxed with
+an affectionate smile.
+
+"When did you come? Where have you been? What is your life? Why have
+you come?"
+
+"Wooden Staff" expressed his surprise by incessant questions, never
+giving his brother time to answer.
+
+Gabriel at length explained, that he had arrived the previous night,
+and that he had waited outside the church since early dawn in the
+hopes of seeing his brother.
+
+"I have now come from Madrid, but before that I was in many places:
+in England, in France, in Belgium, who knows where besides. I have
+wandered from one town to another, always struggling against hunger
+and the cruelty of men. My footsteps have been dogged by poverty and
+the police. When I rest a little, worn out by this Wandering Jew's
+existence, Justice, inspired by fear, orders me to move on, and so
+once again I begin my march. I am a man to be feared, Esteban, even as
+you now see me, with my body ruined before old age, and the certainty
+before me of a speedy death. Again, yesterday in Madrid, they told me
+I should be sent once more to prison if I stayed there any longer, and
+so in the evening I took the train. Where shall I go? The world is
+wide; but for me and other rebels it is very small, and narrows till
+it does not leave a hand's breadth of ground for our feet. In all the
+world nothing was left me but you, and this peaceful silent corner
+where you live so happily, and so, I came to seek you. If you turn me
+out, nothing will be left me but to die in prison, or in a hospital,
+if indeed they would take me in when they know my name."
+
+And Gabriel, spent with his words, coughed painfully, a hollow
+cavernous cough that seemed to tear his chest. He expressed himself
+vehemently, moving his arms freely, with the gestures of a man used to
+speaking in public, burning with the zeal of his cause.
+
+"Ah! brother, brother!" said Esteban, with an accent of mild reproof,
+"what has it profited you reading so many books and newspapers? What
+is the use of trying to disturb and upset things that are all right;
+and if they are all wrong, is there no other means of righting them
+possible? If you had followed your own path quietly, you would have
+been a beneficiary of the Cathedral, and, who knows, you might have
+had a seat in the choir among the canons, for the honour and profit of
+the family! But you were always wrong-headed, although you were the
+cleverest of us all. Cursed talent that leads to such misery! What
+I have suffered, brother, trying to hear about your affairs! What
+bitterness have I not gone through since you last came here! I thought
+you were contented and happy in the printing office in Barcelona,
+receiving a salary that was a fortune compared to what we earn here.
+I was disturbed at reading your name so often in the papers, at those
+meetings, where the division of everything is advocated, the death of
+religion and of the family, and I do not know what follies besides.
+The 'companion' Luna said this, or the 'companion' Luna has done the
+other, and I tried to hide from the people of the 'household' that
+this 'companion' could be you, guessing that such madness must turn
+out ill--furiously ill--and after--after came the affairs of the
+bombs."
+
+"I had nothing to do with that," said Gabriel sadly. "I am only a
+theorist; I condemned the action as premature and inefficacious."
+
+"I know it, Gabriel. I always thought you innocent. You so good, so
+gentle, who since you were a little one always astonished us by your
+kindness; you who seemed like a saint, as our poor mother used to say!
+You kill, and so treacherously, by means of such infernal artifices!
+Holy Jesus!"
+
+And the "Wooden Staff" was silent, overcome by the recollection of
+those attempts that had overwhelmed his brother.
+
+"But what is certain is," he continued after a little, "that you fell
+into the trap spread by the Government after those affairs. What I
+suffered for a while! Now and again I heard firing in the castle ditch
+beyond there, and I searched anxiously in the papers for the names
+of those executed, always fearing to find yours. There were rumours
+current of horrible tortures inflicted on those taken to make them
+confess the truth, and I thought of you, so frail, so delicate, and
+I feared that some day you would be found dead in a dungeon. And I
+suffered even more from my anxiety that no one here should know of
+your situation; you a Luna! a son of Señor Esteban, the old gardener
+of the Primate, with whom all the canons and even the archbishop
+talked. You mixed up with those infernal scoundrels who wish to
+destroy the world. For this reason when Eusebio the 'Virgin's Blue,'
+asked me if you could possibly be the Luna of whom he read in the
+papers, I replied that my brother was in America, that I heard from
+him now and again, but that he was occupied with a big business--you
+see what pain! Fearing from one moment to another that they would
+kill you, unable to speak, unable to complain, fearful of telling
+my distress even to my family. How often have I prayed in there!
+Accustomed as we of the 'household' are to associate daily with
+God and the saints, we may be a little hard and narrow-minded, but
+misfortune softens the heart, and I addressed myself to Her who can do
+everything, to our patroness the Virgin of the Sagrario, begging her
+to remember you, who used to kneel at her shrine as a little child
+when you were preparing to enter the seminary."
+
+Gabriel smiled gently as though admiring the simplicity of his
+brother.
+
+"Do not laugh, I pray you--your smile wounds me. The Divine Lady did
+all she could for you. Months afterwards I learnt that you and others
+had been put on board ship with orders never to return to Spain, and,
+up to the present time, never a letter or a scrap of news, good or
+ill. I thought you had died, Gabriel, in those distant lands, and more
+than once I have prayed for your poor soul, that I am sure wanted it."
+
+The "companion" showed in his eyes his gratitude for these words.
+
+"Thanks, Esteban. I admire your faith, but I did not come out of that
+dark adventure as well as you imagine. It would have been far better
+to have died. The aureole of a martyr is worth more than to enter a
+dungeon a man and come out of it a limp rag. I am very ill, Esteban,
+my sentence is irrevocable. I have no stomach left, my lungs are gone,
+and this body that you see is like a dislocated machine that can
+hardly move, creaking in every joint, as though all the bits intended
+to fall apart. The Virgin who saved me at your recommendation might
+really have interceded a little more in my favour, softening my
+jailors. Those wretches think to save the world by giving free rein
+to those wild beast instincts that slumber in us all, relics of a
+far-away past. Since then, at liberty, life has been more painful than
+death. On my return to Spain, pressed by poverty and persecution, my
+life has been a hell. I dare stop in no place where men congregate;
+they hunt me like dogs, forcing me to live out of the towns, driving
+me to the mountains, into the deserts, where no human beings live. It
+appears I am still a man to be feared, more to be feared than those
+desperadoes who throw bombs, because I can speak, because I carry in
+me an irresistible strength which forces me to preach the Truth if
+I find myself in the presence of miserable and trodden-down
+wretches--but all this is coming to an end. You may be easy, brother,
+I am a dead man; my mission is drawing to a close, but others will
+come after me, and again others. The furrow is open and the seed is in
+its bowels--'GERMINAL!'[1] as a friend of my exile shouted as he saw
+the last rays of the setting sun from the scaffold of the gibbet. I am
+dying, and I think I have the right to rest for a few months. I wish
+to enjoy for the first time in my life the sweets of silence, of
+absolute quiet, of incognito; to be no one, for no one to know me; to
+inspire neither sympathy nor fear. I should wish to be as a statue
+on the doorway, as a pillar in the Cathedral, immovable, over whose
+surface centuries have glided without leaving the slightest trace or
+emotion. To wait for death as a body that eats or breathes, but cannot
+think or suffer, nor feel enthusiasm; this to me would be happiness,
+brother. I do not know where to go; men are waiting for me out beyond
+these doors to drive me on again. Will you let me stay with you?"
+
+[Footnote 1: "It will sprout."]
+
+For all answer the "Wooden Staff" laid his hand affectionately on
+Gabriel's arm.
+
+"Let us come upstairs, madman--you shall not die, I will nurse you;
+what you want is care and quiet. We will cure that hot head, which
+seems like that of Don Quixote. Do you remember when you were a child
+reading us his history in the long evenings? Go along, dreamer, what
+does it signify to you if the world is better or worse regulated?
+As we found it, so it has always been. What does signify is that we
+should live like Christians, with the certainty that the other life
+will be a better one, as it will be the work of God and not of man. Go
+up--let us go up."
+
+And taking hold of the vagabond affectionately, they passed out of
+the cloister through the beggars, who had followed the interview with
+curious eyes, without, however, being able to hear a single word. They
+crossed the street and entered the staircase of the tower. The steps
+were of red brick, worn and broken; the whitewashed walls were covered
+on all sides with grotesque drawings and various inscriptions,
+scrawled by those who had ascended the tower, attracted by the fame of
+the big bell.
+
+Gabriel went up slowly, gasping, and stopping at every step.
+
+"I am ill, Esteban, very ill; these bellows let out the wind in every
+part."
+
+Then, as though repenting his forgetfulness, he suddenly asked:
+
+"And Pepa, your wife? I hope she is all right."
+
+The brows of the Cathedral servant contracted, and his eyes became
+bright as though full of tears.
+
+"She died," he said with laconic sadness.
+
+Gabriel stopped suddenly, clinging to the handrail, struck with
+surprise; then, after a short silence, he went on, wishing to console
+his brother.
+
+"But, Sagrario, my niece, she must have grown a beauty. The last time
+I saw her she looked like a queen, with her crown of auburn hair and
+her smiling face, with its golden bloom, like a ripe apricot. Did she
+marry the cadet, or is she still with you?"
+
+The "Wooden Staff" appeared even more sad, and he looked grimly at his
+brother.
+
+"She also died," he said drily.
+
+"Sagrario also dead!" exclaimed Gabriel astounded.
+
+"She is dead to me, which is the same thing. Brother, by all you love
+best in the world, do not speak to me of her."
+
+Gabriel understood that he had opened some deep wound by his
+inquiries, and so said no more, beginning once more his ascent. During
+his absence a terrible event had happened in his brother's life--one
+of those events that break up a family and separate for ever those
+that survive.
+
+They crossed the gallery covered by the archbishop's archway and
+entered the upper cloister called "the Claverias": four arcades
+of equal length to those of the lower cloister, but quite bare of
+decoration, and with a poverty-stricken aspect. The pavement was
+chipped and broken, the four sides had a balustrade running round
+between the flat pillars that supported the old beams of the roof. It
+had been a provisional work three hundred years ago, and had always
+remained in the same state. All along the whitewashed walls, the doors
+and windows belonging to the "habitacions" of the Cathedral servants
+opened without order or symmetry. These were transmitted with the
+office from father to son. The cloister, with its low arcade, looked
+like a street having houses on one side only; opposite was the flat
+colonnade with its balustrade, against which the pointed branches of
+the cypresses in the garden rested. Above the roof of the cloister
+could be seen the windows of another row of "habitacions," for nearly
+all the dwellings in the Claverias had two stories.
+
+It was the population of a whole town that lived above the Cathedral,
+on a level with its roofs; and when night fell, and the staircase of
+the tower was locked, it remained quite isolated from the city. This
+semi-ecclesiastical tribe was born and died in the very heart of
+Toledo without ever going down into the streets, clinging with
+traditional instinct to the carved mountain of stone, whose arches
+served it as a refuge. They lived saturated with the scent of incense,
+breathing the peculiar smell of mould and old iron belonging to
+ancient buildings, and with no more horizon than the arches of the
+bell tower, whose height soared into the small patch of blue sky
+visible from the cloister.
+
+The "companion" Luna thought he was returning with one step to the
+days of his childhood. Little children like the Gabriel of former days
+were playing about the four galleries, and sitting in that part of the
+cloister bathed by the first rays of the sun. Women, who reminded
+of his mother, were shaking the bedclothes out over the garden, or
+sweeping the red bricks opposite their dwellings; everything seemed
+the same. Time had left it quite alone, evidently thinking there was
+nothing there that he could possibly age. The "companion" could now
+see two sketches of lay brothers that he had drawn with charcoal when
+he was eight years old; had it not been for the children one might
+have thought that life had been suspended in that corner of the
+Cathedral, as though this aerial population could neither be born nor
+die.
+
+The "Wooden Staff," frowning and gloomy since the last words were
+spoken, tried to give some explanation to his brother.
+
+"I live in our same old house. They left it to me out of respect to
+the memory of my father. I am grateful to the clergy of the Chapter,
+taking into consideration that I am nothing but a sad old 'Wooden
+Staff.' Since my misfortune happened I have had an old woman to keep
+house, and Don Luis, the Chapel-master, lives with me. You will come
+to know him, a young priest of great talent, but quite hidden here:
+one of God's souls, whom they think crazy in the Cathedral, but who
+lives like an angel."
+
+They entered into the house of the Lunas, which was one of the best in
+the Claverias. By the door two rows of flower vases in the shape of
+a clock-case fastened to the walls were filled with hanging plants;
+inside, in the sitting room, Gabriel found everything the same as
+during his father's lifetime. The white walls that with years had
+become like ivory, were still decorated with the old engravings of
+saints, the chairs of mahogany, bright with constant rubbing, looked
+like new, in spite of their curves, which showed them to belong to
+a previous century, and their seats almost ready to drop through.
+Through a half-open door he could see into the kitchen, where his
+brother had gone to give some orders to a timid-looking old woman. In
+one corner of the room, half hidden, was a sewing machine. Luna had
+seen his niece working at it the last time he came to the Cathedral.
+It was the permanent remembrance the "little one" had left behind her
+after that catastrophe which had filled her father with such gloomy
+sadness. Through a back window of the room Gabriel could see the inner
+court, which made this "habitacion" one of the most charming in the
+Claverias, the open expanse of sky, and the upper rooms on all four
+sides, supported by rows of slender pillars, that made the courtyard
+look like a little cloister.
+
+Esteban came back and rejoined his brother.
+
+"You must say what you would like for breakfast. It would soon be
+ready; ask, man, ask for what you want, for though I am poor I shall
+take little credit to myself unless I can make you pick up a little
+and lose that look of a resuscitated corpse."
+
+Gabriel smiled sadly.
+
+"It is useless your troubling; my stomach is quite gone; a little milk
+is enough for it, and I am thankful if it retains it."
+
+Esteban ordered the old woman to go into the town in search of the
+milk, and he had hardly seated himself by his brother's side when the
+door giving into the cloister opened, and the head of a young man
+appeared.
+
+"Good-day, uncle!" he exclaimed.
+
+His face was unhealthy and currish, the eyes were malicious, and above
+his ears were combed two large tufts of glossy hair.
+
+"Come in, vagabond, come in," said the "Wooden Staff."
+
+And he added, turning to his brother:
+
+"Do you know who this is? No? It is the son of our poor brother, whom
+God has taken to his glory. He lives in the upper dwellings of the
+cloister with his mother, who washes the linen of the choir, and of
+the señores canons; and it is a delight to see how she crimps the
+surplices. Thomas, lad, bow to the gentleman; it is your uncle
+Gabriel, who has just arrived from America, and from Paris, and I
+don't know from where else besides! From very far off countries, very
+far off."
+
+The young man saluted Gabriel, though he seemed rather scared by the
+sad and suffering face of their relative, whom he had heard his mother
+speak of as a mysterious and romantic being.
+
+"Here, as you see him," proceeded Esteban, speaking to his brother,
+and pointing to his nephew, "he is the worst lot in the Cathedral.
+The Señor Obrero[1] would more than once have turned him out into
+the street, were it not for respect to the memory of his father and
+grandfather, and also to the name he bears, for everybody knows the
+Lunas are as ancient in the Cathedral as the stones in its walls. No
+escapade enters his head but he hastens to carry it out, and he swears
+like a pagan even in full sacristy, under the very noses of the
+beneficiaries. Don't dare to deny it! Grumbler!"
+
+[Footnote 1: Canon in charge of the fabric.]
+
+And he shook his first at the lad, half severely, half smiling, as
+though in the bottom of his heart he felt some pride in his nephew's
+scrapes, who received his reprimand with grimaces that made his face
+twitch like that of a monkey, while his eyes retained their fixed and
+insolent stare.
+
+"It is a real shame," continued the uncle, "that you should comb your
+hair in that fashion, like the Merry Andrews that come to Toledo from
+the Court on great festivals. In the good old times of the Cathedral
+they would have shaved your head for you. But in these days of
+alienation, of universal licence and misfortunes, our holy church is
+as poor as a rat, and poverty does not give the señores canons much
+inclination to examine details. It is a grievous pity to see how
+everything is going down. What desolation, Gabriel! If you could only
+see it! The Cathedral is as beautiful as ever, but we do not now see
+the former beauty of the Lord's worship. The Chapel-master says the
+same thing, and he is indignant to see that on great festivals only
+about half-a-dozen musicians take their place in the middle of the
+choir. The young people who live in the Claverias have not our great
+love for the mother-church; they complain of the shortness of their
+salaries without considering that it is the temporalities that support
+religion. If this goes on I should not be surprised to see this
+popinjay and other rascals like him playing at 'Rayuelo'[1] in the
+crossways in front of the choir. May God forgive me!"
+
+[Footnote 1: A game of drawing lines.]
+
+And the simple "Wooden Staff" made a gesture as though scandalised at
+his own words. He went on:
+
+"This young fellow you see here is not satisfied with his position in
+life, and yet, though he is only a youth, he occupies the place his
+poor father could only attain to after thirty years' service. He
+aspires to be a toreador, and often on a Sunday he dares to take part
+in the bull-fight in the bull-ring of Toledo. His mother came down,
+dishevelled like a Magdalen, to tell me all about it, and I, thinking
+that as his father was dead I ought to act in his place, I watched for
+our gentleman as he returned tricked out smartly from the bull-ring,
+and I thrashed him up the tower staircase to his rooms with the same
+wooden staff that I use in the Cathedral, and he can tell you if I
+have not a heavy hand when I am angry. Virgin of the Sagrario! A Luna
+of the Holy Metropolitan Church lowering himself to be a bull-fighter!
+The canons did laugh, and even the Lord Cardinal himself, as I have
+been told, when they heard about the affair! A witty beneficiary has
+since nicknamed him the 'Tato,'[1] and so they all call him now in
+the Cathedral. So you see, brother, how much respect this rascal pays
+to his family."
+
+[Footnote 1: _Tato_--Armadillo.]
+
+The "Silenciario"[1] attempted to annihilate the "Tato" with his
+glance, but this latter only smiled without paying much attention,
+either to his uncle's words or looks.
+
+[Footnote 1: _Silenciario_--Officer appointed to keep silence.]
+
+"You would hardly believe, Gabriel," he continued, "that this creature
+often wants a bit of bread, and it is for this reason he commits all
+these follies. In spite of his wrong-headedness, since the age of
+twenty he has occupied the position of 'Perrero'[3] in the holy
+church, he has obtained what in better times only those could obtain
+who had served well and striven hard for years. He gets his six reals
+a day, and as he can go freely about the church he can show the
+curiosities to strangers; and so with the salary and the tips he
+gets, he is much better off than I am. The foreigners who visit the
+Cathedral, excommunicated people who look upon us as strange monkeys,
+and who think that anything interesting of ours is only worthy of a
+laugh, take a fancy to him. The English ask him if he is a toreador,
+and he--what does he want better than that! When he sees they pay him
+according as he pleases them, he brings out his pack of lies, for,
+unfortunately, no one has any check on the deceit, and he tells them
+about all the great bull-fights in which he has taken part in Toledo,
+and all about the bulls he has killed; and these blockheads from
+England make a note of it in their albums, and even some coarse hand
+may make a sketch of this imposter's head; all he cares for is that
+they should believe all his lies and give him a peseta on leaving. It
+matters very little to him, if when these heretics return to their
+own country they spread the report that in Toledo, in the Holy
+Metropolitan Church of all Spain, the Cathedral servants are
+bull-fighters, and assist in the ceremonies of worship between the
+bull runs. The sum total is, that he earns more than I do, but in
+spite of this he considers his employment beneath him. And such
+beautiful duties, too. To walk in the great processions before
+everyone, close to the Primate's great banner, with a staff covered
+with red velvet to support him should he chance to fall, and wearing a
+robe of scarlet brocade like a cardinal. Our Chapel-master, who knows
+a great deal about such things, says that when he wears that robe
+he looks like a certain Diente, or some name of the sort, who
+lived hundreds of years ago in Italy, and went down into hell, and
+afterwards described his journey in poetry."
+
+[Footnote 3: _Perrero_--Beadle whose special duty it is to chase the
+dogs out of church.]
+
+Sounds of footsteps were heard on the narrow circular staircase in the
+thickness of the wall that led from the sitting-room to the storey
+above.
+
+"It is Don Luis," said the "Wooden Staff," "he is going to say his
+mass in the chapel of the Sagrario, and afterwards to the choir."
+
+Gabriel rose from his sofa to salute the priest. He was feeble and
+small of stature, but the thing about him that struck you at first
+sight was the disproportion between his shrunken body and his immense
+head. The forehead, round and prominent, seemed to crush with its
+weight the dark and irregular features, much pitted by smallpox.
+He was very ugly, but still the expression of his blue eyes, the
+brilliancy of his white and regular teeth, and the ingenuous smile,
+almost childlike, that played on his lips, gave his face that
+sympathetic expression which showed him to be one of those simple
+souls wrapped up in their artistic fancies.
+
+"And so this gentleman is the brother of whom you have spoken to me so
+often," said he, hearing the introduction made by Esteban.
+
+He held out his hand in a friendly way to Gabriel. They both looked
+very sickly, but their bodily infirmities seemed to be a bond of
+attraction.
+
+"As the señor has studied in the seminary," said the Chapel-master,
+"he will know something about music."
+
+"It is the only thing that I remember of all those studies."
+
+"But having travelled so much all over the world, you must have heard
+a great deal of good music."
+
+"That is so. Music is to me the most pleasing of all the arts. I do
+not know much about it, but I feel it."
+
+"Very well, very well, we shall be good friends. You must tell me all
+sorts of things; how I envy you having travelled so much."
+
+He spoke like a restless child, without sitting down. Although the
+"Silenciario" offered him a chair at each of his flirtings round the
+room, he wandered from side to side in his shabby cloak, his hat in
+his hand--a poor worn-out hat with not a trace of pile left, knocked
+in, with a layer of grease on its flaps, miserable and old, like the
+cassock and the shoes. But in spite of this poverty the Chapel-master
+had a certain refinement about him. His hair, rather too long for his
+ecclesiastical dress, curled round his temples, and the dignified way
+in which he folded his cloak round his body reminded one of the cloak
+of a tenor at the opera. He had a sort of easy grace that betrayed the
+artist who, under the priestly robes, was longing to get rid of them,
+leaving them at his feet like a winding sheet.
+
+Some deep notes from the bell, like distant thunder, floated into the
+room through the cloister.
+
+"Uncle, they are calling us to the choir," said the "Tato." "We ought
+to have been in the Cathedral before now; it is nearly eight o'clock."
+
+"It is true, lad. I am glad you were here to remind me; let us be
+going."
+
+Then he added, speaking to the musical priest:
+
+"Don Luis, your mass is at eight o'clock. You can talk with Gabriel
+later on; now we must fulfil our obligations, for those who are late
+will, as you say, be turned out, even though our office hardly gives
+us enough to eat."
+
+The Chapel-master assented sadly with a movement of his head, and
+went out, following the two Cathedral servants. He seemed to go
+unwillingly, as though forced to a task that was to him both irksome
+and painful. He hummed absently while giving his hand to Gabriel, who
+thought he recognised a fragment of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony in
+the low and uneven tones that came from the lips of the young priest.
+
+Now that he was alone Luna stretched himself on the sofa, giving
+himself up to the fatigue he felt from his long wait before the
+Cathedral. His brother's old servant placed a little pitcher of
+milk by his side, and filling a cup, Gabriel drank, endeavouring to
+overcome the repugnance of his weak stomach, which almost refused to
+retain the liquid. His body, fatigued by his restless night and the
+long morning wait, at last assimilated the nourishment, and a soft,
+dreamy languor spread over him that he had not felt for a long time.
+He soon fell asleep, remaining for more than an hour motionless on the
+sofa, and though his breathing was disturbed, and his chest racked by
+his hollow cough, they were unable to wake him from his slumber.
+
+When he did awake, it was suddenly, with a nervous start that shook
+him from head to foot, making him bound from the sofa as though a
+spring had been touched. It was the wariness produced by his ever
+present danger, that had become habitual to him; the habit of
+restlessness formed in dark dungeons, expecting hourly to see the door
+open, to be beaten like a dog, or led off between a double file of
+muskets to the square of execution; the habit of living perpetually
+watched, of feeling in every country the espionage of the police
+around him, the habit of being awoke in the middle of the night in his
+wretched room in some inn by the order to leave at once; the unrest of
+the ancient Asheverus, who, as soon as he could enjoy a moment's rest,
+heard the eternal cry--"Go on. Go on."
+
+He did not try to sleep again, he preferred the present reality, the
+silence of the Cathedral which was to him as a gentle caress, the
+noble calm of the temple, that immense pile of worked stone, which
+seemed to press on him, enveloping him, hiding for ever his weakness
+and his persecutions.
+
+He went out into the cloister, and, resting his elbows on the
+balustrade, looked down into the garden.
+
+The Claverias seemed quite deserted. The children who had enlivened
+them in the early morning had gone to school, the women were inside
+their houses preparing their mid-day meal, there seemed to be no one
+in the cloister except himself; the sunlight bathed all one side,
+and the shadow of the pillars cut obliquely the great golden spaces
+flooding the pavement. The majestic silence, the holy calm of the
+Cathedral overpowered the agitator like a gentle narcotic. The seven
+centuries surrounding those stones seemed to him like so many veils
+hiding him from the rest of the world. In one of the dwellings of the
+Claverias you could hear the incessant tap, tap, of a hammer; it was
+that of a shoemaker whom Gabriel had seen through the window-panes,
+bending over his bench. In the square of sky framed by the roofs some
+pigeons were flying, lazily moving their wings, soaring in the vault
+of intense blue; some flew down into the cloister, and, perching on
+the balustrade, broke the religious silence with their gentle cooing;
+now and again the heavy door-curtains of the church were lifted, and
+a breath of air charged with incense floated over the garden of the
+Claverias, together with the deep notes of the organ, and the sound of
+voices chanting Latin words and solemnly prolonging the cadences.
+
+Gabriel looked at the garden surrounded by its arcades of white stone,
+with its rough buttresses of dark granite, in the chinks of which the
+rain had left an efflorescence of fungus, like little tufts of black
+velvet. The sun struck on one angle of the garden, leaving the rest
+in cool green shade, a conventual twilight. The bell-tower hid one
+portion of the sky, displaying on its reddish sides, ornamented with
+Gothic tracery and salient buttresses, the fillets of black marble
+with heads of mysterious personages, and the shields with the arms of
+the different archbishops who had assisted at its building; above,
+near the pinnacles of white stone, were seen the bells behind enormous
+gratings; from below they looked like three bronze birds in a cage of
+iron.
+
+Three deep strokes from a bell, echoing round the Cathedral, announced
+that the High Mass had arrived at its most solemn moment, the mountain
+of stone seemed to tremble with the vibration, which was transmitted
+through the naves and galleries, to the arcades and down to the lowest
+foundations.
+
+Again there was silence, which seemed even deeper after the bronze
+thunders; the cooing of the pigeons could again be heard, and, down in
+the garden, the twittering of the birds, warmed by the sun's rays that
+began to gild its cool twilight.
+
+Gabriel felt himself deeply moved; the sweet silence, the absolute
+calm, the feeling almost of non-existence overpowered him; and beyond
+those walls was the world, but here it could not be seen, it could not
+be felt; it remained respectful but indifferent before that monument
+of the past, that splendid sepulchre, in whose interior nothing
+excited its curiosity. Who would ever imagine he was there? That
+growth of seven centuries, built by vanished greatness for a dying
+faith, should be his last refuge. In the full tide of unbelief the
+church should be his sanctuary, as it had been in former days to
+those great criminals of the Middle Ages, who, from the height of the
+cloister mocked at justice, detained at the doors like the beggars.
+Here should be consummated in silence and calm the slow decay of his
+body, here he would die with the serene satisfaction of having died to
+the world long before. At last he realised his hope of ending his days
+in a corner of the sleepy Spanish Cathedral, the only hope that had
+sustained him as he wandered on foot along the highways of Europe,
+hiding himself from the civil guards and the police, spending his
+nights in ditches, huddled up, his head on his knees, fearing every
+moment to die of cold.
+
+He clung to the Cathedral as a shipwrecked and drowning man clings
+to the spar of a sinking ship; this had been his hope, and he was
+beginning to realise it. The church would receive him, like an old and
+infirm mother, unable to smile, but who could still stretch out her
+arms.
+
+"At last! At last!" murmured Luna.
+
+And he smiled, thinking of the world of sorrows and persecutions that
+he was leaving behind him, as though he were going to some remote
+place, situated in another planet, from which he would never return;
+the Cathedral would shelter him for ever.
+
+In the profound stillness of the cloister, that the sound of the
+street could not reach, the "companion" Luna thought he heard far off,
+very far off, the shrill sound of a trumpet and the muffled roll
+of drums, then he remembered the Alcazar of Toledo, dominating the
+Cathedral from its height, intimidating it with the enormous mass of
+its towers; they were the drums and trumpets of the Military Academy.
+
+These sounds were painful to Gabriel; the world had faded from his
+sight, and when he thought himself so very far from it, he could still
+feel its presence only a little way beyond the roof of the temple.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+Since the times of the second Cardinal de Bourbon Senior Esteban Luna
+had been gardener of the Cathedral, by the right that seemed firmly
+established in his family. Who was the first Luna that entered the
+service of the Holy Metropolitan Church? As the gardener asked himself
+this question he smiled complacently, raising his eyes to heaven, as
+though he would inquire of the immensity of space. The Lunas were as
+ancient as the foundations of the church; a great many generations
+had been born in the abode in the upper cloister, and even before the
+illustrious Cisneros built the Claverias the Lunas had lived in houses
+adjacent, as though they could not exist out of the shadow of the
+Primacy. To no one did the Cathedral belong with better right than
+to them. Canons, beneficiaries, archbishops passed; they gained the
+appointment, died, and others came in their places. It was a constant
+procession of new faces, of masters who came from every corner of
+Spain to take their seats in the choir, to die a few years afterwards,
+leaving the vacancies to be filled again by other newcomers; but the
+Lunas always remained at their post, as though the ancient family were
+another column of the many that supported the temple. It might happen
+that the archbishop who to-day was called Don Bernardo, might next
+year be called Don Caspar, or again another Don Fernando. But what
+seemed utterly impossible was that the Cathedral could exist without
+Lunas in the garden, in the sacristy, or in the crossways of the
+choir, accustomed as it had been for centuries to their services.
+
+The gardener spoke with pride of his descent, of his noble and
+unfortunate relative the constable Don Alvaro, buried like a king in
+his chapel behind the high altar; of the Pope Benedict XIII., proud
+and obstinate like all the rest of his family; of Don Pedro de Luna,
+fifth of his name to occupy the archiepiscopal throne of Toledo, and
+of other relatives not less distinguished.
+
+"We are all from the same stem," he said with pride. "We all came
+to the conquest of Toledo with the good King Alfonso VI. The only
+difference has been, that some Lunas took a fancy to go and fight
+the Moors, and they became lords, and conquered castles, whereas my
+ancestors remained in the service of the Cathedral, like the good
+Christians they were."
+
+With the satisfaction of a duke who enumerates his ancestors, the
+Señor Esteban carried back the line of the Lunas till it became misty
+and was lost in the fifteenth century. His father had known Don
+Francisco III. Lorenzana, a magnificent and prodigal prince of the
+church, who spent the abundant revenues of the archbishopric in
+building palaces and editing books, like a great lord of the
+Renaissance. He had known also the first Cardinal Bourbon, Don Luis
+II., and used to narrate the romantic life of this Infante. Brother of
+the King Carlos III., the custom that dedicated some of the younger
+branches to the church had made him a cardinal at nine years old. But
+that good lord, whose portrait hung in the Chapter House, with white
+hair, red lips and blue eyes, felt more inclination to the joys of
+this world than to the grandeurs of the church, and he abandoned the
+archbishopric to marry a lady of modest birth, quarrelling for ever
+with the king, who sent him into exile. And the old Luna, leaping
+from ancestor to ancestor through the long centuries, remembered the
+Archduke Alberto, who resigned the Toledan mitre to become Governor of
+the Low Countries, and the magnificent Cardinal Tavera, protector
+of the arts, all excellent princes, who had treated his family
+affectionately, recognising their secular adhesion to the Holy
+Metropolitan Church.
+
+The days of his youth were bad ones for the Señor Esteban; it was the
+time of the war of Independence. The French occupied Toledo, entering
+into the Cathedral like pagans, rattling their swords and prying into
+every corner at full High Mass. The jewels were concealed, the canons
+and beneficiaries, who were now called _prebendaries_, were living
+dispersed over the Peninsula. Some had taken refuge in places that
+were still Spanish, others were hidden in the towns, making vows for
+the speedy return of "the desired." It was pitiful to hear the choir
+with its few voices; only the very timid, who were bound to their
+seats and could not live away from them, had remained, and had
+recognised the usurping king. The second Cardinal de Bourbon, the
+gentle and insignificant Don Luis Maria, was in Cadiz, the only one of
+the family remaining in Spain, and the Cortes had laid their hands
+on him to give a certain dynastic appearance to their revolutionary
+authority.
+
+When the war was over and the poor cardinal returned to his seat, the
+Señor Esteban was moved to pity to see his sad and childlike face,
+with the small round head, and insignificant appearance; he returned
+discouraged and disheartened, after receiving his nephew Ferdinand
+VII. in Madrid. All his colleagues in the regency were either in
+prison or in exile, and that he did not suffer a like fate was solely
+due to his mitre and to his name. The unfortunate prelate thought
+he had done good service in maintaining the interests of his family
+during the war, and now he found himself accused of being Liberal, an
+enemy to religion and the throne, without being able to imagine how he
+had conspired against them. The poor Cardinal de Bourbon languished
+sadly in his palace, devoting his revenues to works in the Cathedral,
+till he died in 1823 at the beginning of the reaction, leaving his
+place to Inguanzo, the tribune of absolutism, a prelate with iron-grey
+whiskers, who had made his career as deputy in the Cortes at Cadiz,
+attacking as deputy every sort of reform, and advocating a return to
+the times of the Austrians as the surest means of saving his country.
+
+The good gardener saluted with equal cordiality the Bourbon Cardinal,
+hated by the kings, as the prelate with the whiskers, who made all
+the diocese tremble with his bitter and harassing temper, and his
+arrogance as a revolutionary Absolutist. For him, whoever occupied the
+throne of Toledo was a perfect man, whose acts no one should dare to
+discuss, and he turned a deaf ear to the murmurs of the canons and
+beneficiaries, who, smoking their cigarettes in the arbour of his
+garden, spoke of the genialities of this Señor de Inguanzo, and were
+indignant at the Government of Ferdinand VII. not being sufficiently
+firm, through fear of the foreigners, to re-establish the wholesome
+tribunal of the Inquisition.
+
+The only thing that troubled the gardener was to watch the decadence
+of his beloved Cathedral. The revenues of the archbishop and of the
+Chapter had been greatly wasted during the war. What had occurred was
+what happens after a great flood, when the waters begin to subside
+and carry everything away with them, leaving the land bare and
+uninhabited. The Primacy lost many of its rights, the tenants made
+themselves masters, taking advantage of the disorders of the State;
+the towns refused to pay their feudal services, as though the
+necessity of defending themselves and helping in the war had freed
+them for ever from vassalage; further, the turbulent Cortes had
+decreed the abolition of all lordships, and had very much curtailed
+the enormous revenues of the Cathedral, acquired in the centuries when
+the archbishops of Toledo put on their casques, and went out to fight
+the Moors with double-handed swords.
+
+Even so, a considerable fortune remained to the church of the Primacy,
+and it maintained its splendour as if nothing had happened, but the
+Señor Esteban scented danger from the depths of his garden, hearing
+from the canons of the Liberal conspiracies, the executions by
+shooting and hanging, and the exiling, to which the king Señor Don
+Fernando appealed, in order to repress the audacity of the "Negros,"
+the enemies of the Monarchy and of religion.
+
+"They have tasted the sweets," said he, "and they will return--see if
+they do not return, and take what is left! During the war they took
+the first bite, taking from the Cathedral more than half that was
+hers, and now they will come and take the rest; they will try and
+catch hold of the handle of the fryingpan."
+
+The gardener was angry at the possibility of such a thing happening.
+Ay! and was it for this that so many lord archbishops of Toledo fought
+against the Moors? Conquering towns, assaulting castles and annexing
+pasture lands, which all came to be the property of the Cathedral,
+contributing to the great splendour of God's worship! And was
+everything to fall into the dirty hands of the enemies of anything
+that was holy? Everything that so many faithful souls had willed to
+them on their deathbeds, queens and magnates, and simple country
+gentlemen, who left the best part of their fortunes to the Holy
+Metropolitan Church, in the hope of saving their souls! What would
+happen to the six hundred souls, big and little, clerics and seculars,
+dignitaries and simple servants who lived from the revenues of the
+Cathedral?.... And was this called liberty? To rob what did not
+belong to them, leaving in poverty innumerable families who were now
+supported by the "great pot" of the Chapter?
+
+When the sad forebodings of the gardener began to be realised, and
+Mendizabal decreed the dismemberment, the Señor Esteban thought he
+would have died of rage. But the Cardinal Inguanzo did better. Placed
+in his seat by the Liberals as his predecessor had been by the
+Absolutists, he thought it best to die in order to take no part in
+these attempts against the sacred revenues of the Church.
+
+The Señor Luna, who was only a humble gardener, and who therefore
+could not imitate the illustrious Cardinal, went on living. But every
+day he felt more and more sorrowful, knowing that for shamefully low
+prices, many of the Moderates, who still came to High Mass, were
+stealthily acquiring to-day a house, to-morrow a farm, another day
+pasture lands, properties all belonging to the Primacy, but which had
+lately been put on the list of what was called national property.
+
+Robbers! this slow subversion and sale, that rent in pieces the
+revenues of the Cathedral, caused the Señor Esteban as much
+indignation as though the bailiffs had entered his house in the
+Claverias to remove the family furniture, each piece of which embalmed
+the memory of some ancestor.
+
+There were times in which he thought of abandoning his garden, and
+going to Maestrazgo, or to the northern provinces, in search of some
+of the loyal defenders of the rights of Charles V. and of the return
+to the old times. He was then forty years of age, strong and active,
+and though his temperament was pacific and he had never touched a
+musket, he felt himself fired by the example of certain timid and
+pious students, who had fled from the seminary, and were now, so it
+was said, fighting in Catalonia behind the red cloak of Don Ramon
+Cabrera.
+
+But the gardener, in order not to be alone in his big "habitacion" in
+the Claverias, had married three years previously the daughter of the
+sacristan, and he had now one son; besides, he could not tear himself
+away from the church, he was another square block in the mountain of
+stone, he moved and spoke as a man, but he felt a certainty that he
+should perish at once if he left his garden. Besides, the Cathedral
+would lose one of the most important props if a Luna were wanting in
+its service, and he felt terrified at the bare thought of living out
+of it. How could he wander over the mountains fighting, and firing
+shots, when years had passed without his treading any other profane
+soil beyond the little bit of street between the staircase of the
+Claverias and the Puerta del Mollete?
+
+And so he went on cultivating his garden, feeling the melancholy
+satisfaction that he was at least sheltered from all the wicked
+revolutionaries under the shadow of that colossus of stone, which
+inspired awe and respect from its majestic age. They might curtail
+the revenues of the temple, but they would be powerless against the
+Christian faith of those who lived under its protection.
+
+The garden, deaf and insensible to the revolutionary tempests that
+broke over the church, continued to unfold its sombre beauty between
+the arcades, the laurels grew till they reached the balustrade of the
+upper cloister, and the cypresses seemed as though they aspired
+to touch the roofs; the creepers twined themselves among the iron
+railings, making thick lattices of verdure, and the ivy mantled the
+wall of the central arbour, which was surmounted by a cap of black
+slate with a rusty iron cross. After the evening choir the clergy
+would come and sit in here and read, by the soft green light that
+filtered through the foliage, the news from the Carlist Camp, and
+discuss enthusiastically the great exploits of Cabrera, while above,
+the swallows quite indifferent to human presence, circled and screamed
+in the clear blue sky. The Señor Esteban would watch, standing
+silently, this bat-like evening club, which was kept quietly hidden
+from those belonging to the National Militia of Toledo.
+
+When the war terminated, the last illusions of the gardener vanished,
+he fell into the silence of despair and wished to know of nothing
+outside the Cathedral. God had abandoned the good and faithful, and
+the traitors and evil-doers were triumphant; his only consolation
+was the stronghold of the temple, which had lived through so many
+centuries of turmoil, and could still defy its enemies for so many
+more.
+
+He only wished to be the gardener, to die in the upper cloister like
+his forefathers, and to leave fresh Lunas to perpetuate the family
+services in the Cathedral. His eldest son, Tomas, was now twelve years
+old, and able to help him in the care of the garden. After an interval
+of many years a second son had been born, Esteban, who, almost before
+he could walk, would kneel before the images in the "habitacion,"
+crying for his mother to carry him down into the church to see the
+saints.
+
+Poverty entered into the Cathedral, reducing the number of canons and
+prebendaries; at the death of any of the old servants, their places
+were suppressed, and a great many carpenters, masons, and glaziers
+who previously had lived there as workmen specially attached to the
+Primacy, and were continually working at its repairs, were dismissed.
+If from time to time certain repairs were indispensable, workmen were
+called in from outside, by the day; many of the "habitacions" in the
+Claverias were unoccupied, and the silence of the grave reigned where
+previously the population of a small town had gathered and crowded.
+The Government of Madrid (and you should have seen the expression of
+contempt with which the old gardener emphasised those words) was in
+treaty with the Holy Father to arrange something called the Concordat.
+The number of canons was limited as though the Holy Metropolitan was
+a college, they were to be paid by the Government the same as the
+servants, and for the maintenance of worship in this most famous
+Cathedral of all Spain--which, when it formerly collected its tithe,
+scarcely knew where to lock up such riches--a monthly pension of
+twelve hundred pesetas was now granted.
+
+"One thousand two hundred pesetas, Tomas!" said he to his son, a
+silent boy, who took very little interest in anything but his garden.
+"One thousand two hundred pesetas, when I can remember the Cathedral
+having more than six millions of revenue! Bad times are in store for
+us, and were I anyone else I would bring you up to an office, or
+something outside the church; but the Lunas cannot desert the cause of
+God, like so many traitors who have betrayed it. Here we were born,
+here we must die, to the very last one of the family." And furious
+with the clergy, who seemed to put a good face on the Concordat and
+their salaries, thankful to have come out of the revolutionary tumults
+even as well as they had done, he isolated himself in his garden,
+locking the door in the iron railing, and shrinking from the
+assemblies of former times!
+
+His little floral world did not change, its sombre verdure was like
+the twilight that had enveloped the gardener's soul. It had not the
+brilliant gaiety, overflowing with colours and scents of a garden in
+the open, bathed in full sunlight, but it had the shady and melancholy
+beauty of a conventual garden between four walls, with no more light
+than what came through the eaves and the arcades, and no other birds
+but those flying above, who looked with wonder at this little paradise
+at the bottom of a well. The vegetation was the same as that of the
+Greek landscapes, and of the idylls of the Greek poets--laurels,
+cypress and roses, but the arches that surrounded it, with their
+alleys paved with great slabs of granite in whose interstices wreaths
+of grass grew, the cross of its central arbour, the mouldy smell of
+the old iron railings, and the damp of the stone buttresses coloured a
+soft green by the rain, gave the garden an atmosphere of reverend age
+and a character of its own.
+
+The trees waved in the wind like censers, the flowers, pale and
+languid with an anaemic beauty, smelt of incense, as though the air
+wafted through the doors of the Cathedral had changed their natural
+perfumes.
+
+The rain, trickling from the gargoyles and gutters of the roofs, was
+collected in two large and deep stone tanks; sometimes the gardener's
+pail would disturb their green covering, letting one perceive for an
+instant the blue-blackness of their depths, but as soon as the circles
+disappeared, the vegetation once more drew together and covered them
+over afresh, without a movement, without a ripple, quiet and dead as
+the temple itself in the stillness of the evening.
+
+At the feast of Corpus, and that of the Virgin of the Sagrario in the
+middle of August, the townspeople brought their pitchers into the
+garden, and the Señor Esteban allowed them to be filled from these two
+cisterns. It was an ancient custom and one much appreciated by the
+old Toledans, who thought much of the fresh water of the Cathedral,
+condemned as they were during the rest of the year to drink the red
+and muddy liquid of the Tagus. At other times people came into the
+garden to give little presents to Señor Esteban, the devout entrusted
+him with palms for their images, or bought little bunches of flowers,
+believing them to be better than those they could buy at the farms,
+because they came from the Metropolitan Church, and the old women
+begged branches of laurel for flavouring and for household medicines.
+These incomings, and the two pesetas that the Chapter had assigned to
+the gardener after the final dismemberment, helped the Señor Esteban
+and his family to get on. When he was getting well on in years his
+third son Gabriel was born, a child who from his fourth year attracted
+the attention of all the women in the Claverias; his mother affirmed
+with a blind faith that he was a living image of the Child Jesus that
+the Virgin of the Sagrario held in her arms. Her sister Tomasa, who
+was married to the "Virgin's Blue," and was the mother of a numerous
+family which occupied nearly the half of the upper cloister, talked a
+great deal about the intelligence of her little nephew, when he could
+hardly speak, and about the infantile unction with which he gazed at
+the images.
+
+"He looks like a saint," she said to her friends. "You should see how
+seriously he says his prayers.... Gabrielillo will become somebody;
+who knows if we may not see him a bishop! Acolytes that I knew when
+my father had charge of the sacristy now wear the mitre, and possibly
+some day we may have one of them in Toledo."
+
+The chorus of caresses and praises surrounded the first years of the
+child like a cloud of incense; the family only lived for him, the
+Señor Esteban, a father in the good old Latin style who loved his
+sons, but was severe and stern with them in order that they might grow
+up honourable, felt in the presence of the child a return of his own
+youth; he played with him, and lent himself smilingly to all his
+little caprices; his mother abandoned her household duties to please
+him, and his brother hung on his babbling words. The eldest, Tomas,
+the silent youth who had taken the place of his father in the care of
+the garden, and who even in the depths of winter went barefooted over
+the flower-beds and rough stones of the alleys, came up often bringing
+handfuls of sweet-scented herbs, so that his little brother might play
+with them. Esteban, the second, who was now thirteen and who enjoyed
+a certain notoriety among the other acolytes on account of his
+scrupulous care in assisting at the mass, delighted Gabriel with his
+red cassock and his pleated tunic, and brought him taper ends and
+little coloured prints, abstracted from the breviary of some canon.
+
+Now and then he carried him in his arms to the store-room of the
+giants, an immense room between the buttresses and the arches of the
+nave, vaulted with stone. Here were the heroes of the ancient
+feasts and holidays. The Cid with a huge sword, and four set pieces
+representing as many parts of the world: huge figures with dusty and
+tattered clothes and broken faces, which had once rejoiced the streets
+of Toledo, and were now rotting under the roofs of its Cathedral. In
+one corner reposed the Tarasca, a frightful monster of cardboard,
+which terrified Gabriel when it opened its jaws, while on its wrinkled
+back sat smiling, idiotically, a dishevelled and indecent doll, whom
+the religious feeling of former ages had baptised with the name of
+Anne Boleyn.
+
+When Gabriel went to school all were astonished at his progress. The
+youngsters of the upper cloister who were such a trial to "Silver
+Stick," the priest charged with maintaining good order among the tribe
+established in the roofs of the Cathedral, looked upon the little
+Gabriel as a prodigy. When he could scarcely walk he could read
+easily, and at seven he began to recite his Latin, mastering it
+quickly, as though he had never spoken anything else in his life, and
+at ten he could argue with the clergy who frequented the gardens, and
+who delighted in putting before him questions and difficulties.
+
+The Señor Esteban, growing daily more bent and feeble, smiled
+delightedly before his last work; he was going to be the glory of his
+house! His name was Luna, and therefore he could aspire to anything
+without fear, because even Popes had come from that family.
+
+The canons would take the boy into the sacristy after choir, and
+question him as to his studies. One of the clergy belonging to the
+archbishop's household presented him to the cardinal, who, after
+hearing him, gave him a handful of sugared almonds and the promise of
+a scholarship, so that he could continue his studies at the seminary
+gratuitously.
+
+The Lunas and all their relations more or less distant, who were
+really nearly the whole population of the upper cloister, were
+rejoiced at this promise; what else could Gabriel be but a priest? For
+these people, attached to the church from the day of their birth, like
+excrescences of its stones, who considered the archbishops of Toledo
+as the most powerful beings in the world after the Pope, the only
+profession worthy of a man of talent was the Church.
+
+Gabriel went to the Seminary, and to all the family the Claverias
+seemed quite deserted. The long, pleasant evenings in the house of
+the Lunas came to an end, at which the bell-ringer, the vergers, the
+sacristans and other church servants had been used to assemble, and
+listen to the clear and well modulated voice of Gabriel, who read like
+an angel--sometimes the lives of the saints, at other times Catholic
+newspapers that came from Madrid, or chapters from a Don Quixote with
+pages of vellum and antiquated writing--a venerable copy which had
+been handed down in the family for generations.
+
+Gabriel's life in the Seminary was the ordinary and monotonous life of
+a hard-working student: triumphs in theological controversies, prizes
+in heaps, and the satisfaction of being held up to his companions as a
+model.
+
+Sometimes one of the canons who lectured in the seminary would come
+into the garden:--
+
+"The lad is getting on very well, Esteban; he is first in everything,
+and besides, is as steady and pious as a saint. He will be the comfort
+of your old age."
+
+The gardener, always growing older and thinner, shook his head. He
+should only be able to see the end of his son's career from the
+heavens, should it please God to call him there. He would die before
+his son's triumph; but this did not sadden him, for the family
+would remain to enjoy the victory and to give thanks to God for His
+goodness.
+
+Humanities, theology, canons, everything, the young man mastered with
+an ease which surprised his masters, and they compared him to the
+Fathers of the Church, who had attracted attention by their precocity.
+He would very soon finish his studies, and they all predicted that his
+Eminence would give him a professorship in the seminary, even before
+he sang his first mass. His thirst for learning was insatiable, and it
+seemed as though the library really belonged to him. Some evenings he
+would go into the Cathedral to pursue his musical studies, and talk
+with the Chapel-master and the organist, and at other times in the
+hall of sacred oratory he would astound the professors and the Alumni
+by the fervour and conviction with which he delivered his sermons.
+
+"He is called to the pulpit," they said in the Cathedral garden. "He
+has all the fire of the apostles; he will become a Saint Bernard or
+a Bossuet. Who can tell how far this youth will go, or where he will
+end?"
+
+One of the studies which most delighted Gabriel was that of the
+history of the Cathedral, and of the ecclesiastical princes who had
+ruled it. All the inherent love of the Lunas for the giantess who was
+their eternal mother surged up in him, but he did not love it blindly
+as all his belongings did. He wished to know the why and the wherefore
+of things, comparing in his books the vague old stories that he had
+heard from his father, that seemed more akin to legends than to
+historical facts.
+
+The first thing that claimed his attention was the chronology of the
+archbishops of Toledo--a long line of famous men, saints, warriors,
+writers, princes, each with his number after his name, like the kings
+of the different dynasties. At certain times they had been the real
+kings of Spain. The Gothic kings in their courts were little more than
+decorative figureheads that were raised or deposed according to the
+exigencies of the moment. The nation was a theocratic republic, and
+its true head was the Archbishop of Toledo.
+
+Gabriel grouped the long line of famous prelates by characters. First
+of all the saints, the apostles in the heroic age of Christianity,
+bishops as poor as their own people, barefooted, fugitives from the
+Roman persecution, and bowing their heads at last to the executioner,
+firm in the hope of gaining fresh strength to the doctrine for which
+they sacrificed their lives--Saint Eugenio, Melancio, Pelagio, Patruno
+and other names that shone in the past scarcely breaking through the
+mists of legend. Then came the archbishops of the Gothic era; those
+kingly prelates who exercised that superiority over the conquering
+kings by which the spiritual power succeeded in dominating the
+barbarian conquerors. Miracles accompanied them to confound the
+Arians, and celestial prodigies were at their orders to terrify and
+crush those rude men of war. The Archbishop Montano, who lived with
+his wife, and was indignant at the consequent murmurs, placed red-hot
+coals in his sacred vestments the while he said mass, and did not
+burn, demonstrating by this miracle the purity of his life. Saint
+Ildefonso, not content with only writing books against heretics,
+induced Santa Leocadia to appear to him, leaving in his hands a piece
+of her mantle, and he enjoyed the further honour of this same Virgin
+descending from heaven to present him with a chasuble embroidered by
+her own hands. Sigiberto, many years after, had the audacity to
+vest himself in this chasuble, and was in consequence deposed,
+excommunicated and exiled for his temerity.
+
+The only books that were produced in those times were written by the
+prelates of Toledo. They compiled the laws, they anointed the heads
+of the monarchs with the holy oil, they set up Wamba as king, they
+conspired against the life of Egica, and the councils assembled in
+the basilica of Santa Leocadia were political assemblies in which the
+mitre was on the throne and the crown of the king at the feet of the
+prelate.
+
+At the coming of the Saracen invasion the series of persecuted
+prelates begins again. They did not now fear for their lives as during
+the time of Roman intolerance; for Mussulmen as a rule do not martyr,
+and furthermore, they respect the beliefs of the conquered.
+
+All the churches in Toledo remained in the hands of the Christian
+Muzarabés[1] with the exception of the Cathedral, which was converted
+into the principal mosque.
+
+[Footnote 1: Muzarabés--Christians living among the Moors and mixing
+with them; also an ancient form of service still continued in one
+chapel in Toledo and in one at Salamanca.]
+
+The Catholic bishops were respected by the Moors, as were also the
+Hebrew rabbis; but the Church was poor, and the continual wars between
+the Saracens and the Christians, together with the reprisals which set
+a seal on the barbarities of the reconquest, made the continuance and
+life of worship extremely difficult.
+
+Having arrived at this point Gabriel read the obscure names of Cixila,
+Elipando and Wistremiro. Saint Eulogio termed this last "the torch of
+the Holy Spirit, and the light of Spain"; but history is silent as to
+his deeds, and Saint Eulogio was martyred and killed by the Moors
+in Cordova on account of his excessive religious zeal. Benito,
+a Frenchman who succeeded to the chair, not to be behind his
+predecessors, made the Virgin send him down another chasuble to a
+church in his own country before he came to Toledo.
+
+After these, came the interesting chronology of the warrior
+archbishops, warriors of coat-of-mail and two-edged sword, the
+conquerors who, leaving the choir to the meek and humble, mounted
+their war-horses and thought they were not serving God unless during
+the year they added sundry towns and pasture lands to the goods of the
+Church. They arrived in the eleventh century, with Alfonso VI., to the
+conquest of Toledo. The first were French monks from the famous Abbey
+of Cluny, sent by the Abbot Hugo to the convent of Sahagun, and they
+were the first to use the "don" as a sign of lordship. To the pious
+tolerance of the preceding bishops, accustomed to friendly intercourse
+with Arabs and Jews in the full liberty of the Muzarabé worship,
+succeeded the ferocious intolerance of the Christian conqueror. The
+Archbishop Don Bernardo was scarcely seated in the chair before he
+took advantage of the absence of Alfonso VI. to violate all his
+promises. The principal mosque had remained in the hands of the Moors
+by a solemn compact with the king, who, like all the monarchs of the
+reconquest, was tolerant in matters of religion. The archbishop,
+using his powerful influence over the mind of the queen, made her
+the accomplice of his plans, and one night, followed by clergy and
+workmen, he knocked down the doors of the mosque, cleansed it and
+purified it, and next morning when the Saracens came to pray towards
+the rising sun, they found it changed into a Catholic cathedral. The
+conquered, trusting in the word given by the conqueror, protested,
+scandalised, and that they did not rise was solely due to the
+influence of the Alfaqui Abu-Walid, who trusted that the king would
+fulfil his promises. In three days Alfonso VI. arrived in Toledo from
+the further end of Castille, ready to murder the archbishop and even
+his own wife for their share in this villainy that had compromised his
+word as a cavalier, but his fury was so great that even the Moors were
+moved, and the Alfaqui went out to meet him, begging him to condone
+the deed as it was accomplished, as the injured parties would agree to
+it, and in the name of the conquered he relieved him from keeping his
+word, because the possession of a building was not a sufficient reason
+for breaking the peace.
+
+Gabriel admired as he read the prudence and moderation of the good
+Moor Abu-Walid; but with his enthusiasm as a seminarist he admired
+still more those proud, intolerant and warlike prelates, who trampled
+laws and people under foot for the greater glory of God.
+
+The Archbishop Martin was Captain-General against the Moors in
+Andalusia, conquering towns, and he accompanied Alfonso VIII. to the
+battle of Alarcos. The famous prelate Don Rodrigo wrote the chronicle
+of Spain, filling it with miracles for the greater prosperity of the
+Church, and he practically made history, passing more time on his
+war-horse than on his throne in the choir. At the battle de las Navas
+he set so fine an example, throwing himself into the thick of the
+fight, that the king gave him twenty lordships as well as that of
+Talavera de la Reina. Afterwards, in the king's absence, he drove
+the Moors out of Quesada and Cazorla, taking possession of vast
+territories, which passed under his sway, with the name of the
+Adelantamiento.[1] Don Sancho, son of Don Jaime of Aragon, and brother
+to the Queen of Castille, thought more of his title of "Chief Leader"
+than of his mitre of Toledo, and on the advance of the Moors went out
+to meet them in the martial field. He fought wherever the fighting was
+fiercest, and was finally killed by the Moslems, who cut off his hands
+and placed his head on a spear.
+
+[Footnote 1: _Adelantamiento_--Advancement.]
+
+Don Gil de Albornoz, the famous cardinal, went to Italy, flying from
+Don Pedro the Cruel, and, like a great captain, reconquered all the
+territory of the Popes, who had taken refuge in Avignon. Don Gutierre
+III. went with Don Juan II. to fight against the Moors. Don Alfonso de
+Acuna fought in the civil war during the reign of Enrique IV.; and as
+a fitting end to this series of political and conquering prelates,
+rich and powerful as true princes, there arose the Cardinal Mendoza,
+who fought at the battle of Toro, and at the conquest of Granada,
+afterwards governing that kingdom; and Jimenez de Cisneros, who,
+finding no Moors left in the Peninsula to fight, crossed the sea and
+went to Oran, waving his cross and turning it into a weapon of war.
+
+The seminarist admired these men, magnified by the mists of ancient
+history and the praises of the Church. For him they were the greatest
+men in the world after the Popes, and, indeed, often far superior to
+them. He was astonished that the Spaniards of the present times were
+so blind that they did not entrust their direction and government to
+the archbishops of Toledo, who in former centuries had performed
+such heroic deeds. The glory and advancement of the country was so
+intimately connected with their history, their dynasty was quite as
+great as that of the kings, and on more than one occasion they had
+saved these latter by their counsels and energy.
+
+After these eagles came the birds of prey; after the prelates with
+their iron morions and their coats-of-mail came the rich and luxurious
+prelates, who cared for no other combats but those of the law courts,
+and were in perpetual litigation with towns, guilds, and private
+individuals in order to retain the possessions and the vast fortune
+accumulated by their predecessors.
+
+Those who were generous like Tavera built palaces, and encouraged
+artists like El Greco, Berruguete and others, creating a Renaissance
+in Toledo, an echo from Italy. Those who were miserly, like Quiroga,
+reduced the expenses of the pompous church, to turn themselves into
+money-lenders to the kings, giving millions of ducats to those
+Austrian monarchs on whose dominions the sun never set, but who,
+nevertheless, found themselves obliged to beg almost as soon as their
+galleons returned from their voyages to America.
+
+The Cathedral was the work of these priestly ecclesiastics; each one
+had done something in it which revealed his character. The rougher
+and more warlike its framework, that mountain of stone and wood which
+formed its skeleton; those who were more cultivated, elevated to the
+See in times of greater refinement, contributed the minutely-worked
+iron railings, the doors of lace-like stonework, the pictures, and
+the jewels which made its sacristy a veritable treasure house. The
+gestation of the giantess had lasted for three centuries; it seemed
+like those enormous prehistoric animals who slept so long in their
+mother's womb before seeing the light.
+
+When its walls and pilasters first rose above the soil Gothic art was
+in its first epoch, and during the two and a half centuries that its
+building lasted architecture made great strides. Gabriel could follow
+this slow transformation with his mind's eye as he studied the
+building, discovering the various signs of its evolution.
+
+The magnificent church was like a giantess whose feet were shod with
+rough shoes, but whose head was covered with the loveliest plumes. The
+bases of the pillars were rough and devoid of ornament, the shafts of
+the columns rose with severe simplicity, crowned by plain capitals
+at the base of the arches, on which the Gothic thistle had not yet
+attained the exuberant branching of a later florid period; but the
+vaulting which was finished perhaps two centuries after the first
+beginning, and the windows with their multi-coloured ogives, displayed
+the magnificence of an art at its culminating point.
+
+At the two extreme ends of the transepts Gabriel found the proof
+of the immense progress made during the two centuries in which the
+Cathedral had been rising from the ground. The Puerta del Reloj[1],
+called also de la Feria[2], with its rude sculptures of archaic
+rigidity, and the tympanum, covered with small scenes from the
+creation, was a great contrast to the doorway at the opposite end
+of the crossway, that of Los Leones[3], or by its other name, de la
+Alegria[4], built nearly two hundred years afterwards, elegant and
+majestic as the entrance to a palace, showing already the fleshly
+audacities of the Renaissance, endeavouring to thrust themselves into
+the severity of Christian architecture, a siren fastened to the door
+by her curling tail serving as an example.
+
+[Footnote 1: _Reloj_--Clock.]
+
+[Footnote 2: _Feria_--Of the fair.]
+
+[Footnote 3: _Los Leones_--Lions.]
+
+[Footnote 4: _Alegria_--Joy.]
+
+The Cathedral, built entirely of a milky white stone from the quarries
+close to Toledo, rose in one single elevation from the base of the
+pillars to the vaulting, with no triforium to cut its arcades and to
+weaken and load the naves with superimposed arches. Gabriel saw in
+this a petrified symbol of prayer, rising direct to Heaven, without
+assistance or support. The smooth, soft stone was used throughout
+the building, harder stone being used for the vaultings, and on
+the exterior the buttresses and pinnacles, as well as the flying
+buttresses like small bridges between them, were of the hardest
+granite, which from age had taken a golden colour, and which protected
+and supported the airy delicacy of the interior. The two sorts of
+stone made a great contrast in the appearance of the Cathedral, dark
+and reddish outside, white and delicate inside.
+
+The seminarist found examples of every sort of architecture that had
+flourished in the Peninsula. The primitive Gothic was found in the
+earliest doorways, the florid in those del Perdon and de los Leones,
+and the Arab architecture showed its graceful horseshoe arches in the
+triforium running round the whole abside of the choir, which was the
+work of Cisneros, who, though he burnt the Moslem books, introduced
+their style of architecture into the heart of the Christian temple.
+The plateresque style showed its fanciful grace in the door of the
+cloister, and even the chirruguesque showed at its best in the famous
+lanthorn of Tome, which broke the vaulting behind the high altar in
+order to give light to the abside.
+
+In the evenings of the vacation Gabriel would leave the seminary,
+and wander about the Cathedral till the hour at which its doors were
+closed. He delighted in walking through the naves and behind the high
+altar, the darkest and most silent spot in the whole church. Here
+slept a great part of the history of Spain. Behind the locked gates of
+the chapel of the kings, guarded by the stone heralds on pedestals,
+lay the kings of Castille in their tombs, their effigies crowned, in
+golden armour, praying, with their swords by their sides. He would
+stop before the chapel of Santiago, admiring through the railings of
+its three pointed arches the legendary saint, dressed as a pilgrim,
+holding his sword on high, and tramping on Mahomedans with his
+war-horse. Great shells and red shields with a silver moon adorned the
+white walls, rising up to the vaulting, and this chapel his father,
+the gardener, regarded as his own peculiar property. It was that of
+the Lunas, and though some people laughed at the relationship, there
+lay his illustrious progenitors, Don Alvaro and his wife, on their
+monumental tombs. That of Doña Juana Pimental had at its four corners
+the figures of four kneeling friars in yellow marble, who watched over
+the noble lady extended on the upper part of the monument. That of
+the unhappy constable of Castille was surrounded by four knights of
+Santiago, wrapped in the mantle of their Order, seeming to keep guard
+over their grand master, who lay buried without his head in the stone
+sarcophagus, bordered with Gothic mouldings. Gabriel remembered what
+he had heard his father relate about the recumbent statue of Don
+Alvaro. In former times the statue had been of bronze, and when mass
+was said in the chapel, at the elevation of the Host, the statue, by
+means of secret springs, would rise and remain kneeling till the
+end of the ceremony. Some said that the Catholic queen caused the
+disappearance of this theatrical statue, believing that it disturbed
+the prayers of the faithful; others said that some soldiers, enemies
+of the constable, on a day of disturbance, had broken in pieces the
+jointed statue. On the exterior of the church the chapel of the Lunas
+raised its battlemented towers, forming an isolated fortress inside
+the Cathedral.
+
+In spite of his family considering this chapel as their own, the
+seminarist felt himself more attracted by that of Saint Ildefonso
+close by, which contained the tomb of the Cardinal Albornoz. Of all
+the great past in the Cathedral, that which excited his greatest
+admiration was the romantic figure of this warlike prelate; lover of
+letters, Spanish by birth, and Italian by his conquests. He slept in a
+splendid marble tomb, shining and polished by age, and of a soft
+fawn colour; the invisible hand of time had treated the face of the
+recumbent effigy rather roughly, flattening the nose, and giving the
+warlike cardinal an expression of almost Mongolian ferocity. Four
+lions guarded the remains of the prelate. Everything in him was
+extraordinary and adventurous even to his death. His body was brought
+back from Italy to Spain with prayers and hymns, carried on the
+shoulders of the entire population, who went out to meet it in order
+to gain the indulgences granted by the Pope. This return journey to
+his own country after his death lasted several months, as the good
+cardinal only went by short journeys from church to church, preceded
+by a picture of Christ, which now adorns his chapel, and spreading
+among the multitude the sweet scent of his embalming.
+
+For Don Gil de Albornoz nothing seemed impossible; he was the sword of
+the Apostle returned to earth in order to enforce faith. Flying from
+Don Pedro the Cruel, he had taken refuge in Avignon, where lived
+exiles even more illustrious than himself. There were the Popes driven
+out of Rome by a people who, in their mediaeval nightmare, tried to
+restore at the bidding of Rienzi the ancient republic of the Consuls.
+Don Gil was not a man to live long in the pleasant little Provençal
+court; like a good archbishop of Toledo, he wore the coat-of-mail
+underneath his tunic, and as there were no Moors to fight he wished to
+strike at heretics instead. He went to Italy as the champion of the
+Church; all the adventurers of Europe and the bandits of the country
+formed his army. He killed and burnt in the country, entered and
+sacked the towns, all in the name of the Sovereign Pontiff, so that
+before long the exile of Avignon was again able to return and occupy
+his throne in Rome. The Spanish cardinal after all these campaigns,
+which gave half Italy to the Papacy, was as rich as any king, and he
+founded the celebrated Spanish college in Bologna. The Pope, well
+aware of his robberies and rapacity, asked him to give some sort of
+accounts. The proud Don Gil presented him with a cart laden with keys
+and bolts.
+
+"These," said he proudly, "belong to the towns and castles I have
+gained for the Papacy. These are my accounts."
+
+The irresistible glamour that a powerful warrior throws over a man
+physically feeble was strongly felt by Gabriel, and it was augmented
+by the thought that so much bravery and haughtiness had been joined
+in a servant of the Church. Why could not men like this arise now, in
+these impious times, to give fresh strength to Catholicism?
+
+In his strolls through the Cathedral Gabriel greatly admired the
+screen before the high altar, a wonderful work of Villalpando, with
+its foliage of old gold, and its black bars with silvery spots like
+tin. These spots made the beggars and guides in the church declare
+that all the screen was made of silver, but that the canons had had
+it painted black so that it might not be plundered by Napoleon's
+soldiers.
+
+Behind it shone the majestic decorations of the high altar, splendid
+with soft old gilding, and a whole host of figures under carved
+canopies representing various scenes from the Passion. Behind the
+altar and the screen the gilding seemed to spring spontaneously from
+the white walls, marking with brilliant lights the divisions between
+the stalls. Beneath highly-decorated pointed arches were the tombs of
+the most ancient kings of Castille, and that of the Cardinal Mendoza.
+
+Under the arches of the triforium an orchestra of Gothic angels with
+stiff dalmatics and folded wings sang lauds, playing lutes and flutes,
+and in the central parts of the pillars the statues of holy bishops
+were interspersed with those of historical and legendary personages.
+
+On one side the good Alfaqui Abu-Walid, immortalised in a Christian
+church for his tolerant spirit, on the opposite side the mysterious
+leader of Las Navas who, after showing the Christians the way to
+victory, suddenly disappeared like a divine envoy--a statue of
+exceeding ugliness with a haggard face covered by a rough hood. At
+either end of the screen stood as evidences of the past opulence of
+the church two beautiful pulpits of rich marbles and chiselled bronze.
+
+Gabriel cast a glance at the choir, admiring the beautiful stalls
+belonging to the canons, and he thought enthusiastically that perhaps
+some day he might succeed in gaining one to the great pride of his
+family. In his wanderings about the church he would often stop before
+the immense fresco of Saint Christopher, a picture as bad as it
+was huge--a figure occupying all one division of the wall from the
+pavement to the cornice, and which by its size seemed to be the
+only fitting inhabitant of the church. The cadets would come in the
+evenings to look at it; that colossus of pink flesh, bearing the child
+on its shoulders, advancing its angular legs carefully through the
+waters, leaning on a palm tree that looked like a broom, was for them
+by far the most noticeable thing in the church. The light-hearted
+young men delighted in measuring its ankles with their swords and
+afterwards calculating how many swords high the blessed giant could
+be. It was the readiest application that they could make of those
+mathematical calculations with which they were so much worried in the
+academy. The apprentice of the church was irritated at the impudence
+with which these dressed up popinjays, the apprentices of war,
+sauntered about the church.
+
+Many mornings he would go to the Muzarabé Chapel, following
+attentively the ancient ritual,[1] intoned by the priests especially
+devoted to it. On the walls were represented in brilliant colours
+scenes from the conquest of Oran by the great Cisneros. As Gabriel
+listened to the monotonous singing of the Muzarabe priests he
+remembered the quarrels during the time of Alfonso VI. between the
+Roman liturgy and that of Toledo--the foreign worship and the national
+one. The believers, to end the eternal disputes, appealed to the
+"Judgment of God." The king named the Roman champion, and the Toledans
+confided the defence of their Gothic rite to the sword of Juan Ruiz,
+a nobleman from the borders of Pisuerga. The champion of the Gothic
+breviary remained triumphant in the fight, demonstrating its
+superiority with magnificent sword thrusts, but, in spite of the will
+of God having been manifested in this warlike way, the Roman rite by
+slow degrees became master of the situation, till at last the Muzarabé
+ritual was relegated to this small chapel as a curious relic of the
+past.
+
+[Footnote 1: The Muzarabé ritual is still sung in Arabic both in
+Toledo and Salamanca.]
+
+Sometimes in the evenings, when the services were ended and the
+Cathedral was locked up, Gabriel would go up to the abode of the
+bell-ringer, stopping on the gallery above the door del Perdon.
+Mariano, the bell-ringer's son, a youth of the same age as the
+seminarist, and attached to him by the respect and admiration his
+talents inspired, would act as guide in their excursions to the upper
+regions of the church; they would possess themselves of the key of the
+vaultings and explore that mysterious locality to which only a few
+workmen ascended from time to time.
+
+The Cathedral was ugly and commonplace seen from above. In the very
+early days the stone vaultings had remained uncovered, with no other
+concealment beyond the light-looking carved balustrade, but the rain
+had begun to damage them, threatening their destruction, and so the
+Chapter had covered the Cathedral with a roof of brown tiles, which
+gave the Church the appearance of a huge warehouse or a great barn.
+The pinnacles of the buttresses seemed ashamed to appear above this
+ugly covering, the flying buttresses became lost and disappeared among
+the bare-looking buildings, built on to the Cathedral, and the little
+staircase turrets became hidden behind this clumsy mass of roofing.
+
+The two youths climbing along the cornices, green and slippery from
+the rain, would mount to quite the upper parts of the building. Their
+feet would become entangled in the plants that a luxuriant nature
+allowed to grow amid the joints of the stones, flocks of birds would
+fly away at their approach; all the sculptures seemed to serve as
+resting-places for their nests, and every hollow in the stone where
+the rain-water collected was a miniature lake where the birds came
+to drink; sometimes a large black bird would settle on one of the
+pinnacles like an unexpected finial; it was a raven who settled there
+to plume his wings, and it would remain there sunning itself for
+hours; to the people who saw it from below it appeared about the size
+of a fly.
+
+These vaultings caused Gabriel a strange impression; no one could
+guess the existence of such a place in the upper regions of the
+building. He would walk through the forest of worm-eaten posts which
+supported the roof, through narrow passages between the cupolas of the
+vaulting that arose from the flooring like white and dusty tumours;
+sometimes there would be a shaft through which he could see down into
+the Cathedral, the depth of which made him giddy. These shafts were
+like narrow well-mouths at the bottom of which could be seen people
+walking like ants on the tile flooring of the church. Through these
+shafts were lowered the ropes of the great chandeliers, and the golden
+chains that supported the figure of Christ above the railing of the
+high altar. Enormous capstans showed through the twilight their cogged
+and rusty wheels, their levers and ropes like forgotten instruments
+of torture. This was the hidden machinery belonging to the great
+religious festivals; by these artifices the magnificent canopy of the
+holy week was raised and fastened.
+
+As the sun's rays shone in between the wooden posts the dust of ages
+that lay like a thick mantel on the roof of the vaulting would rise
+and dance in them for a few seconds, and the huge old spiders' webs
+would wave like fans in the wind, while the footsteps of the intruders
+would occasion wild and precipitous scrambles of rats from all the
+dark corners. In the furthest and darkest corners roosted those black
+birds who by night flew down into the church through the shafts in
+the vaulting, and the eyes of the owls glowed with phosphorescent
+brilliancy, while the bats flew sleepily about sweeping the faces of
+the lads with their wings.
+
+The bell-ringer's son would examine the deposits dropped in the dust,
+and would enumerate all the different birds who took refuge in the
+summit of the mountains of stone: this belonged to the hooting owl,
+and that to the red owl, and this again to the raven, and he spoke
+with respect of a certain nest of eagles that his father had seen as a
+young man, fierce birds who had endeavoured to tear out his eyes,
+and who had so thoroughly frightened him that he had been obliged to
+borrow the gun belonging to the night watchers on each occasion that
+his duties took him to the roof.
+
+Gabriel loved that strange world, harbouring above the Cathedral with
+its silence and its imposing solitude. It was a wilderness of wood,
+inhabited by strange creatures who lived unnoticed and forgotten under
+the roof-tree of the church. Truly the good God had a house for the
+faithful down below, and an immense garret above for the creatures of
+the air.
+
+The savage solitude of the higher regions was a great contrast to the
+wealth of the chapel of the Ochava, full of relics in golden vessels
+and caskets of enamel and precious marbles, to the quantities of
+pearls and emeralds in the magnificent treasury, heaped up as though
+they had been peas, and to the elegant luxury of the wardrobe, full
+of rare and costly stuffs and vestments exquisitely embroidered with
+every colour of the rainbow.
+
+Gabriel was just eighteen when he lost his father. The old gardener
+died quietly, happy in seeing all his family in the service of the
+Cathedral and the good old tradition of the Lunas continued without
+interruption. Thomas, the eldest son, remained in the garden, Esteban,
+after serving many years as acolyte and assistant to the sacristans,
+was Silenciario, and had been given the Wooden Staff and seven reals
+a day, the height of all his ambition; and as far as regarded the
+youngest, the good Señor Esteban had the firm conviction that he
+had begotten a Father of the Church, for whom a place in heaven was
+especially reserved at the right hand of God Omnipotent.
+
+Gabriel had acquired in the seminary that ecclesiastic sternness that
+turns the priest into a warrior more intent on the interest of the
+Church than on the concerns of his family. For this reason he did
+not feel the death of his father very greatly; besides, much greater
+misfortunes soon occurred to preoccupy the young seminarist.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+There was great excitement both in the Cathedral and in the seminary,
+everyone discussing from morning till night the news from Madrid, for
+these were the days of the September revolution. The traditional and
+healthy Spain, the Spain of the great historical tradition had fallen.
+The Cortes Constituyentes were a volcano, a breath from the infernal
+regions, to those gentlemen of the black cassock who crowded round the
+unfolded newspaper, and, if they found comfort and satisfaction in a
+speech of Maesterola's they would suffer the agonies of death at the
+revolutionary harangues, which dealt such terrible blows at the olden
+days. The clergy had turned their eyes towards Don Carlos, who
+was beginning the war in the northern provinces; the king of the
+Vascongados[1] mountains would be able to remedy everything when he
+came down into the plains of Castille. But years passed by, Amadeus
+had come and gone, they had even proclaimed a republic! And yet the
+cause of God did not seem to advance much, and Heaven seemed deaf. A
+republican deputy proclaimed a war against God, challenging Him to
+silence him; and so impiety stalked along immune and triumphant, and
+its eloquence flowed abroad like a poisonous spring.
+
+[Footnote 1: Provinces of Alava, Guipuscoa, and the lordship of
+Biscay.]
+
+Gabriel lived in a state of bellicose excitement--he forgot his books,
+he disregarded his future, he never thought now of singing his mass.
+What would happen to his career now that the Church was in peril, and
+that the sleepy poetry of past ages, that had enveloped him from his
+cradle like a perfumed cloud of old incense and dried roses, was on
+the point of vanishing?
+
+Often some of the pupils disappeared from the seminary, and the
+professors would reply to the inquiries of the curious with a sly
+wink.
+
+"They have gone out--with the good sort. They could not see quietly
+what was happening--'child's play,' 'follies.'"
+
+But nevertheless such follies made them smile with paternal
+satisfaction.
+
+He thought to be himself among those who fled, as the world seemed
+to be coming to an end. In certain towns the revolutionary mob had
+invaded and profaned the churches; as yet they had not murdered any of
+the ministers of God as in other revolutions, but still the priests
+were unable to go about the streets in their cassocks for fear of
+being hooted and insulted. The remembrance of the archbishops of
+Toledo, those brave ecclesiastical princes, implacable warriors
+against the infidels, fired his warlike feelings. As yet he had never
+been away from Toledo, away from the shadow of its Cathedral; Spain
+seemed to him as vast as all the rest of the world put together, and
+he began to feel the ardent desire of seeing something new, of seeing
+closer all the wonderful things he had read about in his books,
+stirring within him.
+
+One day he kissed his mother's hand, without feeling any very great
+emotion towards the trembling and nearly blind old woman, for the
+seminary had for him more tender memories than the house of his
+fathers, smoked his last cigar with his brothers in the garden without
+revealing his intentions to them, and that night he fled from Toledo
+with a scapulary of the Heart of Jesus sewed into his waistcoat, and a
+beautiful silk scarf in his wallet, one of those worked by white hands
+in the convents of the city. The son of the bell-ringer went with
+him. They joined one of the insignificant bands who were devastating
+Murcia, but they soon went on to Valencia and Catalonia, anxious to
+perform greater exploits for the cause of God than merely stealing
+mules and extorting contributions from the rich.
+
+Gabriel felt an intense delight in this wandering life, with its
+continual alarms owing to the proximity of the troops.
+
+He had been made an officer at once, on account of his education, and
+because of the letters of recommendation that certain of the prebends
+of the Metropolitan Church had given him; letters lamenting greatly
+that a youth of so much theological promise should go and risk his
+life like a simple sacristan.
+
+Luna enjoyed the free and lawless life of war with the zest of a
+collegian out of bounds; but he could not hide the feeling of painful
+disillusion that the sight of those armies of the Faith caused him.
+He had expected to find something akin to the ancient crusading
+expeditions: soldiers who fought for an ideal, who bent the knee
+before beginning the fight, so that God might be on their side, and
+who at night, after a hard-fought field, slept the pure sleep of an
+ascetic; instead of which he found an armed mob, mutinous to their
+leaders, incapable of that fanaticism which rushes blindfold to death,
+anxious only that the war might last as long as possible, so that they
+might continue the life of lawless wandering at the expense of the
+country, which they considered the best life possible; people who
+at the sight of wine, women or plunder would disband themselves,
+hungering, turning against their leaders.
+
+It was the ancient life of the horde, surging up through civilisation,
+the atavic custom of stealing the stranger's bread and women by force
+of arms, the ancient Celtiberic love of factions and internal strife,
+that only caught hold of a political pretext in order to revive.
+
+Gabriel, with very rare exceptions, found none in those badly-armed
+and worse-clothed bands who fought with a fixed idea; they were
+adventurers who wished for war for the sake of war; visionaries
+anxious for fortune; country lads from the fields, who in their
+passive ignorance had joined the factions, just as they would have
+stayed at home if they had had better counsels; simple souls who
+firmly believed that in the towns they were burning and destroying
+God's ministers, and who had thrown themselves into the fray so that
+society should not lapse into barbarism.
+
+The common danger, the misery of the interminable marches to deceive
+the enemy, the scarcity suffered in the barren fields and on the rough
+hilltops on which they took refuge, made them all equals, enthusiasts,
+sceptics or rustics. They all felt the same desire to compensate
+themselves for their privations, to appease the ravenous beast they
+felt inside, awakened and irritated by a life of such sudden changes;
+as much by the wild abundance and plundering of a sack as by the
+distress endured in the long marches over interminable plains without
+ever seeing the slightest sign of life. On entering a town they would
+shout, "Long live religion," but on the slightest provocation they
+would do this, that and the other in the name of God and all the
+saints, not omitting in their filthy oaths to swear by everything most
+sacred in that same religion.
+
+Gabriel, who soon became accustomed to this wandering life, ceased
+to feel shocked. The former scruples of the seminarist vanished,
+smothered under the crust of the fighting man, which became hardened
+with war.
+
+The romantic figure of Doña Blanca, the king's sister-in-law passed
+before him, like a person in a novel; in her romantic energy this
+princess wished to emulate the deeds of the heroines of La Vendeé, and
+mounted on a small white horse, her pistol in her belt, and the white
+scarf tied over her floating tresses, she put herself at the head of
+these armed bands, who revived in the centre of the Peninsula
+the strife of almost prehistoric times. The flutter of the dark
+riding-habit of this heroine served as a standard to the battalions of
+Zouaves, to the troop of French, German, and Italian adventurers, the
+scum of all the wars on the globe, who found it pleasanter to follow
+a woman anxious for fame than to enlist themselves into the foreign
+legion of Algeria.
+
+The assault of Cuenca, the sole victory of the campaign, made a deep
+impression on Gabriel's memory; the troops of men wearing the scarf,
+after they had knocked down the ramparts as weak as mud walls, rushed
+like overflowing streams through the streets. The firing from the
+windows could not stop them; they rushed in pale, with discoloured
+lips and eyes brilliant with homicidal mania, the danger overcome, and
+the knowledge that they were at length masters of the place drove them
+mad; the doors of the houses fell under their blows, terrified men
+rushed out to be pierced with bayonets in the streets, and in the
+houses you could see women struggling in the arms of the assailants,
+striking them in the face with one hand, while with the other they
+struggled to retain their clothes.
+
+Gabriel saw how the roughest of the mountaineers destroyed in the
+Institute all the apparatus of the Cabinet of Physical Science,
+breaking it in pieces. They were furious with these inventions of the
+evil one, with which they thought the unbelievers communicated with
+the Government of Madrid, and they smashed on the ground with the butt
+ends of their muskets, and trampled with their feet, all the
+gilt wheels of the apparatus, and all the discs and batteries of
+electricity.
+
+The seminarist was delighted at all this destruction; he also hated,
+but it was with a calm, reflective hate bred in the seminary, all
+positive and material sciences, for the sum total of his reasoning was
+that they came perilously near to the negation of God; those sons of
+the mountains in their blessed ignorance, had without knowing it done
+a great deed. Ah! if only the whole nation would imitate them! In
+former times there were none of these ridiculous inventions of
+science, and Spain was far happier. To live a holy life, the learning
+of the priests and the ignorance of the people was sufficient, for
+both together produced a blessed tranquillity; what did they want
+more? For so the country had existed for centuries, all through the
+most glorious period of its existence.
+
+The war came to an end, the closely pursued rebels passed through the
+centre of Catalonia and were finally driven over the frontier, where
+they were compelled to give up their arms to the French custom-house
+officers. Many availed themselves of the amnesty, anxious to return to
+their own homes. Mariano, the bell-ringer, was one of these. He did
+not wish to live in a foreign land; besides, during his absence his
+father had died, and it was extremely probable that he might succeed
+to the charge of the Cathedral tower if he laid due stress on the
+merits of his family, his three years' campaigning for the sake of
+religion, and a wound he had received in his leg; he would really be
+able to compare himself with the martyrs for Christianity.
+
+Gabriel preferred emigration. "He was an officer and therefore
+could not take the oath of allegiance to a usurping dynasty." This
+declaration he made with all the pride learnt in this caricature of an
+army, which emphasised all the ceremonies of ancient warfare, and who,
+ragged and shoeless as they were, with their swords by their sides,
+never failed to transmit orders to each other as "high-born officer."
+But the real reason which prevented Luna from returning to Toledo was
+that he wished to follow the course of events, to see new countries
+and different customs. To return to the Cathedral would mean to remain
+there for ever, to renounce everything in life, and he, who during the
+war had tasted of worldly delights, had no desire to turn his back on
+them quite so soon; also he was not yet of age, so he had plenty of
+time before him in which to finish his studies; the priesthood was a
+sure retreat, but one to which he was in no hurry to return just at
+present; besides, his mother was dead, and his brother's letters told
+him of no alteration in the sleepy life of the upper cloister, beyond
+that the gardener was married and that the "Wooden Staff" was courting
+a girl in the Claverias, it being against all the good traditions of
+these people to ally themselves with anyone outside the Cathedral.
+
+Luna lived for more than a year in the emigrants' cantonments; his
+classical education and the sympathy aroused by his youth smoothed his
+path to a certain extent; he talked Latin with the French abbés, who
+were delighted to hear about the war from the young theologian, and
+at the same time they taught him the language of the country. These
+friends procured for him Spanish lessons among the upper middle
+classes who were friendly to the Church. In these days of penury he
+was saved by his friendship with an old legitimist Countess, who
+invited him to spend several days in her country house, introducing
+the warlike seminarist to all the grave and pious friends at her
+assemblies as though he had been a crusader newly returned from
+Palestine.
+
+Gabriel's great desire was to go to Paris; his life in France had
+radically changed his ideas, he really felt as though he had fallen
+into a new planet. Accustomed to the monotonous life in the seminary,
+and to the nomadic existence during that mountainous and inglorious
+war, he was astonished at the material progress, the refinement of
+civilisation, the culture and the well-being of the people in France.
+He remembered now with shame his Spanish ignorance, all that Castilian
+phantasmagoria, fed by lying literature, that had made him believe
+that Spain was the first country in the world, and its people the
+noblest and bravest, and that all the other nations were a sort of
+wretched mob, created by God to be victims of heresy, and to receive
+overwhelming punishment each time that they ventured to interfere with
+this privileged country, which, though it eats little and drinks less,
+has yet produced the holiest saints and the greatest captains of
+Christendom.
+
+When Gabriel could express himself fluently in French and had
+contrived to save a few francs for his journey, he went to Paris. A
+friendly abbé had procured him employment as corrector of proofs in a
+religious library close to Saint Sulpice. In this priestly quarter of
+Paris, with its hostels for the clergy and for religious families, as
+gloomy as convents, with its shops full of pious images, which flood
+the globe with varnished and smiling saints, was accomplished the
+great transformation of Gabriel.
+
+This quarter of Saint Sulpice with its streets almost Spanish in their
+silence and peacefulness, with the sisters in black veils gliding by
+the walls of the seminary, drawn by the sound of the bells, was for
+the Spanish seminarist what the road to Damascus had been for the
+Apostle. The French Catholicism, cultivated, reasoning and respectful
+to human progress, bewildered Gabriel, whose fierce Spanish bigotry
+had taught him to despise all profane science. There was only one true
+learning in the world, and that was theology. The other sciences were
+only toys, only fit to amuse the eternal infancy of humanity. To know
+God and to meditate on the greatness of His power, this was the only
+serious study to which men could devote themselves; machinery, the
+discoveries of the positive sciences, in fact everything which did not
+treat of divinity and the future life, was only a bagatelle for the
+amusement of fools and people of no faith.
+
+The former seminarist, who from his earliest childhood had despised
+all human progress, was stupefied when he perceived how earnestly all
+French Catholicism spoke of it. In correcting the proofs of so many
+religious works he could not but notice the profound respect which
+this despised science inspired in the good French priests, men of such
+far superior culture to that of the canons down there. And moreover he
+noticed a certain humble shrinking in the representatives of religion
+when they came face to face with science--a desire to please, not
+to be censorious, to help on with their sympathy any conciliatory
+solutions, so that dogma should not fall to the ground, finding no
+place in the rapid march of events that was hurrying humanity into
+the future with the whirl of its new discoveries. Entire books were
+written by eminent priests with the view of adjusting and bringing
+into line the revelations of the holy books and the discoveries of
+modern science, even at the risk of doing some violence to the former.
+The ancient and venerable Church that Gabriel had seen in his own
+country, immovable in its antiquated majesty, unwilling to move a
+single fold of its mantle for fear of losing some of the dust of ages,
+was stirring in France, endeavouring to renew itself, throwing on one
+side the ancient garments of tradition, like old rags that would turn
+it into ridicule, and stretching out its hands with almost despairing
+strength to catch hold of the modern achievements of science; the
+great enemy of yesterday, whose appearance had been ushered in with
+bonfires and shameful abjurations was triumphant to-day.
+
+What had that fatal apple of Paradise contained, that after six
+thousand years of malediction that same Church had begun to venerate
+it, striving to make it forget its ancient persecutions? Why was
+religion, firm as a rock throughout the centuries, which had defied
+persecutions, schisms and wars, beginning to dissolve before the
+discoveries of a few men, and entering into that wild current which
+sought for the cause and explanation of everything? If it had the
+secular support of faith, why should it seek the assistance of reason
+to maintain its traditions and to justify its dogmas?
+
+Gabriel felt the same fever of curiosity which had obliged him as a
+child to bend his back over the old volumes, bound in parchment, in
+the library of the seminary; he wished to be acquainted with the
+mysterious perfume of that hated science which had so disturbed God's
+priests, and had made them indirectly deny the beliefs of nineteen
+centuries. He wished to know why the sacred books were being
+dislocated and tortured in order to explain by geological periods the
+creation which God had accomplished in six days. What danger did they
+hope to avoid by making the divinity appear before science in order to
+explain its acts and fit them into the decisions of the latter?
+Whence came the instinctive fear of the religious authors of roundly
+affirming miracles? attempting instead to justify them by intricate
+and tentative reasonings, without daring to adduce as the decisive
+proof the incomprehensibility of supernatural prodigies.
+
+For the time being Gabriel abandoned the tranquil atmosphere of the
+religious library. His reputation as a humanist had reached the ears
+of an editor living near the Sorbonne, so, without leaving the left
+bank of the Seine, he moved into the Latin quarter to undertake the
+correction of proofs in Latin and Greek. He earned in this way twelve
+francs a day--far more than those canons of Toledo, who formerly had
+appeared to him as great dukes. He lived in a small inn for students
+near to the School of Medicine, and his vehement discussions at night
+with his fellow-lodgers over the smoke of their pipes taught him as
+much as the books of that hated science. Those students who lent him
+books, or who told him of those he should search for in his free
+hours in the library on the hill of Saint Genevieve, laughed like
+pagans at the exalted ideas of the former seminarist.
+
+For two years young Luna did little else but read; now and again he
+accompanied his friends in some escapade, throwing himself into the
+free and joyous life of the Quartier, wearing out the elbows of his
+sleeves on the tables of the beershops. The Mimi of Murger often
+passed before him, but less melancholy than the creation of the poet,
+and the ex-seminarist found his Sunday evening idylls in the woods
+surrounding Paris. But Gabriel was not of an amorous temperament;
+curiosity and the thirst for knowledge mastered him, and after these
+escapades from which he returned fresher, and with his brain keener,
+he threw himself with greater ardour into his studies.
+
+History, true history, whose cold clearness contrasted so strongly
+with that intricate morass of miracles in the chronicles that he had
+read in his childhood, beat down the greater part of his beliefs.
+Catholicism was no longer for him the only religion, neither could
+he any longer divide the history of humanity into two periods, that
+before and that after the appearance in Judea of a handful of obscure
+men, who, spreading themselves over the world, preached a cosmopolitan
+morality drawn from the maxims of Orientals, and from the teachings of
+Greek philosophy.
+
+Religions were for him human inventions, subject to the conditions of
+existence belonging to all organisms, its generous infancy capable of
+blind sacrifices, its self-contained and masterful manhood, in which
+the early sweetness was changed by the authoritative imposition of its
+power, and its inevitable age, with a long agony, in which the sick
+man, guessing his speedy end, clings to life with all the energy of
+desperation.
+
+His faith in Catholicism as the only religion disappeared completely;
+losing his belief in dogmas he lost also, by inevitable logic, that
+belief in the monarchy which had driven him to fight in the mountains,
+and he understood clearly now the history of his country without
+prejudices of race. The foreign historians showed him the sad fate of
+Spain, arrested in the most critical period of her development, when
+she was emerging young and strong during the most fertile period of
+the Middle Ages, by the fanaticism of priests and inquisitors, and the
+folly of some of her kings, who, with utterly inadequate means, wished
+to revive the empire of the Caesars, draining the country for this mad
+enterprise. Those people who had broken with the Papacy, turning their
+backs for ever on Rome, were far happier and more prosperous than that
+Spain, which slept like a beggar at the door of the Church.
+
+At this period of his intellectual development Gabriel had an ideal,
+and often of an evening he would leave his work to go and listen to
+him for an hour at the College of France: this was Ernest Renan;
+Gabriel admired him for a double reason, for his talent and for his
+history. The great man had also passed through a seminary, and even
+now had a priestly look as though he had suffered deeply from the
+pressure of the ecclesiastical yoke; he was a rebel, and Gabriel felt
+as though he belonged to his own family. "Truly the hammers to destroy
+the temple are forged within the temple," and the law fatal to all
+religions was being accomplished, when faith vanishes, and the
+multitude no longer feel the fervour of early days.
+
+Gabriel was astonished to hear how the teacher could penetrate the
+intellectual development of the Hebrew people, which had served as the
+basis of Christianity, as he heard him demolish bit by bit the
+immense altarpiece, before which humanity had knelt for over nineteen
+centuries. The Spanish seminarist revolted against his old faith with
+all the impetuosity of his vehement temperament. How could he have
+believed all that and have considered it the height of human wisdom!
+Certainly Christianity had exercised a beneficial influence at one
+period of the infancy of humanity, it had filled men's lives in the
+Middle Ages when there was little to think of beyond religion, and, in
+a land desolated by strife, there was no other refuge for intellectual
+thought but the cathedral in the towns and the monastery in the
+country. "The fairs--the assemblies for business and pleasure," said
+the master, "were religious feasts; the scenic representations were
+mysteries, the journeys were pilgrimages and the wars crusades." After
+this the ways of life divided--religious life took one way and human
+life the other. Art placed nature above the ideal, and men thought
+more of earth than of heaven. Reason was born, and every advance that
+it made was one step backward for faith, and at last the time arrived
+when the clear-sighted, those who were anxious about the future, began
+to ask themselves what the new belief was likely to be which would
+replace the moribund religion. Luna had no doubts on the point--it was
+science, and science alone, which could fill the vacuum caused by that
+religion now dead for ever.
+
+Influenced by the Hellenism of his master, which he assimilated
+easily, being accustomed to daily intercourse with the Greek authors,
+he dreamed that the humanity of the future would be an immense Athens,
+an artistic and learned democracy governed by great thinkers, with
+no strifes but those of the mind, with no ambition but that of
+cultivating the intellect, of gentle manners, and devoted to the joys
+of the mind and the culture of reason.
+
+Of all his old beliefs, Gabriel only retained that of a creative
+God from a certain superstitious scruple. His ideas were rather
+disconcerted by astronomy, which he had taken up with an almost
+childish eagerness, attracted by the charm of the marvellous.
+That infinite space in which in olden days legions of angels had
+manoeuvred, and which had served the Virgin as a pathway in her
+terrestrial descents, he suddenly found to be peopled with thousands
+of millions of worlds, and the more powerful men's instruments became
+the more numerous they seemed to be, the distances being infinitely
+prolonged to immensities that were inconceivable. Bodies were
+attracted to one another travelling in space at the rate of millions
+of miles a minute, and all this cloud of worlds revolved without ever
+passing twice over the same spot in this immensity of silence, in
+which fresh stars, and again others and others, were continually being
+discovered as the instruments of observation became more perfect.
+
+This God of Gabriel's having lost the corporeal form given to Him by
+religion, and as divulged in the history of the creation, lost at once
+all His attributes, and being magnified to fill the infinite and being
+absorbed into it, became so impalpable and subtle to the intellect as
+to appear a phantasm.
+
+Nothing remained to Gabriel of all his ancient beliefs. His mind was
+like a bare field over which the whirlwind had passed, for his last
+belief, which had remained standing like a monolith in the midst of
+ruins, the belief in the history of creation, had now fallen.
+
+But it was impossible to the former seminarist to remain inactive with
+his cargo of new ideas. He felt obliged to believe in something, to
+devote to the defence of some ideal all the faith in his character, to
+make some use of that fervour of proselytising which had been so
+much admired in the class of eloquence in the seminary, and so
+revolutionary sociology took possession of him. First of all it was
+Proudhon with his audacious writings, and afterwards the work was
+completed by some "militantes" who were working in the same printing
+office as himself--old soldiers of the Commune, who had lately
+returned from their exile in the prisons of Oceania, and were renewing
+their campaign against social organisation with an ardour increased
+tenfold by their painful sufferings and their desire of vengeance.
+With them he went to the anarchist meetings; there he heard Reclus
+and Prince Kropotkine, and the words of the since deceased Miquel
+Bakronhine came to him as the gospel of a Saint Paul of the future.
+
+Gabriel had met with his new religion, and he gave himself over to
+it entirely, dreaming of the regeneration of humanity through its
+stomach. Believing in a future life, misfortunes gave the false
+consolation of happiness after death; but all religion was a lie,
+there was no other life but that of the present, and Luna rose in
+anger against the social injustice that condemned millions of beings
+to poverty and misery for the happiness of a few privileged thousands.
+Authority, which was the fount of all evil, was to him the greatest
+enemy; it must be destroyed, but men must be created who were capable
+of living without masters, priests or soldiers. The natural gentleness
+of his character, and the horror of violence with which his three
+years' campaigning had filled him, caused him rather to draw back from
+his new companions, who, dreaming of hecatombs from dynamite and the
+dagger to reform the world, obliged him to accept these new doctrines
+through fear. No; he believed in the strength of the "idea," and in
+the innocent evolution of humanity; he had only to work like the first
+apostles of Christianity certain of the future, but without hurrying,
+to see his ideas realised; he had only to fix his eyes on the day's
+work, without thinking of the long years and centuries before it would
+bear its fruit.
+
+The ardour of his proselytising made him leave Paris at the end of
+five years. He was anxious to see the world, to study for himself all
+these social miseries, so as to judge what forces these disinherited
+could command for their great transformation. Besides, he began to
+find himself incommoded by the vigilance of the French police, on
+account of his intimacy with the Russian students of the Quartier
+Latin--young men with cold eyes and limp and dishevelled hair who were
+endeavouring to implant in Paris the vengeances of Nihilism. In London
+he came to know a young Englishwoman of weak health, but burning like
+himself with all the ardour of revolutionary propaganda, who would
+walk from morning till night in the lanes and surroundings of
+workshops and laboratories, distributing pamphlets and printed
+leaflets that she kept in a band-box that was always hanging on her
+arm. In a short time Lucy became Gabriel's companion; they loved each
+other without excitement, with a cold and quiet passion, more from
+community of ideas than anything else, for the love of revolutionists,
+dominated with the thought of rebellion against everything existing,
+has not much room for any other feeling.
+
+Luna and his companion went to Holland and thence to Belgium, settling
+afterwards in Germany, always travelling from group to group of
+"companions," taking up different work with that facility of
+adaptation which seems universal among revolutionaries, who wander
+over the world penniless, enduring every sort of privation, but
+finding always in their difficulties some brotherly hand to raise them
+and set them again on the path.
+
+After eight years of this life Gabriel's friend died of consumption.
+They were then in Italy, and Luna, finding himself alone, understood
+for the first time how much support the gentle companion of his life
+had given him. In his sorrow for the loss of Lucy he forgot for a
+while his revolutionary enthusiasm, lamenting only the void left in
+his life. He had not loved her as most men love, but she was his
+companion, his sister, they were alike in their pleasures and their
+sorrows, and their common poverty had welded them into one will.
+Moreover, Gabriel felt himself aged before his time by this life
+of soul-stirring adventures and painful privations. He had been
+imprisoned in many places in Europe, being suspected of complicity
+with the terrorists, he had often been beaten by the police, and he
+began to find a difficulty in travelling about the Continent, as his
+photograph figured with that of several other "companions" in the
+central police offices of the principal nations. He was a vagabond and
+dangerous dog, who would end by being kicked out of every place.
+
+Gabriel could not live alone; he was accustomed to see those kind blue
+eyes near him, and to hear the caressing voice with its bird-like
+inflexions which had so much encouraged him in times of trial and
+difficulty, and he could not endure the solitude in a strange land
+after Lucy's death. A great longing for his native land awoke in him,
+he wished to return to Spain, to that land he had so often ridiculed,
+and which now in spite of its backwardness seemed to him so
+attractive. He thought of his brothers, fixed like plants to the
+stones of the Cathedral, never interesting themselves with what took
+place in the world, never seeking for news of him, as though they had
+entirely forgotten him.
+
+With a sudden impulse, as though he were afraid of dying away from
+his native land, he returned to Spain. In Barcelona some of the
+"companions" had obtained for him the management of a printing press,
+but before taking up his post he wished to spend a few days in Toledo.
+He returned an old man, though he was barely forty, speaking four or
+five languages, and poorer than when he had left it. He found that
+his brother the gardener had died, and that the widow and her son had
+taken refuge in a garret in the Claverias, where she supported herself
+by washing the canon's linen. Esteban, the "Wooden Staff," received
+him with the same admiration he had felt for him while in the
+seminary. He talked a great deal about his travels, gathering together
+all the people in the upper cloister, so that they should listen to
+this man who had travelled all over the world, just as though he were
+going about his own house. In their inquiries they painfully entangled
+geography, as they could only comprehend two divisions in it, the
+countries of heretics, and the countries of Christians.
+
+Gabriel pitied the great poverty of these people, and admired the
+humbleness of these Cathedral servants, content to live and die in the
+same place, without any curiosity as to what was taking place outside
+the walls. The church seemed to him a huge derelict. It was like the
+petrified skeleton of one of those immense and powerful animals of
+former days, that had been dead for ages, its body decayed, its soul
+evaporated, and nothing left but this framework, like to the shells
+found by geologists in prehistoric strata by whose structure they can
+guess at the soft parts of the vanished being. Seeing the ceremonies
+of worship which in former days had so moved him, he felt roused to
+protest, a longing to shout to the priests and acolytes to stop, and
+withdraw, as their times were passed, and faith was dead, and it was
+only from routine and the fear of outside opinion that people now
+frequented these places, which formerly religious fervour had filled
+from morning till night.
+
+On his arrival in Barcelona Gabriel's life was a whirlwind of
+proselytising, of struggles, and of persecutions. The "companions"
+respected him, seeing in him the friend of all the great propagandists
+of "the idea," and one who might himself rank among the most famous
+revolutionists. No meeting could be held without the "companion" Luna;
+that natural eloquence which had caused such wonder on his entry into
+the seminary, bubbled up and spread like an intoxicating gas in these
+revolutionary assemblies, firing that ragged, hungry, and miserable
+crowd, making them tremble with emotion at the description of future
+societies set forth by the apostle, that celestial city of the
+dreamers of all ages, without property, without vices, without
+inequalities, where work would become a pleasure, and where there
+would be no other worship but that of science and art. Some of his
+hearers, the darker spirits, would smile with a compassionate gesture,
+listening to his maledictions against authority, and his hymns to
+the sweetness and triumph to be won by passive resistance. He was an
+idealist, one to whom they must listen because he had served the cause
+well; they who were the strong men, the fighters, knew well enough how
+to crush in silence that cursed society if it should show itself deaf
+to the voice of Truth.
+
+When they exploded bombs in the streets the "companion" Luna was the
+first to be surprised at the catastrophe, he was also the first to be
+taken to prison on account of the popularity of his name. Oh! those
+two years passed in the castle of Montjuich! They had ploughed a deep
+furrow in Gabriel's memory, a deep wound that could not heal, that
+made him tremble at the slightest remembrance, disturbing his calm,
+and making him hot and cold with terror.
+
+The madness of fear had taken possession of society, and all laws and
+regard to humanity, were trampled under foot to defend it. The justice
+of former ages, with its violent procedure was resuscitated in full
+civilisation. The judge was distrusted as being too cultured and
+scrupulous, and a free hand was given to the petty officers of
+justice, ordering them to introduce afresh all the old instruments of
+torture.
+
+In the darkness of the night Gabriel saw his Moorish dungeon lighted
+up; some men in uniform seized him and dragged him down the staircase
+to a room where others were waiting with huge cudgels. A young man
+with a soft voice, in the uniform of a lieutenant, and with the lazy
+manners of a Creole, questioned him as to the various attempts that
+had occurred months before down in the town. Gabriel knew nothing, had
+seen nothing. But all the same these men were your companions; but
+he, having fixed his eyes on high, contemplating his visions of the
+future, had never realised that all around him this violence was
+surging and germinating. His reiterated negative rendered the men
+furious; the soft voice of the Creole became harsh with anger, and
+with menaces and blasphemies they all threw themselves upon him, and
+the cruel hunt of the man round and round the dungeon began, the
+cudgels falling on his body, beat his head or his legs indifferently,
+pursuing him into corners, following him as with a desperate bound he
+reached the opposite wall, opening the way with his bent head, his
+back resounding like an empty box beneath the blows. Now and then the
+desperation of pain inflamed the victim, the lamb turned into a wild
+beast, and before falling to the ground, cowering like a child before
+superior numbers, he would throw himself on the executioners, tearing
+them, and trying to bite them. Gabriel kept a button from the
+lieutenant's uniform which had remained in his fingers after one of
+these revolts of his weakness.
+
+Afterwards, his tormentors, wearied by the inutility of their
+violence, left him forgotten in the dungeon. A loaf of bread and some
+bits of dry salt cod were his only food. Thirst, an infernal thirst,
+racked his bowels, contracted his throat, and burnt his mouth. At
+first he called piteously under the door for water, but afterwards he
+would beg no more, knowing beforehand what the answer would be. It was
+a calculated torture; they promised him as much water as he wished,
+after he should have disclosed the names of the guilty, confessing
+things of which he had no knowledge. Hunger strove in him against
+thirst, but fearing this latter most, he would throw this salted food
+into a corner as though it were poison. He was delirious with the
+delirium of a shipwrecked man tormented with visions of fresh water
+in the midst of the salt waves. In his nightmare he saw clear and
+murmuring brooks, great rivers; and seeking freshness for his mouth
+he would pass his tongue over the filthy walls, finding a certain
+alleviation in the lime of the whitewash.
+
+The privations and the incarceration disturbed his mind with horrible
+ravings; often Gabriel was surprised at finding himself on all fours,
+growling and barking opposite the door without knowing how or why.
+
+His tormentors seemed to forget him; they had other prisoners to look
+after. The jailors gave him water, but whole months passed without
+anyone entering his cell. Some nights he would hear vaguely and
+far off through the greasy walls wailing and sobs in the adjacent
+dungeons. One morning he was awoke by sounds as of thunder, in spite
+of a tiny ray of sunlight filtering through his loophole; hearing the
+jailors in the corridors near, he understood the mystery. They had
+been shooting some of the prisoners.
+
+Luna received as a happiness this hope of death; he would renounce
+with pleasure that shadow of a life in a small stone box, tormented by
+physical pain and the fear of men's ferocity. His stomach, weakened by
+all these privations, refused for many days, with horrible nausea, to
+receive the bitter bread and the coppery mess. His want of exercise,
+the want of air, and the bad and scanty nourishment had made him
+fall into a mortal anaemia; he coughed continually, suffering great
+oppression on his chest. The knowledge he had acquired of the human
+body in his thirst for knowing everything did not admit of his being
+mistaken; he would die as poor Lucy had died.
+
+After a year and a half of imprisonment he appeared before a council
+of war, mixed up with a mob of old men, women, and even quite young
+people, all weakened and broken by imprisonment, with their skin white
+and thick as chewed paper, and that dazed look in their eyes that
+comes from solitary confinement. Gabriel hoped he would be executed.
+When the fiscal came to the name of Luna on the long list he stopped
+an instant, shooting a ferocious glance at him--this man was among the
+theorists. It appeared from the declarations of witnesses that he took
+no direct part in the deeds of violence, and that in his speeches he
+had always deprecated them; still it must be remembered that he was
+one of the principal propagandists of anarchism, and that he had
+delivered speeches in all the workmen's societies frequented by the
+authors of the attempts.
+
+An elderly captain bent towards another member of the council,
+speaking in his ear, but Gabriel caught his words:
+
+"It is on these gentlemen who make speeches that we must lay our hand,
+so that they may be warned not to lecture any more on Tolstoi or
+Ibsen, or any of those foreign worthies who advocate throwing bombs."
+
+Gabriel spent many months of solitary confinement in his prison.
+From words now and then dropped by his jailors he could guess at the
+fluctuations of his fate. Sometimes he would gather that he and all
+his companions in misfortune were to be sent to the jail in Africa, or
+again they would hint at his immediate liberation, or would prophesy
+that they were all to be shot _en masse_. When at the end of two
+years he left this gloomy castle, it was to be embarked with all his
+companions for exile. He was only the shadow of a man; his weakness
+made his walk as uncertain and tremulous as that of a child, but he
+forgot his own misery in trying to assist those of his companions who
+were even weaker than himself, and who bore the cruel scars of the
+torments they had endured.
+
+The return to liberty recalled all his former gentleness and the
+philosophic pity with which he surrounded all men, pitying and
+pardoning their faults. On landing in England the more violent of
+his companions spoke of future vengeance on their persecutors, while
+Gabriel asked pardon for them, as blind instruments employed by
+society in a moment of terror, thinking they had saved it by their
+barbarity.
+
+The climate of London aggravated Gabriel's illness, and in about two
+years he was obliged to move to the Continent, although England with
+its absolute liberty was the only land where he could have lived
+quietly and ignored.
+
+His existence was a cruel one, always a fugitive through the different
+countries of Europe, driven from one place to another by the vigilance
+of the police, thrown into prison, or expelled on the slightest
+suspicion. It was a return to the ancient persecution of the gipsies,
+the constant hunting of independent people, leading vagabond lives, of
+the Middle Ages. His illness and his desire for rest and peace made
+him return to Spain. Time had produced a certain amount of tolerance
+towards the exiles, and in Spain everything is soon forgotten, and
+though the authorities are harder and less scrupulous than in other
+countries, still they interfere less on account of their improvidence
+and the carelessness natural to the race.
+
+Sick and without any work by which he could earn his living, precluded
+from seeking work among the printers, as his name was encircled by
+a halo which terrified the masters, Gabriel fell into such extreme
+poverty that the little help and succour his companions could afford
+were unable to relieve it, and he travelled from end to end of the
+Peninsula begging from his fellows and hiding from the police.
+
+His spirit was broken, he was conquered, and he had no longer strength
+to continue the struggle. Nothing remained for him but to die, but
+merciful death came slowly to his call. He thought of his brother, the
+only affection remaining to him in the world; he remembered the quiet
+family in the Claverias, of which he had caught a glimpse on his last
+visit to the Cathedral, and he turned to seek them as his last hope.
+
+On his return to Toledo, he found the happy family dissolved;
+misfortune had come even to that silent and stagnant corner.
+
+But the Cathedral, insensible to all human vicissitudes was there,
+the same as ever, and to it he clung, hiding himself in its recesses,
+hoping to die there in peace, with no other hope but to be forgotten;
+dying before his proper time, tasting the bitter happiness of
+annihilation, leaving behind him at the door, like an animal who sheds
+its skin, all that rebellion which had drawn upon him the hatred of
+society.
+
+His happiness was not to think, not to speak, to mould himself to that
+dead world; he would be among the living statues peopling the upper
+cloister, one more automaton; he would imitate those beings who seemed
+to have absorbed into themselves something of the austerity of the
+granite buttresses, he would inhale like a healing balsam the scent
+of the rusty iron railings and the incense that spread through the
+church, the ancient perfume of the past centuries.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+On leaving the cloister in the mornings soon after daybreak, the first
+person Gabriel would see was Don Antolin, the "Silver Stick." This
+priest exercised an authority like that of Governor of the Cathedral,
+for all the lay servants were under his orders, and all the repairs of
+little importance were done under his supervision.
+
+Down below, in the church, he watched the sacristans and the acolytes,
+careful that the canons and beneficiaries should have no cause of
+complaint in the services. Upstairs, in the cloister, he watched over
+the good behaviour and cleanliness of the families, being by the grace
+of the cardinal archbishop a sort of magistrate over that little town.
+
+He occupied the best "habitacion" in the Claverias. At the great
+ceremonies he walked in front of the Chapter in his pluvial, carrying
+a silver stick nearly as tall as himself, making the tiles of the
+pavement re-echo with its blows. During High Mass and the choir in the
+evening he walked about the naves to check any irreverence on the part
+of the congregation or any inattention on that of the staff. At eight
+o'clock at night in the winter, and at nine in summer, he locked the
+door of the staircase leading to the upper cloister, putting the key
+in his pocket, and so all the people in the cloister remained quite
+isolated from the town. If now and again anyone was taken ill in the
+night, it was necessary to wake Don Antolin who, plunging his hand
+into the depths of his cassock, would produce his key, and deign to
+restore communication with the outer world.
+
+He was about seventy years of age, small and wizened; age had scarcely
+tinged his shaven crown with grey, his forehead was broad and square,
+and rose straight beneath the silk cap he wore in winter. His features
+were rather drawn out, without a single wrinkle, and devoid of any
+expression that showed emotion, the jaw-bone narrow and sharp, and the
+eyes as inexpressive and motionless as the rest of the face, but with
+a cold, penetrating glance that was extremely disconcerting.
+
+Gabriel had known him from his childhood; he was, to use his own
+expression, like a private soldier of the church, who by reason of his
+years and services had attained the rank of sergeant, but who could
+rise no further. When Luna first entered the seminary Don Antolin had
+just been ordained priest, and since then had passed his life in the
+sacristy of the Primacy where he had begun as acolyte.
+
+On account of his absolute and irrational faith and his unbending
+adhesion to the Church, the professors in the seminary had pushed him
+on in his career, in spite of his ignorance; he was a son of the soil,
+having been born in a village in the mountains round Toledo. The Holy
+Metropolitan Church was to him the second house of God in the world,
+only ranking after Saint Peter's in Rome, and all ecclesiastical
+learning was to him like rays emanating from the Divine wisdom, which
+blinded him, and were to be adored with the profound respect of
+ignorance.
+
+He had that blessed and entire want of education so appreciated by the
+Church in former years. Gabriel felt sure that if Silver Stick had
+been born in the flourishing times of Catholicism he would have become
+a saint on dedicating himself to the spiritual life, or he would have
+played an excellent part in the Inquisition on the arrival of that
+militant society. Having come into the world at the wrong time, when
+faith was weakened and the Church could no longer impose its laws
+by violence, the good Don Antolin had remained hidden in the lower
+administration of the Cathedral, assisting the Canon Obrero in the
+division and assignment of the money that the State allowed to the
+Primacy, giving long thought over the spending of each handful of
+farthings, endeavouring that the holy house, like the ruined families,
+should keep up its good outward appearance without revealing the
+poverty inside.
+
+He had been promised several times a chaplaincy of nuns, but he was
+one of those faithful to the Cathedral, one of those quite in love
+with the great establishment. He was proud of the confidence that the
+Lord Archbishop placed in him, and of the frank friendliness
+with which the canons and beneficiaries spoke to him, and of his
+administrative conferences with the Obrero and the Treasurer. For this
+reason he could not repress a gesture of contemptuous superiority when
+having donned his pluvial, and clutching his silver stick, he advanced
+and spoke to any strange clergy from the neighbouring villages who
+visited the Primacy.
+
+His faults were purely ecclesiastic; he saved in secret, with that
+cold, determined avarice so usual at all times in people attached to
+the Church. His greasy skull cap had been discarded as too old by its
+former owner, one of the canons; his cassock of a greenish black and
+his shoes had also belonged to some one of the beneficiaries; in the
+Claverias they all whispered of the monies hoarded by Don Antolin,
+and of his savings that were devoted to usury--loans that never went
+beyond two or three duros to the poorer servants of the church ground
+down by poverty, and which he recovered with interest at the beginning
+of every month when they were paid by the Canon Obrero. In him avarice
+and usury were joined to the most implicit honesty in regard to the
+interests of the church; he would punish relentlessly the smallest
+pilfering in the sacristy, and he made up his accounts for the Chapter
+with a minuteness that annoyed the Obrero. To every one his own, the
+church was poor and it would be a sin worthy of hell to deprive her of
+a single farthing; he, as a good servant of God was poor also, and he
+thought he was doing no wrong in drawing a certain profit from the
+money he had gathered together by dint of bargaining, and by many
+painful privations in the midst of his poverty.
+
+His niece, Mariquita, lived with him, an ugly woman with masculine
+features and a fresh colour, who had come from the mountains to look
+after her uncle, of whose riches and power in the Primacy all his
+relations and friends in the village talked a great deal. She rode
+roughshod over all the other women in the Claverias, taking undue
+advantage of Don Antolin's supreme authority. The more timid formed
+round her a circle of adulation, endeavouring to evoke her protection
+by cleaning her house and cooking for her, while Mariquita, dressed in
+the habit, and with her hair most carefully combed--the only luxury
+allowed by her uncle--loitered about the cloister hoping to meet there
+some cadet, or that some of the foreigners visiting the tower or the
+hall of the giants would take notice of her. She made sheep's eyes
+at every man; and she, so hard and imperious to all the women, would
+smile sweetly on all the bachelors living in the Claverias. The "Tato"
+was a great friend of hers; he would come and visit her when her uncle
+was absent in order to air his graces as apprentice to a Torrero.
+Gabriel, with his delicate looks, his mysterious self-containment, and
+the confused story of all his great travels about the world interested
+her not less; she would even speak with marked deference to the
+"Wooden Staff," as he was both a man and a widower, and, as the
+"Perrero" wickedly said, the very sight of a pair of trousers nearly
+drove the poor woman mad in that establishment where the greater part
+of the men wore petticoats.
+
+Don Antolin had known Gabriel since his childhood, and spoke to him in
+the second person. The ignorant priest still retained the remembrance
+of Luna's great triumphs obtained in the seminary, and though he saw
+him so poor and ailing, taking refuge in the Cathedral almost on
+charity, his "tuteo" of superiority was not free from admiration.
+Gabriel, on his side, feared Silver Stick, knowing his intolerant
+fanaticism. For this reason he confined himself to listening to him,
+careful in their conversation that not a single word should slip in
+which could betray his past. He would be the first to demand his
+expulsion from the Cathedral, where he wished to live unknown and
+silent.
+
+On meeting each other in the cloister, the two men began with the same
+questions every morning:
+
+"How is your health to-day?"
+
+Gabriel showed himself an optimist. He knew that his illness had
+no remedy; still, that quiet life free from all emotions, and his
+brother's care, feeding him at all hours, like a bird and almost by
+force, had arrested the decay of his health. The course of the illness
+was slower--death was meeting with obstacles.
+
+"I am better, Don Antolin. And yesterday, what sort of a day had you?"
+
+Silver Stick plunged his dirty and horny hands into the recesses of
+his cassock, and produced three greasy little ticket-books, one red,
+one green and the third white. He turned over the leaves, considering
+the counterfoils of those he had torn out; he took the most respectful
+care of these little books, as though they were far more important
+than the big music books in the choir.
+
+"A very slack day, Gabriel! Being in the winter, so few people travel.
+Our best time is in the spring, when they say the English come in by
+Gibraltar. They go first to the fair in Seville, and afterwards they
+come to have a look at our Cathedral. Besides, in milder weather the
+people come from Madrid, and although they grumble, the flies crowd
+to see the giants and the big bell, then I have to hurry with the
+tickets; one day, Gabriel, I took eighty duros. I remember it was at
+the last 'Corpus'; Mariquita had to sew up the pockets of my cassock,
+for they tore with the weight of so many pesetas; it was a blessing
+from the Lord."
+
+He looked sadly at the little books, as though regretting that many
+days passed in winter when he only tore out one or two leaves. This
+plan of selling entrance tickets to see the treasures and curiosities
+of the Cathedral filled all his thoughts. It was the salvation of the
+church, the modern proceeding to help it on, and he felt proud of
+fulfilling this function, which made him one of the most important
+persons in the life of the temple.
+
+"You see these green tickets?" said he to Gabriel. "These are the
+dearest, they cost two pesetas each. With these you can see everything
+that is most important--the treasury, the chapel of the Virgin, and
+the Ochavo with its relics which are unique in the world. The other
+cathedrals are dirt compared with ours, and their relics lies, many of
+them invented on account of the envy that our Holy Metropolitan Church
+inspired. You see these red ones? These only cost six reals, and with
+them you can visit the sacristies, the wardrobe, the chapels of Don
+Alvaro de Luna and of Cardinal Albornoz, and the Chapter-house, with
+its two rows of portraits of the archbishops which are wonders. Who
+would not scrape their purse to see such prodigies?"
+
+Afterwards he added, showing the last ticket book with contempt:
+
+"These white ones are only worth two reals. They are to see the giants
+and the bells. We sell a great many of those to the lower class who
+come to the Cathedral on feast days. Could you believe it, but many
+of the Protestants and Jews call this a robbery? The other day three
+soldiers came from the Academy with some country folks to see the
+giants, and they made quite a scandalous scene because we would not
+let them in for an old song. As if we were asking their charity! Many
+of them commit all sorts of nuisances about the Cathedral, just as
+if they were heretics, to say nothing of their drawing all sorts
+of abominable things and writing obscene words on the walls of the
+staircase. What shocking times, eh, Gabriel? What shocking times!"
+
+Luna smiled silently, and Silver Stick, encouraged by what seemed to
+him acquiescence, went on with pride:
+
+"And about these tickets, I invented them--that is to say, I am not
+really their inventor, but their introduction into this house is owing
+to me. You have travelled so much, and must have seen in those foreign
+countries that everything is shown on payment. The Lord Cardinal
+before this one, who is now in blessed glory (and he raised his hand
+to his skull cap) had also travelled a great deal--he was quite a
+'modern,' and had he lived would have ended by putting electric light
+in the naves of the Cathedral. I heard him on one occasion speak of
+what was done in the museums and other interesting places in Rome
+and other towns; unrestricted entrance at all hours--on payment, an
+immense convenience to the public, who required to get no tickets
+beforehand to visit these things. So one day when the Obrero and I
+were biting our nails, seeing that this miserable thousand and odd
+pesetas (God forgive me!) that this unhappy State allows us, could not
+possibly suffice for our monthly expenses, I propounded my idea. Now,
+could you believe that some of the gentlemen in the Chapter opposed
+it? Some of the young canons spoke of the sellers in the Temple, you
+know who they were--certain Jews who drove the Lord out with scourges
+in their hand, for I know not what misdemeanours. The older ones said
+the Cathedral had always had its treasures open to all for centuries,
+and so it ought to go on. All the gentlemen were quite right, but
+you cannot do anything with a stupid canon, and at last the defunct
+cardinal, who is now in the enjoyment of God (another tug at his cap)
+interfered, and the Chapter were obliged, though with much grumbling,
+to accept the reform, and they ended by praising it. In all bitter
+there is a sweet! Do you know how much money I handed to the Lord
+Cardinal last year? More than three thousand duros, nearly as much as
+this sinful State allows us, and this without prejudice to anybody.
+The public pays, they admire and they go; in any case they are only
+birds of passage who come once, and when they go they do not return.
+And what are four wretched pesetas, when for that money you can see
+one of the most glorious churches in Christendom, the cradle of
+Spanish Catholicism, the Cathedral of Toledo!"
+
+The two men were walking in the cloister on the side warmed by the sun
+at that early hour, the cleric had put away his ticket books, and his
+eyes were fixed on Gabriel, who thought that to smile in his enigmatic
+way, which Don Antolin accepted as assent, quite met the situation,
+and it encouraged him to continue his confidences.
+
+"Ay, Gabriel! You cannot think that my heavy duties can be fulfilled
+without hard work; the Cardinal trusts me, the Chapter distinguish
+me with their regard, and the Obrero has no other hope but in my
+assistance. Thanks to these tickets we can carry the Cathedral along,
+and keep up its ancient appearance of grandeur, so that the public
+will come and admire. But we are poorer than rats, and we must be
+thankful that even some crumbs are left us from the past. If the wind
+or the hail break some of our glass in the naves, we can still lay our
+hands on some of the stores left by the Obreros of former days. Ay,
+señor! And to think there was a time when the Chapter maintained at
+its own expense inside the church, cutters and painters of glass,
+plumbers, and I know not what beside, so that any great works could be
+undertaken without seeking any help outside the house! If one of the
+tombs gets broken, even now we have quantities of borderings carved
+with saints and flowers that are wonderful to see. But what will
+happen when all these are finished? When the last pane of glass in
+the stores has been broken, and the last fragments of carving in the
+Obreria used up? We shall have to put cheap white panes in the windows
+to prevent the rain and wind coming in. The Cathedral will look like
+an inn--may God forgive me the comparison--and the priests of the
+Primacy will praise God dressed like the chaplain of a hermitage."
+
+And Don Antolin laughed sarcastically, as though this future that he
+was anticipating was an absurd contradiction of the eternal laws.
+
+"You will easily believe," he went on, "that they do not waste
+anything, and that they make money out of every possible thing. The
+garden that was for so many years in your family is now leased out by
+the Chapter, since your brother's death; twenty duros a year your Aunt
+Tomasa pays for her son to cultivate it, and this only because, as you
+know, the old woman is such a great friend of His Eminence, as they
+have known each other since they were children. I go about like a
+water carrier, all round the church and the cloisters, watching that
+no one plays tricks, for there are a lot of young light-hearted
+people, whom you cannot trust. One minute I am in the Ochavo, watching
+that your nephew the 'Tato' has sold the tickets to the foreigners
+(for he is quite capable of letting them in gratis if they tip him
+on leaving), and the next I am up in the cloister looking after that
+shoemaker who repairs the giants; they cannot deceive me, no one
+escapes me without paying; but, ay! it is a long while since I have
+sung mass. You can see me at mid-day when the Cathedral is closed
+reading my hours hurriedly in the cloisters, watching the clock in
+order to go down the moment the church is opened, when the strangers
+begin to come to see the treasury. This is not the life of a good
+Catholic, and if God does not lay it to my account that I am doing it
+all for the glory of His house, I fear that I shall lose my soul."
+
+The two men walked up and down some time in silence, but Don Antolin
+could not hold his tongue for long when the subject was the economic
+life of the Primacy.
+
+"And to think, Gabriel," he continued, "that having been what we were
+in former times, we should have come to this! You and most of those
+alive have no idea how rich this house used to be--as rich as a king,
+and often far richer. From a child no one has known as you have the
+history of our glorious archbishops, but of the fortune they amassed
+for God, you know nothing. Of course these temporalities do not
+interest learned people like you. Have you any idea what donations the
+kings and great lords gave in their lifetime to our Cathedral, or the
+legacies they left her on their deathbeds? You have a great deal to
+learn! I know all about it, I have searched in the Obreria, in the
+archives, in the library; everyone does what interests them, and I and
+the Señor Obrero have often raged at the indigence of the house, but I
+console myself by thinking of what we had, long before any of us were
+born. We were very rich, Gabriel--very, very rich. The archbishops of
+Toledo could have placed one or two crowns on their mitre, I dare not
+say three, for I think of the Supreme Pontiff. First of all, there is
+the Deed of Gift to the Cathedral, made by the King Alfonso VI., by
+reason of his having conquered Toledo. It was made a hermitage, after
+the election of the Bishop Don Bernardo, and I have seen it in the
+archives with my own sinful eyes, a parchment with Gothic letters, and
+at the head is written, 'The privileges of this Holy Church.' The good
+king gave to the Cathedral nine towns--if I wished I could tell you
+their names--several mills, and vineyards innumerable, houses and
+shops in the town, and he ends by saying with all the munificence of
+a Christian cavalier, 'This, therefore, in such a way I give, and I
+grant to this church and to you, Bernard, Archbishop, in free and
+perfect gift, that neither by homicide, nor any other calumny, shall
+it ever be forfeited. Amen.' Afterwards, Don Alfonso VII. gave us
+eight towns on the other side of the Guadalquiver, several ovens, two
+castles, the salt works of Belinchon, and a tenth of all the money
+coined in Toledo, for the vestments of the prebendaries. The VIII. of
+the name showered on the Cathedral a perfect rain of gifts, towns,
+villages, and mills. Illescas is ours, and a great part of Esquivias,
+as also the mortgage on Talavera. Afterwards came the fighting
+prelate, Don Rodrigo, who took much land from the Moors, and the
+Cathedral possesses one principality, the Adelantamiento de Cazorla,
+with towns like Baza, Niebla, and Alcaraz. And besides the kings there
+is a great deal to be said about the nobles, great princes who showed
+their generosity to the Holy Metropolitan Church. Don Lope de Haro,
+Lord of Vizcaya, not content with paying the cost of the building from
+the Puerta de los Escribanos as far as the choir, gave us the town of
+Alcubilete, with its mills and fisheries, and he also left a legacy
+so that in the choir when complines are sung, that lamp called the
+Preciosa should be lighted, which is placed by the great bronze eagle
+belonging to the big missal. Don Alfonso Tello de Meneses gave us
+four towns on the banks of the Guadiana, granted us tithes and bridge
+tolls, and I know not what riches besides. We have been very powerful,
+Gabriel; the territory of this diocese is larger than a principality.
+The Cathedral had property on the earth, in the air, and in the sea!
+Our dominions extended throughout the whole nation from end to end;
+there was not a single province in which we did not hold possessions.
+Everything contributed to the glory of the Lord, and to the comfort
+and welfare of His ministers; everything paid to the Cathedral: bread
+when it was baked in the ovens, the casting of the net, wheat as it
+passed through the mill, money as it came from the Mint, the traveller
+as he went on his way; the country people who then paid no taxes or
+contributions served their king and saved their own souls, giving
+the best sheaf in every ten, so that the granaries of the Holy
+Metropolitan Church were quite insufficient to contain such abundance.
+What times were those, Gabriel! There was faith, Gabriel, and faith
+is the chief thing in life--without faith there is no virtue nor
+decency--nor nothing."
+
+He stopped for a moment, quite out of breath with talking. The priest
+was so saturated with the atmosphere of the Cathedral, that in himself
+he seemed to unite all the various scents of the church; his cassock
+had collected the mouldy smell of the old stones and the rusty iron
+railings, and his mouth seemed to breathe of the gutters and the
+gargoyles, and the rank damp of the garrets.
+
+With the rapid enumeration of all the past wealth Don Antolin warmed,
+even to indignation.
+
+"And having been so rich, now we find ourselves in extreme poverty.
+And I, my son, a priest of the Lord, am obliged to go hither and
+thither with those tickets so that we may all live, just as though
+I were a seller of entrance tickets to a bull-fight, and the Lord's
+house were a theatre, having to endure all those foreign heretics,
+who come in without blessing themselves, and who look at everything
+through opera-glasses. And I have to smile at them because they pay us
+and provide us with some dessert for our poor stew! Carape! Jesus have
+mercy on me! I was going to say a sacrilege."
+
+Don Antolin continued his angry complaints till, in passing the front
+of his house, Mariquita of the scowling and ugly countenance appeared
+at the door.
+
+"Uncle, enough of walking. Your chocolate is getting cold."
+
+But before the priest disappeared into his house, she went on, smiling
+amiably at Luna:
+
+"Will you have some, Don Gabriel?"
+
+And with her bold eyes, like a hungry wolf, she invited Luna to enter.
+She liked the masterful ways of the man, she said, and the ease which
+his former intercourse with the world had given him, and, moreover,
+for her woman's imagination Gabriel's mysterious past possessed
+a great attraction; his proud silence, the vague reports of his
+adventures, and the smile, as much compassionate as disdainful, with
+which he listened to the people of the upper cloister.
+
+The insinuating Mariquita withdrew, and Gabriel continued his walk
+through the cloister, after finishing the little jar of milk that his
+brother brought him up every morning.
+
+At eight o'clock, Don Luis, the Chapel-master, came out, his cloak
+wrapped as usual theatrically round him, and his big hat well tilted
+back, like a glory, round his enormous head; he was humming absently,
+restless with perpetual nervous movements; he inquired anxiously if
+the bell had yet rung for the choir, frightened by the threats of a
+fine in case he were late. Gabriel felt himself very much attracted
+by this poor priestly musician, who lived so despised in the furthest
+corner of the church, thinking far more of music than of dogma.
+
+In the evenings Gabriel would often go up to the little room inhabited
+by the Chapel-master, on the tipper floor of the Lunas' house; the
+room contained all the priest's fortune--a little iron bed, which had
+belonged formerly to the seminarist, two plaster busts of Beethoven
+and Mozart, and an enormous pile of bundles of music, bound scores,
+loose sheets of ruled paper, so big and so piled up and disorderly
+that every now and then a pile would slip down, covering the floor of
+the little room with white sheets to its furthest corner.
+
+"That is how all his money goes," said the Wooden Staff with an air of
+good-natured reproof, "he will never have a farthing. As soon as he
+gets his pay he orders more music from Madrid. It would be far better
+for Don Luis if he were to buy himself a new hat, even if it were a
+cheap one, so that the gentlemen of the choir should not laugh at the
+covering he has on his head."
+
+In the winter evenings, after the choir, the musician and Gabriel took
+refuge in this little room. The canons, wishing to avoid the cold
+winds and the rain, took their daily walk in the galleries of the
+upper cloister, not wishing to forego this exercise to which their
+methodical existence had accustomed them. The rain would beat on the
+window of the little room, and in the dull grey twilight the musician
+would turn over his portfolios, or letting his hands wander over the
+harmonium, he would talk the while with Gabriel, who was seated on the
+bed.
+
+The musician would grow excited, speaking of his love of art. In the
+midst of some peroration he would become suddenly silent, and bending
+over the instrument its melodies would fill the room, and floating
+down the staircase would reach the ears of the walkers in the cloister
+like a distant echo. Suddenly he would cease playing and resume his
+chattering, as though afraid that with his absent-mindedness his ideas
+would evaporate.
+
+The silent Luna was the only listener he had met with in the
+Cathedral; the first who would listen to him for long hours without
+ridiculing him or thinking him crazy, and who often showed by his
+short interruptions and questions the pleasure with which he listened.
+
+The end of the evening's conversation was always the same--the
+greatness of Beethoven, the idol of the poor musician.
+
+"I have loved him all my life," said the Chapel-master, "I was
+educated by a Jeronomite friar, an old man driven from his convent
+who, after leaving it, had wandered over the world as a professor
+of the violoncello. The Jeronomites were the great musicians of the
+Church. You did not know this, neither should I have known it if this
+holy man had not taken me under his protection soon after I was born,
+and been to me a real father. It appears that in olden days each order
+devoted itself to some special thing. One, I think the Benedictines,
+copied and annotated old books; others made sweet liqueurs for the
+ladies, others were wonderfully clever in training cage birds, and
+the Jeronomites studied music for seven years, each one playing the
+instrument of his choice, and to these we owe that there has been
+preserved in the Spanish churches a little, but very little, good
+musical taste. And from what my little father told me, what wonderful
+orchestras these Jeronomites must have had in their convents! For the
+ladies it was a great delight to go on Sunday evenings to the parlour,
+where they met the good fathers, each one a master of his own
+particular instrument. These were the only concerts in those days, and
+with their pittance assured, and no anxiety as to housing or clothing
+themselves, and with the love of art as their only duty, you may
+imagine, Gabriel, what musicians they could become. For this reason,
+when the friars were expelled from their convents the Jeronomites were
+not the worst off. There was no need to beg masses in the churches
+or to live on the charity of devout families; they were able to earn
+their bread by an art conscientiously studied, and consequently they
+soon got places as organists and Chapel-masters; the Chapters really
+fought for them. Some were more venturesome, and, anxious to see more
+of that musical world which had seemed to them while in their convents
+a vision of Paradise, entered the orchestras of theatres, many
+travelling even to Italy, transforming themselves so entirely that
+even their own former prior could not have recognised them. One of
+these was my little father. What a man! He was a good Christian, but
+he had thrown himself so thoroughly into music that he retained
+very little of the former friar. When he was told that probably the
+convents would be re-established, he shrugged his shoulders with
+indifference, a new sonata interested him much more. He sometimes said
+things that have always lived in my memory. I remember one day when I
+was a child he took me to a meeting of musical friends in Madrid, who
+played, for their own pleasure only, the famous 'Seventh Symphony.' Do
+you know it? It is the freshest and most graceful of all Beethoven's
+works. I remember my little father leaving the room quite wrapped up
+in himself, with his head bent, dragging me along, for I could hardly
+keep up with his long footsteps, and when we got home he looked at me
+fixedly, as though I had been a grown-up person. 'Listen, Luis,' he
+said, 'and remember this well. There is only one Lord in the world,
+Our Lord Jesus Christ, and there are two lesser lords, Galileo and
+Beethoven.'"
+
+The musician looked lovingly at the plaster bust which faced the room
+from one corner, with its leonine brows and the diffident eyes of a
+deaf person.
+
+"I do not know much about Galileo," continued Don Luis. "I know that
+he was a very wise man, and a scientific genius. I am only a musician
+and I know very little about other things, but I adore Beethoven,
+and I think my little father did the same--he is a god; the most
+extraordinary man the world has ever produced. Don't you think so,
+Gabriel?"
+
+His nerves were quivering with his excitement, and getting up, he
+walked rapidly up and down the room, trampling on all the loose sheets
+of music.
+
+"Ay! how I envy you, Gabriel, having travelled so much, and having
+heard so many good things! The other night I could not sleep for
+thinking of all you had told me about your life in Paris--those
+beautiful Sunday afternoons when you would go to the Lamoureax
+concerts, or sometimes to Colonnas, giving yourself a surfeit of
+sublimity! And here am I, shut up, my only hope being perhaps to
+conduct a Mass of Rossini's at one of the great festivals! My only
+comfort is to read music, instructing myself thoroughly in those great
+works that so many fools in the towns can listen to half asleep and
+bored. Here I have, in this pile, the nine symphonies of the great
+man--his innumerable sonatas, his masses, and together with him,
+Haydn, Mozart, Mendelssohn, in fact all the great writers. I have even
+Wagner. I read them, and I play what is possible on the harmonium.
+But--it is just as if you were to describe the drawing and colours of
+a picture to a blind man, buried in this cloister. I know, blindly,
+that there are most beautiful things in this world--for those who can
+hear them."
+
+The Chapel-master kept from the previous year the remembrance of a
+great happiness, and he spoke of it enthusiastically. He had been
+chosen by the Cardinal Archbishop to go to Madrid, to be one of a
+board of examiners for organists.
+
+"That was the best time I ever had in my life, Gabriel. One evening
+I listened to Wagner, dressed in the clothes of a friend of mine, a
+violinist, who plays here in Toledo at the great festivals. I heard
+the Walkyria in the pit of the Real Theatre, another night I went to
+a concert; but the greatest night of all was the one on which I heard
+the Ninth Symphony of that ugly old fellow, of that deaf, bad-tempered
+genius who is listening to us."
+
+And with one bound the musician rushed to the bust, kissing it
+with childish humility, just as a child would caress a stern and
+domineering father.
+
+"You know the Ninth Symphony; true, Gabriel? And what did you feel as
+you listened to it? When I listen to music strange things happen to
+me. I close my eyes and I see unknown countries and strange faces, and
+whenever I hear the same works the same visions are repeated. If I
+speak about this with any of the people down below they say I am mad,
+but I know that you feel as I do, and I am not afraid that you will
+laugh at me. There are musical passages that make me see the sea, blue
+and boundless, with silvery waves, and this, though I have never seen
+the ocean; other works bring before me woods and castles, or groups
+of shepherds with white flocks; with Schubert I always see two lovers
+sighing at the foot of a linden tree, and certain French composers
+bring before my mind's eye beautiful women walking among beds of
+roses, dressed in violet, always violet. And you, Gabriel, do not you
+see these things?"
+
+The anarchist assented--yes, music awoke in him also a world of
+fantastic visions, far more beautiful than reality.
+
+"I remember," went on the priest, "what the Ninth Symphony made me
+see. I see it still if I only hum some of its passages. Oh! that
+graceful Scherzo with its strange tremolos! I thought, hearing it,
+that God and his court of saints had left the heavens to take a
+walk, leaving the little angels masters of the house, full liberty!
+Universal gambols! The heavenly children, without any restraint,
+sported from cloud to cloud, amusing themselves by scattering on the
+earth the garlands of flowers that the saints had left behind them;
+one let loose the rain and made it fall on the earth; another seized
+the key of the thunder and touched it, fearful peals which frightened
+all the revellers and made them fly. But they returned again to
+continue their graceful play, beginning afresh their noisy games that
+the thunder had disturbed. And the Adagio! What do you say about that?
+Do you know anything softer, more loving or so divinely peaceful?
+Human beings will never speak like this again, however much progress
+they make. Hearing it, I thought of those fresco-painted ceilings with
+mythological figures--gods and goddesses with pink flesh and flowing
+curves, Apollo and Venus reclining on a mountain of pink and gold
+clouds, like a lovely dawn."
+
+"Chaplain, what has come to you?" said Gabriel; "this is not very
+Christian."
+
+"No, but it is artistic," said the musician simply. "I do not trouble
+myself much about religion, I believe what I was taught, and I have
+never taken the trouble to inquire any further. Music alone occupies
+me, of which someone has said 'that it will be the religion of the
+future,' the purest manifestation of the ideal. Everything that is
+beautiful delights me, and I believe in it as a work of God. 'I
+believe in God and in Beethoven,' as his pupil said--and besides, how
+much religion the grandeur of music contains! Do you know the last
+quartet that Beethoven wrote? He felt he was dying, and he wrote on
+the edge of the score this terrible question: 'Must it be?' and lower
+down he added, 'Yes, it must be, it must be.' It was necessary to die,
+even for such a genius to leave life, while he still carried in his
+mind such glorious things, to pay the tribute of human renovation;
+and then he wrote that lament, that farewell to life, whose greatness
+cannot be equalled by any song, or by any words of religion."
+
+The musician sat down to the harmonium, and for a long while played
+that last lament of the genius, his sorrowful complaint on crossing
+the threshold, not despairing and trembling through fear of the
+unknown, but with a brave melancholy, sinking into the eternal shadow,
+confident that nothing could obscure his genius.
+
+These evenings of artistic communion in that corner of the sleepy
+Cathedral drew the two men together with an ever increasing affection.
+The musician talked, turning over his scores, or playing his
+harmonium; the revolutionist listened silently, only interrupting his
+friend by his painful cough. They were evenings of sweet sadness that
+these two men spent together, one dreaming of leaving the stone prison
+of the Cathedral to see the world, the other returning from life
+wounded and breathless, content with the obscure repose of the
+beautiful church, and guarding with prudent silence the secret of his
+past. Art shone for them like the rays of the sun in the grey and
+monotonous atmosphere of the Cathedral.
+
+When they met in the early mornings in the cloister the conversation
+between the two friends generally ran on the same lines.
+
+"This evening, eh?" the Chapel-master would say mysteriously. "I have
+some fresh music, we shall enjoy something new that I have been sent
+to-day, and besides, I wrote a little thing last night."
+
+The anarchist nodded affirmatively, quite ready to serve as
+entertainment for this pariah of art, who saw in him his only
+audience, and who took so much kindly trouble to interest him.
+
+While the services lasted Gabriel would walk alone in the cloisters;
+all the men were in the Cathedral, except the shoemaker, who was
+mending the giants. Tired of the chattering of the women who stood
+at the doors of the Claverias, he would go up to the dwelling of the
+bell-ringer, his old companion in arms, or he would go down into the
+garden by the remarkable staircase del Tenorio when it was open, or by
+the archbishop's archway crossing the street.
+
+He delighted in passing an hour under the trees; he found in the
+garden as many memories of his family as in the "habitacion" upstairs.
+Besides, he was tired of always finding his walks bounded by stone
+walls, which reminded him of his prison, and he wanted the movement of
+the vegetation caressed by the breeze to foster the illusion that he
+was living in complete liberty in the open country.
+
+In the arbour, where he had formerly so often seen his father, infirm
+and crippled with age, directing his eldest son, who received all his
+orders impassively, he would now meet his Aunt Tomasa, knitting her
+stockings, and watching with vigilant eyes the work of a boy whom she
+had taken into her service.
+
+Gabriel's aunt was by far the most important person in the Claverias;
+her word was worth quite as much as Don Antolin's, the Silver Stick
+was afraid of her, bending before the powerful protection that they
+all guessed stood behind the poor old woman. In the days when her
+father, Gabriel's maternal grandfather, was sacristan in the Cathedral
+the functions of acolyte were exercised by a small boy, nephew of one
+of the beneficiaries of the Cathedral, who ended by paying for his
+education in the seminary. This little acolyte of half a century
+before was now a prince of the church, and the Cardinal Archbishop of
+Toledo. Old Tomasa and he had known each other as children, fighting
+over trifles in the upper cloister, or playing tricks on the beggars
+who sat at the Puerta del Mollete. The imposing Don Sebastian, whose
+look alone made the Chapter and all the clergy in the diocese tremble,
+became happy, fraternal and confidential, when now and then in the
+evenings he saw Tomasa. She was the only living reminder of his
+childhood in the Cathedral. The old woman would kiss his ring with
+great reverence, but very soon she would lapse into talking to him as
+one of her own family, often very nearly speaking to him in the second
+person. The cardinal, always surrounded by fear and adulation, often
+felt the necessity of the old woman's careless and frank conversation.
+The people belonging to the Cathedral declared that the Señora Tomasa
+was the only person who dared to tell the cardinal home-truths face to
+face, and the neighbours in the Claverias felt their pride flattered
+when they saw the prince of the church sweeping down the stone steps
+in his brilliant scarlet robes to sit in the arbour and gossip for
+a good hour with the old woman, while his attendants remained
+respectfully standing at the gate of the iron railings.
+
+Tomasa was not puffed up with this honour; to her this ecclesiastical
+prince was only the friend of her childhood, who had had a certain
+amount of good luck; and in the end, he was only Don Sebastian,
+without going any further into ceremonies and formulas of respect. But
+her family knew how to take advantage of this friendship, especially
+her son-in-law, "Virgin's Blue," a hypocrite, as the old woman
+declared, who would make money out of the very cobwebs of the
+Cathedral; an insatiable locust who, profiting by the friendship of
+the cardinal and his mother-in-law, went on continually obtaining
+fresh privileges, without the priests and sacristans daring to make
+the slightest protest, seeing him so well protected.
+
+Gabriel much enjoyed his aunt's talk. She was the only person born
+in the cloister who seemed to have freed herself from the soporific
+influence of the church. She loved the Cathedral, as being her ancient
+roof-tree, but she did not retain much respect for the saints in the
+chapels, nor for the human dignitaries who sat in the choir. She
+laughed with the happiness of a healthy and placid old woman, her
+seventy years being, as she said, quite free from any evil done to her
+neighbour. Her language was free and easy, like that of a woman who
+has seen much, and does not believe in human majesty or irreproachable
+virtues; but the bed-rock of her character was its tolerance, her
+compassion for all faults, but she Was indignant with those who
+attempted to hide them.
+
+"They are all men, Gabriel," she would say to her nephew, speaking of
+the clergy of the Cathedral. "Don Sebastian is only a man; all sinners
+who have much to answer for before God. They cannot be anything else,
+and so I forgive them. But believe me, nephew, I often feel inclined
+to laugh when I see the people kneeling before them. I believe in the
+Virgin of the Sagrario, and a little in God; but in these gentlemen!
+If you only knew them as I do! But, when all is said and done, we must
+all live, and the evil is not in having faults, but in attempting to
+hide them; playing a farce with the shamelessness of my son-in-law
+who, here as you see him, is as proud as a castle, beats his breast,
+kisses the ground like the Beatas,[1] and yet he is anxious for my
+death, thinking I have something laid away in my chest; he filches
+what he can from the Virgin's poor-box, steals the wax tapers, and
+plays tricks with what is paid for masses, and yet he would be in
+the street if it were not for me, who always think of my poor sick
+daughter and my poor little grandchildren."
+
+[Footnote 1: _Beata_--woman engaged in works of charity who wears the
+religious habit.]
+
+When Gabriel went down to see her in the garden, she always received
+him with the same salutation:
+
+"Hola, you ghost! but to-day you are looking better, you are being
+patched up. I believe your brother will pull you through with all his
+care."
+
+And then followed a comparison between her healthy and vigorous old
+age and his ruined youth, which was fighting so tenaciously against
+death.
+
+"Here you see my seventy years, and never an illness in all my life.
+Summer and winter I never hear four o'clock strike in bed, and all my
+teeth are as sound as in the days when Don Sebastian came in his red
+dress as server in the church and wanted to steal half my breakfast.
+You Lunas have always been delicate; your father, long before he was
+my age, could barely walk, and was always complaining of rheum and of
+the damp in this garden. Here am I in it constantly, and I feel just
+the same as when I am upstairs in the Claverias. We, the Villalpandos,
+are made of iron; for, of course, we are descended from that famous
+Villalpando who made the screen of the high altar, the custodia, and
+an innumerable quantity of other things. He really must have been a
+giant, to judge by the ease with which he twisted and moulded every
+sort of metal."
+
+Gabriel's ill-health awoke in her the deepest compassion, but all the
+same not quite free from malicious suggestions.
+
+"How much you must have amused yourself about the world, eh, nephew?
+But that war was your perdition; without it you would now have had
+your stall in the choir, and who knows if you might not have come to
+be another Don Sebastian. The truth is, that from his childhood no one
+spoke half as much about him in the seminary as they did of you, and
+he certainly was no prodigy of learning. But you saw the world, and
+you took a fancy to those countries where they say the ladies are
+very pretty, and wear hats as large as parasols. You are a monster of
+ugliness now, but you were very smart, though I, who am your aunt, say
+so. And now you have come back so lean and suffering! You must have
+lived very fast; who knows what you have done in the world--sly boots!
+And your poor mother, who thought you would be a saint! God have mercy
+on us! Don't deny it; you have done no good and I hate lies. You did
+right to enjoy yourself and to take advantage of every opportunity,
+but the misfortune is that you should have returned as you are, for it
+is pitiful to see you, but I have known a great many like you. I don't
+know what evil spirit possesses people belonging to the church, but
+once they throw themselves into life, they don't know where to stop,
+and they burn the candle at both ends till there is next to nothing
+left; many of them, like you, have passed through the seminary."
+
+One morning Gabriel asked a question of his aunt that he had been long
+thinking about, but that he had never before dared to put into words.
+He wanted to know all about his niece, Sagrario, and what had happened
+in his brother's house.
+
+"You who are so kind, aunt, you will tell me; everyone seems afraid to
+speak about it; even my nephew the Tato, who is such a chatterer
+and skins everyone in the Claverias, is silent when I ask him. What
+happened, aunt?"
+
+The old woman's face grew very sad.
+
+"A great misfortune, my son, such as was never known before in the
+upper cloister. The madness of the world came into the Cathedral, and
+made a nest in the most honoured, most ancient, and most respectable
+house in the Claverias. We are all good people, though we have never
+seen as much of the world as can be seen from a skylight, and live
+here as though wrapped in cotton wool, but you Lunas have always been
+the best among the best, to say nothing of us Villalpandos, who come
+close behind. Ay! if your mother could raise her head! If your father
+were alive! But I lay all the blame on your brother, as being weak and
+a simpleton, having that cursed blindness of all fathers, who ignore
+the danger in the hope of marrying their daughters well."
+
+"Well, but how was it, aunt? What passed between my niece and the
+cadet?"
+
+"What happens frequently in the world, but what has never happened
+here before. A thousand times I said to my brother, 'See, Esteban,
+this young gentleman is not for your daughter'--very sympathetic,
+very lively, and wearing the uniform of the Academy like no one else,
+leader of a group of the wildest cadets in all their escapades about
+the town, besides a son of a great family--wealthy people who did not
+allow him to come to Toledo with his purse empty. And she--the poor
+Sagrario, crazy with love, flattered by her cadet, as proud as
+possible when she walked on Sundays through the Zocodover and the
+Miradero between her mother and that handsome young lover, that all
+the girls in the place envied her. The beauty of your niece was
+the talk of all Toledo; the girls in the college for noble ladies,
+nicknamed her the 'sacristana' of the Cathedral; but the poor girl
+lived only for her cadet, and she seemed to devour him with her
+beautiful blue eyes. That idiot, your brother, let him come to the
+house, proud of the honour that was being done to the family. You
+know, Gabriel, the eternal blindness of those middle-class Toledans,
+who encourage with pride the courtship of one of their girls by a
+cadet, though they are perfectly well aware that it is most rare that
+one of these courtships should end in marriage. There is no woman here
+with the slightest pretence to a pretty face who has escaped without
+her mouthful of love for one of those red pantaloons. Even I remember
+when I was a girl how I would smooth my hair and pull out my dress
+when I heard the rattle of a sword on the flags of the cloister. It is
+a blindness that descends from mothers to daughters, and the worst
+is, that those cursed ones have all their cousins and their lovers in
+their own country, and to them they return as soon as they leave the
+Academy."
+
+"That is true, aunt, but what happened to my niece?"
+
+"When the young man passed out a lieutenant, his family decided he
+ought to return to Madrid. The farewells were like a scene at the
+theatre. I believe that even your brother and that simpleton his wife,
+who is now in glory, wept as though the lover were theirs. The young
+people sat for hours with clasped hands, gazing into each other's
+eyes, as though they would devour each other. He was the calmest; he
+promised to come every Sunday and to write every day, and at first he
+did so, but before long many weeks passed without his coming, and the
+postman came up less often to the Claverias, and at last did not come
+at all--it was ended, the young lieutenant found other amusements in
+Madrid. Your poor niece was like one demented; the colour in her face
+faded, she was no longer like the beautiful ripe apricot, with the
+soft skin that made you long to bite it. She wept like a Magdalen in
+every corner--and one day the foolish girl fled--and up to now--"
+
+"But where was she? Did no one search for her?"
+
+"Your brother seemed quite dazed. Poor Esteban! several nights we
+found him half dressed in the upper cloister, as stiff as a post,
+gazing up at the heavens with eyes that looked like glass. He became
+furious if any of us spoke of searching for the child; the scandal
+was past remedy, and he did not wish to aggravate it by her return,
+bringing back a lost one to the Holy Metropolitan Church, and to the
+honoured house of the Lunas. For more than a year everyone in the
+Claverias seemed crushed by this blow; it seemed as though we were all
+in mourning. You see, that such a thing should occur in the Cathedral
+where the years pass by in blessed peace without any of us saying
+one word louder than the other! And then I remembered you. It seemed
+impossible that from these Lunas, so quiet and steady, should have
+sprung a girl with sufficient pluck to run away to Madrid, where she
+had never been before, to join a man, without fear of God or of her
+own people. To whom could I liken the unhappy child? To her uncle, to
+Gabriel who passed for a saint, but who, nevertheless, after fighting
+like a wolf, wandered all over the world just like a gipsy."
+
+Gabriel made no protest at the conception his aunt had formed of his
+past.
+
+"And after her flight? What did you know about the child?"
+
+"At first a good deal, but latterly not a word. The two were living
+in Madrid together, peacefully and quietly, away from the world, as
+though they were man and wife. This lasted for a good while, and I,
+hearing about it, began to wonder if I had not been mistaken, and that
+the man we had blamed so much had repented and would end by marrying
+Sagrario. But at the end of the year everything was ended; he grew
+tired, and the family intervened, in order that the escapade should
+not cut short the career they had marked out for the young man. They
+even sought the aid of the police, to frighten the child, so that she
+should not molest the young officer in the first angry transports of
+her desertion. Afterwards--nothing certain is known. Now and again
+those who have gone to Madrid told me a little; some of them had seen
+her, but it would have been far better if they had not seen her. It is
+a disgrace, Gabriel; a dishonour for your family which is mine. This
+unhappy girl is the worst of the worst. I heard that she had been very
+ill, and I believe that she is so still. Just imagine, what a life!
+And for five years! What will have happened to the unfortunate girl!
+And to think that she is my sister's daughter!"
+
+The Señora Tomasa spoke with deep feeling.
+
+"Afterwards, Gabriel, you know what happened here; your poor
+sister-in-law died, we hardly knew why, it was only a matter of a few
+days; possibly she may have died of the shame, as she died saying that
+the fault was entirely hers. It broke one's heart to see the state
+your brother was in after all this. Esteban has never been good for
+much, and now after this affair of his daughter he seemed to become
+quite imbecile. Ay, nephew! I also have felt it greatly, even though
+you see me so happy, and so satisfied with life, every now and then
+the remembrance of that unhappy girl strikes me here, in my head, and
+I eat badly and sleep worse, thinking that a girl who, after all, is
+of our own blood, is wandering lost over the world, a plaything for
+men, without anyone sheltering her, as though she were all alone, as
+though she had no family."
+
+The Señora Tomasa wiped her eye with the point of her forefinger, her
+voice shook and the tears fell over her wrinkled old cheeks.
+
+"Aunt, you are very kind," said Gabriel, "but you ought to have
+searched more for this poor girl; you ought to have recovered her, to
+have saved her, to have brought her back here. We must be merciful to
+the weakness of others, especially when that other is one of our own
+flesh."
+
+"Ay, son! Who do you say it to? A thousand times I have thought this,
+but I was afraid of your brother. He is like a bit of dough, but he
+turns into a wild beast if you speak to him of his daughter. Even if
+we found her and brought her here he would not receive her; he would
+be as angry as if you were proposing some sacrilege to him. He could
+not calmly bear her presence in the house which was that of your
+forefathers. Besides, though he does not say so, he fears the scandal
+among the neighbours in the Claverias who know what had happened. This
+is the easiest part to arrange, as they would be very careful not to
+open their mouths when I am among them. But your brother frightens me,
+and I do not dare."
+
+"I will help you," said Gabriel firmly. "Let us seek for the child,
+and once we have found her I will undertake to manage Esteban."
+
+"It will be most difficult to find her. For a long time we have heard
+nothing. Doubtless those who do see her are careful to say nothing
+for fear of paining us. But I will try and find out--we will see,
+Gabriel--we will think about her."
+
+"And the canons? and the cardinal? Will they not oppose the return of
+the poor girl to the Claverias?"
+
+"Bah! The thing happened some time ago, and few of them will remember
+it; besides, we might place the girl in a convent, where she would be
+looked after and quiet, and cause scandal to no one."
+
+"No, not that, aunt. It is a cruel remedy. We have no right to try and
+save this poor girl at the cost of her liberty."
+
+"You are right," said the old woman, after a few moments' reflection.
+"I don't care much for these nuns myself. Where would she be more
+likely to follow a good example than in the heart of her own family?
+We will bring her back to this house if she repents and wishes for
+peace. And I will scratch out the eyes of the first woman in the
+Claverias who dares to say anything against her. My son-in-law will
+probably pretend to be scandalised, but I will settle him. It would be
+much better if he did not wink at the walks that Juanito, that
+cadet nephew of Don Sebastian's, takes in the cloister whenever my
+granddaughter stands at the door. The crackbrained fellow dreams of
+nothing less than becoming related to the cardinal, and seeing his
+daughter a general's wife; he might remember poor Sagrario. And as far
+as regards Don Sebastian, you may be quite easy, Gabriel. He will say
+nothing but that we ought to bring the child back--and what should he
+say? People ought to be charitable one to another, and none more than
+they; for after all, Gabriel, believe me--they are only men, nothing
+but men!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+The people of the Primacy always received with obstinate silence the
+slightest allusion to the reigning prelate. It was a traditional
+custom in the Claverias, and Gabriel remembered to have noticed the
+same in his childhood.
+
+If they spoke of the preceding archbishop, these people, so used to
+grumbling, like all those who live in solitude, would loose their
+tongues and comment on his history and his defects. There was nothing
+to fear from a dead prelate, and besides, it was an indirect praise to
+the living archbishop and his favourites to speak ill of the defunct.
+But if during the conversation the name of His reigning Eminence
+arose, they were all silent, raising their hands to their caps to
+salute, as though the prince of the church were able to see them from
+the neighbouring palace.
+
+Gabriel, listening to his companions of the upper cloister, remembered
+the funeral judgment of the Egyptians. In the Primacy no one dared to
+speak the truth about the prelates, or to discuss their faults till
+death had taken possession of them.
+
+The most that they dared to do was to comment on the disagreements
+among the canons, to compare their lists of those who saluted one
+another in the choir, or who glared at one another between versicle
+and antiphon like mad dogs ready to fly at one another, or to speak
+with wonder about a certain polemic discussed by the Doctoral and the
+Obrero in the Catholic papers in Madrid, which had lasted for three
+years, as to whether the deluge was partial or universal; answering
+each other's articles with an interval of four months.
+
+A group of friends had collected round Gabriel. They sought him,
+feeling the necessity of his presence, experiencing that attraction
+exercised by those who are born to be leaders of men even though they
+remain silent. In the evenings they would meet in the dwelling of the
+bell-ringer, or when it was fine weather they would go out into the
+gallery above the Puerta del Perdon. In the mornings the assembly
+would be in the house of the shoemaker who mended the giants, a yellow
+little man, who suffered from continual pains in his head, which
+obliged him to wear sundry coloured handkerchiefs tied round his head
+in the fashion of a turban.
+
+He was the poorest in all the Claverias; he had no appointment, and
+mended the giants without any remuneration in the hopes of succeeding
+to the first vacant place, feeling very grateful to those gentlemen of
+the Chapter who gave him his house rent free, on account of his wife
+being the daughter of a former old servant of the church. The smell
+of the paste and of the damp floor infected his house with the rank
+atmosphere of poverty. A hopeless fecundity aggravated this poverty;
+his sad, placid wife with her big yellow eyes appeared every year with
+a new baby tugging at her flabby breast, and several children crept
+along the cloister walls, dull and inert with hunger, with enormous
+heads and thin necks, always sickly, though none of them managed to
+die; afflicted by all the pains of anaemia, by boils that arose and
+vanished on their faces, and watery eruptions covering their hands.
+The shoemaker worked for the shops in the town, without, however,
+earning much money. From the rising of the sun one could hear the
+sound of his hammer in the cloister. This sole evidence of profane
+work attracted all the unoccupied to the miserable and evil-smelling
+dwelling. Mariano, the Tato, and a verger who also lived in the
+cloister, were those who most frequently met Gabriel, seated on the
+shoemaker's ragged and broken chairs, so low that one could touch the
+floor of red and dusty bricks with one's hands.
+
+Often the bell-ringer would run to his tower to ring the usual
+bells, but his vacant place would be immediately occupied by an old
+organ-blower, or some of the servants from the sacristy, all attracted
+by what they heard of these meetings of the lower servants of the
+Primacy. The object of the assembly was to listen to Gabriel. The
+revolutionary wished to keep silence, and listened absently to their
+grumblings at the daily round of worship; but his friends longed to
+hear about those countries in which he had travelled, with all the
+curiosity of people who lived confined and isolated; listening to his
+descriptions of the beauties of Paris and the grandeur of London they
+would open their eyes like children listening to a fairy tale.
+
+The shoemaker with his head bent, never ceasing his work, listened
+attentively to the recital of such marvels; when Gabriel was silent
+they all agreed on one point, those cities must be far more beautiful
+than Madrid; and just think how beautiful Madrid was! Even the
+shoemaker's wife, standing in the corner forgetful of her sickly
+children, would listen to Luna with wonder, her face enlivened by a
+feeble smile, which showed the woman through the animal resigned to
+misery, when Luna described the luxury of the women in foreign parts.
+
+All these servants of the church felt their narrowed and dulled minds
+stirred by these descriptions of a distant world that they were never
+likely to see; the splendours of modern civilisation touched them much
+more nearly than the beauties of heaven as described in the sermons,
+and in the pungent and dusty atmosphere of the dirty little house they
+would see unrolled before their mind's eye beautiful and fantastic
+cities, and they would ask questions in all innocence as to the food
+and habits of those distant people, as though they believed them
+beings of a different species.
+
+Towards evening, at the hour of the choir, when the shoemaker was
+working alone, Gabriel, tired of the monotonous silence of the
+cloister, would go down into the church.
+
+His brother, in a woollen cloak with a white neck band, and a staff as
+long as an ancient alguacil's, stood as sentry in the crossways, to
+prevent the inquisitive passing between the choir and the high altar.
+
+Two tablets of old gold with Gothic letters, hung on to one of the
+pilasters, set forth that anyone talking in a loud voice or making
+signs in the church would be excommunicated; but this menace of former
+centuries failed to impress the few people who came to vespers and
+gossiped behind one of the pillars with some of the church servants.
+The evening light, filtering through the stained glass, threw on the
+pavement great patches of colour, and the priests as they walked
+over this carpet of light would appear green or red according to the
+colours flashed from the windows.
+
+In the choir the canons sang for themselves only in the emptiness of
+the church; the shutting of the iron gates of the screen, opened to
+admit some late-coming priest, echoed like explosions throughout the
+building, and above the choir the organ joined in at times between the
+plain song, but it sounded lazily, timidly, as though from necessity,
+and seemed to lament its feebleness in the gathering twilight.
+
+Gabriel had not completed the round of the Cathedral before he was
+joined by his nephew, the Perrero, who left his conversation with
+the servers and acolytes, and with the errand boy belonging to the
+Secretary of the Chapter, whose fixed seat was at the door of the
+Chapter-house. Luna was always very much diverted by the pranks of the
+Tato, and the confidence and carelessness with which he moved about
+the temple, as though having been born in it deprived him of all
+feeling of respect The entry of a dog into the nave caused great
+excitement.
+
+"Uncle," said he to Luna, "you shall see how I can open my cloak."
+
+Seizing the two ends of his garment he advanced towards the dog with
+the contortions and bounds of a wrestler; the animal, knowing this of
+old, endeavoured to escape through the nearest door, but the Tato,
+cutting off his retreat, drove him into the nave, and, pretending to
+pursue him, drove him from chapel to chapel, finally rounding him up
+where he could give him some good sound whacks. The dismal howlings
+disturbed the singing of the canons, and the Tato laughed more than
+ever to see behind the iron railing of the choir, the angry gesture of
+the good Esteban threatening him with his wooden staff.
+
+"Uncle," said the depraved Perrero one evening, "you, who think you
+know the Cathedral so well, have you ever seen the lively things in
+it?"
+
+The wink of his eye, and the gesture accompanying the words showed
+that the things might very well be more than lively.
+
+"I am always very much interested," he went on, "with the jokes the
+ancients allowed themselves. Come along, uncle, it will amuse you for
+a little; you, like all those who think they know the Cathedral, will
+have passed many times by these things without noticing them."
+
+Going along the outside of the choir, the Tato led Gabriel to the
+front opposite the door del Perdon. Under the great medallion, which
+serves as a back to the Mount Tabor, the work of Berruguete, opens the
+little chapel of the Virgin of the Star. "Look well at that image,
+uncle. Is there another like it in all the world? She is a courtezan,
+a siren who would drive men mad if she only fluttered her eyelids."
+
+For Gabriel this was no new discovery; from his childhood he had known
+that beautiful and sensual figure, with its worldly smile, its rounded
+outlines, and its eyes with their expression of wanton gaiety as
+though she were just going to dance.
+
+The child in her arms was also laughing and placing his hand on the
+bosom of the beautiful woman, as though he intended to tear the
+covering from her breast. The image of painted stone, stuffed and
+gilt, wore a blue mantle strewn with stars, from whence its name.
+
+"Even you, who have read so much, uncle, may possibly not know the
+history of this chapel, which is far more ancient than the Cathedral.
+The woolstaplers, carders, and weavers of Toledo had their patroness
+here long before the church was built, and they only gave up their
+right to the ground on the condition that they should be entire
+masters of the chapel, and do in it whatever they pleased and in all
+this piece of the Cathedral as far as those nearest pillars. Oh! the
+trouble this wrought! On the days they held their feasts to the Virgin
+they never paid any heed to the canons in the choir, and they greatly
+disturbed all the offices with 'rabeles,'[1] lutes and disorderly
+songs. If the canons begged them to be silent, they replied that it
+was they in the choir who ought to keep silence, considering that
+they were in their own chapel, which was far more ancient than the
+Cathedral. Did you know this, uncle?"
+
+[Footnote 1: An ancient instrument with three strings, played with a
+bow.]
+
+"Yes, I remember it now. The Archbishop Valero Loza brought a suit
+against them at the beginning of the eighteenth century; you can see
+his tomb at the foot of the altar. He lost his suit, and died from
+disappointment. He desired to be buried in that place, so that the
+insolent wool merchants should trample on him in death, even as
+they had vanquished him in his lifetime. The haughtiness of these
+ecclesiastical princes drove them to the proudest humility. But is
+this all you wished to show me?"
+
+"You shall see better things than this. Let us say good-bye to the
+Virgin. But do look at her! What a face! What alluring eyes! The
+beautiful woman! I spend hours looking at her; she is my sweetheart.
+Oh! the many nights I have dreamt of her."
+
+They walked on a little towards the great doorway of the Cathedral, so
+as to obtain a better view of the exterior face of the choir. Above
+the three hollows or chapels that pierce it runs a frieze of ancient
+relievos, the work of some obscure mediaeval artist. Gabriel
+recognised these coarse sculptures as being contemporaneous with the
+Puerta del Reloj, and by far the most ancient work in the Cathedral.
+
+"Look you, in the first medallion Adam and Eve are as naked as worms;
+but the Lord drives them out of Paradise, and they are obliged to
+dress themselves to appear in the world; and see what they do directly
+they get their clothes. But look at the fifth medallion on our right
+hand; the old gossip who cut that had a lively turn of mind."
+
+Gabriel looked for the first time attentively at these forgotten
+sculptures. They were carved with all the naturalistic simplicity
+of the Middle Ages, with all the directness with which the artists
+represented their profane conceptions, with the desire to perpetuate
+the triumph of the flesh in some ignored corner of the mystical
+buildings, in order to testify that human life was not dead.
+
+The Tato was delighted at the surprise on his uncle's face.
+
+"Eh! what do you think of that? I discovered it wandering about the
+church. The canons sing every day on the other side of this wall
+without ever suspecting what gay doings they have over their heads.
+And the stained glass, uncle, look at it well. At first so many
+colours blind one and the forms are indistinct; besides, the lead cuts
+the figures and it is difficult to make out anything, but I know them
+to my fingers' ends. They are stories, things of their own times, that
+these glass-workers painted; the intrigues have been forgotten, and no
+one has disentangled them."
+
+He pointed to the windows of the second nave, through which the
+evening light was shining with a ruddy glow.
+
+"Look up there," went on the Perrero. "A gallant in a red cape and
+sword mounts by a rope ladder; at the window a nun is waiting for him.
+It seems something like the Don Juan Tenorio that they represent at
+All Saints'. Further on, you see those two in bed, and people knocking
+at the door. They must be the same pair of birds with the family
+surprising them. Then in the next window--look well at it--lovers,
+with scarcely any clothes beyond bare skin. These things belong to the
+days when people had no shame, when they went with their heads covered
+and the rest of their flesh bare."
+
+Gabriel smiled at the whimsical ideas with which ancient art inspired
+the Perrero.
+
+"But in the choir, uncle, there is also something to see. Let us go
+there; the service is over and the canons are coming out."
+
+Luna felt overpowered by admiration as he always did on entering the
+choir. Those magnificent stalls, the work on one side of Philip of
+Burgundy, and on the other side of Berruguete, bewildered him with
+their profusion of marbles, jaspers, gildings, statues and medallions.
+It was the genius of Michael Angelo reviving in the Toledan Cathedral.
+
+The Perrero examined the lower stalls, ferreting out among the Gothic
+relievos the discoveries enjoyed by his unwholesome curiosity. This
+first row of stalls, almost on a level with the ground, were occupied
+by the inferior clergy, and were anterior by half a century to the
+upper stalls; but in those fifty years art had made a great stride,
+from the hard and rigid Gothic to the flowing lines and good taste of
+the Renaissance. They had been carved by Maestre Rodrigo at the time
+when Christian Spain, roused to enthusiasm, was helping the Catholic
+kings with all its strength to complete the reconquest. On the backs
+of the stalls, and on the entablature of the frieze fifty-four carved
+pictures represented the principal incidents of the conquest of
+Granada.
+
+The Tato did not look at these carvings of walnut or oak, with troops
+of horsemen and companies of soldiers scaling the walls of Moorish
+towns. What interested him most were the arms of the stalls, the
+handrails of the steps leading to the upper seats, and the salients
+dividing the stalls which served to rest the head, all covered with
+animals, grotesque beings, dogs, monkeys, big birds, friars, and
+little birds, all in difficult postures, some beautiful, some obscene.
+Hogs and frogs wound themselves up together in inextricable tangles,
+monkeys with ignoble gestures were mixed up with interlaced birds in
+never ending variety--it was a world of caricatures of voluptuousness,
+of monkey-like actions and satirical suggestions, in which appeared
+carnal passion with the most grotesque animal grimaces.
+
+"Look here, uncle. Is not this capital--it is far the best."
+
+And the Tato showed Gabriel the little chubby figure of a preaching
+friar with enormous donkey's ears.
+
+When they came out of the choir Gabriel spied the Chapel-master close
+to the fresco of Saint Christopher. He had just emerged from a little
+door close to the giant, which led by a circular staircase to the
+musical archives. He was carrying under his arm a big book with dusty
+pages which he showed to Gabriel.
+
+"I am taking it upstairs. You shall hear something out of it; it is
+worth the trouble."
+
+And turning his eyes from the book to the little door close by he
+exclaimed:
+
+"Ay! these archives, Gabriel, how it pains one! Each time I visit them
+I come out sadder. The vandals have been at work there; nearly all the
+music books have pages torn out, pieces cut out wherever there was an
+illuminated letter, a vignette or anything pretty. The señor canons
+do not care for music, neither do they understand it, and they are
+incapable of devoting a few pesetas so that it might be heard on
+festival days. It is quite enough for them to walk in procession to
+some piece of Rossini's; and as far as regards the organ, all they
+care about is that it must play slowly, very slowly. The slower it
+plays, the more religious they think it, even though the organist may
+be playing a Habanera."
+
+He continued looking at the little door with melancholy eyes as though
+he were ready to weep over the decay of music.
+
+"In there, Gabriel, are many beautiful works, that ought not to be
+forgotten as long as art lives in the world. In profane music we have
+not been great, but believe me that Spain has been far otherwise with
+religious authors. That is, provided that profane music and religious
+music really exist, which I doubt; for me there is only--music--and I
+think he will be a clever man who draws the line where one ends and
+where the other begins. Behind this wall of Saint Christopher's, the
+works of all the great Spanish musicians sleep, mutilated and covered
+with dust. Perhaps it is better they do sleep, when you hear what is
+sung in this choir! Here you will find Christobal Morales, who three
+hundred years ago was Chapel-master here, and began the reform of
+music twenty years before Palestrina. In Rome he shares the glory
+with the famous master; his portrait is in the Vatican, and his
+lamentations, his motets, and his Magnificat rest here, forgotten for
+centuries. And Victoria? Do you know him? Another of the same period;
+his jealous contemporaries called him 'Palestrina's monkey' taking
+all his works to be imitations, in consequence of his long sojourn in
+Rome; but, believe me, instead of being plagiarisms from the Italian,
+they are far superior. Here also is Rivera, a Toledan master who no
+one remembers, but in the archives there is a whole volume of his
+masses, and Romero de Avila, who more than anyone had studied the
+Muzarabé chants, and Ramos de Pareja, not the least musician of
+the fifteenth century, who wrote in Bologna his book 'De Musica
+Tractatus,' and destroyed the ancient system of Guido de Arezzo,
+discovering the tonality of sound; and the Monk Urena, who added the
+note 'si' to the scale, and Javier Garcia, who in the last century
+reformed music, leading it towards Italy (God forgive him!), a beaten
+track from which we have not yet emerged; and Nebra, the great
+organist of Carlos III., who, a century before Wagner was born, used
+musical discords. When he wrote the Requiem for the funeral of Dona
+Barbara di Braganza, foreseeing the surprise and difficulties that the
+musicians and singers would meet with in the innovations in his score,
+he wrote on the margin, 'This is to give notice that there are no
+mistakes in the score.' His Litany became so celebrated that it was
+forbidden to copy it, under pain of excommunication; but I think
+to-day the persons who remember it would be the excommunicated.
+Believe me, Gabriel, these archives are a pantheon of great men, but a
+pantheon, unluckily, from which no one emerges."
+
+Then he added, lowering his voice:
+
+"The Church has never been a great lover of music. To feel and
+understand it you must be born a musician, and you know well enough
+that these gentlemen who are paid to sing in the choir know nothing
+about music. When I see you, Gabriel, smiling at religious things,
+I guess by your manner how much you conceal, and I am sure you are
+right. I was interested to know the history of music in the Church.
+I have followed step by step the long Calvary of this unhappy art,
+carrying the cross of worship uphill through the long centuries. You
+have heard people often talk of religious music, as if it were a thing
+apart, believed in by the Church; but it is all a lie, for religious
+music does not exist."
+
+The Perrero had moved off when he heard that the Chapel-master, whose
+loquacity was indefatigable when he spoke of his art, had started on
+the theme of music. He had formed his own opinion of Don Luis and told
+it to everyone in the upper cloister. He was a simpleton who only knew
+how to play melancholy ditties on his harmonium, without ever thinking
+of enlivening the poor people in the Claverias by playing something to
+which they could dance, as the niece of Silver Stick had asked him.
+
+The priest and Gabriel walked slowly through the silent naves talking
+the while; the only people to be seen were a group of the household at
+the door of the sacristy, and two women kneeling before the railing
+of the high altar praying aloud. The early twilight of the winter
+evenings was beginning to darken the Cathedral, and the first bats
+were coming down from the vaulting and fluttering through the columns.
+
+"Ecclesiastical music," said the artist, "is a real anarchy; but in
+the Church everything is anarchy. I believe there is a great deal to
+be said for the unity of the Catholic worship throughout the world.
+When Christianity began to form itself into a religion it did not
+invent even a single bad melody; it borrowed its hymns and the manner
+of singing them from the Jews, a primitive and barbarous music that
+would shock our ears if we heard it now. Out of Palestine, and where
+there were no Jews, the earliest Christian poets--Saint Ambrose,
+Prudencio and others--adopted their new hymns and psalms to the
+popular songs that were then in vogue in the Roman world, or possibly
+to Greek music. It seems as though that word 'Greek music' ought to
+mean a great deal; is it not so, Gabriel? The Greeks were so great in
+their poetry and in the plastic arts that anything that bears their
+name would seem to be surrounded by an atmosphere of undying beauty.
+But it is not so: the march of the arts has not been parallel in human
+life; when sculpture had its Phidias, and had reached its climax,
+painting had hardly passed that rudimentary stage that we see in
+Pompeii, and music was only a childish babbling. Writing could not
+perpetuate music, for there seemed as many musical styles as there
+were peoples, and everything was left to the judgment of the
+executant. You could not fix on parchment what mouths and instruments
+played, and so progress was impossible. For this reason, though there
+was a Renaissance for sculpture, for painting, for architecture, at
+the revival of the arts after the Middle Ages, music was found in the
+same elementary stage in which it was at the break-up of the ancient
+world."
+
+Gabriel nodded his head assenting to the words of the Chapel-master.
+
+"This was the first Christian music," continued Don Luis. "Confided
+to tradition and transmitted orally, the religious songs soon became
+disfigured and corrupt. In every church they sang in a different way,
+and religious music became a hotch-potch. The mystics leaned to
+rigid unity, and in the sixth century Saint Gregory published his
+'Antifonario,' a collection of all liturgic melodies, purifying them
+according to his ideas. They were a mixture of two elements: the
+Greek, rather oriental and florid, very much like the present debased
+style; and the grave and rough Roman. The notes were expressed
+by letters, the Phrygian and Lydian styles followed, and so the
+intricacies of Greek music continued though much altered, with
+fioriture, rests, and breathing pauses. The collection became lost,
+and many who think a return to the old style would be best, much
+regret it. To judge by the fragments that remain, if such music was
+now executed it would have very little that was religious about it, as
+we understand religion in art to-day; it would more resemble the songs
+of the Moors, or the Chinese, or those of some schismatic Greeks who
+still use the ancient liturgies. The harp was the principal instrument
+in the churches till the organ appeared in the tenth century, a rough
+and barbarous instrument that had to be played with blows, and was
+supplied with wind from inflated skins. Guido di Arezzo made a musical
+rule on the basis of Gregory's collection, and this was sufficient for
+the invention of the pentagramma[1] to be assigned to the Benedictine.
+They continued to use the letters of Boccio and Saint Gregory as
+notes, but they placed them on lines of three different colours. The
+imbroglio continued; to learn music badly took twelve years, and then
+they could not manage that singers from different towns could read
+from the same score. Saint Bernard, dry and austere as his times,
+ridiculed this music as not being solemn enough; he was a man
+antagonistic to all art; he would have liked to see the churches
+dismantled and without any architectural adornments; and the slower
+the music was, the better it seemed to him. He was the father of plain
+song, and he maintained that the more drawn out the music was, the
+more religious it became. But in the thirteenth century Christians
+found this chant most wearisome. The cathedrals in those days were the
+point of attraction: the theatre, the centre of all life. People went
+to the church to pray to God and to amuse themselves, forgetting for
+the moment all the wars and the violence and confusion outside. Once
+again popular music came into the churches, and you could hear intoned
+in the cathedrals all the songs most in vogue, and which were often
+obscene. The people took part in the religious music, singing in
+different tones, each one as seemed best to him, and these were the
+first beginnings of concerted singing. In those days religion was
+joyful, popular--democratic as you would say, Gabriel; there was
+no Inquisition, nor suspicion of heresy to embitter the soul with
+fanaticism and fear. All the coarse wind and stringed instruments that
+the artisans had in the towns, or the labourers in the fields, came
+into the churches, and the organ was accompanied by violas, violins,
+bagpipes, flutes, guitars and lutes. The plain song was the
+established liturgy almost throughout Europe; but the people disliked
+it, and interspersed it with songs, and at the great festivals,
+religious hymns were sung, adapted to the popular melodies then in
+fashion, such as 'The song of the armed man,' 'Morencia, give me a
+kiss,' 'I know not what confuses me,' 'Weep for me, lady,' 'Bad luck
+to him who married you,' and others in the same style. And Rome, you
+will ask, and the Church? What did it say about such disorders? The
+Church lived without artistic perception: it never had any. What are
+the boundaries between religious and profane music? From the sixteenth
+to the seventeenth century all critics have asked themselves this
+question, but the Church let them talk, accepting everything without
+remark. Now and again Rome made itself heard by a Papal bull, to which
+no one paid any attention, because the Pontiff was incapable of saying
+this is religious art, and the other is profane. Palestrina was
+entrusted with the task of reforming church music; the Pope showed
+himself disposed not to leave anything but plain song, and to suppress
+even that if necessary. The mass of Papa Marcelo and other melodies
+was the result of this, but things did not advance much. It was
+necessary in order that music should be purified inside the Church
+that the great secular musical movement should begin with the Italian
+Monteverde, with the Frenchman Rameau, and with the Germans Sebastian
+Bach and Handel; what splendid times, Gabriel! And just think what
+genius followed: Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Mehül, Boieldieu, and, above
+all, our good friend Beethoven."
+
+[Footnote 1: The stave.]
+
+The Chapel-master was silent for a little as though the name of his
+idol imposed on him a religious silence. Presently he continued.
+
+"All this avalanche of art passed over the Church, and she, according
+to her habit, appropriated everything that was most to her taste; in
+any country the Catholic religion adopted the music most in accordance
+with its traditions--in Spain we have been saturated with the Italian
+style since the days of Palestrina, and German or French music never
+came to us. We were first of all fuguists and contrapuntists; but
+after the 'Stabat Mater' of Rossini we felt the attraction of
+theatrical melody so strongly that we have never wished to taste a
+fresh dish. Religious music in Spain has run parallel with Italian
+opera, a thing of which the canons are ignorant; they would be furious
+if at the mass you played them anything by Beethoven, which they would
+consider profane, but they listen with mystic unction to fragments
+which have gone the round of all the theatres in Italy. And about the
+plain song, you will ask? The plain song had its nest in this Primacy.
+It was preserved here for centuries and purified; all the best was
+collected in Toledo, and from the books in this Cathedral have gone
+forth the chorales of all the churches in Spain and America. Poor
+plain song! it has long been dead. You see for yourself, Gabriel, who
+comes to the Cathedral at the hour of the choir? No one, absolutely no
+one. The matins are recited, and all the offices are intoned in the
+midst of perfect solitude. The people who still believe know nothing
+of the liturgy; they do not prize it and have forgotten all about it;
+they are only attracted by the novenas, the triduos and retreats, all
+that is termed tolerated and extra-liturgic worship. The Jesuits, with
+their cunning, guessed that they must give their services a theatrical
+attraction, and for this reason their churches--gilt, carpeted, and
+decked with flowers like dressing-rooms--are always full, whereas the
+old cathedrals are as empty as tombs. They have not proclaimed the
+necessity for this reform aloud, but they have put it into practice
+by abolishing the singing in Latin, and substituting all sorts of
+romances and songs. In the churches, with the exception of the
+Tantum-ergo, nothing is sung in Latin, sermons and hymns are in the
+language of the country, just as in a Protestant church. For the mass
+of devout people, who believe without thinking, religions only differ
+in their exterior forms. It would be impossible to consign such a
+multitude to the bonfires, or that half Europe should again be in the
+clutches of the thirty years' war, or that the Popes should launch
+excommunication after excommunication, only to find in the end that
+the only difference between a Catholic or an evangelical church is a
+few images and a few wax tapers, but that the worship in both is the
+same. But we must go, Gabriel; they are going to lock up."
+
+The bell-ringer was hurrying through the naves, shaking his bunch
+of keys and startling the bats which were becoming more and more
+numerous. The two devout women had disappeared; no one remained in the
+Cathedral save Gabriel and the Chapel-master. From the farther end of
+the nave were coming the night watchmen, to take up their charge till
+the following morning, preceded by the dog.
+
+The two friends went out into the cloister, guided through the dusk by
+the rich glow from the stained glass windows; outside, the last rays
+of the sun were touching both the garden and the cloister of the
+Claverias with crimson.
+
+"I repeat," continued the musical priest, looking back at the door
+from which they had come out, "that in there they do not love music
+and they do not understand it. The Church has only rendered one
+service to music, and that without wishing it: they have been obliged
+to have instrumentalists and vocalists for the services, and that
+made them support the chapels and choir-schools that have served for
+musical education in default of schools. We who represent art in the
+cathedrals are as much despised as were the minstrels in the old
+chapels, players of the clarion and bassoon. For the canons, all that
+sleeps in the musical archives is so much Greek, and we, the artistic
+priests, form a race apart, and are only just a step above the
+sacristans. The Chapel-master, the organist, the tenor, contralto, and
+the bass form the chapel. We are clergy like the canons, we become
+beneficiaries by appointment, we have studied religious science as
+they have, and, moreover, we are musicians; but in spite of this
+we receive less than half the salary of a canon, and to remind us
+constantly of our inferior position we have to sit in the lower
+stalls. We, the only ones in the choir who know anything about music,
+have to occupy the lowest places. The precentor is by right the chief
+of the singers, and the precentor is a canon named by Rome without
+competition, probably not knowing a note of the pentagramma. Oh! the
+anarchy, friend Gabriel! Oh! the contempt of the Church for music
+which has always been its slave and never its daughter! In many
+convents of nuns the organist and the singers are despised and called
+sergeants. There seems money for everything in the Church: the
+revenues of the building are ample for everything except for music.
+The canons look upon us as fools masking in ecclesiastical robes. When
+the feast of Corpus or that of the Virgin of the Sagrario comes round,
+and I dream of a fine mass worthy of the Cathedral, the Canon Obrero
+attacks me and begs for something Italian and simple, an affair of
+half-a-dozen musicians that I must pick up in the town, and then I
+have to conduct a few bungling musicians, raging to hear how the
+miserable orchestra sounds under these vaults, which were built for
+something grander. In the end, friend Luna, it is dead, quite dead."
+
+The complaint of the Chapel-master did not surprise Gabriel. Everyone
+in the Cathedral complained of the miserable and sordid way in which
+the services were conducted. Some, like the Silver Stick, declared
+that it was due to the impiety of the age, others, like the musician,
+made that same religion responsible, but they did not dare to say so
+aloud. Respect to the Church and to the higher powers, instilled since
+their childhood, kept the population of the Cathedral silent. The
+greater part of the servitors of the Church were living morally in the
+sixteenth century, in an atmosphere of servility and superstitious
+fear of their superiors, feeling the injustice of their position, but
+without daring to give form, even in their thoughts, to their vague
+notions of protest.
+
+Only at night, in the silence of the upper cloister, in the privacy
+of those families who were born and died among the stones of the
+Cathedral, did they dare to repeat the murmurs of the Church,
+the interminable tangle of tattle which grew over the monotonous
+ecclesiastical existence, the complaints of the canons against His
+Eminence, and what the cardinal said about the Chapter, an underground
+war which was reproduced at every archiepiscopal elevation, intrigues
+and heart-burnings of celibates, embittered by ambition and
+favouritism, primitive hatreds that reminded one of the time when the
+clergy elected their own prelates and ruled over them, instead of
+groaning as now under the iron rule of the archbishop's will.
+
+Everyone in the cloister knew of these quarrels, and the remarks that
+the canons allowed themselves to make in the sacristy reached their
+ears; but these humble servitors kept silence when these murmurs were
+repeated in their presence, fearing to be reported by their neighbour,
+who possibly might covet their post. It was the terror of the
+Inquisition still alive amidst this little stagnant world.
+
+The Perrero was the only one who seemed to have no fear, and who spoke
+openly about the Chapter and the cardinal. What did it matter to him!
+Possibly he may have wished to be turned out of "that den" to give
+himself up to his favourite pursuit, going to the bull-ring without
+any objections from the household. Moreover, he delighted in speaking
+evil of the gentlemen of the Chapter, who had given him more than one
+cuff when he was an acolyte.
+
+He gave nicknames to all the canons, and pointing them out one by one
+to Gabriel, related the most intimate secrets of their lives. He knew
+the houses where each prebendary passed the evening after the choir
+time, and the names of all the ladies and nuns who crimped their
+surplices, and could tell of the fierce and deadly rivalries between
+these admirers of the Chapter, endeavouring to vanquish each other
+by the exquisite way in which they washed and ironed the canonical
+batiste. As the choir were coming out he pointed out the precentor, an
+obese prebendary with his face covered with red spots.
+
+"Look at him, uncle," he said to Gabriel, "that rash on his face is a
+record of the past. He was a great gallant, never fixing himself long
+anywhere. The other evening he said to a chaplain of the chapel of the
+kings, 'Those captain professors at the Academy think that in point
+of women they cull the best in Toledo, but where is the Church! The
+seculars must lower their flag!'"
+
+He laughed as he pointed out a group of young priests, carefully
+shaved, with their cheeks blue and shining, dressed in silk mantles
+that diffused a strong scent of musk as they moved. These were the
+dandies of the Chapter, the young canons, who often made journeys to
+Madrid to confess their patronesses--ancient marchionesses who, by
+dint of influence, had gained for them a seat in the choir. At the
+Puerta del Mollete they stopped a few moments to arrange the folds of
+their cloaks before they went into the street.
+
+"They are going out to court the ladies," said the Tato. "Brrrum! make
+way for Don Juan Tenorio!"
+
+When they had watched all the canons come out, the Perrero spoke to
+his uncle about the cardinal.
+
+"In these days he is given over to the fiends. No one in the palace
+can manage him; his internal complaint nearly drives him mad."
+
+"But is it true he is so very ill?" asked Gabriel.
+
+"Everyone says so; ask your Aunt Tomasa. They say they are such great
+friends because she makes a lotion that calms him like an angel's
+hand. In the morning when he wakes in a bad temper all the palace
+trembles, and very soon all the diocese. He is a good man, but when
+the mad dog bites him everyone must fly. I have seen him on pontifical
+days wearing his mitre, looking at us with such eyes, as though he
+were ready to seize his crozier and belabour us all with it, from what
+the aunt says--if he did not drink!"
+
+"Then the complaints of the Chapter are true."
+
+"He does not get drunk. No, señor, give the devil his due, but a glass
+now, and another presently, and a third if a friend comes to see him,
+must obfuscate him. It is a habit he brought with him from Andalusia,
+where he was bishop before coming here. But nothing common, a fine and
+refreshing drink, only to keep up his strength, nothing more. And the
+wine is first class, uncle; I know it from one of his household. He
+gives as much as fifty duros the arroba![1] They keep him the best in
+all la Mancha, a vintage from the time of the French, a syrup that
+warms the stomach and tempers it as though it were an organ. From what
+the Aunt Tomasa says, the doctors patch him up, and then he does his
+best to get ill again with this glorious wine."
+
+[Footnote 1: _Arroba_--Measure containing thirty-two pints.]
+
+The Tato, in the midst of his cynical mockery, still showed a regard
+for the prelate.
+
+"Do not believe, uncle, that he is a nonentity. Apart from his bad
+temper he is really a strong man, even as you see him here, with his
+small white and shining head like a baby's, that seems even smaller
+above his immense corporation; but it carries something in it! He has
+spoken a great deal in Madrid, and all the newspapers took as much
+notice of him as though he were Guerra. His wisdom finds a remedy for
+everything. If they speak of the poverty and misery in the world, he
+sings the old song: bread for the poor, charity from the rich, and
+much Christian doctrine for everyone; that men ought not to quarrel
+because I have more than you, and there ought to be patience and
+decency in the world, for that is what is wanting. What nonsense, eh,
+uncle? You laugh at it? But His Eminence's recipe rather pleases me,
+especially that about the bread; but the cursed Catechism is in fault
+as we have all learnt from our childhood."
+
+The Perrero grew quite excited speaking about his prince:
+
+"And as a man? A masterful man; no hypocrisy about him, nor hiding his
+head. Everyone knows he was a soldier in his younger days. The Aunt
+Tomasa remembers seeing him in the cloister with his helmet with
+horse-hair crest, his sergeant's epaulets, and his rattling broad
+sword. He is not afraid of anything, is not easily scandalised, and
+does not make a fuss about things. Last year a Portuguese lady arrived
+here, who nearly drove all the cadets out of their senses with her
+silk stockings and her big hats. You know Juanito, and you are aware
+that he is the son of a nephew of His Eminence who died some years
+ago. Well, the youngster paraded up and down the Zocodover in his
+uniform with the Portuguese lady on his arm to arouse the jealousy
+of his companions in the Academy. One day the young woman presented
+herself at the palace, and the servants, seeing her so beautifully
+dressed, made no difficulty about letting her in, thinking she was
+some lady from Madrid. His Eminence received her with a paternal
+smile, and listened to her without winking. A friend of mine, one of
+the pages who was present, told me about it. She came to complain to
+the cardinal that his nephew, the cadet, had entertained her for two
+days without giving her a farthing. His Eminence smiled modestly:
+'Lady, the Church is poor, but I do not wish that for this misfortune
+the good name of the family should suffer. Take this and it will be
+remedied,' and he handed her two duros. The Portuguese, encouraged by
+her good reception, began to bawl and complain, thinking she would
+terrify Don Sebastian by making a scandal. But you should have seen
+the fury of His Eminence as he shouted to the page, 'Boy, call the
+police'; and the look on his face was such that the Portuguese lady
+vanished as quickly as she could, leaving the two pieces of silver on
+the table."
+
+Gabriel laughed, listening to the story.
+
+"He is a strong man, believe me, uncle. I like him because he holds
+the Chapter in his fist. He is not like his predecessor, who was like
+a sop in milk, who only knew how to pray, and trembled before the
+last-made canon. He is quite capable of going down into the choir one
+evening and turning them all out with blows from his crozier. It
+is more than two months since he has been down into the Cathedral,
+neither has he seen the canons. The last time they sent a deputation
+to the palace everybody trembled. They went to propose I know not what
+reform to the Primate, and they began by saying, 'My lord, the Chapter
+thinks--.' Don Sebastian, turned into a basilisk, interrupted them,
+'The Chapter cannot think anything; the Chapter has not common sense,'
+and he turned his back, leaving them petrified. Afterwards, he began
+shouting, and thumping the furniture with his fists, saying he would
+fill all the vacancies in the Cathedral with the dregs of the clergy,
+that he would fill the Chapter with drunkards, with impostors, etc. 'I
+will harass the Chapter,' he shouted, 'I will dirty it; I will teach
+them to talk less of me; I will cover them, yes, sir, I will cover
+them with....' And you may guess, uncle, with what His Eminence wished
+to cover the canons. And the poor man was right. Why should those
+in the choir interfere with this way or that way that Don Sebastian
+lives, or if he has those bonds or others? Does not he let them live
+as they choose? Does he ever say a word to them about their scandalous
+visits, although all Toledo knows of them?"
+
+"And what do the canons say about the cardinal?"
+
+"They say Juanito is his grandson, and that his father, who died, and
+who passed as nephew of His Eminence, was really his son by a certain
+lady when he was bishop in Andalusia. But this does not seem to
+irritate Don Sebastian much; but what does irritate him and makes him
+behave like a fiend is when they speak of Doña Visitacion."
+
+"And who is that lady?"
+
+"Come, that is good! You do not know Doña Visitacion? When no one
+inside the Cathedral or out of it can speak of anybody else? She is
+the niece of Don Sebastian, who lives with him in the palace. It is
+she who rules everything, and Don Sebastian, who is so terrible with
+everyone else, becomes like an angel when he sees her. He rages and
+screams and bites the days when he is ill, but if Doña Visita appears,
+he controls himself at once; he suffers in silence, moans like a
+child, and it is sufficient for her to say a soft word, or give him a
+caress for His Eminence to slobber with delight. He loves her dearly."
+
+"But what is she?" asked Gabriel with interest.
+
+"Clearly she is what you think. What else could she be? She was from
+her childhood in the college for noble ladies, and as soon as the
+cardinal came to Toledo he took her out, and brought her to the
+palace. What a blind infatuation is Don Sebastian's! And the thing is,
+the object is hardly worth it--a very thin, pale little girl, with
+large eyes and a soft skin; that is all. They say she sings, and plays
+the piano, and reads and knows a great many things that they teach
+in that wealthy college, and by God's grace can keep His Eminence in
+order. She comes sometimes into the Cathedral by the arch, dressed
+as a beatita with the habit and mantilla, accompanied by a very ugly
+servant."
+
+"She cannot be what you think, youngster."
+
+"Go on; all the Chapter affirm it, and even the most steady canons
+thoroughly believe it. Even those who are friends and favourites of
+His Eminence, and carry him tales about all the grumbling against him,
+do not deny it with any warmth. And Don Sebastian gets angry, and is
+furious each time any murmurs about this reach his ears. If they told
+him the choir intended to give a dance he would be less irritated than
+when he hears them wag their tongues about Doña Visita."
+
+The Perrero was silent for a few moments as though he were doubtful
+about saying something serious.
+
+"The lady is very good and kind. They all love her in the palace
+because she speaks so gently. Besides, she makes use of the great
+power she has over the cardinal to prevent the violence of His
+Eminence, who very often, when he is racked with excessive pain, would
+throw cups and plates at the heads of his servants. Why should they
+interfere with her? Does she do them any harm? Let everyone do as he
+likes in his own house, and he who does evil, let God punish him."
+
+He scratched his head as though he were once more doubtful.
+
+"And as to what Doña Visita is to the Cardinal," he added, "I have
+no doubt whatever. I have facts to go on, uncle, and I know how they
+live. One of the servants has often seen them kissing--that is to
+say, not the two kissing. No, she does the kissing, and Don Sebastian
+receives her kittenish ways with the smile of an angel. The poor man
+is so old!"
+
+And the Tato ended his confidences with various indecent remarks.
+
+All this grumbling against the cardinal, that came from the sacristy
+up to the cloister, annoyed Gabriel's brother greatly. The "Wooden
+Staff," who was a staunch private soldier of the Church, could not
+bear to hear with equanimity those attacks on his superiors; in his
+opinion they were all calumnies. The canons had spoken of all the
+preceding archbishops precisely as they now spoke of Don Sebastian,
+but this did not in the least prevent their all being called saints
+after their deaths. When he discovered the Tato repeating in the
+Claverias all the gossip from down below, he threatened him with all
+his authority as head of the house.
+
+Esteban was also very much concerned at the state of his brother's
+health. He was pleased at the very prudent behaviour of the latter,
+who conformed with silent respect to all the customs of the Cathedral,
+never permitting a word to escape him that could reveal his past;
+he felt beyond measure proud of the atmosphere of admiration that
+surrounded his brother, and the attention with which the simple
+inhabitants of the cloister listened to the account of his travels,
+but the state of his health was a continual anxiety, the certainty
+that death had laid its hand upon him, and that it was solely the care
+with which he was surrounded that retarded the fatal moment.
+
+There were days in which the Silenciario smiled with pleasure, seeing
+Gabriel a better colour, and hearing less frequently his painful
+cough.
+
+"You are going on well, brother," he would say joyfully.
+
+"Yes," replied Gabriel, "but do not have any illusions. _That_ will
+come at its own hour, it has me in its grasp. It is only you who are
+holding it back, but one day it will be stronger than you."
+
+The certainty that death would at last be victorious made Esteban
+redouble his efforts. He thought that frequent nourishment was the
+only remedy, and he scarcely ever approached Gabriel without something
+in his hands.
+
+"Eat this. Drink what I bring you."
+
+He struggled valiantly with that broken constitution, with that
+stomach disordered by poverty, with those lacerated lungs and with
+that heart subject to constant disturbance of its functions, with that
+human machine dislocated by a life of suffering and trials.
+
+The constant watching over the sick man had upset Esteban's economic
+life; his miserable wages and the poor assistance the Chapel-master
+could give were insufficient even for that extra mouth, which consumed
+more than all the others in the household put together. At the end of
+the month Esteban was obliged to invoke the aid of Silver Stick to
+enable him to get along the last few days, entering thus into the
+humble and miserable flock bound by the priest's usury. Sometimes the
+Chapel-master, waking for an instant to reality, would give him a few
+pesetas, sacrificing the joy of obtaining a fresh score.
+
+Gabriel guessed the privations that his brother underwent, and was
+anxious to contribute to the expenses of the little household. But
+what work could he obtain in his concealment in the Cathedral? He
+wished for some post in the service of the church, in order to receive
+at the beginning of every month a few pesetas from the hands of Silver
+Stick; but all the posts were occupied, death alone could cause a
+vacancy, and there were many eager ones watching for the opportunity
+to urge their family claims.
+
+The impossibility of being useful to his brother, of helping to
+make his sacrifices less expensive, weighed heavily on Gabriel, and
+disturbed the otherwise placid monotony of his life. He inquired of
+Esteban as to what he could possibly do, not to remain inactive, but
+his brother always answered with his kindly expression: "Take care of
+yourself, only take care of yourself; you have no other duty but to
+look after your own health, I am here to do all the rest."
+
+When Holy Week came round Gabriel found an opportunity of getting a
+few days' work. They were going to put up in the Cathedral the famous
+"Monument" between the choir and the Puerta del Perdon. It was a heavy
+and complicated erection, of a sumptuous and rococo style, which had
+cost the second Cardinal de Bourbon a fortune at the beginning of last
+century. A real forest of woodwork formed the basis of the monument;
+the riches of the cardinal had created a prodigality of solidity and
+sumptuousness, and several days were required to fit together the Holy
+Catafalque, and not a few workmen.
+
+Gabriel interviewed Don Antolin asking for a place on the works. The
+wages were seven reals a day, which he would be able to give his
+brother for two weeks; and he, who had been used in former days to
+have his work so lavishly paid, accepted this small daily wage as a
+piece of unexpected good fortune.
+
+The "Wooden Staff" was indignant. Gabriel was ill and ought not to
+risk his poor health in the fatigues of this work. What was he going
+to do, coughing and suffocating every moment? How was he going to
+undertake the heavy work of carrying the framework and fixing it
+together? The invalid tranquillised him. He knew what those works were
+in the church; everything was done with parsimony, but without much
+regard to time. The workmen in the service of the church worked with
+that calm laziness, and that slow prudence which characterised every
+act of religion. Besides, Silver Stick, knowing his condition, would
+reserve the least heavy work for him; he could fix screws and bolts,
+place the candelabra in line on the steps, and arrange the tapestry;
+he trusted him as a man of good taste who had seen much in his
+travels.
+
+Gabriel worked for two weeks on the monument. This time of relative
+activity seemed to give him a certain amount of relief. He moved
+about, intent on giving orders to his fellow-workers; he went from the
+church to the top of the Claverias, where the monument was stored, and
+seeing himself covered with dust, and with his limbs fatigued by the
+constant coming and going, he deluded himself into thinking he was
+strong again.
+
+During these two weeks he never went to the shoemaker's house, and so
+lost sight of his various friends. The bell-ringer and his friends
+were lost in astonishment. A man of so much learning, to work like one
+of themselves in order to help his brother!
+
+The Señora Tomasa stopped him one morning by the iron railing of the
+garden.
+
+"I have news, Gabriel. I think I know where our child is. I won't say
+any more; but be ready to help me. The day when you least expect it
+you may see her in the Cathedral."
+
+The erection of the monument was finished. All that part of the church
+between the choir and the door del Perdon was occupied by this showy
+and ponderous fabric. According to their traditional custom all the
+Toledans gathered to admire--the steps covered with rows of burning
+lights, the Roman legionaries in alabaster leaning on their lances,
+and the rich curtain with its innumerable folds that hung from the
+vaulting down to the platform of the monument.
+
+On the evening of Holy Thursday Gabriel stood considering what was
+in some sense his work, surrounded by a group of worshippers. The
+Cathedral shone with its immaculate whiteness, in spite of the black
+veils that covered both statues and altars. The clouds of colour from
+the lovely rose windows relieved the funereal aspect of the religious
+ceremony, while from the choir a tenor voice intoned the lamentations
+of the oriental prophet.
+
+Gabriel felt someone pulling his jacket, and turning, saw the
+gardener's widow.
+
+"Come, nephew, we have got her here; she is waiting for you in the
+cloister."
+
+Coming out, the Señora Tomasa pointed to a woman sitting crouched on
+the stone coping of the garden, wrapped in an old cloak, and with the
+headkerchief drawn down over her eyes.
+
+Gabriel would never have recognised her. He remembered the pretty
+smiling face of former years, and he looked almost with horror at
+the tarnished youth, haggard with prominent cheek-bones, of the face
+before him. The eyes deep sunk in the sockets without eyebrows or
+eyelashes, with the pupils still beautiful, but dulled with a glassy
+opacity. Everything about her revealed poverty and desolation; the
+dress was a summer one, and from under it showed her split boots much
+too large for her feet.
+
+"Salute him, child," said the old woman. "It is your Uncle Gabriel,
+one of God's angels, in spite of his misfortunes, and you owe it to
+him that we searched for you."
+
+The gardener's widow pushed Sagrario towards her Uncle, but the young
+woman lowered her head, moved her shoulders and drew back, as though
+she could not endure the presence of a member of her family; she
+covered her face with her wretched cloak to hide her tears.
+
+"Aunt, let us go home," said Gabriel, "it is not good for the child to
+be here."
+
+At the cloister staircase they made the young woman pass on in front;
+she went up with her head bent and without looking, as though her feet
+trod those broken steps instinctively.
+
+"We arrived from Madrid this morning," said the gardener's widow as
+they went up. "I kept her at an inn till it was time to bring her to
+the Cathedral in the evening. It is the best time, for Esteban is in
+the choir, and you will have time to settle things here. I spent three
+days there. Ay, Gabriel, my son, what things I have seen, what hells
+there are for poor women! and we call ourselves Christians, but I
+think we are fiends! Mercifully I had friends at court--some old
+bell-ringers who had been in the Cathedral and who remembered the
+gardener's widow. I wanted everything, even money, to get this unhappy
+girl out of the devil's clutches."
+
+The upper cloister was quite deserted. On arriving at the door of the
+Lunas the girl seemed to wake up, and drew quickly back with a look
+of terror, as though inside the "habitation" some great danger was
+awaiting her.
+
+"Go in, woman, go in," said the aunt; "it is your home. You had to
+come back some time or other."
+
+And she pushed her till she was through the door. Once inside the
+sitting-room her tears ceased; she looked round with astonishment, no
+doubt surprised at finding herself there. Her eyes examined everything
+with a sort of stupefaction, as though marvelling that everything
+should be in the same place as five years before, and with an
+exactitude that made her doubt if such a long time had really elapsed.
+Nothing seemed changed in that little world under the shadow of the
+Cathedral. She only, who had left it in the bloom of her youth, now
+returned aged and broken.
+
+There was a long silence between the three people.
+
+"Your room, Sagrario," said Gabriel at last gently, "is the same as
+when you left it. Go in and do not come out till I call you. Be calm
+and do not cry; trust me. You do not know me well, but the aunt will
+have told you that I am interested in your fate. Your father will soon
+be coming; hide yourself and be silent. I repeat it again, do not come
+out till I call you."
+
+When the old woman and her nephew were alone they could hear the
+girl's suffocating sobs that burst out on seeing her old room.
+Afterwards they heard a sound as though she were throwing herself on
+the bed, and the violence of her grief seemed to become more and more
+uncontrolled.
+
+"Poor child!" said the old woman, who was very nearly crying also,
+"she is good, and she has repented of her sins; if only her father had
+sought her out when that rascal deserted her, what shame and misery
+it would have spared her. And her health? I really think she is worse
+than you are, Gabriel. Oh, those men! with their honour which is
+nothing more than lies! What is honourable is to be charitable and
+compassionate to others, and to harm no one. I said this the other
+day when I was shocked at the shamelessness of my son-in-law, who
+was furious at my going to Madrid to find the child. He spoke of the
+honour of the family, and that if Sagrario returned no decent people
+could live in the Cathedral, and that he could not allow his daughter
+to stand at the door; and he such a thief that he steals the Virgin's
+wax every day, and deceives the devout who pay him for masses that are
+never said; that is why his skin shines so and he is so fat. With so
+much honour."
+
+After a short silence the old woman looked undecidedly at Gabriel.
+
+"Well, shall we begin the struggle? Shall I call Esteban?"
+
+"Yes, call him, he will be in the Cathedral. And you, shall you dare
+to be present at the interview?"
+
+"No, son, manage it yourself. You know Esteban, and you know me. I
+should either begin to cry, or I should turn and rend him for his
+obstinacy. You will manage better by yourself, for this God has given
+you those talents that you have used so badly."
+
+The old woman went away, and Gabriel remained alone for more than
+half an hour, looking out of a window into the deserted cloister. The
+yearly commemoration of the death of God spread in the priestly tribe
+on the roofs, an atmosphere of sadness even more marked than that
+inside the church. All the women and children of the Claverias were
+down below admiring the monument, the "habitacions" seemed quite
+deserted. As he sat Gabriel saw his brother pass by the window, and in
+another moment he appeared at the door.
+
+"What do you want, Gabriel? What has happened to you? The aunt
+frightened me with her summons. Are you worse?"
+
+"Sit down, Esteban. I am well, calm yourself."
+
+The "Wooden Staff" looked with surprise at Gabriel; his strange
+seriousness alarmed him and the prolonged silence in which he appeared
+to be arranging his thoughts without knowing where to begin.
+
+"Speak, man! Do make a beginning; you alarm me."
+
+"Brother," said Gabriel gravely, "you know very well that I have
+respected the mystery in your life that I found on my return here. You
+said to me, 'My daughter is dead,' and you never showed any wish to
+speak of her, and you can say if I have ever touched your old wound by
+the slightest allusion."
+
+"Well, and what then? When are you going to stop?" said Esteban,
+becoming very gloomy; "why do you speak to me on a day so holy of
+things that cause me so much pain?"
+
+"Esteban, we shall never understand each other if you hold on to your
+prejudices. Do not make that gesture, but listen to me calmly; do
+not act like an automaton, pulled by the same wires that moved our
+grandfathers and our ancestors. Be a man, and act according to your
+own thoughts. You and I have different beliefs. Setting aside religion
+which I know is a consolation to you, you know that I am silent as
+to mine, so as not to render my life here impossible. But apart from
+this, you believe that the family is a work of God, an institution of
+supernatural origin. I believe it to be a human institution based
+on the necessities of the species. You condemn for ever anyone who
+betrays the laws of the family, or who deserts his banner, you
+sentence him to death and oblivion. I pity his weakness and forgive.
+We understand honour from a different point of view. You believe in
+the Castillian honour--that traditional and barbarous honour, more
+cruel and dismal even than dishonour; a theatrical honour, whose
+impulses are never founded on human feeling, but on the fear of what
+others will say, the desire to appear greater and more dignified in
+the eyes of others than to your own conscience. For the adulterous
+wife, death; for the murderer, revenge; for the fugitive daughter,
+contempt and forgetfulness; this is your gospel. I have another
+standard; for the wife who forgets her duties, contempt and oblivion;
+for that fragment of our own flesh who flies from us, love, support,
+gentleness, even endeavouring to compass her return to us. Esteban, we
+are separated by our beliefs, the gulf of centuries lies between us,
+but you are my brother, we love each other, and I only desire your
+good. I bear the same name of which you are so proud, and I loved our
+poor parents as much as you could love them, and in the name of all
+these I tell you that this situation must come to an end; you must not
+live insensible and frozen in what you call your dignity, without the
+remembrance of your daughter wandering about the world, troubling you.
+You, who are so kind, who have sheltered me in the most difficult
+crisis of my life, how can you sleep, how can you eat, without your
+life being embittered by the remembrance of your lost daughter? What
+do you know about her now? May she not be dying of hunger while you
+eat? May she not be lying in a hospital while you are living in the
+home of your fathers?"
+
+Esteban's brow contracted, and he wore his gloomiest look as he
+listened to his brother.
+
+"It is useless for you to strive, Gabriel, nothing can come of it.
+Have I denied you anything? Am I not ready to do anything for my
+brother? But do not speak to me of that; she has caused me much pain,
+she has broken my life, how I did not die, I know not. Have you
+thought well that for centuries the family of the Lunas have been the
+mirror of the Cathedral, respected by even the archbishops, and now,
+suddenly to find oneself among the lowest, exposed to the ridicule of
+all and looked upon with compassion by the veriest little acolyte!
+What I have suffered! The times I have wept with rage alone in this
+home, hearing what they were saying behind my back. And then," he
+added quietly as though grief were paralysing his voice, "there was
+that unhappy martyr who died of shame; my poor wife who left the world
+so as not to see my grief and the contempt of others! And do you wish
+me to forget all this? For the rest, Gabriel, I cannot express what
+I feel as well as you do. But honour--is honour. It is to live in my
+house without fear of being shamed, to sleep at night without fearing
+to see in the darkness our father's eyes, asking why I allow a lost
+woman to live under the same roof that the Lunas won for themselves
+by centuries of service to the house of God; it is to avoid people
+mocking at our family. Let them say, 'Those Lunas! how unfortunate
+they are,' but they shall never say the Lunas are a family wanting in
+shame. By our love, brother, leave me; do not speak to me of this.
+Those evil doctrines have poisoned your mind; not only have you ceased
+to believe in God, but you have ceased to believe in honour."
+
+"And what is all this?" said Gabriel, warming. "You yourself do not
+know. 'Honour is honour.' Well, I say, children are children. You, man
+of prejudices, you do not wait to consider that those beings are the
+continuation of our own existence. Your religion makes you think
+children are a fruit from God, nevertheless you think yourself better
+and more perfect when you reject and curse those gifts of Heaven if
+they cause you any trouble. No, Esteban, the love of children and pity
+for their faults ought to come before all prejudices. This eternal
+life of the soul, that lying promise of religion, is only true through
+our children. The soul dies with the body; it is no more than a
+manifestation of our own thoughts, and thought is a cerebral function,
+but children perpetuate our own being throughout the generations and
+the centuries; it is they who make us immortal, and that preserve
+and transmit something of our personality, even as we have inherited
+something from our ancestors. He who forgets those beings who are his
+own creation is more worthy of execration than he who leaves life by
+suicide. The disappointments of life, the laws and customs invented by
+men, what are they before the instinctive affection we feel for beings
+that have proceeded from ourselves, and who perpetuate the infinite
+variety of our habits and thoughts? I abhor those wretches who, in
+order not to disturb the commonplace peace of matrimony, abandon the
+children they have outside the house. Paternity is the most noble of
+all animal functions, but the animals have more courage and dignity
+than man in fulfilling it. No animal of the higher sort abandons or
+disowns its cub, and yet there are many men who turn their backs on
+their children for fear of what people will say. If I, having a son,
+were enamoured of the most beautiful woman in the world, and she
+required me to forget that son, I would stifle my passion sooner than
+abandon the little one. If my son sinned against every human law,
+and was sent to prison, even there would I follow him, defying the
+execration of the world, sooner than deny that he is my work. We
+are united for ever to the creatures to whom we give life, it is a
+compromise of solidarity that we make with the species when we work
+for its continuance. He who breaks the chain and flies is a coward."
+
+"You will not convince me, Gabriel," screamed Esteban. "I will not!--I
+will not!"
+
+"I repeat it is cowardly on your part. This honour that weighs so
+heavily on you is a cruel and antiquated honour that settles all the
+conflicts of life by shedding blood. Why do you not seek the man who
+stole your daughter? Why do you not kill him like a father in an old
+play? Is it because you are a fearful man and have not learnt the art
+of murder, and that arms are his profession? If you had taken lawless
+vengeance, relying only on what you think your right, his powerful
+family would have retaliated on you; but you have not revenged
+yourself through an instinct of self-preservation, through fear of
+prison and all the punishments invented by society; you have been
+afraid in spite of your anger, and this fear you indulge at the
+expense of cruelty to the weaker creature. Your anger only falls on
+your daughter. Come, Esteban, this is not worthy of a man."
+
+The "Wooden Staff" shook his head obstinately.
+
+"You will not convince me, I do not wish to hear you. That woman shall
+not return here; did she not leave me? Let her follow her own path."
+
+"She left you from impulses of that instinct which all healthy beings
+possess. That instinct for the preservation of the species, which
+poetry beautifies and which it calls 'Love.' If she had left you after
+receiving the blessing of a man before an altar, you would have been
+delighted, and would have received her with open arms whenever she
+came to see you. She left you to be deceived, to fall into misery and
+shame, and, seeing her so unhappy, does she not deserve more pity at
+your hands than if you saw her living happily? Reflect, Esteban, on
+the way in which your poor daughter fell. What had you taught her to
+enable her to defend herself from the evil in the world? How was she
+armed to preserve intact what you call honour? You and your wife had
+set her the example of the respect due to wealth and high birth by
+allowing that young man to come to your house, thinking it an honour
+that a gentleman should have fallen in love with your daughter. When
+the inevitable results of social inequality came about she could not
+give him up; she had one of those noble natures that rise in revolt
+against the prejudices of the world, even at the risk of suffering all
+the bitterness of their rebellion, and she fell vanquished. Whom can
+you blame? Her ignorance, her life of isolation from the world, or
+yourselves who never taught her better, and who, blinded by ambition,
+let her wander to the edge of the precipice? Blame her less than
+anybody. Unhappy girl! She has paid with interest her noble defiance
+of social prejudices. She has been vanquished in the social fight--a
+corpse that has to be buried; and you, her father, ought to be the one
+to fulfil that work of mercy."
+
+Esteban, with his head bent, continued to make gestures of refusal.
+
+"Brother," said Gabriel solemnly; "if you hold tenaciously to your
+refusal I have only one thing more to say. If your daughter does not
+return here, I must go. Everyone has his scruples; you fear the gossip
+of the people; I fear myself and what my thoughts can throw in my face
+in my solitary moments. Since I have been your guest I have thought
+constantly of your daughter, and ever since I have known what happened
+in this house I have proposed to myself that the unhappy victim should
+return here. You will not let her return? Well then, I must go. I
+should be a thief if I ate your bread while a creature who is flesh
+of your flesh suffers hunger, or if I should be nursed in my illness
+while she, who is possibly worse than I am, has no friendly hand to
+comfort her. If she does not return, I am not your brother, but an
+intruder, usurping the share of affection and comfort that ought to
+fall to her. Brother, everyone has his own code of morality; yours is
+taught by the priests, mine I have made for myself, and though it is
+less apparent, it may very likely be more strict. In the name of my
+morality I say to you, Esteban, my brother, either your daughter
+returns here or I go away. I must return to the world to be persecuted
+like a wild beast, to the hospital, to the prison, to die like a dog
+in the ditch by the roadside. I do not know what will become of me,
+but one thing is certain, it is that I shall go to-morrow, or even
+to-day, so as not to enjoy a moment more what is not mine. I, who
+consider the appropriation of the goods of the world by a privileged
+minority as an iniquitous robbery, cannot enjoy knowingly the comforts
+that belong by natural right to another unhappy being. I can only
+enjoy them sharing them with her."
+
+Esteban had risen to his feet with a gesture of despair.
+
+"Are you mad, Gabriel? Do you wish to leave me? And you say it so
+calmly? Your presence here is the only joy of my life after so many
+misfortunes. I am accustomed to see you. I must care for you, you are
+my whole family; before I had no interest, I lived without hope. Now
+I have one, to see you strong and well, and can you say so carelessly
+that you will leave me? No, you shall not go--only this was wanting to
+me--after the daughter, the brother; kill me once for all!--Lord God,
+take me to Thyself!"
+
+And the simple servant of the Church raised his hands in supplication
+while his eyes filled with tears.
+
+"Be calm, Esteban. Let us speak like men, without exclamations and
+tears. Look at me, I am calm, but do not think for that it is less
+certain that I shall go to-day if you do not grant me what I pray."
+
+"But--and she? Where is she that you plead so earnestly for her?" said
+Esteban. "Have you seen her and spoken to her? Is she in Toledo? Have
+you with the insolence of your unbelief even brought her into the
+Cathedral?"
+
+Gabriel, seeing him tearful and broken by his threat of leaving,
+thought the decisive moment had arrived, and opening the door of
+Sagrario's room he called:
+
+"Come out, child, ask your father's pardon."
+
+He looked astounded, then he fixed his eyes on Gabriel as though
+he could not guess who that woman was. What joke had his brother
+prepared?
+
+With a brutal impulse he tore the woman's hands from her face, looking
+at her earnestly; even so he did not recognise her. In the midst of
+a painful silence he stood a long while looking at her. Little by
+little, in that face so altered by illness, he began to trace the
+well-known features. In the tearful eyes devoid of eyelashes something
+reminded him of the blue eyes of the lost daughter. The discoloured
+lips, surrounded by deep lines, quivered painfully, murmuring always
+the same word:
+
+"Pardon! pardon!"
+
+At the sight of such a wreck the father felt his courage fail; his
+eyes expressed an immense, an overwhelming sadness.
+
+He retreated backwards to the door of the "habitacion," followed by
+the young woman, dragging herself on her knees and stretching out her
+hands.
+
+"Brother, it is well," he said despairingly; "you are stronger than I
+am, let your will be accomplished. Let her remain, as you wish it, but
+do not let me see her!--remain, both of you. It is I that will go."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+The sewing machine clicked from early morning till night in the house
+of the Lunas. This and the hammering of the shoemaker were the only
+sounds of work that disturbed the holy silence of the upper cloister.
+
+When Gabriel left his bed at sunrise, after a night of painful
+coughing, he would find Sagrario already in the entrance room
+preparing her machine for the day's work. From the day following that
+of her return to the Cathedral she had devoted herself to work with
+sullen silence as a means of returning unnoticed to the Claverias,
+trusting that the people would forgive her past. The gardener's widow
+procured her work, and so the sound of the stitching was continually
+heard in the old "habitacion," accompanied very often by melodies from
+the Chapel-master's harmonium.
+
+The "Wooden Staff" moved about his house like a shadow. He remained
+continually in the Cathedral or in the lower cloister, only coming up
+to the "habitacion" when it was absolutely necessary. He ate his meals
+with his head bent, in order not to look at his daughter, who was
+seated opposite to him at the other end of the table, ready to burst
+into tears at the sight of her father before her. A painful silence
+oppressed the family. Don Luis being so absent-minded, seemed the only
+one not to perceive the situation, and chatted gaily with Gabriel
+about his hopes and his musical enthusiasms. Everything seemed to him
+quite natural; nothing disturbed him, and the return of Sagrario to
+the family hearth had not caused him the slightest surprise.
+
+When dinner was over Esteban fled, not to return to the house till
+night-time; after supper he locked himself into his own room,
+leaving his brother and his daughter in possession of the entrance
+sitting-room. The machine began to work again, and Don Luis fingered
+his harmonium till nine o'clock, when Silver Stick locked the tower
+staircase, rattling his bunch of keys with a noise that equalled a
+curfew. Gabriel felt indignant at his brother's obstinacy.
+
+"You will kill the child; what you are doing is unworthy of a father."
+
+"I cannot help it, brother; it is impossible for me to look at her. It
+is sufficient for me to tolerate such things in the house. Ay! if you
+could only tell how the people's looks wound me!"
+
+In reality the scandal produced by the return of Sagrario to the
+Claverias had been much less than he had feared. She seemed so ill and
+so weary that none of the women felt any animosity against her, and
+the energetic protection of her Aunt Tomasa imposed respect. Besides,
+those simple women of instinctive passions could not now feel towards
+her that hostile envy that her beauty and the cadet's courtship had
+formerly inspired. Even Mariquita, Silver Stick's niece, found a
+certain salve to her vanity in protecting with disdainful tolerance
+that unhappy girl who in former days had attracted the attention of
+every man who visited the upper cloister.
+
+Curiosity only disturbed the calm of the Claverias for about a week.
+Little by little the women ceased to stand about the Luna's door
+to watch Sagrario bending over her machine, and the girl quietly
+continued her sad and hard-working life. Gabriel seldom left the
+"habitacion." He spent whole days by the young woman's side,
+endeavouring by his presence to atone for the hostile aloofness of her
+father. It pained him that she should find herself so despised and
+solitary in her own house. Every now and then the Aunt Tomasa came to
+see them, enlivening them with the optimism of her happy old age. She
+was pleased with her niece's conduct; to work hard so as not to be a
+drag on her obstinate old father, and to help towards the maintenance
+of the house, was clearly what was required; but all the same there
+was no reason she should kill herself with work--calm and good humour,
+this bad time would lead to a better; she was there to get things
+straight with that fiend-possessed Gabriel, and she made the gloomy
+"habitacion" ring with her healthy laugh and lively words.
+
+At other times Gabriel's friends would invade the house, abandoning
+the assemblies at the shoemaker's. They could not bear Luna's absence,
+they wanted to hear him, to consult him, and even the shoemaker when
+his work was not urgent would leave his bench and, smelling of paste,
+with his apron tucked into his belt and his head rolled up in striped
+handkerchiefs, would come and sit by Sagrario's machine.
+
+The young woman fixed her sad eyes with admiration on her uncle. She
+had always from her childhood heard her parents speak with respect of
+that extraordinary relative who was travelling in foreign countries;
+she vaguely remembered him as a shadow crossing her love dream when he
+had spent a few days in the Cathedral before establishing himself in
+Barcelona, astonishing them all by the accounts of his travels and
+his foreign customs. Now she returned to find him aged, as sickly as
+herself, but influencing all who surrounded him by the mysterious
+power of his words, that were like heavenly music to those poor
+narrow-minded souls.
+
+In the midst of her sadness Sagrario had no other pleasure but to
+listen to her uncle; she felt the same as did those simple men who
+left their work to seek Luna in their anxiety to hear fresh things
+from his lips. Gabriel was the modern world that for so many years had
+rolled on far from the Cathedral, never touching it, but which had at
+last entered in to stir and awaken a handful of men who were still
+living in the sixteenth century.
+
+The appearance of Sagrario had brought about a change in Luna's life;
+he became more communicative, and he lost a great deal of the reserve
+he had imposed upon himself when he took refuge in the stony lap of
+the church. He no longer forced himself to keep silence and to hide
+his thoughts; the presence of a woman seemed to enliven him and
+wake once more his propagandist fervour. His companions saw a new
+Gabriel--more loquacious and more disposed to communicate to them the
+"new things," that were already upheaving the traditional course of
+their thoughts, and that even now had on many nights disturbed their
+sleep.
+
+They talked, discussed and consulted Luna, so that he could clear
+their confused ideas, and above the voices of the men sounded the
+continual click, click of the sewing machine, always busy, like an
+echo of the universal work surging in the world, while the calm of the
+Infinite spread itself through the precincts of the church.
+
+All those men, accustomed to the slow, regular, quiet duties of the
+church, with long periods of rest, admired the nervous activity of
+Sagrario.
+
+"You will kill yourself, child," said the old organ-blower. "I know
+very well what it is like, I have done something of the same sort; I
+blow and blow at those bellows, and when it is a mass with much
+music, such as Don Luis loves, I end by cursing the organ and him who
+invented it, for indeed it nearly breaks my arms."
+
+"Work!" said the bell-ringer with emphasis. "Work is a punishment from
+God! You all know its origin. It was the eternal penalty imposed on
+our first parents by the Lord when He drove them out of Paradise. It
+is a chain that we must drag on for ever."
+
+"No, señor," replied the shoemaker. "As I have read in the newspapers,
+work is the greatest of all the virtues, not a punishment; laziness is
+the mother of vice, and work is a virtue. Is it not so, Don Gabriel?"
+
+The shoemaker looked at the master, watching for his words as a
+thirsty man looks for water.
+
+"Work," said Gabriel, "is neither a punishment nor a virtue; it is a
+hard law to which we have to submit for self-preservation and for the
+welfare of the species. Without work life could not exist."
+
+And with the same fervid enunciation with which he had in former times
+swayed the multitude at those meetings of protest against society, he
+explained to this half-dozen men and the quiet sewer, who stopped her
+machine to listen, the greatness of universal work, which every day
+laboured on the earth, to subdue it and force it to yield sustenance
+for man.
+
+It was a struggle the whole twenty-four hours against the blind forces
+of Nature. The army of work extended over the whole globe, exploring
+the continents, leaping to the islands, sailing the seas, and
+descending to the bowels of the earth. How many were its soldiers? No
+one could count them--millions and millions. At daybreak no one was
+absent from the roll-call; the casualties were replaced, the gaps that
+poverty and misfortune opened in the ranks were filled up immediately.
+As soon as the sun rose the factory chimney began to smoke, the hammer
+broke the stone, the file bit the metal, the plough furrowed the
+earth, the ovens were lighted, the pump worked its piston, the hatchet
+sounded in the wood, the locomotive moved amidst clouds of vapour, the
+cranes groaned on the wharves, the steamers cut the waters, and the
+little barks danced on the waves dragging their nets. None were absent
+from work's review. All hurried on, driven by the fear of hunger,
+defying danger, not knowing if they would live till night, or if the
+sun rising over their heads would be the last in their lives. And that
+daily concentration of human energies began with the first light of
+day in all parts of the world, wherever men had assembled and built
+towns and constituted societies, or even in the deserts to be
+reclaimed by their energies.
+
+The stonemason breaks the stone with his hammer, and at every breath
+is poisoned by inhaling the invisible particles. The miner descends to
+the hell of modern times with no other guide than the glimmer from
+his lamp, to wrest from the strata of the earliest ages relics of the
+earth's infancy, those carbonised trees that gave shade to prehistoric
+animals. Far from the sun and far from life, he defies death, just as
+the mason, poised on a slight scaffolding despises giddiness, watched
+only by the birds, surprised to see a creature without wings perched
+on such a dizzy height.
+
+The workman in the factory, changed by a fatal and mistaken progress
+into a slave of machinery, lives fastened to it like another wheel, a
+spring of human flesh, struggling with his physical weariness against
+the iron muscles that never tire; brutalised daily by the deafening
+cadence of pistons and wheels to give us the innumerable products of
+industry rendered necessary by the life of civilisation.
+
+And these millions and millions of men who support the existence
+of society, who fight for it against the blind and cruel forces of
+Nature, who every morning return to the struggle, seeing in this
+monotonous and continual sacrifice the sole aim of their existence,
+form the immense family of wage-earners, living on the surplus of a
+privileged minority, contenting themselves to subsist on the smallest
+part of what these reject, submitting to a wretched remuneration,
+always the lowest, without hope of saving or of emancipation.
+
+"It is this egotistical minority," said Gabriel, having arrived at
+this point, "who have falsified truth, endeavouring to persuade the
+majority of workers that work is a virtue, and that the only mission
+of man on earth is to work till he perishes. This code, invented, by
+the great capitalists, misquotes science, declaring that people can
+only live healthily who devote themselves to work, and that all
+inaction is fatal, but is silent as to what science adds--that
+excessive work destroys men with far greater rapidity than if they
+were living in idleness. They say that work is a painful necessity for
+the preservation of life, but they do not say it is a virtue, because
+repose and sweet inaction are far more grateful to men and to all
+animals than exertion and fatigue. The fable of Paradise, the story of
+the Biblical God imposing the sweat of labour as a punishment in order
+to earn subsistence, shows that in all times the natural temperament
+of man considered rest as the pleasantest condition, and that work
+must be considered as an evil indispensable to life, but all the same
+an evil. Ruled by the instinct of preservation, man ought only to work
+just as much as is necessary for food. But as the immense majority do
+not work for themselves alone, but for the profits of a minority of
+employers, these require that a man should work as much as he is able,
+even if he dies from his over-exertion, and in this way they become
+rich, hoarding the surplus from production. Their contention is that
+a man should work more than is required for himself, that he should
+produce more than is required for his own necessities. In this surplus
+lies their wealth, and to obtain it they have invented a monstrous and
+inhuman morality, that by means of religion and even of philosophy,
+glorifies work, saying that work is the greatest of all virtues and
+idleness the source of all vices. And this makes me ask, if idleness
+is a vice in the poor, how is it that among the rich it is counted as
+a sign of distinction and even of elevation of mind? And if work is
+the greatest of all virtues, how is it that capitalists endeavour to
+amass wealth in order to free themselves and their descendants from
+the practice of so great a virtue? Why is it that this society which
+exalts work with every sort of poetical conception relegates the
+worker to the lowest rank? Why do they receive with greater enthusiasm
+a soldier who has fought, more or less, than an aged workman who has
+spent seventy years working without any one praising him or being
+grateful to him for so much virtue?"
+
+The servants of the Cathedral nodded their heads, assenting to what
+fell from the master; they looked up to him as simple people always
+look up to those who come down to them as apostles of a new idea.
+
+The continual friction with Gabriel had caused to germinate in their
+minds, stunted by the traditional atmosphere, a growth of ideas, like
+the microscopic mosses the winter rains had formed on the granite
+buttresses of the church. Hitherto they had lived resigned to the
+life that surrounded them, moving like somnambulists on the undecided
+boundary which separates soul from instinct, but the unexpected
+presence of that fugitive from social battles was the impulse that
+launched them into full thought, walking tentatively and with no other
+light than that of their master.
+
+"You," went on Gabriel, "do not suffer from the slavery of work like
+those who live among modern factories. The Church does not require
+great exertions from you, and the service of God does not destroy you
+from over-fatigue, though it kills you with hunger. There exists a
+monstrous inequality between the salaries of those down below who sit
+in the choir and sing and what you earn, who lend to worship all the
+strength of your arms. You will not die of fatigue, it is true; many a
+workman in the towns would laugh at the lightness of your duties; but
+you languish from poverty. I see in this cloister the same anaemic
+children that I saw in workmen's slums, I see what you eat and what
+you are paid. The Church pays its servants as in the days of faith;
+she believes that we still live in the times when whole towns would
+throw themselves into the work with the hope of gaining heaven, and
+would help to raise cathedrals without any more positive recompense
+than the workman's stew and the blessing of the bishop; and all this
+while, you, beings of flesh who require nourishment, deceive your
+stomachs and those of your wives and children with potatoes and bread,
+while down below those wooden images are covered with pearls and gold
+in senseless profusion, and without its ever occurring to you to ask
+yourselves why the idols who have no wants should be so rich, while
+you are unable to satisfy your own and live in misery."
+
+The listeners looked at each other in astonishment, as though these
+words were an illuminating flash. They were doubtful for a moment as
+though frightened, and then the faith of conviction illuminated their
+faces.
+
+"It is true," said the bell-ringer in a gloomy tone.
+
+"It is true," repeated the shoemaker, throwing into his words all
+the bitterness of his grinding life of poverty, with a constantly
+increasing family, and with no other help but his inadequate work.
+
+Sagrario remained silent. She did not understand many of her uncle's
+sayings, but she received them all as gospel coming from him, and they
+sounded in her ears like delicious music.
+
+Gabriel's reputation spread among the humble inhabitants of the
+church, and all the servants of the Primacy gossiped about his wisdom.
+The clergy took notice of him, and more than once on rainy evenings
+the canon librarian, taking his walk in the cloisters, tried to make
+Gabriel talk; but the fugitive, with a remnant of prudence, showed
+himself towards the cassocks, as they themselves said, coldly
+courteous and reserved, fearing that they would expel him if they
+became acquainted with his views.
+
+Only one priest of all those he saw in the upper cloister had inspired
+him with any confidence. This was a young man of wretched appearance,
+with worn-out clothes, a chaplain of one of the innumerable convents
+of nuns in Toledo. He received seven duros a month, which were all
+his means of supporting himself and his old mother, a common peasant
+woman, who had denied herself bread in order to give an education to
+her son.
+
+"You see, Gabriel," said the priest. "You see how it is--such a great
+sacrifice to earn less than a common labourer earns in my village. Why
+did they ordain me with so much ceremony? Was it for this I sang mass
+in the midst of so much pomp, as though in wedding the Church I were
+uniting myself to wealth?"
+
+His poverty made him the slave of Don Antolin, and in the last third
+of the month he came almost every day to the cloister, trying to
+soften Silver Stick with his prayers and induce him to lend a few
+pesetas. He even flattered Mariquita, who could not show herself shy
+with him, in spite of his cassock.
+
+"He has a very good appearance," she said to the women of the
+Claverias with the enthusiasm inspired by every man. "I like to see
+him by the side of Don Gabriel and to hear them talk as they walk in
+the cloister. They look like two great noblemen. His mother called him
+Martin, no doubt because he resembled the Saint Martin by that painter
+they call El Greco, that hangs in some parish church, but I forget
+which."
+
+To cajole Don Antolin was a far more arduous task, and the poor little
+curate suffered much in his endeavours to propitiate the miser, who
+was irritated if his miserable loans were not repaid at the proper
+time. Silver Stick with his love of authority was delighted to hold a
+priest and an equal under his thumb, so that those in the Claverias
+should see that he did not order about the small fry only. Don Martin
+was for him only a servant in a cassock, and he made him come up to
+the cloister nearly every evening on various pretexts. His delight
+Was to keep him whole hours standing in front of his door, obliged to
+listen and to pay attention to all his words.
+
+Gabriel felt pity for the moral dependency in which the poor young man
+lived, and he would often leave his niece, going out into the cloister
+to join them. His other friends were not long in discovering him;
+first of all the bell-ringer, then the organ-blower, and presently the
+verger, the Perrero, and the shoemaker would join the group, of which
+Silver Stick was the nucleus. Don Antolin was delighted to see himself
+surrounded by so many people, never imagining that Gabriel was the
+attraction, thinking always it was his authority that inspired fear
+and respect.
+
+Recognising equality with no one but Luna, to him only he addressed
+his conversation, as though the others had no other duty but to listen
+to him in silence; if anyone spoke to him he pretended not to hear,
+but continued addressing Gabriel. Mariquita, huddled up in a shawl,
+followed them with her eyes from the door, sharing her uncle's pride
+in seeing himself surrounded by such a group, who accompanied him in
+his stroll up and down the cloister; the proximity of so many men
+seemed to turn her head.
+
+"Uncle! Don Gabriel!" she called in a coaxing voice. "Won't you come
+in; you will be more comfortable inside the house, because, even
+though it is sunny, it is very cold."
+
+But the uncle paid no attention to her words, and continued his walk
+on the side of the cloister bathed by the sun, talking pompously on
+his favourite theme, the present poverty of the Cathedral and its
+greatness In former times.
+
+"These cloisters in which we are," he said; "do you believe that they
+were built to serve as a refuge to the humble secular people who now
+live in them? No, señor, although the Church was generous, she would
+not have built these 'habitaciones,' with their inner courtyards and
+their colonnades for Wooden Staffs and vergers, etc. This cloister,
+which was to have been as large and beautiful as the one below, was
+begun by the great Cardinal Cisneros" (Don Antolin raised his hand to
+his cap) "so that the canons should live in them subject to conventual
+regulations; but the canons in those days were very rich, and,
+being great lords, would not consent to live shut up here; they all
+protested, and the cardinal, who was very quick-tempered, wished to
+keep them in leading strings, but one of them started to Rome with
+their complaints, sent by his comrades. Cisneros, being governor of
+the kingdom, placed guards at all the ports, and the emissary was
+arrested as he was going to embark at Valencia. The end of it all
+was that after a long suit the gentlemen of the Chapter came off
+victorious, and lived out of the Primacy, and the Claverias remained
+unfinished with this low roof and this balustrade, both provisional.
+But even as it is kings have lived in this cloister; that great
+monarch, Philip II., spent several days here. What glorious times!
+when the kings, who had palaces at their command, preferred living in
+these rooms, so as to be inside the Cathedral and nearer to God. Such
+kings, such people. For this reason Spain was greater then than ever.
+We were masters of the world. We had power and money, and we lived
+happily on earth in the certainty of reaching heaven after death."
+
+"That is true," said the bell-ringer; "those were the good times, and
+for their return we fought in the mountains. Ay! if only Don Carlos
+had been victorious! if only there had not been traitors amongst us!
+Is it not true, Gabriel? You who fought in the war as I did, you can
+say if I am not right."
+
+"Hold your tongue, Mariano," said Gabriel, smiling sadly. "You do not
+know what you are saying. You fought and shed your blood for a cause
+that even now you do not understand. You went to the war as blindly as
+I did. Do not look so sullen; it is no use contradicting. Well then,
+let us see, what did you wish for when you went out to fight for Don
+Carlos?"
+
+"I? First of all that every man should come by his own. Did not the
+crown belong to his family? Well, let it be given to him."
+
+"And is this all?" asked Luna with displeasure.
+
+"That was the least of it. What I wanted, and do want, is that
+the nation should have a good master, an upright lord, and a good
+Catholic, who without restraints of laws or Cortes, should govern us
+all with bread in one hand and a stick in the other. For the robber,
+garrote him! for the honoured, 'you are my friend!' A king who will
+not allow the rich to crush the poor, and who will not allow any one
+to die of hunger who wishes to work. Come, I think I am explaining
+myself clearly."
+
+"And all this, do you believe that it existed at any time, or that
+your king would be able to restore it? Those centuries that you
+describe as those of greatness and well-being were really the worst
+in our history; they were the cause of Spanish decadence, and the
+beginning of all our ills."
+
+"Stop there, Gabrielillo," said Silver Stick. "You know a great deal,
+and have travelled and read much more than I have, but we cannot
+swallow that. I am very much interested in the question, and I will
+not allow you to take advantage of the ignorance of Mariano and these
+others. How can you say that those times were evil, and that the
+fault is theirs of what is happening to us now? The true culprit is
+liberalism, the unbelief of the age, which has let the devil loose in
+our house. Spain, when it does not trust its kings and has no faith in
+Catholicism, is like a lame man who drops his crutches and falls to
+the ground. We are nothing without the throne and the altar, and the
+proof of this is everything that has happened to us since we had
+revolutions. We have lost our islands, we count for nothing among the
+other countries. The Spaniards who are the bravest men in the world,
+have been defeated, there is not a peseta anywhere, and all those
+gentlemen who harangue in Madrid vote fresh taxes and we are always
+involved in difficulties. When was this ever seen in former times?
+When?"
+
+"Worse and more shameful things were seen," said Luna.
+
+"You are mad, youngster! Those travels have corrupted you, till I
+believe you are hardly a Spaniard! Look you, that he denies what
+everybody knows, what is taught in all the schools! And the Catholic
+kings; were they nothing? You need no books to know that. Go into the
+choir, and you will see on the lower stalls all the battles that those
+religious kings gained over the Moors with the help of God. They
+conquered Granada and drove out the infidels who had held it seven
+centuries in barbarism. Afterwards came the discovery of America. Who
+could accomplish that? No one but ourselves; and that good queen who
+pawned her jewels so that Columbus should accomplish his voyage. You
+cannot deny all this, it seems to me. And the Emperor Charles V.! What
+have you to say about him? Do you know any more extraordinary man! He
+fought all the kings of Europe, and half the world was his, 'the sun
+never set on his dominions,' we Spaniards were masters of the world;
+you cannot either deny this. And still we have said nothing of Don
+Philip II., a king so wise and so astute that he made all the monarchs
+of Europe dance at his pleasure, as though he were pulling them with
+a string. Everything was for the greater glory of Spain and the
+splendour of religion. Of his victories and greatness we have said
+nothing; if his father was victorious at Pavia, he overturned his
+enemies at St. Quintin. And what do you say about Lepanto? Down in the
+sacristy we preserve the banners of the ship that Don Juan of Austria
+commanded. You have seen them; one of them represents Jesus crucified,
+and they are so long, so very long, that when they were fastened to
+the triforium, the ends had to be turned up so that they should not
+trail on the ground. So, was Lepanto nothing? Come, Gabriel, you
+really must be mad to deny certain things. If someone had to conquer
+the Moors lest they should possess themselves of all Europe and
+endanger the Christian faith, who did it? The Spaniards. When the
+Turks threatened to become masters of the seas, who went out to meet
+them? Spain and her Don Juan. And who went to discover a new world
+but the ships of Spain; and who sailed round the world but another
+Spaniard, Magallanes; and for everything great it has always been us,
+always us, in those days of religion and prosperity. And what can
+we say about learning? Those centuries produced Spain's most famous
+men--great poets and most eminent theologians; no one has equalled
+them since. And to show that religion is the source of all greatness,
+the most illustrious writers have worn the religious habit. I guess
+what will be your argument, that after such glorious kings came others
+less distinguished, and so the decadence commenced. I know something
+about that also. I have heard the librarian of the Cathedral and other
+people of great learning say this. But this really means nothing.
+These are the designs of God, by which He puts His people to the
+proof, just as He does with individuals, bringing them down to low
+estate, to raise them again to great honour, so that they may continue
+in the right way. But we will not speak of this; if there has been
+a decadence we do not want to know anything about it. We want the
+glorious past, the brilliant times of the Catholic kings, of Don
+Carlos and the two Philips, and it is on them that we fix our eyes
+when we talk of Spain returning to her good old times."
+
+"But those centuries, Don Antolin," said Gabriel calmly, "were those
+of Spanish decadence; in them was begun our ruin. I am not surprised
+at your anger; you repeat what you have been taught. There are people
+here of the highest education who are not less irritated if you touch
+what they call their golden age. The fault is in the education that
+is given in this country. All history is a lie, and to know it so
+misrepresented it would be far better not to know it at all. In the
+schools the past of the country is taught from the point of view of a
+savage, who appreciates a thing because it shines and not because of
+its worth or utility. Spain was great, and was on the high road to
+become the first nation in the world, by solid and positive merits
+that the hazards of war or policy could not have destroyed; but that
+was before the centuries that you praise, before the times of the
+foreign kings: in the Middle Ages which held great hopes, which have
+vanished since the consolidation of national unity. Our Middle Ages
+produced a cultivated, industrious and civilised people like none
+other in the world; they had in them the materials for the building of
+a great nation; but foreign architects came in who hastily ran up this
+edifice; those first few years of existence that astound you with the
+splendour of novelty, and among whose ruins we are still groping."
+
+Gabriel forgot all his prudence in the ardour of discussion. He felt
+no fear of Silver Stick, with his manner of an inquisitor incapable of
+reasoning. He wished to convince him; he felt all the fervour, all the
+irresistible impulse of his proselytising days, without trying in any
+way to disguise his feelings from consideration of the atmosphere
+surrounding him. Don Antolin listened to him in astonishment, fixing
+on him his cold glance. The others listened, feeling confusedly the
+marvel that such ideas should be enunciated in the cloister of a
+cathedral. Don Martin, the chaplain of the nuns, who stood behind his
+miserly protector, showed in his eyes the eager sympathy with which he
+heard Luna's words.
+
+He described the Hispano-Roman people over whom the Gothic invasion
+swept, without, however, causing a gap, because before long the
+conquerors had succumbed to the lower Latin degeneration, remaining
+without strength, spending themselves in theological struggles and
+dynastic intrigues like those of Byzantium. The regeneration of Spain
+did not come from the north with the hordes of barbarians, but from
+the south with the invading Arabs. At first they were few, but they
+were sufficient to conquer Roderick and his corrupt courtiers. The
+instinct of the Christian nationality revolting against the invaders,
+and the gathering together of the whole soul of Spain on the rocky
+heights of Covadonga to fall once more upon their conquerors, was all
+a lie. The Spain of those days gratefully welcomed the people from
+Africa and submitted without resistance. A squadron of Arab horsemen
+was sufficient to make a town open its gates. It was a civilising
+expedition more than a conquest, and a continual current of
+immigration was established over the Straits. Over them came that
+young and vigorous culture, of such rapid and astonishing growth,
+which seemed to conquer though it was scarcely born: that civilisation
+created by the religious enthusiasm of the Prophet, who had
+assimilated all that was best in Judaism and in Byzantine
+civilisation, carrying along with it also the great Indian traditions,
+fragments from Persia and much from mysterious China. It was the
+Orient entering into Europe, not as the Assyrian monarchs into Greece,
+which repelled them seeing her liberties in danger, but the exact
+opposite, into Spain, the slave of theological kings and warlike
+bishops, which received the invaders with open arms. In two years they
+became masters of what it took seven centuries to dispossess them. It
+was not an invasion contested by arms, but a youthful civilisation
+that threw out roots in every part. The principle of religious liberty
+which cements all great nationalities came in with them, and in the
+conquered towns they accepted the Church of the Christians and the
+synagogues of the Jews. The Mosque did not fear the temples it found
+in the country, it respected them, placing itself among them without
+jealousy or desire of domination. From the eighth to the fifteenth
+century the most elevated and opulent civilisation of the Middle Ages
+in Europe was formed and flourished. While the people of the north
+were decimating each other in religious wars, and living in tribal
+barbarity, the population of Spain rose to thirty millions, gathering
+to herself all races and all beliefs in infinite variety, like the
+modern American people. Christians and Mussulmans, pure Arabs,
+Syrians, Egyptians, Jews of Spanish extraction, and Jews from the East
+all lived peaceably together, hence the various crossings and mixtures
+of Muzarabes, Mudejares, Muladies and Hebrews. In this prolific
+amalgamation of peoples and races all the habits, ideas, and
+discoveries known up to then in the world met; all the arts, sciences,
+industries, inventions and culture of the old civilisations budded
+out into fresh discoveries of creative energy. Silk, cotton, coffee,
+oranges, lemons, pomegranates, sugar, came with them from the East, as
+also carpets, silk tissues, gauzes, damascene work and gunpowder. With
+them also came the decimal numeration algebra, alchemy, chemistry,
+medicine, cosmology and rhymed poetry. The Greek philosophers, who
+were nearly vanishing into oblivion, saved themselves by following the
+footsteps of the Arab conquerors. Aristotle reigned in the university
+of Cordoba. That spirit of chivalry arose among the Spanish Arabs,
+which has since been appropriated by the warriors of the north, as
+though it were a special quality belonging to Christian people. While
+in the barbarous Europe of the Franks, the Anglo-Normans, and the
+Germans, the people lived in hovels, and the kings and barons in rocky
+castles blackened by the smoke of their fires, devoured by vermin,
+dressed in coarse serge, and fed like prehistoric man, the Spanish
+Arabs were raising their fantastic Alcazars, and, with the refinement
+of ancient Rome, they met at their baths to converse on all literary
+and scientific questions. If any monk from the north felt the hunger
+of learning, he came to the Arab universities or the Jewish synagogues
+of Spain, and the kings of Europe thought they would be cured of their
+infirmities if, by dint of golden bribes, they could procure a Spanish
+physician.
+
+When little by little the aboriginal element separated itself from the
+invaders and small Christian nationalities arose, the Arabs and the
+old Spaniards (if indeed after the constant mingling of blood there
+was any difference between the two races) fought chivalrously without
+exterminating each other after the battles, mutually respecting one
+another, with long intervals of peace, as though they wished to
+retard the moment of final separation, and often joining in various
+enterprises.
+
+A system of liberty ruled in most of the Christian States. The Cortes
+arose much earlier than in the other western countries of Europe, and
+the Spanish people governed and regulated their expenses themselves,
+seeing only in their king a military chief. The municipalities were
+little republics with their own elected magistrates. The town militia
+realised the ideal of a democratic army. The Church at one with the
+people lived peacefully with the other religions in the country; an
+intelligent bourgeoisie created large industries in the interior, and
+fitted out the first navy of the times at their own cost, and Spanish
+products were more sought after than any other in all the ports
+of Europe. There were towns then as populous as any of the modern
+capitals; whole populations devoted themselves to weaving different
+kinds of stuffs, and everything was cultivated on the soil of the
+Peninsula.
+
+The Catholic kings marked the apogee of national strength, but it was
+the beginning also of its decadence. Their reign was great because the
+flow of energy begun in the Middle Ages lasted till their times; but
+it was execrable, because their tortuous policy turned Spain from the
+right way, rousing in us religious fanaticism and the ambition of
+universal empire. Two or three centuries ahead of the rest of Europe,
+Spain was for the world of those days what England is for our own
+times. If we had followed the same policy of religious toleration, of
+fusion of races, of industrial and agricultural work in preference to
+military enterprises, where should we not be now?
+
+Gabriel asked this question, interrupting his ardent description of
+the past.
+
+"The Renaissance," continued Luna, "was more Spanish than Italian. In
+Italy the literature of antiquity, and Greco-Roman art revived, but
+the Renaissance was not entirely literary. The Renaissance represents
+the springing into life of a new and cultivated society, with arts
+and manufactures, armies and, scientific knowledge, etc. And who
+accomplished this but Spain, that Arab-Hebrew-Christian Spain of the
+Catholic kings? The Gran Capitan taught the world the art of modern
+warfare; Pedro Navarro was a wonderful engineer; the Spanish troops
+were the first to use firearms, and they created also the infantry,
+making war democratic, as it gave the people the superiority over the
+noble horsemen clad in armour; finally, it was Spain who discovered
+America."
+
+"And does all this seem little to you?" interrupted Don Antolin. "Do
+you not exactly agree with what I said? We have never seen so much
+power and greatness united in Spain as in the times of those kings,
+who with reason some call the Catholics."
+
+"I agree that it was a grand period of our history; the last that was
+really glorious, the last gleam that flashed before that Spain, who
+alone walked in the right way, was extinguished. But before their
+deaths the Catholic kings commenced the decadence by dismembering that
+strong and healthy Spain of the Arabs, the Christians and the Jews.
+You are right, Don Antolin, to say that those kings are not called
+the Catholics for nothing. Doña Isabel with her feminine fanaticism
+established the Inquisition, so science extinguished her lamp in the
+mosques and synagogues, and hid her books in Christian convents.
+Seeing that the hour for praying, instead of reading, had come,
+Spanish thought took refuge in darkness, trembling in cold and
+solitude, and ended by dying. What remained devoted itself to poetry,
+to comedies and theological tracts. Science became a pathway that led
+to the bonfire; and then came a fresh calamity, the expulsion of the
+Spanish Jews, so saturated with the spirit of this country, loving it
+so dearly, that even to-day, after four centuries, scattered on the
+shores of the Danube or the Bosphorus there are Spanish Jews who weep,
+like old Castillians, for their lost country:
+
+  'Perdimos la bella Sion;
+  Perdimos tambien España
+  Nido de consolacion.'[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: 'We lost our lovely Sion; we also lost our Spain, that
+nest of consolation.]
+
+"That people who had given Maimonides to the science of the Middle
+Ages, and who were the mainstay of all the industries and commerce
+of Spain, left our country _en masse_. Spain, deceived by its
+extraordinary vitality was opening its own veins to satisfy the
+growing fanaticism, believing that it could survive this loss without
+danger. Afterwards came what a modern writer has called 'the foreign
+body,' interposing itself in our national life--those Austrians who
+came to reign and caused Spain to lose her distinctive character."
+
+"Gabriel," interrupted the priest, "you are talking absurdities. The
+true Spain began with the emperor, and went on equally gloriously
+under Don Philip II. This is the pure and uncorrupted Spain that we
+ought to take as an example, and which we hope to restore."
+
+"No. The pure and uncorrupted Spain, the Spanish Spain without foreign
+admixture, is that of the Arabs, Moors and Jews, that of religious
+tolerance, that of industrial and agricultural wealth, and of free
+municipalities; that which perished under the Catholic kings. What
+came after was a Teutonic and a Flemish Spain turned into a German
+colony, serving as a mercenary under foreign standards, ruining itself
+in undertakings in which it had no interest, shedding blood and gold
+for the ambition of the so-called Holy Roman Empire. I can understand
+the enchantment that the emperor exercised over the bigoted and
+ignorant people who worshipped the past. A great man that Don Carlos!
+Brave in fight, astute in politics, jolly and hearty as one of the
+burgomasters of his own country; a great eater, a great drinker, and
+loving to catch the girls round the waist. But he had nothing Spanish
+about him. He only appreciated his mother's heritage for what he could
+wring out of it. Spain became a servant to Germany, ready to supply
+as many men as were required, and to furnish loans and taxes. All the
+exuberant life garnered in this country by Hispano-Arab culture
+was absorbed by the north in less than a hundred years. The free
+municipalities disappeared, their defenders went to the scaffold both
+in Castille and Valencia; the Spaniard abandoned his plough or his
+weaving to range the world with an arquebus on his shoulder, and the
+town militias were transformed into bands which fought all over Europe
+without knowing why. The flourishing towns became villages; churches
+were turned into convents; the popular and tolerant clergy were
+changed into friars who imitated with servile complacency the German
+fanaticism. The fields remained barren for want of hands to cultivate
+them, the poor dreamt of becoming rich from the sack of the enemy's
+towns and left their work; the industrious burghers abandoned commerce
+as only fit for heretics, and became nurseries of clerks and petty
+magistrates; and the armies of Spain as unbeaten and glorious as they
+were ragged, with no pay but pillage and in continual mutiny against
+their chiefs, flooded our country with a swarm of wretched vagabonds,
+from whence proceeded the bully, the beggar with his blunderbuss, the
+highwayman, the wandering hermits, the starving nobleman, and all
+those characters of which picturesque novels have availed themselves."
+
+"But, the devil, Gabriel!" cried indignantly Silver Stick; "do you
+deny that Don Carlos, who built the Alcazar of Toledo, and Don Philip
+II., who lived in this very cloister, were two great kings?"
+
+"I do not deny it; they were two extraordinary men, but they killed
+Spain for ever. They were two foreigners, two Germans; Philip II.
+clothed himself with a false Spaniardism to continue the German policy
+of his father. This masquerading caused us great harm, because there
+are many men now who think of him as the noblest representation of a
+Spaniard. The absurd inventions and lapses from truth to which those
+times give rise are enough to drive one mad. Many Catholics dream of
+canonising Philip II. for the cold cruelty with which he exterminated
+heretics, but such a king had really no Catholicism but his own; he
+was heir to the German Cæsarism, that eternal hammer of the Popes.
+Driven by pride, he was always sailing to the windward of schism and
+heresy; that he did not break with the Pontificate was solely that
+this latter feared that the Spanish soldiery, who had twice entered
+Rome, would remain there for ever, and that it would have to submit to
+all their extortions. The father and son robbed us with dissimulation
+of our nationality, and dissipated our life for their purely personal
+plans of reviving the Cæsarism of Charlemagne and forming the Catholic
+religion to their own imagination and taste. They nearly destroyed the
+ancient religious feeling of Spain, so cultivated and tolerant from
+its continual intercourse with Mahomedanism and Judaism; that Spanish
+Church, whose priests lived peacefully in the towns with the alfaqui
+and the rabbi, and who punished with moral penalties those who from
+excess of zeal disturbed the worship of the infidels. That religious
+intolerance which foreign historians consider a purely Spanish product
+was really imported by the German Caesars. It was the German friar who
+came with his devout brutality and his crazy theology, not tempered
+as in Spain by Semitic culture. With their intolerance and
+impracticability they provoked the revolution of the Reformation in
+the northern countries, and, driven out of them, they came here to
+plant afresh their ignorance and fanaticism. The ground was well
+prepared. When the free towns whose municipalities were republics
+fell, the people also languished; the foreign seed produced in a
+short time an immense forest, the forest of the Inquisition and the
+fanaticism which still exists; the modern woodmen cut and lop, but
+they soon fall off wearied; the arms of one man can do little against
+a trunk that has grown for centuries. Fire, nothing but fire, can
+exterminate that cursed vegetation."
+
+Don Antolin opened his eyes in horror. He was not angry now, he seemed
+quite thunderstruck by Luna's words.
+
+"Gabriel, my son!" he exclaimed; "you are 'greener' than I thought.
+Just think where you are; remember what you are saying. We are in the
+Holy Metropolitan Church of all the Spains."
+
+But Luna was fairly launched by the renewal of his historical
+remembrances and he was not to be stopped, driven on as he was by his
+propagandist zeal. He was fired by the old oratorical fervour, and he
+spoke as at those meetings when he could scarcely continue his speech
+for the applause, and the protests and surging of the multitude
+obstructing the police.
+
+The horror of the priest only seemed to excite him more.
+
+"Philip II.," he continued, "was a foreigner, a German to the very
+bones. His grave taciturnity, his slow and penetrating mind, were not
+Spanish, they were Flemish. The impassibility with which he received
+the reverses which ruined the nation was that of a foreigner who was
+bound by no ties of affection to the country. 'It is better to reign
+over corpses than over heretics,' he said, and corpses the Spaniards
+really were, condemned not to think, but to lie in order to conceal
+their thoughts. All the ancient offices had disappeared. Outside
+the Church there was no future for any adventurous soul, except in
+America--which ceased to be of any use to the nation after it became
+converted into the treasure chest of the king--or to be a soldier
+fighting in Europe for the rehabilitation of the Holy German Empire,
+for the subjection of the Pope to the Emperor or the extinction of the
+reformed religion, undertakings that in no way concerned Spain, but
+were all the same very blood-letting affairs, even for those who
+escaped with their lives. All the handicraftsmen disappeared, carried
+away to the armies, and the towns became filled with invalids and
+veterans, carrying their rusty swords, their only proof of personal
+valour. All the middle-class guilds were suppressed; there only
+remained nobles proud of being servants to the king and a populace
+who only asked for bread and entertainments, like the Romans, and
+contented themselves with the broth from the convents and the burning
+of heretics organised by the Inquisition.
+
+"After this, ruin overwhelmed us; after the great Caesars, so fatal to
+Spain, came the little ones--Philip III., who gave the final blow by
+expelling the Moors; Philip IV., a degenerate with literary fancies,
+who wrote verses and courted nuns, and the miserable Charles II.
+
+"Spain had never been so religious, Don Antolin," said Luna. "The
+Church was mistress of everything; the ecclesiastical tribunals judged
+even the king himself, but secular justice could not touch even the
+hem of a garment of the lowest sacristan, even though he committed the
+greatest crimes in the public streets. Only the Church could judge its
+own; as Barrioneuva relates in his memoirs, friars armed to the teeth
+wrested from the king's justice at the foot of the scaffold, in broad
+daylight in the midst of the Plaza Mayor in Madrid, one of their own
+brothers condemned for murder. The Inquisition, not satisfied with
+burning heretics, judged and punished gangs of cattle-lifters. Men of
+letters, terrified, took refuge in ornamental literature as the last
+refuge of thought, confining themselves to the production of witty
+novels or plays, in which a fantastic honour was exalted which only
+existed in poets' imagination, while the greatest corruption of morals
+reigned. The great Spanish genius ignored or feigned to ignore what
+the religious revolution beyond the frontiers was saying. Quevedo
+only, who was the most daring, ventured to say:
+
+  'With the Inquisition....
+  Hush! Silence!'
+
+the sad epitaph of Spanish thought which preferred to perish as it
+could not speak the truth. In order to live quietly and support
+themselves in those days of ignorance, many poets sought the shadow
+of the Church and wore its vestments. Lope de Vega, Calderon, Tirsode
+Molina, Miradamerscua, Tarriga, Argensola, Gongora, Rioja, and others
+were priests, many of them after stormy lives. Montalban was a priest
+and employed in the Inquisition, and even the poor Cervantes, in
+his old age, had to take the habit of St. Francis. Spain had eleven
+thousand convents, more than a hundred thousand friars, and forty
+thousand nuns, and to these must be added seventy-eight thousand
+priests and the innumerable servitors and dependents of the Church,
+such as alguaciles, familiars, jailors, and notaries of the
+Inquisition, sacristans, stewards, buleros,[1] convent door-porters,
+choristers, singers, lay brothers, novices--and I know not how many
+other people. In exchange, the nation from a population of thirty
+millions had shrunk to seven millions in less than two hundred
+years. The expulsion of Jews and Moors by religious intolerance, the
+continual foreign wars, the emigration to America in the hopes of
+growing rich without work, hunger, the lack of sanitation, and the
+abandonment of agriculture, had brought about this rapid depopulation.
+The revenues of Spain had fallen to fourteen million ducats, whereas
+the clerical revenue had risen to eight millions; the Church possessed
+more than half the national fortune! What times! Eh, Don Antolin?"
+
+[Footnote 1: _Buleros_--One charged with distributing crusading bulls
+and collecting alms for them.]
+
+Silver Stick listened coldly, as though he had formed some definite
+idea about Luna, and therefore did not make much account of his words.
+
+"However bad they were," he said slowly, "they could not be worse than
+they are at present. At all events no one robbed the Church. Everyone
+was contented in his poverty, thinking of heaven, which is the only
+truth, and the worship of God which corresponds to it. Is it that you
+possibly do not believe in God?"
+
+Gabriel avoided an answer, and went on talking of those times.
+
+"It was a period of barbarism and stagnation, and while Europe was
+developing and progressing the people who had been foremost in all
+civilisation were now left far behind. The kings, inspired by Spanish
+pride and the hereditary pretensions of the German Caesars, conceived
+the mad idea of mastering all Europe, with no more support than
+a nation of seven million of inhabitants, and a few companies of
+ill-paid and starving soldiers. The gold from America had gone to fill
+the Dutchmen's purses, and in this undertaking, worthy of Don Quixote,
+the nation received blow after blow. Spain became more and more
+Catholic, poorer and more barbarous. She aspired to conquer the whole
+world, yet in the interior she had whole provinces uninhabited; many
+of the old towns had disappeared, the roads were obliterated and no
+one in Spain knew for certain the geography of the country though few
+were ignorant of the situation of heaven and of purgatory. The farms
+of any fertility were not occupied by granges but by convents, and
+along the few highways bivouacked bands of robbers, who took refuge,
+when they found themselves pursued, in the monasteries, where they
+were welcomed for their piety, and for the many masses they ordered
+for their sinful souls.
+
+"The ignorance was atrocious, the kings were advised even in warlike
+matters by priests. Charles II., when the Dutch troops offered to
+garrison the Spanish towns in Flanders, consulted with the clerics as
+on a case of conscience, because this might facilitate the diffusion
+of heresy, and he ended by preferring to let them fall into the hands
+of the French, who, although they were enemies, were at all events
+Catholics. In the university of Salamanca the poet Torres de
+Villarroel could not find a single work on geography, and when he
+spoke of mathematics, the pupils assured him it was a kind of sorcery,
+a devilish science that could only be understood by anointing oneself
+with an ointment used by witches. The theologians rejected the project
+of a canal to unite the Tagus and the Manzanares, saying that this
+would be a work against the will of God; but having laid this
+down--fiat--the two rivers joined themselves even though they had
+been separated from the beginning of the world. The doctors of Madrid
+begged Philip IV. to allow the refuse to remain in the streets
+'because the air of the town being exceedingly keen, it would cause
+great ravages unless it were impregnated with the vapours from the
+filth,' and a century later, a famous theologian in Seville registered
+in a public document with those who were discussing with him, 'that
+we would far rather err with Saint Clement, Saint Basil and Saint
+Augustin, than agree with Descartes and Newton.'
+
+"Philip II. had threatened with death and confiscation anyone who
+published foreign books or who circulated manuscripts, and his
+successors forbade any Spaniard to write on political subjects, so,
+finding no ways of expansion for thought, they devoted themselves to
+fine arts and poetry; painting and the theatre rose to a higher level
+than in any other country; they were the safety valves of the national
+genius; but this spring of art was only ephemeral, for in the midst of
+the seventeenth century a grotesque and debasing decadence overwhelmed
+everything.
+
+"The poverty in those centuries was horrible; that same Philip II.,
+though he was lord of the world, put up titles of nobility for sale
+for the sum of six thousand reals, noting on the margin of the decree
+'that it was not necessary to inquire much into the quality and origin
+of the people.' In Madrid the people sacked the bakeries, fighting
+with their fists for the bread. The president of Castille travelled
+through the province with the executioner to wring the scanty harvest
+from the peasants. The collectors of taxes, finding nothing that they
+could collect in the towns, tore off the roofs of the houses, selling
+the woodwork and the tiles. The families fled to the mountains
+whenever they saw in the distance the king's representative, and so
+the towns remained deserted and fell into ruins. Hunger came in even
+to the royal palaces, and Charles II., Lord of Spain and of the
+Indies, was unable on several occasions to procure food for his
+servants. The ambassadors of England and Denmark were obliged to sally
+forth with their armed servants to seek for bread in the suburbs of
+Madrid.
+
+"And amidst all this the innumerable convents, masters of more than
+half the country and the sole possessors of wealth, showed their
+charity by distributing soup to those who had strength to fetch it,
+and by founding asylums and hospitals, where the people died of misery
+though they were certain of reaching heaven. The ancient manufactures
+had all disappeared. Segovia, so famous for its cloth, that had
+employed over 40,000 persons in its manufacture, only held 15,000
+inhabitants, and these had so completely forgotten the art of weaving
+wool that when Philip V. wished to re-establish the industry, he was
+obliged to import German weavers.
+
+"And it was the same thing in Seville, in Valencia, and in Medina del
+Campo, so famous for their fairs and their manufactures," continued
+Gabriel. "Seville which in the fifteenth century had 16,000 silk
+weavers, at the end of the seventeenth could only produce 65. Though
+it is true in exchange its Cathedral clergy numbered 117 canons, and
+it had 78 convents, with more than 4,000 friars and 14,000 priests
+in the diocese. And Toledo? At the close of the fifteenth century
+it employed 50,000 artisans in its silk and wool weaving and in its
+factory of arms, to say nothing of curriers, silversmiths, glovers,
+and jewellers; at the end of the seventeenth century it had hardly
+15,000 inhabitants. Everything was decayed, everything was ruined;
+twenty-five houses belonging to illustrious families had passed into
+the hands of the convents, and the only rich people in the town were
+the friars, the archbishop and the Cathedral. Spain was so exhausted
+at the end of the Austrian rule that she saw herself nearly divided
+among the different powers of Europe, like Poland, another Catholic
+country like ours. The quarrels among the kings were the only thing
+that saved her."
+
+"If those times were so bad, Gabriel," said Silver Stick, "how was
+it the Spaniards showed such unanimity? How was it there were no
+'pronunciamientos' and risings in these deplorable times?"
+
+"What could they do? The despotism of the Caesars had imposed on the
+Spaniards a blind obedience to the kings as the representatives
+of God, and the clergy had educated them in this belief from the
+community of interests between the Church and the throne. Even the
+most illustrious poets corrupted the people, exalting servility to the
+monarchy in their plays. Calderon affirmed that the property and life
+of a citizen did not belong to himself but to the king. Besides,
+religion filled everything; it was the sole end of existence, and the
+Spaniards meditating always on heaven, ended by accustoming themselves
+to the miseries of earth. Do not doubt but the excess of religion was
+our ruin, and came very near exterminating us as a nation. Even now we
+are dragging along the consequences of this plague which lasted for
+centuries. To save this country from death what had to be done? The
+foreigners had to be called in, and the Bourbons came. See how low we
+had fallen that we had not even soldiers. In this land, even if we
+were wanting in other advantages, we could from the earliest days
+reckon on good warlike leaders; but look, in the war of succession we
+had to have English and French generals, and even officers, for there
+was not a Spaniard who could train a cannon or command a company; we
+had no one to serve us as a minister, and under Philip V. and Fernando
+VI. all the Government were foreigners, strangers called in to revive
+the lost manufactures, to reclaim the derelict lands, to repair the
+ancient irrigation channels, and to found colonies in the deserts
+inhabited by wild beasts and bandits. Spain, who had colonised half
+the world after her own fashion, was now re-discovered and colonised
+by Europeans.[1] The Spaniards seemed like poor Indians, guided by
+their Cacique the friar, with their rags covered with scapularies and
+miracle-working relics. Anti-clericalism was the only remedy against
+all this superstition and ruin, and this spirit came in with the
+foreign colonists. Philip V. wished to suppress the Inquisition and to
+end the naval war with the Mussulman nations which had lasted for a
+thousand years, depopulating the shores of the Mediterranean with the
+fear of the Barbary and Turkish pirates. But the natives resisted any
+reform coming from the colonists, and the first Bourbon had to desist,
+finding his crown in danger. Later on his immediate successors, having
+deeper roots in the country dared to continue his work. Carlos III.
+in his endeavour to civilise Spain laid a heavy hand on the Church,
+limiting its privileges and curtailing its revenues, being careful of
+earthly things and forgetful of the heavenly. The bishops protested,
+speaking in letters and pastorals 'of the persecutions of the poor
+Church, robbed of its goods, outraged in its ministers, and attacked
+in its immunities,' but the awakened country rejoiced in the
+only prosperous days it had known in modern times before the
+disestablishment. Europe was ruled by philosophic kings and Charles
+III. was one of them. The echo of the English revolution still
+vibrated through the world; the monarchs now wished to be loved and
+not feared, and in every country they struggled against the ignorance
+and brutality of the masses, bringing about progressive reforms
+by royal enactment and even by force. But the great evil of the
+monarchical system was its heredity, the power settled in one family,
+for the son of a clever man with good intentions might be an imbecile.
+After Charles III. came Charles IV., and as if this were not
+sufficient, in the year of his death the French revolution broke out,
+which made all the kings in Europe tremble, and the Bourbons of Spain
+quite lost their heads, which they were never able to recover. They
+went astray, wandering from the right way, throwing themselves once
+more into the arms of the Church as the only means of avoiding the
+revolutionary danger, and they have not yet returned, nor will they,
+to the right track. Jesuits, friars and bishops became once more the
+counsellors at the palace, as they still are, as in the times when
+Carlos II. concocted his military and political plans with a council
+of theologians. We have had false revolutions which have dethroned
+people, but not ideas. It is true we have advanced a little, but
+timidly, with halting footsteps and disorderly retreats, like one who
+advances fearfully, and suddenly, at the slightest noise, rushes back
+to the point of departure. The transformation has been more exterior
+than interior. The minds of the people are still in the seventeenth
+century; they still feel the fear and cowardice engendered by the
+inquisitorial bonfires. The Spaniards are slaves to their very marrow;
+their pride and their energies are all on the surface; they have not
+lived through three centuries of ecclesiastical servitude for nothing.
+They have made revolutions, they are capable of rebelling, but they
+will always stop short at the threshold of the Church, who was their
+mistress by force and remains so still, even though its power has
+vanished. There is no fear of them entering here. You may remain quite
+easy, Don Antolin, though in justice many accounts might be required
+of her from the past. Is it because they are as religious as formerly?
+You know that this is not the case, though they complain with reason
+of the way in which the ancient grandeur of the Church has been
+extinguished without popular aid."
+
+[Footnote 1: In 1897 an Act was passed "to colonise derelict land in
+Spain."]
+
+"That is true," said Silver Stick; "there is no faith. No one is
+capable of making any sacrifice for the house of God. Only in the hour
+of death, when fear comes in, do some of them remember to assist us
+with their fortune."
+
+"There is no faith, that is the truth. The Spaniard, after that
+religious fever that nearly killed him, lived in a state of perfect
+indifference, not from scientific reflection but from inability to
+think at all. They know they will go either to heaven or hell; they
+believe it because they have been taught so, but they let themselves
+be carried on by the stream of life, without the strength to choose
+either one place or the other. They accept the established, living
+in a sort of an intellectual somnambulism. If now and then thought
+awakening suggests some criticism it is smothered at once by fear;
+the Inquisition still lives among us though we have no longer the
+bonfires, but we are terribly afraid of 'what will be said.' A
+stationary and narrow-minded society is our modern holy office. He
+who raises his protest, rising above the general and common monotony,
+draws upon himself the stupid anger of scandalised man, and suffers
+punishment; if he is poor he is put to the proof of hunger, his means
+of life being cut away from him, and if he is independent he is burned
+in effigy, creating emptiness around him. Everyone must be correct and
+agree to what is established, and hence it arises, that, bound to
+one another by fear, never an original thought arises, there is no
+independent thought, and even the learned keep to themselves the
+conclusions they draw from their studies. As long as this goes on the
+task of the revolutionary is useless in this country; they may change
+the apparent nature of the soil, but when the pickaxe strikes they
+come at once on the stones of ages, solid and compact. The national
+character though it has lost its religious faith is unchanged. Faith
+is dead, but the corpse still remains with the appearance of life,
+occupying the same place and obstructing the pathway. The Church is
+poor and driven into a corner compared to what it was formerly, Don
+Antolin, but do not fear, its situation will not be aggravated, the
+tide has risen to its full height and will not overflow; as long as
+the people in this country are afraid to say what they think, as long
+as they are scandalised by a new idea, and tremble at what their
+neighbours will say, so long will they laugh at revolutions, for
+however much they break out, none of these will bring the water to
+your mouths."
+
+Don Antolin laughed on hearing this.
+
+"But Gabrielillo, man--you must be mad. All this reading and
+travelling has turned your head. At first I was indignant, thinking
+you were among those who wished for another revolution to take
+away the little that is left to us, proclaiming the republic and
+suppressing all ecclesiastical things, but I see that you go much
+beyond this, that you conform to nothing, and that everything seems to
+you the worst; and this rather pleases me, because I see you are not a
+terrible enemy to be feared as you fire from too far. It seems to me
+that your head is as much affected as your chest. But do all these
+revolutions we have had seem as nothing to you? Do you think the
+country is still as savage as you have described it in past years? But
+I," continued the priest ironically, "hear a great deal said about the
+progress of the country, and I know that we have railways, and that
+the long chimneys are arising in all the town suburbs, and many of the
+impious are delighted at this, comparing them to the church belfries."
+
+"Bah!" exclaimed Gabriel indifferently. "There is a little of this
+progress; the revolutions have placed Spain in touch with other
+countries, the progressive current has caught this country and is
+carrying it along as the Asiatics and others are carried; no one
+can escape it nowadays. But we advance at very low water, inert and
+without strength; if we advance it is with the current, and not by
+our own energy, while other people stronger than we swim and swim,
+advancing at every stroke. How have we contributed to this progress?
+Where are our manifestations of modern life? The railways, few and
+bad, are the work of foreigners, and are their property; the grass
+grows between the rails, which shows that we still follow the holy
+calm of carts and wagons. The most important industries, metallurgy
+and mines, are all in the hands of foreigners or of Spaniards who are
+subject to them, living under their bountiful protection. Commerce
+languishes under an old-fashioned protection which enhances the price
+of all commodities, and so there is no capital forthcoming; money
+remains hidden in earthen jars in the fields as treasure, or in the
+towns is devoted to usury as in past times; the most daring venture
+to invest in public stock; Government continues the mismanagement,
+certain of always finding someone to lend, and pointing to this credit
+as a proof of the country's prosperity. There are in Spain two million
+hectares of uncultivated land, twenty-six millions of unirrigated
+arable land, and only one million irrigated. This cultivation of
+unirrigated land, which has come to be almost our only agriculture
+is a concession that Spanish indolence makes to hunger, a perpetual
+demonstration of the fanaticism that trusts in prayer or in the rain
+from heaven more than in human progress. The rivers rush to the sea
+through scorched-up provinces overflowing in winter, not to fertilise,
+but to carry away everything in the volume of the inundation; there is
+plenty of stone for churches and new convents, but none for dykes and
+reservoirs; they build belfries and cut down the trees that attract
+the rain. And do not tell me again, Don Antolin, that the Church is
+poor and in no ways in fault; the poor are yourselves, you of the old
+and traditional Church, you of the religion 'à la Española,' for in
+this as in everything else there are fashions, and the faithful
+follow the most recent; for here are the Jesuits, the most modern
+manifestation of Catholicism, the 'latest novelty,' with their Sacred
+Heart of Jesus and other French idolatries, building palaces and
+churches in all directions, diverting the money that formerly went to
+the Cathedrals, the only evidence of wealth in the country. But let us
+return to our progress. Worse even for agriculture than the drought
+is the ignorance and routine of the labourers, every new invention or
+scientific appliance repels them, thinking it evil. 'The old times
+were the good ones, our ancestors cultivated in this way and so ought
+we'; and so ignorance is turned into a sort of national glory, and
+we cannot hope for any remedy at present. In other countries the
+universities and high schools send out reformers, men fighting for
+progress; here the centres of learning only send out a proletariat
+of students who must live, besieging all the professions and public
+appointments, with the sole desire to open themselves a way to
+continuous employment. They study (if you can call it study) for a few
+years, not to learn, but to gain a diploma, a scrap of paper which
+authorises them to earn their bread. They learn anything that the
+professor teaches, without the slightest desire to inquire any
+further. The professors are for the greater part doctors or barristers
+practising their profession, who come between whiles and sit for an
+hour in their chairs, repeating like a phonograph what they have said
+for many previous years, and then they return to their sick or their
+lawsuits, without caring in the least what is being said or written in
+the world since they got their appointments. All Spanish culture is at
+second hand, purely on the surface, 'translated from the French,' and
+even this is only for the scanty minority who read, for the rest of
+those so-called intellectuals have no other library but the text-books
+they studied as children, and all they learn of the progress of human
+thought is from the newspapers. The parents who are desirous of
+securing as soon as possible the future of their sons who are seeking
+a career, send them to these centres of learning when they scarcely
+know how to speak; the man-student of other countries, in the
+full plenitude of his thinking powers, does not exist here. The
+universities are full of children, and in the different institutes you
+only see short trousers, and the Spaniard, before he shaves himself
+for the first time, is a licentiate and on the high road to become
+a doctor; the wet nurse will end by sitting by the professor. These
+children who receive the baptism of science at an age when in other
+countries they are playing with their toys, being confirmed in the
+title that proclaims their scientific acquirements, study no more;
+these are the intellectuals who are to direct and save us, and who
+to-morrow may be legislators and ministers. Come, my good man, it is
+enough to make one laugh!"
+
+Gabriel did not laugh, but Silver Stick and the others applauded his
+words. Any criticism against the present times delighted the priest.
+
+"This country is drained, Don Antolin, nothing remains standing. The
+number of towns which have vanished since our decadence commenced is
+incalculable. In other countries ruins are carefully preserved, as
+so many stone pages of their history; they are cleaned, preserved,
+supported and strengthened, and paths opened round them so that all
+can examine them. Here, where Roman, Byzantine and Arab art have
+passed, and also the Mudejar, the Gothic and the Renaissance--in fact,
+all the styles of Europe--the ruins in the country are hidden and
+disfigured by herbage and creepers, and in the towns they are
+mutilated and disfigured by the vandalism of the people. They are
+constantly thinking of the past, and yet they despise its remains;
+what a country of dreams and desolation! Spain is no longer a country,
+it is an ill-arranged and dusty museum, full of old things that
+attract all the curious of Europe, but in which even the ruins are
+ruined."
+
+The eyes of Don Martin, the young curate, fastened themselves on
+Gabriel. They seemed to speak to him and express the pleasure with
+which he heard his words. The other listeners, silent and with bowed
+heads, did not feel less the enchantment of those propositions which
+sounded so audaciously in the restful and rank atmosphere of the
+cloister. Don Antolin was the only one who laughed, finding Gabriel's
+ideas quite charming but absolutely crazy It was getting late and the
+sun had sunk below the roofs of the Cathedral. Silver Stick's niece
+called to them once again from the door of her house.
+
+"We are coming, child," said the priest, "but I have one thing first
+to say to this gentleman."
+
+And addressing himself to Luna, he continued:
+
+"But, Hombre de Dios![1]--but I ought not to call you that as you
+are so turbulent--you think everything is out of joint. The Spanish
+Church, worn out as you say, has become very poor, and still you say
+this revolution is a very small affair. What do you wish for? What
+is it that you desire so that things might be settled? Tell us your
+secret quickly and let us go, for the cold is very sharp."
+
+[Footnote 1: Man of God.]
+
+And he laughed again, looking at Gabriel with paternal pity as though
+he were a child.
+
+"My remedy!" exclaimed Gabriel, taking no notice of the priest's
+gesture. "I have no remedy whatever, it is the progress of humanity
+that alone offers one. All the nations on earth have passed through
+the same evolutions; first of all they were ruled by the sword, then
+by faith, and now by science. We ourselves have been ruled by warriors
+and priests, but now we tarry at the gate of modern life, without the
+strength or wish to take science by the hand, who is the only guide
+we could have, hence our sad situation. Science is nowadays in
+everything--in agriculture, in all manufactures, in arts and crafts,
+in the culture and well-being of the people; it is even in war. Spain
+still lives far from the sun of science, at most she knows a pale
+reflection, cold and feeble, that comes to us from foreign countries.
+The failure of faith has left us without strength, like those
+creatures who, having suffered from a severe illness in their youth,
+remain anaemic for ever, without possible recuperation, condemned to
+premature old age."
+
+"Bah! Science!" said Silver Stick, turning towards his house; "that
+is the eternal cry of all the enemies of religion. There is no better
+science than to love God and His works. Good evening."
+
+"Very good evening, Don Antolin; but remember this, we have not yet
+done with faith and the sword; sometimes one directs us or the other
+drives us; but of science, never a word, unless Spain has changed in
+the last twenty-four hours."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+After this evening Gabriel avoided the meetings in the cloister, so
+as to have no more discussions with Silver Stick. He repented of his
+audacity, and when he was alone reflected on the danger to which
+he had exposed himself in expressing his views so freely. He felt
+terrified at the possibility of being expelled from the Cathedral to
+roam the world afresh; he reproached himself, throwing in his own
+teeth his folly in hurling himself against the prejudices of the past.
+What could he hope to effect by changing the thoughts of these poor
+people? What weight could the conversion of these few men, stuck
+like limpets to the stones of the past, have in the emancipation of
+humanity?
+
+The Cathedral was to Gabriel like a gigantic tumour, which blistered
+the Spanish epidermis, like scars of its ancient infirmities. It was
+not a muscle capable of development, but an abscess which bided its
+time either to be extirpated, or to disappear of itself through the
+working of the germs it contained; he had chosen this ruin as
+his refuge and he ought to be silent, to be prudent so that his
+ingratitude should not be flung in his face.
+
+Moreover, his brother Esteban, breaking the cold reserve into which he
+had retired since the arrival of his daughter, counselled prudence.
+
+"His mind seems possessed by the demon, Esteban," said the priest,
+"and he explains his views with the most perfect calmness in this holy
+house, as though he were in one of those infernal clubs which exist in
+foreign countries. Where on earth has your brother been to learn such
+things? Never have I heard such frightful heresies. Tell him that I
+shall forget it all as I have known him since his childhood, and that
+I remember he was the pride of our seminary, but more especially
+because he is ill, and it would be inhuman to drive him out of the
+Cathedral; but he must not repeat this scandal. Silence! Let him keep
+all those atrocities in his own head, if it so pleases him to lose his
+soul; but in this holy house, and especially before its staff, not a
+word. Do you understand? not a word. The next thing will be that he
+will hold meetings in the Holy Metropolitan Church. Besides, your
+brother must remember that, after all, at this moment, he is eating
+the bread of the Church, as he lives on you, and is supported by you,
+and it is not right to speak in this way of the most excellent work of
+God, and try to point out all its defects."
+
+This last consideration weighed the most with Gabriel, and it wounded
+his dignity. Don Antolin said rightly, he was no more than a parasite
+of the Cathedral, and having taken refuge in her lap, he owed her
+gratitude and silence. He would keep silence. Had he not decided
+when he took refuge there to live as one dead? He would live like an
+animated corpse, which in some religious orders is the supreme of
+human perfection. He would think like everyone else, or rather, he
+would try not to think at all, but would simply vegetate there till
+his last hour came, like the plants in the garden or the fungus on the
+buttresses of the cloister.
+
+The Cathedral servants seated themselves round the sewing machine,
+hoping in vain that their master would come down, but content on the
+whole, though they did not see him, to be near him, to look at his
+empty seat, and to talk to the girl who expressed such ingenuous
+admiration for her uncle's conversation. The Chapel-master was
+delighted that Luna, his sole admirer, had returned to visit him;
+during his temporary eclipse the poor musician had suffered all the
+bitterness of solitude, despairing with almost infantile rage, as
+though an immense audience had turned its back on him. He caressed
+Gabriel as though he was the woman he loved, listening to his
+coughing, and recommending all sorts of fantastic remedies imagined
+by himself, uneasy at the progress of his malady and trembling at the
+idea that death might tear from him his only listener.
+
+He told Gabriel of all the music he had studied during his absence.
+When the sick man coughed much, he would cease playing his harmonium,
+and begin long talks with his friend, always on the subject of his
+constant preoccupation, musical art.
+
+"Gabriel," said the musician one evening; "you who are so keen an
+observer, and who knows so much, has it ever struck you that Spain is
+sad, and has not the sweet sentimentality of true poetry? She is not
+melancholy, she is sad, with a wild and savage silence. She either
+laughs in wild peals, or weeps moaning. She has not the gentle smile,
+the joyful brightness that distinguishes the man from the animal. If
+she laughs it is showing all her teeth; her inner meaning is always
+gloomy, with the obscurity of a cavern in which all passions rage like
+wild beasts seeking for an outlet."
+
+"You say truly, Spain is sad," replied Luna. "She does not now go
+dressed in black, with the rosary hanging to the pommel of her sword
+as in former years. Still in her heart she is always dressed in
+mourning and her soul is gloomy and wild. For three hundred years the
+poor thing has endured the inquisitorial anguish of burning or being
+burnt, and she still feels the spasm of that life of terror. There is
+no joy here."
+
+"There certainly is not, and you find this more in music than in any
+other phase of Spanish life. The Germans dance the gay and voluptuous
+waltz with a 'bock' in their hand, singing the _Gaudeamus igitur_,
+that students' hymn glorifying the material life free from care. The
+French sing amid rippling laughter, and dance with their free and
+elastic limbs, greeting with rapturous applause their fantastic and
+monkey-like movements. The English have turned their dance into
+gymnastics, with the energy of a healthy body delighting in its own
+strength. But all these people, when they feel the sweet sadness of
+poetry, sing Lieds, romances, ballads, something soft and flowing,
+that rests the soul and speaks to the imagination. Here even the
+popular dances have much that is priestly, recalling the priestly
+stiffness of the sacred dances, and the circling frenzy of the
+priestess, who ended by falling in front of the altar with foaming
+mouth and bloodshot eyes. And our songs? They are most beautiful, the
+products of many civilisations, but most sad, despairing, gloomy,
+revealing the soul of a sick and tainted people, who find their
+greatest pleasure in human bloodshed, or urging on dying horses in the
+enclosure of a circus. Spanish joy! Andalusian merriment! I cannot
+help laughing at it. One night in Madrid I assisted at an Andalusian
+fête, all that was most typical, most Spanish. We went to enjoy
+ourselves immensely. Wine and more wine! And accordingly the bottle
+went round, with ever frowning brows, gloomy faces, abrupt gestures.
+'Ole! come along here! This is the joy of the world!' but the joy did
+not appear in any part. The men looked at one another with scowling
+brows, the women stamped their feet and clapped their hands with a
+stupid vacuity in their looks, as though the music had emptied their
+brains. The dancers swayed like erect serpents, with their mouths
+open, their looks hard, grave, proud, unapproachable, like dancers who
+were performing a sacred rite. Now and then above the monotonous and
+sleepy rhythm, a song, harsh and strident like a roar, like the scream
+of one who falls with his body run through. And the poetry? As dreary
+as a dungeon, sometimes very beautiful, but beautiful as might be the
+song of a prisoner behind his bars, dagger thrusts to the faithless
+wife, offences against the mother washed out in blood, complaints
+against the judge who sends to prison the caballeros[1] of the
+broad-brimmed sombreros and sashes. The adieus of the culprit who
+watches in the chapel the light of his last morning dawn. A poetry
+of death and the scaffold that wrings the heart and robs it of all
+happiness; even the songs to the beauty of women contain blood and
+threats. And this is the music that delights the people in their hours
+of relaxation and that will go on 'enlivening' them probably for
+centuries. We are a gloomy people, Gabriel, we have it in our very
+marrow, we do not know how to sing unless we are threatening or
+weeping, and that song is the most beautiful which contains most
+sighs, most painful groans and gasps of agony."
+
+[Footnote 1: Highwaymen.]
+
+"It is true, the Spanish people must necessarily be so. It believes
+with its eyes shut in its kings and priests as the representatives of
+God, and it moulds itself in their image and likeness. Its merriment
+is that of the friars--a coarse merriment of dirty jests, of greasy
+words and hoarse laughs. Our spicy novels are stories of the refectory
+composed in the hours of digestion, with the garments loosened, the
+hands crossed on the paunch, and the triple chin resting on
+the scapulary. Their laughter arises always from the same
+sources--grotesque poverty, the troublesome hangers on, the tricks
+of hunger to rob a companion of his provision of begged scraps. The
+tricks to filch purses from the gaily-dressed ladies who flaunt in the
+churches, who serve as models to our poets of the golden age to depict
+a lying world devoid of honour. The woman enslaved behind iron bars
+and shutters, more dishonest and vicious than the modern woman with
+all her liberty. The Spanish sadness is the work of her kings, of
+those gloomy invalids who dreamt of conquering the whole world while
+their own people were dying of hunger. When they saw that their deeds
+did not correspond to their hopes, they became hypochondriacs and
+despairingly fanatical, believing their ruin to be a punishment from
+God, giving themselves over to a cruel devotion in order to appease
+the divinity. When Philip II. heard of the wreck of the _Invincible_,
+the death of so many thousand men, and the sorrow of half Spain, he
+never even winked an eyelid. 'I sent it to fight with men, not with
+the elements,' and he went on with his prayers in the Escorial. The
+imperturbable gloom and ferocity of the kings re-acted on the nation,
+and this is why for many centuries black was the favourite colour at
+the court of Spain. The sombre groves in the royal palaces, with their
+gloomy winter foliage, were and still are their favourite resorts; the
+roofs of their country palaces are black, with towers surmounted by
+weather-cocks, and dark cloisters like monasteries."
+
+Shut into that small room with no other listener than the
+Chapel-master, Gabriel forgot the discretion he had imposed on
+himself with a view to the continuance of his quiet existence in
+the Cathedral. He could speak without fear in the presence of the
+musician, and he spoke warmly about the Spanish kings and of the gloom
+that from them had filtered through the country.
+
+Melancholy was the punishment imposed by Nature on the despots of the
+Western decadence. When a king had any artistic predispositions, like
+Fernando VI., instead of tasting the joy of life he nearly died of
+weariness listening to the airs on the guitar feebly tinkled by
+Farinelli. As they were born with their minds closed to every
+inspiration of beauty or poetry, they spent their lives gun in hand in
+the woods near Madrid, shooting the deer and yawning with disgust at
+the fatigues of the chase, while the queens amused themselves at a
+distance hanging on to the arm of one of the bodyguard. They could
+not live with impunity for three centuries in close contact with the
+Inquisition, exercising power simply as papal delegates, under the
+direction of bishops, Jesuits, confessors, and monastic orders, who
+only left to the Spanish monarchy the appearance of power, turning
+it, in fact, into an oppressed theocratic republic. The gloom of
+Catholicism penetrated into their very bones, and while the fountains
+of Versailles were playing among their marble nymphs, and the
+courtiers of Louis XIV. were decked like butterflies in their
+multi-coloured garments, as shameless as pagans among the beautiful
+goddesses, the court of Spain, dressed in black, with a rosary hanging
+at its girdle, assisted at the burnings and, girt with the green scarf
+of the holy office, honoured itself by undertaking the duties of
+alguacil at the bonfires of heretics. While humanity, warmed by the
+soft breath of the Renaissance, was admiring the Apollos and adoring
+the Venus' discovered by the plough amid the ruins of mediaeval
+catastrophes, the type of supreme beauty for the Spanish monarchy
+was the criminal of Judea. The black and dusty Christs in the old
+cathedrals, with the livid mouth, the skeleton and distorted body, the
+feet bony, and dripping with blood, much blood,--that liquid so loved
+by the religious when doubt begins and faith weakens, and to impose
+dogma they place their hand on the sword.
+
+"For this reason the Spanish monarchy has been steeped in gloom,
+transmitting its melancholy from one generation to another. If by any
+chance there appeared among them anyone happy and pleased with life,
+it was because in the blue blood of the maternal veins there was a
+plebeian drop, which pierced like the rays of the sun into a sick
+room."
+
+Don Luis listened to Gabriel, receiving his words with affirmative
+gestures.
+
+"Yes, we are a people governed by gloom," said the musician. "The
+sombre humour of those dark centuries lives in us still. I have often
+thought how difficult life must have been to an awakened spirit. The
+Inquisition listening to every word, and endeavouring to guess every
+thought. The conquest of heaven the sole ideal of life! And that
+conquest becoming daily more difficult! Money must be paid to the
+Church to save one's self, and poverty was the most perfect state; and
+again, besides the sacrifice of all comfort, prayers at all hours,
+the daily visits to the church, the life of confraternities, the
+disciplines in the vaults of the parish church, the voice of the
+brother of Mortal Sin interrupting sleep to remind one of the approach
+of Death; and added to this fanatical and weary life the uncertainty
+of salvation, the threat of falling into hell for the slightest fault,
+and the impossibility of ever thoroughly appeasing a sullen and
+revengeful God. And then again, the more tangible menace, the terror
+of the bonfire, engendering cowardice and debasing suspected men."
+
+"In this way we can understand," said Gabriel, "the cynical confession
+of the Canon Llorente explaining why he became secretary to the Holy
+Office: 'They began to roast, and in order not to be roasted I took on
+me the part of roaster.' For intelligent men there was nothing else
+to be done. How could they resist and rebel? The king, master of all
+lives and property, was only the servant of bishops, friars, and
+familiars. The kings of Spain, except the first Bourbons, were nothing
+but servants of the Church; in no country has been seen as palpably
+as in this one the solidarity between Church and State. Religion
+succeeded in living without the kings, but the kings could not exist
+without religion. The fortunate warrior, the conqueror who founded
+a throne, had no need of a priest. The fame of his exploits and his
+sword were enough for him, but as death drew near he thought of his
+heirs, who would be unable to dispose of glory and fear to make
+themselves respected as he had done, and he drew near to the priest,
+taking God as a mysterious ally who would watch over the preservation
+of the throne. The founder of a dynasty reigned 'by the grace of
+strength' but his descendants reigned 'by the grace of God.' The king
+and the Church were everything for the Spanish people. Faith had made
+them slaves by a moral chain that no revolutions could break; its
+logic was indisputable--the belief in a personal God, who busied
+Himself with the most minute concerns of the world, and granted His
+grace to the king that he might reign, obliged them to obey under pain
+of going to hell. Those who were rich and well placed in the world
+grew fat, praising the Lord who created kings to save men the trouble
+of governing themselves; those who suffered consoled themselves by
+thinking that this life was but a passing trial, after which they
+would be sure to gain a little niche in heaven. Religion is the best
+of all auxiliaries to the kings; if it had not existed before the
+monarchs these last would have invented it. The proof is that in these
+times of doubt they are firmly anchored to Catholicism, which is the
+strongest prop of the throne. Logically the kings ought to say, 'I am
+king because I have the power, because I am supported by the army.'
+But no, señor, they prefer to continue the old farce and say, 'I, the
+king, by the grace of God.' The little tyrant cannot leave the lap of
+the greater despot; it is impossible to them to maintain themselves by
+themselves."
+
+Gabriel was silent for some time; he was suffocating, his chest was
+heaving with the spasms of his hollow cough. The Chapel-master drew
+near alarmed.
+
+"Do not be uneasy," said Luna, recovering himself; "it is so every
+day. I am ill and I ought not to talk so much, but these things excite
+me, and I feel irritated by the absurdities of the monarchy and
+religion, not only in this country, but all over the world. But,
+notwithstanding, I have felt real pity, profound commiseration for a
+being with royal blood. Can you believe it? I saw him quite close in
+one of my journeys through Europe. I do not know how the police
+who guarded his carriage did not drive me away, fearing a possible
+attempt, but what I felt was compassion for the kings who have come
+so late into a world that no longer believes in the divine right; and
+these last twigs, sprouting from the worm-eaten and rotten trunk of a
+dynasty, carry in their poor sap the decay of the rotten branches. It
+was a youth, as sick as I am, not by the chances of life, but weakly
+from his cradle, condemned before his birth to suffer from the malady
+that came to him with his life. Just imagine, Don Luis, if at this
+time for the preservation of my own interests I begot a son, would it
+not be a coldly premeditated attempt against the future?"
+
+And the revolutionist described the young invalid: his thin body,
+artificially strengthened by hygiene and gymnastics, his eyes heavy
+and sunk deep in their sockets, the lower jaw hanging loose like that
+of a corpse, wanting the strength that keeps it fixed to the skull.
+
+"Poor youth! Why was he born? What would be accomplished in his
+journey through the world? Why had Nature, who so often refuses
+fecundity to the strong, shown herself prodigal to the loveless union
+of a dying consumptive? What was the use to him of having carriages
+and horses, liveried servants to salute him, and ninnies to give him
+food; it would have been far better had he never appeared in the world
+but had remained in the limbo of those who are never born. Like the
+squire of Don Quixote, who finding himself at last in the plenty of
+Barataria, had by his side a doctor Recio to restrain his appetite,
+this poor creature could never enjoy with freedom the pleasures of the
+remains of life left to him."
+
+"They pay him thousands of duros," added Gabriel, "for every minute of
+his life, but no amount of gold can procure him a drop of fresh blood
+to cure the hereditary poison in his veins. He is surrounded by
+beautiful women, but if he feels arising the happy tremors of youth,
+the sap of the spring of life, the predisposition of a family who have
+only been notable for the victories won in love's battles, he must
+remain cold and austere, under his mother's vigilant eye, who knows
+that carnal passion would rapidly end a life so weak and uncertain.
+And the end of all these sad-and painful privations--inevitable death.
+Why was this poor creature born? Often the greatness of the earth is
+worse than a malediction, and reasons of State are the most cruel of
+all torments for an invalid, obliging him to feign a health he does
+not feel. To speak of the illness of the king is a crime, and the
+courtiers living under the shadow of the throne consider the slightest
+allusion to the king's health as a sacrilege, a crime worthy of
+punishment, as though he were not a human being subject like others to
+death."
+
+"I do not care much for politics," said the Chapel-master; "kings and
+republics are all the same to me, I am a votary of art. I do not know
+what monarchy may be in the other countries that you have seen, but in
+Spain it seems quite played out. It is tolerated like so many relics
+of the past, but it inspires no enthusiasm and no one is inclined to
+sacrifice themselves for it, and I believe that even the people who
+live in its shadow, and whose interests are most bound up with those
+of the crown, have more devotion on their tongues than in their
+hearts."
+
+"It is so, Don Luis," said Gabriel; "for nearly a century the monarchy
+has been dead in Spain; the last loved and popular king was Fernando
+VII. Since then the nation has asserted itself, becoming emancipated
+from the old traditions, but the kings have not progressed; on the
+contrary, they have gone back, withdrawing themselves daily more and
+more from the anticlerical and reforming tendencies of the first
+Bourbons. If in educating a prince nowadays his masters were to say,
+'We will try and make a Carlos III. of him,' even the stones of the
+palace would be scandalised. The Austrians have revived like those
+parasitic plants which, having been torn up, reappear after a little
+while. If in the life of the kings they seek for examples in the past,
+they remember the Austrian Caesars, but it is complete oblivion of
+those first Bourbons who morally killed the Inquisition, expelled
+the Jesuits, and fostered the material progress of the country; they
+renounce the memory of those foreign ministers who came to civilise
+Spain. Jesuits, friars and clerics order and direct as in the best
+times of Charles II. To have had as minister a Count of Aranda, the
+friend of Voltaire, is a shame of the past and to be passed over in
+silence. Yes, Don Luis, you say well, the monarchy is dead. Between it
+and the country there is the same relation as between a corpse and a
+living man. The secular laziness, the resistance to all change, and
+the fear of the unknown that all stationary people feel, are the
+causes of the continuance of this institution, that has not like other
+countries the military outlet or the aggrandisement of its territory
+as a justification of its existence."
+
+With this the conversation ended that evening in the Chapel-master's
+little room.
+
+Gabriel found himself drawn afresh by the affection of his admirers
+in the Claverias. They coaxed him and followed him, lamenting his
+absence. They could not live without him, so declared the shoemaker.
+They had become accustomed to listen to him, they felt the desire of
+being enlightened, and they begged the master not to desert them.
+
+"We meet in the tower now," said the bell-ringer; "Silver Stick
+looks on our meetings with an evil eye, and he has gone so far as
+to threaten the shoemaker to turn him out of the Claverias if the
+meetings continue to be held in his house. He will not interfere with
+me; he knows my character. Besides, if he rules in the upper cloister,
+I rule in my tower. I am quite capable, if he comes to disturb us with
+his spying, of throwing him down the stairs, the miserly devil!"
+
+And he added with an affectionate expression, a great contrast to his
+usual rough and taciturn character:
+
+"Come, Gabriel, we expect you in my house. When you are tired of
+keeping your niece and that crazy Don Luis company, come up for a
+little while. We cannot get on without your words. Don Martin has been
+quite enthusiastic since he heard you the other evening; he wants to
+see you; he says he would go from one end of Toledo to the other to
+hear you. He wishes me to let him know if you decide on rejoining your
+friends, because Don Antolin in speaking to him sets you down as a
+madman and a heretic who does not know what to be after. But he is an
+ignoramus who, after studying for his profession, can do no better
+than sell tickets and squeeze the poor."
+
+Luna returned to the meetings in the bell-ringer's house. The greater
+part of the morning he sat by his niece, soothed by the tic-tac of the
+machine, which caused a gentle drowsiness, watching the cloth pass
+under the presser with little jumps, spreading the peculiar chemical
+scent of new stuffs.
+
+He watched Sagrario always sad, devoting herself to her work with
+taciturn tenacity; when now and then she raised her head to regulate
+her cotton and met Gabriel's glance, a faint smile would pass over her
+face.
+
+In the isolation in which the anger of her father had left them they
+felt obliged to draw together as though a common danger threatened
+them, and their bodily infirmities were a further bond of union.
+Gabriel pitied the fate of the poor young woman, seeing how hardly the
+world had treated her after her flight from the family hearth. Her
+long illness had changed her greatly and still caused her pain, her
+once beautiful teeth were no longer white and regular, and the lips
+were pallid and drawn; her hair had grown thin in places, but she
+contrived to conceal this with locks of the auburn hair, remains of
+her former beauty, which she dressed with great skill; but in spite
+of this her youth was beginning to assert itself, giving light to her
+eyes and charm to her smile.
+
+Many nights Gabriel, tossing on his bed unable to sleep, coughing, and
+with his head and chest bathed in cold sweat, would hear in the room
+adjoining the suppressed moans of his niece, timid and smothered so
+that the rest of the household should not be disturbed.
+
+"What was the matter with you last night?" asked Gabriel the following
+morning. "What were you moaning for?"
+
+And Sagrario, after many denials, finally admitted her discomfort:
+
+"My bones ache; directly I get to bed the pain begins and I feel as
+though my limbs were being torn asunder. And you, how are you? All
+night I heard you cough, and I thought you were suffocating."
+
+And the two invalids stricken by life forgot their own aches and pains
+to sympathise with those of the other, establishing between their
+hearts a current of loving pity, attracted to each other not by the
+difference of sex, but by the fraternal sympathy aroused by each
+other's misfortunes.
+
+Very often Sagrario would try to send her uncle away; it pained her
+to see him sitting close by her, doing nothing, coughing painfully,
+fixing his eyes upon her as though she were an object of adoration.
+
+"Get up from here," the girl would say gaily--"it makes me nervous
+seeing you so very quiet keeping me company when what you want is
+life and movement. Go to your friends; they are expecting you in the
+bell-ringer's tower. They have been talking about me, thinking it is
+I who keep you in the house. Go out to walk, uncle! Go and speak of
+those things that stir you so much, and that those poor people listen
+to open-mouthed. Be careful as you go up the stairs; go slowly and
+stop often, so that the demon of the cough, may not get hold of you."
+
+Gabriel spent the later hours of the morning in the bell-ringer's
+"habitacion." The walls of ancient whitewash were adorned by faded
+and yellow engravings, representing episodes in the Carlist war,
+remembrances of the mountain campaign which for long years had been
+the pride of Mariano, but of which now he never spoke.
+
+Here Gabriel met all his admirers. Even the shoemaker worked at night
+in order not to deprive himself of this meeting. Don Martin, the
+curate, also came up, concealing himself carefully so that Silver
+Stick should not see him. It was a small community grouping itself
+round the sick apostle, with all the zeal inspired by the unknown.
+
+Gabriel answered all these men's questions, that so often betrayed the
+simplicity of their minds. When a fit of coughing seized him, they all
+surrounded him with concern written on their faces. They would have
+wished even at the cost of their own lives to restore him to health.
+Luna, carried away by his enthusiasm, ended by narrating to them the
+story of his life and sufferings, and so the prestige of martyrdom
+came to increase the ardour of these people. The narrowed minds of
+these sedentary men, living tranquil and safe in the Cathedral, made
+them admire the adventures and torments of this fighter; for them he
+was a martyr to this new religion of the humble and oppressed, and
+besides, their innocence converted him into a victim of that social
+injustice which they daily hated more.
+
+For them there was no other truth but Gabriel's words; the
+bell-ringer, although the roughest and most silent among them, was
+the most advanced in his conversion. His admiration for Gabriel which
+dated from their childhood, his dog-like fidelity, carried him on with
+leaps and bounds, making him accept at once even the most distant
+ideals.
+
+"I am whatever you are, Gabriel," he said firmly. "Are you not an
+anarchist? I will be one also--indeed, I think I have always been one.
+Do you not preach that the poor should live and the rich should work;
+that everyone should possess what he earns, and that we should all
+help one another? Well, this is just what I thought when we wandered
+over the country with our guns and our scarf. And as far as religion
+is concerned, which formerly nearly drove us mad, I feel perfectly
+indifferent. I am convinced on hearing you that it is a sort of fable
+invented by clever people in order that we, the poor and unfortunate,
+should submit to the miseries of this world hoping for heaven; it
+is not badly imagined, for in the end those who die and do not find
+heaven will not return to complain."
+
+One day Gabriel wished to go up where the bells were hung. It was now
+well on in spring; it was warm, and the intense blue of the sky seemed
+to attract him.
+
+"I have not seen the 'big bell' since I was a child," he said. "Let us
+go up; I should like to see Toledo for the last time."
+
+And accompanied by his admirers, indeed, almost carried by them, he
+went slowly up the narrow spiral staircase. Arrived at the top, the
+soft wind was murmuring through the great iron railings, the cages of
+the bells. From the centre of the vault hung the famous "Gorda," an
+immense bronze bell, with all one side split by a large crack; the
+clapper, which was the author of the mischief, lay below it, engraved
+and as thick as a column, and a smaller one now occupied the cavity.
+The roofs of the Cathedral, dark and ugly, lay at their feet, and in
+front on a hill rose the Alcazar, higher and larger than the church,
+as though keeping up the spirit of the emperor who built it, Caesar
+of Catholicism, champion of the faith, but who nevertheless strove to
+keep the Church at his feet.
+
+The city spread out around the Cathedral, the houses disappearing in
+the crowd of towers, cupolas and absides. It was impossible to look on
+any side without meeting with chapels, churches, convents and ancient
+hospitals. Religion had absorbed the industrious Toledo of old, and
+still guarded the dead city beneath its hood of stone. From some of
+the belfries a red flag was floating, bearing a white chalice; this
+meant that some newly-ordained priest was singing his first mass.
+
+"I have never been up here," said Don Martin, sitting by Gabriel's
+side on one of the rafters, "without seeing some of these flags;
+ecclesiastical recruiting never ceases, there are always visionaries
+to fill its ranks. Those who really have faith are the minority, the
+greater part enter because they see the Church still triumphant and
+seemingly commanding, and they think that in her ranks some tremendous
+career is waiting for them. Unlucky wights! I also was led to the
+altar with music and oratorical shouts, as though I were walking to a
+triumph. Incense spread its clouds before my eyes, all my family wept
+with emotion at seeing me nothing less than a minister of God. And
+the day following all this theatrical pomp, when the lights and the
+censers were extinguished and the church had recovered its ordinary
+aspect, began this miserable life of poverty and intrigue to earn
+one's bread--seven duros a month! To endure at all hours the
+complaints of those poor women, with their tempers embittered by
+seclusion, common as the lowest servants, who spend their lives
+gossiping in the parlour of what is passing in the towns, inventing
+scandals to please the canons, or the families who protect the house.
+And there are priests who envy me! hungering against me for this
+coveted chaplaincy of nuns! looking upon me as a flattering hanger-on
+of the archiepiscopal palace, not understanding how otherwise, being
+so young, I could have hooked out this preferment that allows me to
+live in Toledo on seven duros a month!"
+
+Gabriel nodded his head, sympathising with the young priest's
+complaints.
+
+"Yes, it is you who are deceived. The day for making great fortunes in
+the Church is past, and the poor youths who now wear the cassock and
+dream of a mitre make me think of those emigrants who go to distant
+countries famous through long centuries of plunder, and find them even
+more poverty-stricken than their own land."
+
+"You are right, Gabriel. The day of the all-powerful Church is past;
+she has still in her udders milk enough for all, but there are few who
+can fasten on to them and fill themselves to repletion, while others
+groan with hunger. One could die of laughing when one hears of the
+equality and the democratic spirit of the Church. It is all a lie; in
+no other institution does so cruel a despotism reign. In early days
+Popes and bishops were elected by the faithful, and were deposed from
+power if they used it badly. The aristocracy of the Church exists
+still; it may be a canon upwards, or one who succeeds in crowning
+himself with a mitre; from them no account is required. Among the
+laity appointments are changed, ministers are turned out, soldiers are
+degraded--even kings are dethroned; but who exacts responsibility from
+Pope or bishops once they are anointed and in more or less frequent
+intercourse with the Holy Spirit? If you want Justice you are sent
+before tribunals equally formed by the aristocrats of the Church;
+there is no power more absolute on earth, not even the Grand Turk, who
+in a measure is responsible through fear of revolts in his seraglio.
+Here, in the seraglio of the Church, we are all less than women. If it
+happens that a priest, weary of persecution, feeling the man once more
+rising beneath his cassock, deals a heavy blow at his tyrant, he is
+declared mad; the climax of hypocrisy! They try to demonstrate that in
+the Church one lives in the best of worlds, and it is only the lack of
+reason that causes any rebellion against its authority."
+
+Don Martin was silent for a long while as though he were searching in
+his memory; at length he continued:
+
+"You also laugh at the idea of the actual poverty of the Church in
+Spain. She is like the great ruined noblemen, who still have enough
+to live upon in idleness, but who think themselves miserably poor
+compared to their former wealth; the Church has the nostalgia of those
+former centuries when she possessed half the wealth of Spain. Poor
+she is if she thinks of those times, but if you compare her with the
+Catholicism of other modern nations you find that, as in former years,
+she is by far the most favoured and best paid establishment in the
+State. She absorbs forty-one millions of the revenue, which is
+enormous in a country which only devotes nine millions to schools and
+teaching, and one million to the relief of the poor. To maintain an
+intercourse with God costs a Spaniard five times as much as to learn
+to read. But this forty-one millions is a blind. My own poverty made
+me inquisitive, and I wished to know what the clergy in Spain really
+receive, and what comes to our hands, the rank and file. The demands
+and pensions of the Church are an intricate tangle, apart from the
+forty-one millions. There is not a single ministry in which the Church
+has not struck her roots; she is paid by the Ministers of State for
+foreign missions, which are no use to anyone, by the Ministers of
+War and Marine for military clergy, and by the Ministers of Public
+Instruction and Justice. She is paid to support the pomp of the Roman
+Pontiff, as we maintain his ambassador in Spain, which is as though
+I allowed myself the luxury of keeping servants, and laid on my
+neighbour the obligation of paying them. She is paid for the repairs
+to churches, for episcopal libraries, for the colonisation of
+Fernando Po, for unforeseen occurrences, and I do not know how many
+supplemental items besides! And you must take into account what the
+Spanish people pay the Church voluntarily apart from what the State
+gives. The Bull of the Holy Crusade produces two and a half million
+pesetas annually; besides this you must consider what the parochial
+clergy draw from their congregations, the annual gifts to the
+religious orders for their ministry and offices (and this is
+the fattest portion), and the ecclesiastical revenue from the
+Ayuntamientos and deputations. In short, this Church, which is
+continually speaking of its poverty, draws from the State and the
+country more than three hundred million pesetas annually--nearly
+double what the army costs; although they are always complaining
+in the sacristies of these modern times, saying that everything is
+devoured by the military, and that the fault of everything that has
+happened is theirs, as they threw themselves on to the side of that
+cursed liberty. Three hundred millions, Gabriel! I have calculated it
+carefully! And I, who form part of this great establishment, receive
+seven duros a month; the greater part of the vicars in Spain are paid
+less than an excise officer, and thousands of clergy live from hand to
+mouth, wandering from sacristy to sacristy trying to obtain a mass to
+put the stew on the fire; and if bands of clergy do not go into the
+highways to rob, it is only from fear of the civil guard, and because
+after a couple of days of hunger a third may come in which they may
+beg some scraps to eat; there is always a crumb to allay hunger, and
+no cassock ever falls in the street dying of want, but there are a
+great many clerics who spend their existence deceiving their stomachs,
+trying to imagine they nourish themselves, till some sudden illness
+comes which hurries them out of the world. Where, then, does all this
+money go? To the aristocracy of the Church, to the true sacerdotal
+caste; but we who are in religion are people of the backstairs. What a
+terrible mistake, Gabriel! To renounce love and family affection, to
+fly all worldly pleasures, the theatre, concerts, the cafe; to be
+looked upon by people, even by those who think themselves religious,
+as a strange being, a sort of intermediate, neither a man nor a woman;
+to wear petticoats and to be dressed like a lugubrious doll; and in
+exchange for all these sacrifices to earn less than a man who breaks
+stones on the road. We live idly, certain that we shall never fall
+from over-work, but our poverty is greater than that of many workmen;
+we cannot acknowledge it, nor put ourselves in the way of begging
+alms, for the honour of our cloth. And besides, why should they keep
+us if we are of no practical use and cost the country so dear? When
+the religious domination came to an end in Spain it was only we, the
+lower ones, who suffered in consequence. The priest is poor, the
+temple is poor also; but the prince of the Church retains his
+thousands of duros yearly, and his great ecclesiastical state, and
+he sings his psalms tranquilly, certain that his pittance is in no
+danger. The revolution up to now has only prejudiced the lower clergy;
+the power of the Church is ended, it is gone; what we see is only its
+corpse, but an enormous corpse that will cost a great deal to remove,
+and whose preservation will swallow up a great deal of money."
+
+"It is true the Church is defunct; what we fight are only its remains.
+The vulgar believe it still lives because they can see and touch it,
+forgetting that a religion counts centuries in its life as minutes,
+and that generation after generation pass between its death and
+burial. Centuries before the birth of Jesus Paganism had fallen.
+The Athenian poets mocked the gods of Olympus on the stage, and the
+philosophers despised it. All the same Christianity required many
+years of propaganda and the political support of the Caesars to bring
+it to an end, and even then it was not done with, for dogmas are like
+men who leave behind something of themselves in the family who succeed
+them. Religions do not disappear suddenly through a trapdoor; they
+are extinguished slowly, leaving some of their beliefs and their
+ceremonies to the religions that follow them. We have been born in one
+of those times of transition, we are present at the death of a whole
+world of beliefs. How long will the agony last? Who knows? Two
+centuries? Possibly less may be wanted to crystallise in humanity a
+fresh proof of its uncertainty and of its fear of the great mystery of
+nature, but death is certain, inevitable. But what religion has been
+eternal? The symptoms of dissolution are visible everywhere. Where is
+that faith that drove those warlike multitudes to the crusades? Where
+is that fervour which continued building cathedrals for a couple of
+hundred years with angelic patience to shelter a host under a mountain
+of stone? Who scourges themselves to-day, or tortures their flesh,
+or lives in the desert musing continually on death and hell? Three
+centuries of intolerance and of excessive clerical severity have
+made our nation the most indifferent to all religious matters. The
+ceremonies of worship are followed by routine, because they appeal
+to the imagination, but no one takes the trouble to understand the
+foundations of the beliefs they profess; they live as they please,
+certain that in their last hours it is sufficient to save their souls,
+to die surrounded by priests with a crucifix in their hands. In former
+days the pressure from clergy, friars, and inquisitors was so great
+that the machine of faith burst into a thousand pieces, and there
+is no one now who can fit the pieces together, which require the
+co-operation of all. And that was a piece of good luck, friend Don
+Martin; a century more of religious intolerance and we should have
+been like those Mussulmen in Africa, who live in barbarism on account
+of their excessive bigotry, after having been the civilising Arabs of
+Cordoba and Granada."
+
+"Do you know," said the young curate, "why Catholicism has held up its
+appearances of power? It is because from ancient times, in all Latin
+countries, it has possessed itself of every avenue through which human
+life must pass."
+
+"It is true, no religion has been so cautious as ours, or has ambushed
+itself better to entrap men. None has chosen with such certainty in
+the time of power the positions it can hold strongly in its decadence.
+It is impossible to move without stumbling against her. She knows of
+old that man as long as he is healthy, in the plenitude of his vital
+strength, is by instinct irreligious. When he lives comfortable the
+so-called eternal life concerns him very little. He only believes in
+God and fears Him in the hour of supreme cowardice, when death opens
+before him the bottomless pit of nothingness, and his pride as a
+rational animal revolts against the complete extinction of his being.
+He wishes his soul to be immortal, and so he accepts the religious
+phantasies of heaven and hell. The Church, fearing the irreligiousness
+of health, has occupied, as you say, all the avenues of life, so that
+no man shall accustom himself to live without her, appealing solely to
+her in the hour of death. The dead provide much money, they are her
+best asset; but she wishes equally to reign over the living. Nothing
+escapes her despotism and her spying. She insinuates herself into
+all human concerns from the greatest to the most insignificant, she
+interferes in both public and private life; she baptizes the child
+when it comes into the world, accompanies the child to school,
+monopolises love, declaring it shameful and abominable if it does
+not submit to her benediction, and divides the earth into two
+categories--the consecrated, for those who die in her bosom, and the
+dunghill in the open air for the heretic. The Church interferes in
+dress, laying down what is honest and Christian wear and what is
+scandalous frivolity. She interferes in the most intimate relations
+of domestic life, and even penetrates into the kitchen, turning
+Catholicism into a culinary art, ruling what ought to be eaten, what
+ought or ought not to be mixed, and anathematizing certain foods,
+which, being good enough the rest of the year, become the most
+horrible sacrilege if partaken on certain days. She accompanies a man
+from his birth, and does not leave him even after he is laid in the
+tomb; she keeps him chained by his soul, making it wander through
+space, passing from one place to another, ascending the pathway to
+heaven, according to the sacrifices imposed on themselves by his
+successors for the benefit of the Church. A greater or more complete
+despotism no tyrant could possibly imagine."
+
+It was mid-day. The bell-ringer had disappeared; suddenly the rattle
+of chains and pulleys was heard and a dull thunder made the tower
+tremble; all the stones and metal and even the surrounding ether
+vibrated. The big "Gorda" had just rung, deafening the bystanders. A
+few moments afterwards, from the front of the Alcazar, came the sound
+of martial music, trumpets, and drums.
+
+"Let us go," said Gabriel. "Really, Mariano might have warned us and
+spared us this surprise."
+
+And he added, smiling ironically:
+
+"It is always the same; it is the parasites who shine the most and
+make the most noise; they make up in noise what they lack in utility."
+
+The festival of Corpus drew near without anything occurring to ruffle
+the quiet life of the Cathedral. Sometimes in the upper cloister they
+spoke of His Eminence's health. His serious quarrels with the Chapter
+had obliged him to keep his bed, and he had just had an attack which
+made them fear for his life.
+
+"It is his heart," said the Tato--who was usually very well informed
+about things in the palace--"Doña Visita is weeping like a Magdalen
+and cursing the canons, seeing Don Sebastian so ill."
+
+As Wooden Staff sat down to table with his family he began to speak
+of the decadence of the feast of Corpus, which had been so famous in
+Toledo in former times. In his desire to complain he forgot the bitter
+silence he had imposed on himself in his daughter's presence.
+
+"You will hardly recognise our Corpus," he said to Gabriel. "Of all
+that we remember nothing remains but the famous tapestries that are
+hung outside the Cathedral. The giants are not drawn up before the
+Puerta del Perdon, and the procession is shorn of its glory."
+
+The Chapel-master also complained bitterly.
+
+"And the mass, Señor Esteban? Just think what a mass for such a solemn
+festivity! Four instruments from outside the house, and a Rossini mass
+of the lightest description so as not to cost much. It would have been
+far better for this to have played the organ alone."
+
+According to an ancient custom, on the vesper before the feast, the
+band of the Academy of Infantry played in the evening before the
+Cathedral. All Toledo came to hear the serenade, which was an event in
+the monotonous life of the town, and from the province of Madrid many
+strangers came for the bull-fight on the following day.
+
+Mariano, the bell-ringer, invited his friends to listen to the
+serenade from the Greco-Roman gallery on the principal front. At the
+hour when the lights were usually extinguished in the Claverias and
+Don Antolin locked the street door, Gabriel and his friends glided
+cautiously to the bell-ringer's "habitacion." Sagrario was also
+persuaded to come by her uncle, who in this way managed to tear her
+from her machine. She really must enjoy some little amusement; she
+ought to appear in the world now and then; she was killing herself
+with all that tiresome work.
+
+They all sat in the gallery. The shoemaker had brought his wife,
+always with a small baby at her flabby breast. The Tato was talking
+delightedly to the organ-blower and the verger about the bull-fight on
+the following day, and Mariano stood by his adored comrade, while his
+wife, a woman as rough as himself, spoke with Sagrario.
+
+The men were deploring the absence of Don Martin. Probably he had gone
+down below among the people who filled the square, doubtless dreading
+that he must be up before daybreak to say mass to the nuns.
+
+The palace of the Ayuntamiento was decorated with strings of light,
+which were reflected on to the façade of the Cathedral, giving the
+stones a rosy flush as of fire.
+
+Among the trees walked groups of girls with flowers and white blouses,
+like the first appearances of spring. The cadets followed them,
+their hands on the pommels of their swords, walking along with
+their pinched-in waists and their full pantaloons _à la Turc_. The
+archiepiscopal palace remained entirely closed. Above the rosy light
+in the piazza, spread the beautiful summer sky, clear and deep,
+spangled with innumerable brilliant stars.
+
+When the music ceased, and the lights began to fade, the inhabitants
+of the Cathedral felt unwilling to leave their seats. They were very
+comfortable there, the night was warm, and they, accustomed to the
+confinement and the silence of the Claverias, felt the joy of freedom,
+sitting on that balcony with Toledo at their feet and the immensity of
+space above them.
+
+Sagrario, who had never been out of the upper cloister since her
+return to the paternal roof, looked at the stars with delight.
+
+"How many stars!" she murmured dreamily.
+
+"There are more than usual to-night," said the bell-ringer. "The
+summer sky seems a field of stars in which the harvest increases with
+the fine weather."
+
+Gabriel smiled at the simplicity of his companions. They all wondered
+at God, so foreseeing and so thoughtful, who had made the moon to give
+light to men by night, and the stars so that the darkness should not
+be complete.
+
+"Well, then," inquired Gabriel, "why is there not a moon always if it
+was made to give us light?"
+
+There was a long silence. They were all thinking over Gabriel's
+question. The bell-ringer, being most intimate with the master,
+ventured to put the question about which they were all thinking. "What
+were the heavens, and what was there beyond the blue?"
+
+The square was now deserted and in darkness, there was no light but
+the gentle shimmering of the stars scattered in space like golden
+dust. From the immense vault there seemed to fall a religious calm, an
+overwhelming majesty that stirred the souls of those simple people.
+The infinite seemed to bewilder them with its vast grandeur.
+
+"You," said Gabriel, "have your eyes closed to immensity, you cannot
+understand it. You have been taught a wretched and rudimentary origin
+of the world, imagined by a few ragged and ignorant Jews in a corner
+of Asia, which, having been written in a book, has been accepted down
+to our days. This personal God, like to ourselves in His shape and
+passions, is an artificer of gigantic capacity, who worked six days
+and made everything existing. On the first day He created light, and
+on the fourth the sun and stars; from whence then came that light if
+the sun had not then been created? Is there any distinction between
+one and the other? It seems impossible that such absurdities should
+have been credited for centuries."
+
+The listeners nodded their heads in assent; the absurdity appeared to
+them palpable--as it always did when Gabriel spoke.
+
+"If you wish to penetrate the heavens," continued Luna, "you must get
+rid of the human conception of distance. Man measures everything by
+his own stature, and he conceives dimensions by the distance his eyes
+can reach. This Cathedral seems to us enormous because underneath its
+naves we seem like ants; but, nevertheless, the Cathedral seen from
+far is only an insignificant wart; compared with the piece of land we
+call Spain it is less than a grain of sand, and on the face of the
+earth it is a mere atom--nothing. Our sight makes us consider thirty
+or forty yards a dizzy height. At this moment we think we are very
+high because we are near the roof of the Cathedral, but compared to
+the infinite this height is as small as when an ant balances on the
+top of a pebble not knowing how to come down. Our sight is short, and
+we who can only measure by yards, and apprehend short distances, must
+make an immense effort of imagination to realise infinity. Even then
+it escapes us and we speak of it very often as of a thing that has no
+meaning. How shall I make you understand the immensity of the world?
+You must not believe, as our ancestors did, that the earth is flat
+and stationary and that the heaven is a crystal dome on which God has
+fastened the stars like golden nails, and in which the sun and moon
+move to give us light, you must understand that the earth is round,
+and whirls round in space."
+
+"Yes, we do know a little about that," said the bell-ringer
+doubtfully, "for we were taught so at school. But, really, do you
+think it moves?"
+
+"Because in your littleness as human beings, because to our
+microscopic mole-like sight the immense mechanism of the world is
+lost, do not for a moment doubt it. The earth turns. Without moving
+from where you are, in twenty-four hours you will have made the
+complete circuit with the globe. Without moving our feet we rush along
+at the rate of four hundred leagues an hour, a velocity that the
+fastest trains cannot attain. You are astonished? We rush along
+without knowing it. Our planet does not only turn on itself, but at
+the same time it turns round the sun at the rate of nearly a hundred
+thousand miles an hour. Every second we cover thirty thousand miles.
+Men have never invented a cannon ball that could fly so quickly. You
+move through space fixed to a projectile which whirls with dizzy
+speed, and, deceived by your smallness, you think you are living
+immovable in a dead cathedral. And this velocity is as nothing
+compared with others. The sun round which we turn, flies and flies
+through space, carrying on by its attraction the earth and the other
+planets. It goes through immensity, dragging us along, travelling
+towards the unknown, without ever striking other bodies, finding
+always sufficient space to move in with a rapidity which makes one
+giddy; and this has gone on for thousands and millions of centuries
+without either it or the earth who follows it in its flight ever
+passing twice over the same spot."
+
+They all listened to Gabriel open-mouthed with astonishment, and their
+bright eyes seemed dazed and bewildered.
+
+"It is enough to drive one mad," murmured the bell-ringer. "What then
+is man, Gabriel?"
+
+"Nothing; even as this earth, which seems so large, and that we have
+peopled with religions, kingdoms and revelations from God, is nothing.
+Dreams of ants! even less! This same sun which seems so enormous
+compared to our globe is nothing more than an atom in immensity. What
+you call stars are other suns like ours, surrounded by planets like
+our earth, but which are invisible on account of their small size. How
+many are they? Man brings his optical instruments to perfection and
+is able to pierce further into the fields of heaven, discovering ever
+more and more. Those which are scarcely visible in the infinite appear
+much nearer when a new telescope is invented, and beyond them in
+the depths of space others and again others appear, and so on
+everlastingly. They are unaccountable. Some are worlds inhabited like
+ours; others were so, and revolve solitary in space, waiting for a
+fresh evolution of life; many are still forming; and yet all these
+worlds are no more than corpuscles of the luminous mist of the
+infinite. Space is peopled by fires that have burnt for millions,
+trillions and quadrillions of centuries, throwing out heat and light.
+The milky way is nothing but a cloud of stars that seem to us as one
+mass, but which in reality are so far apart that thousands of suns
+like ours with all their planets could revolve among them without ever
+coming into collision."
+
+Gabriel remembered the travelling of sound and light. "Their velocity
+is insignificant compared with the distances in space. The sun, which
+is the nearest to us, is still so far that for a sound to go from us
+to it would take three millions of years. Poor human beings will never
+be able to travel with the rapidity of sound.
+
+"These suns travel like ours towards the unknown with giddy flight,
+but they are so distant that three or four thousand years may pass
+without man being aware that they have moved more than a finger's
+breadth. The distances of infinity are maddening. The sun is a nebula
+of inflammatory gas, and the earth an imperceptible molecule of sand.
+
+"The luminous ray of the Polar star requires half a century to reach
+our eyes; it might have disappeared forty-nine years ago, and still we
+should see it in space.
+
+"And all these worlds are created, grow and die like human beings.
+In space there is no more rest than on earth. Some stars are
+extinguished, others vary, and others shine with all the power of
+their young life. The dead planets dissolved by fires furnish
+the material for new worlds; it is a perpetual renewal of forms,
+throughout millions and millions of centuries, that represent in their
+lives what the few dozen years to which we are limited, are in our
+own. And beyond all those incalculable distances there is space, and
+more space on every side, with fresh conglomerations of worlds without
+limit or end."
+
+Gabriel spoke in the midst of solemn silence. The listeners closed
+their eyes as if such immensity stunned them. They followed in
+imagination Gabriel's description, but their narrowed minds wished to
+place a term to the infinite, and in their simplicity they imagined
+beyond these incalculable distances a vault of firm matter millions of
+leagues thick. Surely all that strange and fantastic work must have a
+limit. What was at the back of it? And the barrier created by their
+imagination fell suddenly; and again they flew through space, always
+infinite, with ever new worlds.
+
+Gabriel spoke of them and of their life with absolute certainty.
+Spectral analysis showed the same composition in the stars as on the
+earth, consequently if life had arisen in our atom, most certainly it
+must exist in other celestial bodies, though probably in different
+forms; in many planets it had already ended, in many it was still to
+come; but surely all those millions of worlds had had, or would have,
+life.
+
+Religions, wishing to explain the origin of the world, paled and
+trembled before the infinite. It was like the Cathedral tower, which
+covered with its bulk a great part of the heavens, hiding millions of
+worlds, but which was of insignificant size compared to the immensity
+it hid, less than an infinitesimal part of a molecule--nothing. It
+seemed very great because it was close to men, concealing immensity,
+but when men looked above it, getting a full grasp of the infinite,
+they laughed at its Lilliputian pride.
+
+"Then," inquired timidly the old organ-blower, pointing to the
+Cathedral, "what is it they teach us in there?"
+
+"Nothing," replied Gabriel.
+
+"And what are we--men?" asked the Perrero.
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"And the governments, the laws, and the customs of society?" inquired
+the bell-ringer.
+
+"Nothing. Nothing."
+
+Sagrario fixed her eyes, grown larger by her earnest contemplation of
+the heavens, on her uncle.
+
+"And God," she asked in a soft voice; "where is God?"
+
+Gabriel stood up, leaning on the balustrade of the gallery; his figure
+stood out dark and clear against the starry space.
+
+"We are God ourselves, and everything that surrounds us. It is life
+with its astonishing transformations, always apparently dying, yet
+always being infinitely renewed. It is this immensity that astounds us
+with its greatness, and that cannot be realised in our minds. It is
+matter that lives, animated by the force that dwells in it, with
+absolute unity, without separation or duality. Man is God, and the
+world is God also."
+
+He was silent for a moment and then added with energy:
+
+"But if you ask me for that personal God invented by religions, in the
+likeness of a man, who brought the world out of nothing, who directs
+our actions, who classifies souls according to their merits, and
+commissions Sons to descend into the world to redeem it, I say seek
+for Him in that immensity, see where He hides His littleness. But even
+if you were immortal you might spend millions of years passing from
+one star to another without ever finding the corner where He hides His
+deposed despotic majesty. This vindictive and capricious God arose in
+men's brains, and the brain is a human being's most recent organ, the
+last to develop itself. When man invented God the world had existed
+millions of years."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+On the morning of Corpus the first person Gabriel saw on leaving the
+cloister was Don Antolin, who was looking over his tickets, placing
+them in line in front of him on the stone balustrade.
+
+"This is a great day," said Luna, wishing to smooth down Silver Stick.
+"You are preparing for a great crowd; no doubt many strangers will
+come."
+
+Don Antolin looked intently at Gabriel, evidently doubting his
+sincerity; but seeing that he was not laughing, he answered with a
+certain satisfaction.
+
+"The feast is not beginning badly; there are a great many who wish to
+see our treasures. Ay, son! indeed we want it badly. You who rejoice
+in our troubles may be satisfied. We live in horrible straits. Our
+feast of Corpus is worth very little compared with former times; but
+all the same, what economies we have had to make in the Obreria, to
+provide the four ochavos[1] that the extra festivity will cost!"
+
+[Footnote 1: _Ochavo_--small Spanish brass coin, value two maravedis.]
+
+Don Antolin remained silent for some time, still looking intently at
+Luna, as though some extraordinary idea had just occurred to him. At
+first he frowned as though he were rejecting it, but little by little
+his face lit up with a malicious smile.
+
+"By the way, Gabriel," he said in a honeyed tone which contained
+something very aggressive, "I remember at the time of the monument in
+Holy Week you spoke to me of your wish to earn some money for your
+brother. Now you have an opportunity. It will not be much; still it
+will be something. Would you care to be one of those who carry the
+platform of the Sacrament?"
+
+Guessing the wish of the malicious priest to annoy him, Gabriel was on
+the point of answering haughtily, but suddenly he was tempted by the
+wish to foil Silver Stick by accepting his proposal; he wished to
+astound him by acceding to his absurd idea; besides, he thought that
+this would be a sacrifice worthy of the generosity with which his
+brother treated him. Even though he could not assist with much money,
+he could show his wish to work, and the scruples of his self-love
+vanished before the hope of carrying home a couple of pesetas.
+
+"You do not care about it," said the priest in mocking accents, "you
+are too 'green,' and your dignity would suffer too much by carrying
+the Lord through the streets of Toledo."
+
+"You are mistaken. As for wishing it, I do wish it, but you must
+remember it is very heavy work for an invalid."
+
+"Do not let that trouble you," said Don Antolin resolutely; "you will
+be at least ten inside the car, and I have chosen all strong men; you
+would go to complete the number, and I should recommend you to accept
+in order to earn a little."
+
+"Then we will clench the business, Don Antolin; you may reckon on me,
+I am always ready to earn a day's wage whenever it turns up."
+
+His great wish to get out of the Cathedral had finally decided him,
+his wish once more to walk through the streets of Toledo, that he had
+not seen during his seclusion in the cloister, and without anyone
+being able to take notice of him. Besides, the ironical situation
+tickled him extremely, that he of all men with his round religious
+denials should be the one to pilot the God of Catholicism through the
+devout crowd.
+
+This spectacle made him smile, possibly it was a symbol; certainly
+Wooden Staff would greatly rejoice, he would look upon it as a small
+triumph for religion, that obliged His enemies to carry Him on their
+shoulders. But he himself would look upon it in a different way;
+inside the eucharistic car he would represent the doubt and denials
+hidden in the heart of worship, splendid in its exterior pomp, but
+void of faith and ideals.
+
+"Then we are agreed, Don Antolin. I will come down shortly into the
+Cathedral."
+
+They parted, and Gabriel, after quietly digesting the milk his niece
+brought him, went down into the Cathedral without saying a word to
+anyone about the work he intended carrying out; he was afraid of his
+brother's objections.
+
+In the lower cloister he again met Silver Stick, who was talking to
+the gardener's widow, showing her contemptuously a bunch of wheat ears
+tied with a red ribbon. He had found it in the holy water stoup by the
+Puerta del Alegria. Every year on the day of Corpus he had found the
+same offering in the same place; an unknown had thus dedicated to the
+Church the first wheat of the year.
+
+"It must be a madman," said the priest. "What is the good of this?
+What does this bunch mean? If at least it had been a cart of sheaves
+as in the good old times of the tenths!"
+
+And while he threw the ears with contempt into a flower border in the
+garden, Gabriel thought with delight of the atavic force which had
+resuscitated in a Catholic church, the pagan offering: the homage to
+the divinity of the firstfruits of the earth fertilised by the spring.
+
+The choir was ended and the mass beginning when Gabriel entered the
+Cathedral, the lower servants were discussing at the door of the
+sacristy the great event of the day. His Eminence had not come down to
+the choir and would not assist at the procession. He said he was ill,
+but those of the household laughed at this excuse, remembering that
+the evening before he had walked as far as the Hermitage of the Virgin
+de la Vega. The truth was he would not meet his Chapter; he was
+furious with them, and showed his anger by refusing to preside over
+them in the choir.
+
+Gabriel strolled through the naves. The congregation of the faithful
+was greater than on other days, but even so the Cathedral seemed
+deserted. In the crossways, kneeling between the choir and the high
+altar, were several nuns in starched linen bibs and pointed hoods, in
+charge of sundry groups of children dressed in black, with red or
+blue stripes according to the colleges to which they belonged; a
+few officials from the academy, fat and bald, listened to the mass
+standing, bending their heads over their cuirass. In this scattered
+assemblage, listening to the music, stood out the pupils from the
+school of noble ladies, some of them quite girls, others proud-looking
+young women in all the pride of their budding beauty, looking on with
+glowing eyes, all dressed in black silk, with mantillas of blonde
+mounted over high combs with bunches of roses--aristocratic ladies
+with "_manolesca_" grace, escaped from a picture by Goya.
+
+Gabriel saw his nephew the Tato dressed in his scarlet robes like the
+noble Florentine, striking the pavement with his staff to scare the
+dogs. He was talking with a group of shepherds from the mountains,
+swarthy men twisted and gnarled as vine shoots, in brown jackets,
+leather sandals, and thonged leggings; women with red kerchiefs
+and greasy and mended garments that had descended through several
+generations. They had come down from their mountains to see the Corpus
+of Toledo, and they walked through the naves with wonder in their
+eyes, starting at the sound of their own footsteps, trembling each
+time the organ rolled, as though fearing to be turned out of that
+magic palace, which seemed to them like one in a fairy tale. The women
+pointed out with their fingers the coloured glass windows, the great
+rosettes on the porches, the gilded warriors on the clock of the
+Puerta de la Feria, the tubes of the organs, and finally remained
+open-mouthed in stupid wonder. The Perrero in his scarlet garments
+seemed like a prince to them, and overwhelmed with the respect they
+felt for him, they could not succeed in understanding what he said,
+but when the Tato threatened with his staff a mastiff following
+closely at his master's heels, those simple people decided to leave
+the church sooner than abandon the faithful companion of their wild
+mountain life.
+
+Gabriel looked through the choir railings; both the upper and lower
+stalls were full. It was a great festival, and not only were all the
+canons and beneficiaries in their places, but all the priests of the
+chapel of the kings,[1] and the prebends of the Muzarabé chapel--those
+two small churches who live quite apart with traditional autonomy
+inside the Cathedral of Toledo.
+
+[Footnote 1: The kings of Spain are canons of Toledo Cathedral, and
+are fined in case of absence on festival days.]
+
+In the middle of the choir Luna saw his friend the Chapel-master in
+his crimped and pleated surplice, waving a small bâton. Around him
+were grouped about a dozen musicians and singers, whose voices and
+instruments were completely smothered each time the organ sounded from
+above, while the priest directed with a resigned look the music, which
+lost itself feeble and swamped in the solitude of the immense naves.
+
+At the High Altar, on its square car, stood the famous Custodia,
+executed by the celebrated master Villalpando. A Gothic shrine,
+exquisitely worked and chiselled, bright with the shimmering of its
+gold in the light of the wax tapers, and of such delicate and airy
+work that the slightest motion made it shiver, shaking its finials
+like ears of corn.
+
+Those invited to the procession were arriving in the Cathedral. The
+town dignitaries in black robes, professors from the academy in full
+dress with all their decorations, officers of the Civil Guard, whose
+quaint uniform reminded one of that of the soldiers of the early part
+of the century. Through the naves with affectedly skipping steps
+came the children, dressed as angels--angels _à la Pompadour_, with
+brocaded coat, red-heeled shoes, blonde lace frills, tin wings
+fastened to their shoulders, and mitres with plumes on their white
+wigs. The Primacy got out for this festivity all its traditional
+vestments. The gala uniform of all the church attendants belonged to
+the eighteenth century, the time of its greatest prosperity. The two
+men who were to guide the car had powdered hair, black coats, and knee
+breeches, like the priests of the last century. The vergers and Wooden
+Staffs wore starched ruffs and perukes, and though they had scarcely
+enough to eat, brocade and velvet covered all the people from the
+Claverias; even the acolytes wore gold embroidered dalmatics.
+
+The High Altar was decorated by the "Tanta Monta" tapestries--those
+famous hangings of the Catholic kings, with emblems and shields, given
+by Cisneros to the Cathedral. The auxiliary bishop said mass, and his
+attendant deacons were perspiring under the traditional mantles
+and chasubles covered with beautiful raised embroidery in high and
+splendid relief, as stiff and uncomfortable as ancient armour.
+
+The surroundings of the Cathedral were disturbed by the gathering for
+the procession; the doors of the sacristies slammed, opened and shut
+hurriedly by the various officials and people employed. In that quiet
+and monotonous life the annual occurrence of a procession which had to
+pass through many streets caused as much confusion and disturbance as
+an adventurous expedition to a distant country.
+
+When the mass ended the organ began to play a noisy and disorderly
+march, rather like a savage dance, while the procession was being
+marshalled in order. Outside the Cathedral the bells were ringing,
+the band of the academy had ceased playing its quick march, and the
+officers' words of command and the rattle of the muskets could be
+heard as the cadets drew up in companies by the Puerta Llana.
+
+Don Antolin, with his great silver staff and a pluvial of white
+brocade, went from one place to another collecting the employees of
+the Church; Gabriel saw him approaching, red-faced and perspiring.
+
+"To your post; it is time."
+
+And he led him to the High Altar by the Custodia. Gabriel and eight
+other men crept inside the scaffolding, raising the cloth with which
+its sides were covered. They were obliged to bend themselves inside
+the erection, and their duty was to push it, so that it should move
+along on its hidden wheels. Their only duty was to push it; outside,
+the two servants in black clothes and white wigs were in charge of
+the front and back shaft or tiller, which guided the eucharistic car
+through the tortuous streets. Gabriel was placed by his companions in
+the centre; he was to warn them when to stop and when to recommence
+their march. The monumental Custodia was mounted on a platform with a
+great counterpoise, and between it and the framework of the car was
+about a hand's breadth of space, through which Gabriel looked, thus
+transmitting the orders of the front pilot.
+
+"Attention! March!" shouted Gabriel, obeying an outside signal.
+
+And the sacred car began to move slowly down the inclined wooden plane
+that covered the steps of the High Altar. It was obliged to stop on
+passing the railings. All the people knelt, and Don Antolin and the
+Wooden Staffs having opened a way between them, the canons advanced in
+their ample red robes, the auxiliary bishop with his gilded mitre,
+and the other dignitaries in white linen mitres without ornament
+whatsoever. They all knelt around the Custodia. The organ was silent,
+and, accompanied by the hoarse blare of a trombone, they intoned a
+hymn in adoration of the Sacrament; the incense rose in blue clouds
+around the Custodia, veiling the brilliancy of its gold. When the hymn
+ceased the organ began to play again, and the car once more resumed
+its march. The Custodia trembled from base to summit, and the motion
+made a quantity of little bells hanging on to its Gothic adornments
+tinkle like a cascade of silver. Gabriel walked along holding on to
+one of the crossbeams, with his eyes fixed on the pilots, feeling
+on his legs the movements of those who pushed this scaffolding, so
+similar to the cars of Indian idols.
+
+On coming out of the Cathedral by the Puerta Llana, the only door in
+the church on a level with the street, Gabriel could take in the whole
+procession at a glance. He could see the horses of the Civil Guards
+breaking the regularity of the march, the players of the city
+kettledrums dressed in red, and the crosses of the different parishes
+grouped without order round the enormous and extremely heavy banner
+of the Cathedral, like a huge sail covered with embroidered figures.
+Beyond, all the centre of the street was clear, flanked on either side
+by rows of clergy and soldiers carrying tapers, the deacons with their
+censers, assisted by the roccoco angels carrying the vessels for the
+Asiatic perfume, and the canons in their extremely valuable historical
+capes. Behind the sacrament were grouped the authorities, and the
+battalion of cadets brought up the rear, their muskets on their arms,
+their shaven heads bare, keeping step to the time of the march.
+
+Gabriel breathed with delight the air of the public streets. He who
+had seen all the great capitals of Europe admired the streets of the
+ancient city after his long seclusion in the Cathedral. They seemed
+to him very populous, and he felt the surprise that great modern
+improvements must cause to those used to a retired and sedentary life.
+
+The balconies were hung with ancient tapestries and shawls from
+Manilla; the streets were covered with awnings, and the pavement
+spread thickly with sand, so that the eucharistic car should glide
+easily over the pointed cobble stones.
+
+Up the hills the Custodia advanced laboriously, the men inside the
+car sweating and gasping. Gabriel coughed, his spine aching with the
+enclosure in the movable prison, and the dignity of the march was
+disturbed by the words of command from the Canon Obrero, who, in
+scarlet robes with a staff in his hand, directed the procession,
+reproving the pilots and those who pushed the car inside for their
+jerky and irregular movements.
+
+Apart from these discomforts, Gabriel was delighted with his
+extraordinary escapade through the town; he laughed, thinking what the
+crowd, kneeling in veneration, would have said had they known whose
+eyes were looking out at them from underneath the car. No doubt many
+of those officials escorting God, in their white trousers, red coats,
+with swords by their sides and cocked hats would have news of his
+existence; they would surely have heard some one speak of him, and
+they probably kept his name in their memory as that of a social enemy.
+And this reprobate, rejected by all, concealed in a hole in the
+Cathedral like those adventurous birds who rested in its vaultings,
+was the man who was guiding the footsteps of God through this most
+religious city!
+
+A little after mid-day the Custodia returned to the Cathedral, passing
+in front of the Puerta del Mollete. Gabriel saw the exterior walls
+hung with the famous tapestries. As soon as the farewell hymns were
+ended the canons despoiled themselves quickly of their vestments,
+rushing to the door on their dismissal without saluting. They were
+going to their dinners much later than usual, as this extraordinary
+day upset the even course of their lives. The church, so noisy and
+illuminated in the morning, emptied itself rapidly, and silence and
+twilight once more reigned in it.
+
+Esteban was furious when he saw Gabriel emerging from the eucharistic
+car.
+
+"You will kill yourself, such work is not for you. What caprice could
+have seized you?"
+
+Gabriel laughed. Yes, it was a caprice, but he did not repent of it.
+He had taken a turn through the town without being seen, and he could
+give his brother sufficient for two days' maintenance; he wished to
+work, not to be a heavy charge on him.
+
+Wooden Staff was softened.
+
+"You idiot, have I asked anything of you? Do I want anything else but
+that you should live quietly and get better?"
+
+But, as though he wished to acknowledge this exertion on his brother's
+part by something which would please him, when he returned to the
+Claverias he dropped his usual sullen face, and spoke to his daughter
+during the meal.
+
+Towards evening the Claverias were quite deserted. Don Antolin hurried
+down with his tickets, rejoicing in the knowledge that many strangers
+were waiting for him. The Tato and the bell-ringer had slipped
+furtively down the tower stairs, dressed in their best clothes; they
+were going to the bull-fight. Sagrario obliged to be idle in order to
+keep the feast day holy, had gone to the shoemaker's house, and while
+he was showing the giants to the servants and soldiers of the academy,
+and the peasants from the country, Luna's niece helped to mend the
+clothes for the poor woman crushed by poverty and the superabundance
+of children.
+
+When the Chapel-master and the Wooden Staff went down to the choir,
+Gabriel went out into the cloister. He could only see there a cadet
+who was walking up and down, with his hand on the pommel of his sword,
+holding it horizontally like the fiery tizonas[1] of former days. Luna
+recognised him by the full pantaloons and the wasplike waist, which
+made the Tato declare that this particular cadet wore stays--it was
+Juanito the cardinal's nephew. He often walked in the cloister, hoping
+for an opportunity to talk with Leocadia, the beautiful daughter of
+the Virgin's sacristan. From the parents he had nothing to fear, but
+the future warrior had a certain dread of Tomasa, as the old lady
+looked on these visits with an evil eye, and threatened to make them
+known to his uncle the Cardinal.
+
+[Footnote 1: _Tizona_--name of the Cid's sword.]
+
+Gabriel had often spoken to the cadet, for when the youth met him
+in the cloister he always stopped to speak, endeavouring by the
+platitudes of his conversation to justify his presence in the
+Claverias; but Luna was surprised to meet him there on a festival
+afternoon.
+
+"Are you not going to the bull-fight?" he inquired. "I thought
+everyone from the academy would be in the Plaza."
+
+Juanito smiled, caressing his moustache; it was his favourite gesture,
+as it raised his arm, giving him the satisfaction of displaying the
+sleeve adorned with sergeant's stripes. He was not a common cadet, he
+had his stripes, and though this did not seem much to one who dreamed
+of being a general, still it was a step in the right direction. No;
+he did not go to bull-fights. In truth he was an _habitué_ but he had
+sacrificed himself in order to talk for a whole afternoon with his
+sweetheart at the door of her house in the silence of the Claverias.
+The grandmother had gone down into the garden, and "Virgin's Blue"
+would not be long in going out and leaving the coast clear, as if
+the matter in no way concerned him. "The beautiful evening, friend
+Gabriel!" He had far more serious and important affairs than the new
+comers at the academy, who spent all their Sundays at the cafés, or
+walking up and down like fools--everyone at the academy, even the
+professors, envied him his sweetheart.
+
+"And when is the wedding to be?" said Gabriel gaily.
+
+Master Stripes looked most important as he replied: "There were many
+things to be done before--first of all to bring his uncle to consent,
+which might not be easy, and to follow the guiding of his good star to
+attain a certain rank; but he was intended for great things, so it was
+only a matter of a few years.
+
+"I, friend Luna, am of the stuff of young generals; it is the good
+luck of the family. My uncle, when he was only an acolyte, was certain
+he would become a cardinal, and he succeeded. I shall rise much
+faster. Besides, you know that to be an archbishop of Toledo is not a
+small thing. My uncle has many friends in the palace, and commands in
+the ministry of war just as though he were a general. In point of fact
+he is far more a soldier than a cleric! And to prove it to you, there
+is the only thing he has ever written, a prayer to the Virgin for the
+soldiers to recite before they go into action."
+
+"And you, Juanito, do you really feel any vocation for a military
+life?"
+
+"A great deal--ever since I knew how to open books and read them I
+have wished to rival those great captains that I saw in the prints,
+erect on their horses, with swords in their hands, proud and handsome.
+Believe me, no one enters on this career without a vocation; many are
+entered in the seminaries against their will, but no one can make a
+soldier by force; anyone who comes to the academy has the longing in
+himself."
+
+"And are all of them as sure of the result as you are?"
+
+"Oh, yes; all," said the cardinal's nephew smiling, "except that the
+immense majority have not such probabilities of making a name.
+But, such as we are, there is not one amongst us who dreams of the
+possibility of vegetating as a captain in a reserve regiment, or of
+dying of old age as a commandant. We all of us see first of all youth
+glorified by the uniform, full of adventures (for you know all
+the women fight for us), by the joy of life, loved and respected
+everywhere, head and shoulders above our countrymen; and when old age
+approaches, and we begin to get fat and bald, the gold braid of a
+general, politics, and, who knows, possibly the portfolio of war! This
+is in everyone's thoughts. No one believes but that the future holds a
+bâton for him, and that he has only to unhook it and fasten it to his
+belt. I know for certain what is awaiting me, the rest dream and hope
+for it, and so we go on living."
+
+Gabriel smiled as he listened to the cadet.
+
+"You are all deceiving yourselves, like those poor youths who enter
+the seminaries, believing that a mitre awaits them or a fat benefice
+on the other side of the door. It is the influence and attraction
+still exercised by the great things that have been. Let us see--apart
+from the material result of the profession--why do you become
+soldiers?"
+
+"For the sake of glory!" said the cadet pompously, remembering the
+harangues of the colonel director of the academy. "For our country,
+whose defence is entrusted to us! and for the honour of our flag!"
+
+"Glory!" said Gabriel, ironically. "I know all about that. Very often,
+seeing you all so young and inexperienced, so full of vain hopes, I
+have reconstructed in my own mind what might be called the psychology
+of the cadet. I can guess all that you thought before entering the
+academy, and I foresee the bitter and crushing disillusion that awaits
+you on leaving it. The history of wars and the artistic trappings of
+the uniform have seduced your youth. Afterwards, warlike tales of an
+irresistible fascination--Bonaparte with his little band crossing the
+bridge at Arcola amid showers of bullets. And then our own generals,
+not to go further--Espartero at Luchana, O'Donnel in Africa, and,
+above all, Prim, that almost legendary leader, directing the battalion
+at Castillejos with his sword. 'I wish to be the same,' say these
+youths; 'where one man has arrived another may also succeed';
+enthusiasm is taken for predestination, and each one thinks himself
+created by God on purpose to be a famous leader. In the meanwhile you
+live in Toledo, dreaming of glory, of hairbreadth enterprises, of
+gigantic battles and noisy triumphs. But when, with the two stars on
+your arm you go to a regiment, the first thing that comes to meet you
+at the barrack gate, even before you receive the salute of the sentry,
+is the ugly and disagreeable reality. He who dreams of covering
+himself with glory and becoming a great leader before he is thirty,
+thinking of nothing but strategic combinations and original
+fortifications, must occupy himself with the washing and decency of a
+lot of wild lads, who come in from the fields reeking with excessive
+health; try the rations, discuss drawers and shirts, calculate the
+lasting of ankle boots and hempen shoes, and he who never went near
+the kitchen at home, was most carefully looked after by his mother,
+and thought that everything was women's work except giving words
+of command and drawing soldiers up in line, now finds the first
+requirement in a regiment is to be cook, tailor, shoemaker, etc., very
+often receiving reprimands from his superiors if he prove lazy in
+those duties."
+
+"That is true," said Juanito laughing; "but without these things there
+cannot be an army, and an army is necessary."
+
+"We are not discussing if it is necessary or no. I only wish to point
+out that you (or perhaps not you, as you enter on a good footing,
+but certainly your companions) are self-deceivers, and are preparing
+without knowing it the shipwreck of your lives, precisely like those
+other youths who, poorer, or perhaps less energetic, crowd to enter
+the Church. The Church has come to an end as there is no longer faith;
+military glory has ended in Spain as there are no longer wars of
+conquest, and our character as strong fighting men has been lost for
+centuries. If we have a war, it is either civil or colonial--wars that
+might be called disasters--without glory and without profit, but in
+which men die as at Thermopyle or Austerlitz, as a man can only die
+once; but without the consolation of fame, or of public applause,
+without in fact that aureole that you call glory. You have all been
+born too late; you are the warriors of a people who must perforce live
+in peace; just as those seminarists will be the future priests in a
+country where there are no longer miracles nor faith, only routine and
+utter stagnation of thought."
+
+"But if we have no foreign wars, if conquests have come to an end, we
+serve at least to defend the integrity of Spanish soil, to guard our
+own homes. Is it that you think," said the cadet nettled, "we are
+incapable of dying for our country?"
+
+"I do not doubt it; that is the only thing Spaniards are capable of
+doing, to die most heroically, but in the end to die. Our history
+for the last two centuries has been nothing but a tale of heroic
+deaths--'Glorious defeat in such a place,' 'Heroic disaster in some
+other.' By sea and by land we have astonished the world, throwing
+ourselves blindly into danger, showing a good front, without
+flinching, with the stoicism of a Chinaman. But nations do not grow
+great from their contempt of death, but through their ability to
+preserve life. The Poles were the terror of the Turks, and some of the
+best soldiers in Europe, yet Poland has ceased to exist. If any great
+European power _could_ invade us--you will remark I say _could_, for
+in these things the wish is not the same as the power, I know exactly
+what would happen; the Spaniards would know how to die, but you may be
+perfectly certain the invaders would not require more than two battles
+to sweep away entirely all our military preparations. And all this,
+which could be scattered in a couple of days, what sacrifices it costs
+the country!"
+
+"Then," said the cadet ironically, "I presume we must suppress the
+army, and leave the nation undefended."
+
+"As things are to-day there is no hope of that happening. As long as
+all Europe is armed and the smallest country has an army, Spain will
+have one also. It is not for her to set an example; and besides, the
+example would be of no use, it is as though one having a few thousand
+pesetas should endeavour to initiate the remedy to social injustice by
+sacrificing himself and giving them up."
+
+After a long silence Gabriel spoke again very quietly, noticing the
+ironical and even aggressive manner of the cadet.
+
+"No doubt you are pained by what I say; believe me I feel it, as I
+have no wish to wound the beliefs of anyone, least of all of those who
+have formed to themselves an ideal of life. But truth is truth. The
+social question does not trouble you. Is it not so? You know nothing
+about it, you have never thought about it for an instant and it is the
+same with all your, companions, but nevertheless, what you suffer in
+your prestige, in your love of country and of your standard, has no
+other cause but the social disorder at present rampant in the world.
+Wealth is everything, capital is lord of the world. Science directs
+humanity as the successor of faith, but the rich have possessed
+themselves of its discoveries, and have monopolised them to continue
+their tyranny. In the economic world they have made themselves masters
+of machinery and of all progress, using them as chains to enslave the
+workman, forcing an excess of production, but limiting his daily wage
+to what is strictly necessary. In the life of nations the same thing
+repeats itself--war to-day is nothing but an appliance of science, and
+the richest countries have acquired the greatest improvements in the
+art of extermination. They have crowds of recruits, thousands of
+enormous cannon, they can keep millions of men under arms, with every
+sort of modern improvement, without becoming bankrupt. But to poor
+countries, their only remaining course is to hold their tongues, or to
+rage uselessly, as the disinherited do against those in possession of
+their property. The most cowardly and sedentary people on the face of
+the globe may become invincible warriors if they have the money. The
+bravery of chivalry came to an end with the invention of powder, and
+the pride of race has faded for ever before the advent of trade. If
+the Cid came to life again he would be in jail, he would have become a
+highwayman, unable to adjust himself to the inequalities and injustice
+of modern life. If the Gran Capitan were now minister of war, he would
+probably be unable even with this military tax which oppresses the
+country to put his regiments in condition to undertake a fresh war in
+Italy. It is money, that cursed money! which has killed the finest
+part of soldiering--personal bravery, initiative, originality--just as
+it has crushed the workman, making his life a hell."
+
+The cadet listened attentively to Gabriel, understanding for the first
+time that in great nations there is something more than the warlike
+sympathies of the monarch and the bravery of the army. He saw suddenly
+that wealth was the basis and mainspring of all military enterprise.
+
+"Then," he said thoughtfully, "if foreign nations do not attack us it
+is not because they fear us."
+
+"No; that we are permitted to live in peace is because these
+omnipotent powers with all their ambitions and jealousies preserve a
+certain equilibrium. They are like the great capitalists who, occupied
+with vast projects of speculation, neglect either from carelessness or
+contempt the small undertakings that lie at their door. Do you believe
+that Switzerland or Belgium or other small countries live in peace
+surrounded by great powers because they have an army? They would exist
+just the same if they had not a single soldier, and the military power
+of Spain is not greater than that of one of these small countries;
+the poverty of the country and the scanty population oblige us to be
+humble. In these days there are two kinds of armies those organised
+for conquest and those whose only use is to keep order at home, that
+are no more than police on a large scale, with guns and generals. That
+of Spain, however much it costs, and however much they increase it,
+comes under the latter classification."
+
+"And if it is only this," said the cadet, "is it not something?
+We keep peace at home, and we watch over the tranquillity of our
+country."
+
+"Yes, but that could be done by fewer people and for less money.
+Besides, how about glory? Will you youths, full of illusions,
+overflowing with aggressiveness and energy for new undertakings,
+resign yourselves to this profession of watchmen and caretakers to a
+country? Your future will be as monotonous as that of a priest in his
+cathedral. Every day the same--to drill men to move this or that way,
+to play at dominoes or billiards in a cafe, to walk about in uniform
+or take a nap in the guard-room. There can be nothing for you beyond
+a small disturbance at the tax on provisions, a strike, a closing of
+shops to protest against the taxes, and then to fire on a mob armed
+with sticks and stones. If at any time in your life you are ordered to
+fire, you may be sure it will be on Spaniards. The Government do not
+wish for an army as they know it is useless for the exterior defence
+of the nation; besides, the national finances do not admit of its
+maintenance, and they are consequently satisfied with an embryonic
+organisation which is always insubordinate, distracted by incessant
+and contradictory reforms, copying foreign improvements as a poor
+girl copies the robes of a great lady. Believe me, there is nothing
+pleasant in living such a narrowed and monotonous life, with no other
+chance of glory but that of shooting a workman who protests or a
+people who complain."
+
+"But, how about liberty? How about political progress?" inquired the
+cadet. "I have heard it said by a captain at the academy that if the
+Liberal party exists in Spain it is through the army."
+
+"There is a great deal in that," said Gabriel. "It is indubitably the
+most important service the army has rendered to the State; without it,
+who knows where the civil wars would have ended in this country, so
+stationary and so timid about all reforms! I repeat it, I do not
+ignore this service, but, believe me, that civil wars between liberty
+and political absolutism will never be repeated, neither could the
+guerilla warfare of the Independence with any definite issue. The
+means of communication and military progress have put an end to
+mountain warfare. The Mauser, which is the arm of the day, requires
+well-provided parks of ammunition to follow it, cartridge magazines at
+its back, and all this is incompatible with party fighting."
+
+"But you will admit that we are of some use, and that we render the
+nation good service."
+
+"I admit it in the actual state of things, but I should admit it more
+fully if you were fewer. The greater part of the grant is spent, but
+all the same you live in poverty, decent and hidden, but poverty all
+the same. A lieutenant earns less than many operatives, but he must
+buy himself showy uniforms, be smart, and frequent when he wants
+amusement the same places as the rich. He can only see before him long
+years of waiting and of hidden poverty, borne with dignity, until some
+promotion provides him with a few duros more monthly. You all suffer
+dragging on this existence of slaves to the sword, the nation who
+pays grumbles at seeing you inactive, and forgets other superfluous
+expenses to fix its complaints solely on the military. Believe me, for
+a modern army, you are too few and badly organised; to keep the peace
+at home you are too many and too dear. The fault is not yours, your
+vocation has come too late, when fate has rendered Spain powerless for
+adventurous undertakings. If she revives she will have to follow a
+direction which will certainly not be that of the sword. For this
+reason I say that these youths stray from the right path when they
+seek for glory where their ancestors thought to find it."
+
+The appearance of Silver Stick cut short the dialogue. He ran in, pale
+with excitement, gasping, rattling his bunch of keys.
+
+"His Eminence is coming," he said, hurriedly. "He is already under the
+arch; he wishes to spend the evening in the garden; it is a whim! They
+say he is quite unmanageable to-day."
+
+And he ran on to open the staircase del Tenorio, which put the
+Claverias in communication with the lower cloister.
+
+The cadet was alarmed at the unexpected proximity of his uncle. He did
+not wish to meet him there, he feared the cardinal's temper, and fled
+towards the tower staircase on his way to the bull-fight, sacrificing
+his sweetheart sooner than meet with Don Sebastian.
+
+Gabriel, who now found himself alone in the cloister, leant against a
+column and watched the progress of this terrible prince of the Church.
+He saw him come out of the doorway leading to the abode of the giants,
+followed by two servants. Luna was able to examine him well for the
+first time. He was enormous; but in spite of his age carried himself
+erectly; over his black cassock with the red borders hung his gold
+cross. He was leaning with a martial air on a staff of command, and
+the gold tassels of his hat fell on the pink skin of his fat neck,
+which was fringed with white hair. His small and penetrating eyes
+looked on all sides in the hopes of discovering some delinquency,
+something contravening the established rules, which would enable him
+to break out into shouts and menaces and so give vent to his ill
+humour and to the anger which furrowed his brows.
+
+He disappeared by the staircase del Tenorio, preceded by Don Antolin,
+who, after opening the iron gates, had placed himself at his orders,
+shaking with fear. The silence and solitude of the Claverias were
+undisturbed, it seemed as though the people hidden in their houses
+remained absolutely still, guessing the danger that was passing.
+
+Gabriel, leaning on the balustrade, watched the cardinal enter the
+lower cloister, walking round two sides till he came to the garden
+gate. A slight gesture from the prelate was sufficient to stop the two
+servants, and he walked on alone through the central avenue towards
+the summer-house where Tomasa was fast asleep between its leafy walls,
+her knitting in her hands.
+
+The old woman awoke at the sound of footsteps, and seeing the prelate,
+gave a cry of surprise.
+
+"Don Sebastian! You here!"
+
+"I wished to visit you," said the cardinal with a benevolent smile,
+seating himself on a bench. "It must not be always you who come to
+seek me. I owe you many visits, and here I am."
+
+Plunging one hand into the depths of his cassock, he drew forth a
+small gold case and lighted a cigarette. He stretched out his legs
+with the complacency of one who being always accustomed to wear
+the frowning brow of authority, finds himself for a few moments at
+liberty.
+
+"But have you not been ill?" inquired the gardener's widow. "I had
+thought of coming round to the palace this afternoon to inquire after
+your health from Doña Visita."
+
+"Hold your tongue, you fool; I have never felt better, especially
+since this morning. The slap I have given to _those_ by not going into
+the choir to pray with them has put me in a splendid humour, and in
+order that they may thoroughly understand my meaning I have come to
+see you. I wish them all to know that I am quite well, and that what
+is said about my illness is untrue. I wish all in Toledo to understand
+that the archbishop will not see his canons, and that he does so from
+a sense of dignity, not from pride, as at the same time he can come
+down to see his old friend the gardener's widow."
+
+And the terrible old man laughed like a child to think of the
+annoyance this visit would cause his Chapter.
+
+"Do not believe, however, Tomasa," he continued, "that I have come to
+see you solely for this reason. I felt sad and worried in the palace
+this afternoon. Visitacion was busy with some friends from Madrid, and
+I had that heartache I sometimes feel when I think of the past. I felt
+that I must come and see you, more especially as it is always cool in
+the Cathedral garden, whereas outside it is as hot as an oven. Ah!
+Tomasa! how strong I see you! So slim and so active. You wear better
+than I do; you are not wrapped in fat like this sinner, and you have
+not the pains that disturb my nights. Your hair is still dark, your
+teeth are well preserved, and you do not need like this old cardinal
+to have a mechanism inside your mouth; but all the same, Tomasa, you
+are just as old as I am. We have very few years of life left to us,
+however much the Lord may wish to preserve us. What would I not give
+to return to those days when I ran up to your house in my red gown in
+search of your father, the sacristan, and stole your breakfast. Eh,
+Tomasa?"
+
+The two old people, forgetting social differences, recalled the past
+with the friendly resignation of those advancing towards death.
+Everything was the same as in their childhood--the garden, the
+cloister; nothing about the Cathedral had changed.
+
+His Eminence, closing his eyes, fancied himself once more the restless
+acolyte of fifty years before; the blue spirals from his cigarette
+seemed to carry his thoughts back through the interminable labyrinths
+of the past.
+
+"Do you remember how your poor father used to laugh at me? 'This boy,'
+he would say in the sacristy, 'is a Sixtus V. What do you wish to be?'
+he would ask me, and I always gave the same answer, 'Archbishop of
+Toledo.' And the good sacristan would laugh again at the certainty
+with which I spoke of my hopes. Believe me, Tomasa, I thought much of
+him when I was consecrated bishop, regretting his death. I should have
+been delighted with his tears of joy seeing me with the mitre on my
+head. I have always loved you, you are an excellent family, and have
+often satisfied my hunger."
+
+"Silence, señor, silence, and do not recall those things. I am the one
+who ought to be grateful for your kindness, so simple and genuine in
+spite of your rank, which comes next after the Pope. And the truth
+is," added the old woman with the pride of her frankness, "that no one
+is the loser. Friends like I am you can never have; like all the great
+ones of the earth, you are surrounded by flatterers and rascals. If
+you had remained a simple mass priest no one would have sought you
+out, but Tomasa would have always been your friend, always ready to do
+you a service. If I love you so much it is because you are kind and
+affable, but if you had put on pride like other archbishops, I should
+have kissed your ring and--'Good-bye.' The cardinal to his palace, the
+gardener's widow to her garden."
+
+The prelate received the old woman's frankness smilingly.
+
+"You will always be Don Sebastian to me," she continued. "When you
+told me not to call you Eminence or to use the same ceremonies as
+other people, I was as pleased as if I had been given the mantle of
+the Virgin del Sagrario. Such ceremonies would have stuck in my throat
+and made me ready to cry out, 'Let him have his fill of Eminence and
+Illustrious, but we have scratched each other thousands of times when
+we were little, and this big thief could never see a scrap of bread or
+an apricot in my hand without trying to snatch and devour it!' You may
+be thankful I spoke of you as 'usted'[1] when you became a beneficiary
+of the Cathedral, for, after all, it would not do to 'thou' a priest
+as if he were an acolyte."
+
+[Footnote 1: Contraction of _vuestra merced_--your worship.]
+
+Silence fell on the two old people, their eyes wandered tenderly over
+the garden, as if each tree or arcade covered with foliage contained
+some memory.
+
+"Do you know what I have just remembered," said Tomasa. "I remember
+that we saw each other just here many many years ago, at least
+forty-eight or fifty. I was with my poor elder sister who had just
+married Luna the gardener, and in the cloister wandering round me was
+he who afterwards became my husband. We saw a handsome sergeant come
+into the summer-house with a great jingle of spurs, a sword on his
+arm, and a helmet with a tail just like the Jews on the Monument. It
+was you, Don Sebastian, who had come to Toledo to visit your uncle
+the beneficiary, and who would not leave without visiting your friend
+Tomasita. How handsome and smart you were. I do not say it to flatter
+you, it is truth. You looked like being a rogue with the girls! And I
+still remember you said something to me about how pretty and fresh you
+thought me after so many years absence. You don't mind my reminding
+you of this? Really? It was only a soldier's gallant jests. How many
+would say that now? When you left, I said to my brother-in-law, 'He
+has put on the uniform for good and all; it is useless his uncle, the
+beneficiary, thinking of making a priest of him.'"
+
+"It was a youthful sally," said the cardinal smiling, remembering with
+pride the dashing sergeant of dragoons. "In Spain, there are only
+three professions worthy of a man--the sword, the Church and the toga.
+My blood was hot and I wanted to be a soldier, but unluckily I fell on
+times of peace, my promotion would have been very slow, and in order
+not to embitter my uncle's last years, I renewed my studies and turned
+to the Church. One can serve God or one's country as well in one place
+as another, but, believe me, very often in spite of the pomp of my
+cardinalate I think with envy of that soldier you saw. What happy
+times they were! Even now the sword draws me. When I see the cadets I
+would gladly exchange with some of them, giving them my crozier and
+cross. And possibly I might have done better than any of them! Ah! if
+only the great times of the reconquest could return when the prelates
+went out to fight the Moors! What a great Archbishop of Toledo I
+should have been!"
+
+And Don Sebastian drew up his fat old body, and proudly stretched out
+his arms with all the remains of his former strength.
+
+"You have always been a strong man," said the gardener's widow. "I say
+very often to some of the priests who speak of you and criticise you:
+'You must not trifle with His Eminence, he is quite capable of going
+one day into the choir--some he likes and some he does not--and
+driving you all out at one fell swoop.'"
+
+"I have more than once been tempted to do so," said the prelate
+firmly, his eyes flashing with energy, "but I have been prevented by
+the thought of my charge and my character as a peaceful priest. I am
+the shepherd of a Catholic flock, not a wolf who tears the sheep in
+his fierceness. But sometimes I can bear no more, and God forgive me!
+I have often been tempted to raise the shepherd's crook and chastise
+with blows that rebel flock who harbour in the Cathedral."
+
+The prelate became excited, speaking of his quarrels with the Chapter;
+the placidity of mind produced by the quiet of the garden disappeared
+as he thought of his hostile subordinates. He felt obliged as at
+other times to confide his troubles to the gardener's widow with that
+instinctive kindly feeling which often causes highly-placed people to
+confide in humble friends.
+
+"You cannot imagine, Tomasa, what those men make me suffer. I will
+subdue them because I am the master, because they owe me obedience by
+the rule of discipline without which there can be neither Church nor
+religion; but they oppose and disobey me. My orders are carried out
+with grumbling, and when I assert myself even the last ordained priest
+stands on what he calls his rights, lays complaints against me and
+appeals either to the Rota[1] or to Rome. Let us see, am I the master
+or am I not? Ought the shepherd to argue with his sheep and consult
+how to guide them in the right way? They sicken and weary me with
+their complaints and questions. There is not half a man amongst them,
+they are all cowardly tale-bearers. In my presence they lower their
+eyes, smile and praise His Eminence, and as soon as I turn my back
+they are vipers trying to bite me, scorpion tongues which respect
+nothing. Ay, Tomasa, my daughter! pity me! when I think of all this it
+makes me quite ill."
+
+[Footnote 1: Ecclesiastical court.]
+
+The prelate turned pale, rising from his seat as though he felt a
+sudden spasm of pain.
+
+"Do not worry yourself so much," said the old woman, "you are above
+them all, and you will overcome them."
+
+"Clearly, I shall defeat them; if not, it would fill my cup, for it
+would be the first time I had been vanquished. These squabbles among
+comrades do not trouble me much after all, for I know in the end I
+shall see my detested enemies at my feet. But it is their tongues,
+Tomasa!--what they say about the beings I love most in the world, that
+is what wounds me, and is killing me."
+
+He sat down again, coming quite close to the gardener's widow, so as
+to speak in a very low voice.
+
+"You know my past better than anyone; I have such great confidence in
+you that I have told you everything. Besides, you are very quick,
+and if I had not told you, you would have guessed. You know what
+Visitacion is to me, and most certainly you are aware of what those
+wretches say about her. Do not play the fool; everyone inside and
+outside the Cathedral listens to these calumnies and believes them.
+You are the only one who does not credit them because you know the
+truth. But ay! the truth cannot be told, I cannot proclaim it, these
+robes forbid me."
+
+And he seized a handful of his cassock with his clenched fingers as if
+he would rend it.
+
+A long silence followed. Don Sebastian looked fixedly at the ground,
+clutching with his hands as though he were trying to grasp invisible
+enemies; every now and then he felt a stab of pain and sighed
+uneasily.
+
+"Why do you think about these things?" said the gardener's widow;
+"they only make you ill, and you ought not to have disturbed yourself
+to come and see me, you would have done better to remain in the
+palace."
+
+"No, you distract my mind from them, it is a great comfort to tell you
+of my troubles. Up there I feel in despair, and have to exert all
+my self-command to suppress my anger. I do not wish my servants to
+understand, for they are quite capable of laughing at me, neither do I
+wish poor Visitacion to know anything. I cannot dissimulate. I cannot
+feign happiness when I am so irritated! What a hell I suffer! I cannot
+say that I have been a man, and that I have been weak as the flesh of
+which I am made, that I have with me the fruit of my faults, and that
+I will not separate myself from them, though persecuted by calumny.
+Every man acts as he is able, and I wish to be good in spite of my
+faults. I might have separated from my children, I might have deserted
+them, as others have done to preserve their reputation as saints, but
+I am a man, and I am proud of them; I am a man with all his defects
+and all his virtues, neither greater nor less than the general run of
+humanity. The feeling of paternity is so deeply rooted in me that I
+would sooner lose my mitre than abandon my children. You remember when
+Juanito's father, who passed as my nephew, died, how deeply I felt it,
+I thought I should have died also. Such a fine, handsome man, and
+with such a brilliant future before him! I would have made him a
+magistrate, president of the supreme court, minister, anything I
+wished! And in twenty-four hours he was dead as though Heaven wished
+to punish me. It is true I have my grandson remaining, but this
+Juanito in no way resembles his father, and I confess it to you, I
+do not care much for him. I can only see in him the most distant
+reflection of my poor son. Of my past, of that time which was the
+happiest of my life, all I have left me is Visitacion. She is the
+living image of the poor dead one. I worship her! and this feeble ray
+of happiness these wretched people disturb with their calumnies. It is
+enough to make one kill them!"
+
+Overcome by the happy recollection of the spring-time which had
+flowered during the first years of his episcopate, far away in an
+Andalusian diocese, he repeated once again to Tomasa the tale of his
+relations with a certain devout lady, who from her childhood had felt
+a horror of the world. Devotion had drawn them together, but life
+was not long in asserting her rights, opening herself a way by their
+almost mystical relations, and finally uniting them in a carnal
+embrace. They had lived faithful to each other in the secrecy of
+ecclesiastical life, loving each other with scrupulous prudence, so
+that no rumour of their relations had ever publicly transpired,
+until she died, leaving two children. Don Sebastian, a man of strong
+passions, was almost vehement in his paternal feelings--those two
+beings were the image of the poor dead woman, the remembrance of the
+only idyll which had softened a life wholly given over to ambition,
+and the calumnies circulated by his enemies, founded on the presence
+of his daughter in the archiepiscopal palace nearly drove him mad.
+
+"They believe her to be my mistress!" he said angrily. "My poor
+Visitacion, so good, so affectionate, so gentle to all, changed to a
+courtesan by these wretches! A sweetheart that I have taken for my
+amusement from the college of Noble Ladies! As if I, old and infirm,
+were able to think of such things! Brutes! wretches! Crimes have been
+committed for less!"
+
+"Let them say on. God is in heaven and sees us all."
+
+"I know it, but this is not enough to quiet me. You have children,
+Tomasa, and you know what it is to love them. It is not only what
+is done against them that wounds us, but what is said. What days of
+suffering I endure! You know since my boyhood all my dreams have been
+to rise to where I am. I used to look at the throne in the choir and
+think how comfortable I should be in it--of the immense happiness of
+being a prince of the Church. Well, now I am on the throne. I have
+spent half a century removing the stones from my path, leaving my skin
+and even my flesh on the brambles of the hillside. I only know how
+I was able to rise from the black mass and obtain a bishopric!
+Afterwards--now I am an archbishop! now I am a cardinal! At last I can
+rise no higher! And what is it all? Happiness always floats before us
+like the cloud of light which guided the Israelites. We see it, we
+almost touch it, but it never lets itself be caught. I am more unhappy
+now than in the days when I struggled to rise, and thought myself the
+most unfortunate of men. I am no longer young; the height on which
+I stand draws all eyes to me and prevents me defending myself. Ay,
+Tomasa! pity me, for I am worthy of compassion! To be a father and
+to be obliged to hide it as a crime! To love my daughter with an
+affection which increases more and more as I draw nearer to death, and
+have to endure that people should imagine this pure affection to be
+something so repugnant!"
+
+And the terrible glance of Don Sebastian, which terrified all the
+diocese, was clouded with tears.
+
+"Moreover, I have other troubles," he went on, "but they are those of
+a far-seeing man who fears the future. When I die, all that I have
+will be my daughter's. Juanito inherits what belonged to his mother,
+who was rich; besides, he has his profession and the support of my
+friends. Visitacion will be very rich. You know my adversaries throw
+in my face what they call my avarice. Avaricious I am not, but
+foreseeing, and anxious for the well-being of those belonging to me. I
+have saved a great deal. I am not one of those who distribute bread at
+the gate of his palace, nor who seek popularity through almsgiving.
+I have pasture lands in Estremadura, many vineyards in La Mancha,
+houses, and above all State stock--much stock. As a good Spaniard I
+have wished to help the Government with my money, more especially
+as it bears interest. I do not quite know how much I possess, but
+certainly twenty millions of reals, and probably more, all saved by
+myself and increased by fortunate speculations. I cannot complain
+of fate, and the Lord has helped me. Everything is for my poor
+Visitacion. I should delight in seeing her married to a good man; but
+she will not leave me. She is drawn to the Church, and that is my
+fear. Do not be surprised, Tomasa; I, a prince of the Church, fear to
+see how she is attracted by devotion, and I do all I can to turn her
+from it. I respect a religious woman, but not one who is only happy in
+the Church. A woman ought to live; she ought to be happy as a mother.
+I have always looked badly on nuns."
+
+"Let her be, señor," said the gardener's widow; "there is nothing
+strange in her love for the Church. Living as she does she could
+scarcely do otherwise."
+
+"For the present time, I have no fear. I am by her side, and her being
+fond of the society of the nuns signifies very little to me. But I
+may die to-morrow, and just imagine what a splendid mouthful
+poor Visitacion and her millions would be, left alone, with this
+predilection to religious life, of which those cunning people would
+be sure to take advantage! I have seen a great deal. I belong to the
+class, and I am in the secret. There is no lack of religious orders
+who devote themselves to hunting heiresses for the greater glory of
+God, as they say. Besides, there are many foreign nuns with great
+flapping caps travelling about here, who are lynxes for that sort of
+work, and I am terrified lest they should pounce on my daughter. I
+belong to the ancient Catholicism, to that pure Spanish religion, free
+from all modern extravagances. It would be sad to have spent my life
+in saving, only to fatten the Jesuits or those sisters who cannot
+speak Castilian. I do not wish my money to share the fate of that of
+the sacristans in the proverb. For this reason, to the annoyance
+I feel at my struggles with this inimical Chapter, I must add the
+distress I feel at my daughter's feeble character. Probably she will
+be hunted; some rake will laugh at me and possess himself of my
+money."
+
+Excited by his gloomy thoughts, he gave vent to an interjection both
+caustic and obscene, a memory of his soldiering days; in the presence
+of the gardener's widow there was no need to control himself, and the
+old woman was accustomed to this relief of his temper.
+
+"Let us see," he said imperiously after a long silence. "You, who know
+me better than anyone, am I as bad as my enemies suppose? Do I deserve
+that the Lord should punish me for my faults? You are one of God's
+souls, simple and good, and you know more of all this by your instinct
+than all the doctors of theology."
+
+"You bad, Don Sebastian? Holy Jesus! You are a man like all others,
+neither more nor less; but you are sincere, all of one piece, without
+deceit or hypocrisy."
+
+"A man--you have said it. I am a man like the rest. We who attain a
+certain height are like the saints on the fronts of the churches: from
+below we cause admiration for our beauty, but viewed closely we cause
+horror from the ugliness of the stones corroded by time. However much
+we wish to sanctify ourselves, keeping ourselves apart, we are still
+nothing but men--creatures of flesh and blood like those who surround
+us.
+
+"In the Church those who free themselves from human passion are most
+rare. And who knows if, even among those few privileged ones, some are
+not driven by the demon of vanity to increase the asceticism of their
+lives, thinking of the glory of being on an altar! The priest who
+succeeds in subduing his flesh falls into avarice, which is the
+ecclesiastical vice _par excellence_. I have never hoarded from vice;
+I have saved for my own, but never for myself."
+
+The prelate was silent for a long while; but in his irresistible
+desire to confide in the simple old woman he went on.
+
+"I am sure that God will not despise me when my hour comes. His
+infinite mercy is above all the littleness of life. What has been my
+fault? To have loved a woman, as my father loved my mother; to
+have had children as the apostles and saints had. And why not?
+Ecclesiastical celibacy is an invention of men, a detail of discipline
+agreed upon at the councils; but the flesh and its exigencies are
+anterior by many centuries; they date from Paradise. Whoever crosses
+this barrier, not from vice, but from irresistible passion, because he
+cannot conquer the impulse to create a family and to have a companion,
+fails indubitably towards the laws of the Church, but he does not
+disobey God. I fear the approach of death; many nights I doubt and
+tremble like a child. But I have served God in my own way. In former
+times I would have served Him with my sword, fighting against the
+heretics. Now I am His priest and do battle for Him whenever I see the
+impiety of the age curtailing anything of His glory. The Lord will
+forgive me, receiving me into His bosom. You, who are so good, Tomasa,
+and have the soul of an angel beneath your rough exterior, do you not
+think so?"
+
+The gardener's widow smiled, and her words fell slowly on the silence
+of the dying evening.
+
+"Tranquillise yourself, Don Sebastian. I have seen many saints in this
+house, and they have been worth much less than you. To ensure their
+salvation they would have abandoned their children. To maintain what
+they call purity of soul they would have renounced their family.
+Believe me, no saints enter here; they are men, nothing but men. You
+have nothing to repent of in following the impulse of your heart. God
+created us in His image and likeness, and also planted in us family
+love. All the rest, chastity, celibacy and other trifles, you invented
+for yourselves, to distinguish yourselves from the common herd of
+people. Be a man, Don Sebastian, and the more you show yourself such
+the better it will be for you, and the better the Lord will receive
+you in His glory."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+A few days after Corpus Don Antolin went one morning in search of
+Gabriel. Silver Stick smiled at Luna, speaking to him in a patronising
+way.
+
+He had thought of him all night; it pained him to see him idle,
+walking about the cloister; it was the want of occupation that
+inspired him with such perverse ideas.
+
+"Let us see," he continued, "would it suit you to come down with me
+every afternoon into the Cathedral, to show the Treasury and the
+other curiosities? A great many foreigners come who can scarcely make
+themselves understood when they question me; you will understand them,
+as you know French and English, and, your brother says, many other
+languages. The Cathedral would be a gainer, as it would show these
+strangers that we have an interpreter at our disposal; you would
+be doing us a favour and would lose nothing by it. It is always an
+amusement to see new faces; and about the recompense ..."
+
+Don Antolin stopped here, scratching his head beneath his skull cap.
+He would see what he could screw out of the funds of the Obreria; if
+just at first nothing could be managed, as the revenues of the Primacy
+were meagre and at their lowest ebb, no doubt something could be given
+later on.
+
+He looked anxiously for Gabriel's answer, who, however, was quite
+agreeable; when all was said and done he was a guest of the Cathedral
+and owed it something. And from that afternoon he went down at the
+hour of choir to show the foreigners all the treasures of the church.
+
+There was no lack of travellers who showed Don Antolin's coloured
+tickets waiting for the time to see the jewels. Silver Stick could
+never see a stranger without imagining that he was a lord or a
+duke, and often felt very much surprised at the shabbiness of their
+clothing; according to his ideas only the great ones of the earth
+could give themselves the pleasure of travelling, and he opened wide
+his incredulous and scandalised eyes when Gabriel told him that many
+were shoemakers from London or shopkeepers from Paris, who during
+their holidays treated themselves to a trip through the ancient
+country of the Moors.
+
+Five canons in their choir surplices advanced up the nave, each one
+holding a key in his hand; these were the guardians of the treasure.
+Each one opened the lock confided to his custody, the door swung
+heavily, and the chapel, with its antique treasures, was opened. In
+large glass cases, like a museum, was displayed the ancient opulence
+of the Cathedral: statues of chiselled silver, large globes crowned
+by graceful little figures all of precious metal, ivory caskets of
+complicated work, custodias and viriles[1] of gold, enormous gilt
+dishes, embossed with mythological subjects reviving the joy of
+paganism in that sordid and dusty corner of the Christian Church, and
+precious stones spread their varied colours over pectorals, mitres and
+mantles for the Virgin. There were diamonds so immense as to make one
+doubt their being genuine, emeralds the size of pebbles, amethysts,
+topaz, and pearls--very many pearls, strewn by the hundreds and
+thousands on the Virgin's garments. The foreigners were amazed at all
+this wealth and dazzled by the quantity, while Gabriel, who had become
+accustomed to see it daily, looked at it carelessly. The Treasury
+presented a deplorable spectacle of neglect: the riches had aged with
+the Cathedral, the diamonds did not flash, the gold seemed tarnished
+and dusty, the silver was blackened, the pearls were opaque and sick,
+the smoke from the wax tapers and the damp atmosphere of the church
+had sadly dulled everything.
+
+[Footnote 1: _Virile_--small box with double glass in which the Host
+is exhibited.]
+
+"The Church," said Gabriel to himself, "ages everything she touches.
+The treasures lose their brilliancy in her hands, like jewels that
+fall into the power of usurers. The diamond becomes dulled in the
+bosom of the great miser, and the most beautiful picture becomes
+blackened on her altars."
+
+After the visit to the Treasury came the exhibition of the Ochavo, the
+octagonal chapel of dark marbles, that pantheon of relics where
+the most repulsive human remains--skulls with their ghastly grin,
+mummified arms and worn-eaten vertebras--were shown in gold or silver
+shrines. The gross and credulous piety of former days displayed
+itself in the full tide of unbelief, so that even Don Antolin, so
+uncompromising when he spoke of the glories of his Cathedral, lowered
+his voice and hurried over his explanations as he showed a piece
+of the mantle worn by Santa Leocadia when she "appeared" to the
+Archbishop of Toledo, quite understanding the difficulty of explaining
+how an apparition could wear garments of stuff.
+
+Gabriel translated faithfully Don Antolin's explanation, repeating
+it again and again with imperturbable gravity, while the canons who
+escorted the batch of strangers drew a few paces away with an absent
+look, to avoid questions.
+
+One day a phlegmatic Englishman interrupted the interpreter.
+
+"And have you not amongst all these things a feather from the wings of
+St. Michael?"
+
+"No, señor, and it is a great pity," said Luna, equally seriously,
+"but you will probably find it in some other Cathedral; we cannot have
+everything here."
+
+In the Chapter-house, a mixture of Arab and Gothic architecture, the
+foreigners were much interested by the double row of portraits of the
+Toledan archbishops hanging on the wall, with their mitres and golden
+croziers. Gabriel called their attention to the picture of Don
+Cerebruno, a mediaeval prelate, so called from his enormous head; but
+it was the wardrobe which more especially surprised the foreigners.
+
+It was a room surrounded by large cupboards and shelves of old wood;
+above these the walls were covered with dusty and torn pictures,
+copies of Flemish paintings that the canons had relegated to this
+corner; round the room were placed in line the ancient armchairs of
+the church, some of Spanish workmanship, austere, with straight lines
+and ravelled coverings, others of Greek design with curved feet
+inlaid with ivory. The capes and chasubles were piled on the shelves,
+according to colours, with the collars outside the heap, so that
+people could examine the wonderful embroidery. A whole world of
+patterns appeared with every possible brilliancy of colour on a few
+inches of stuff. The astonishing art of the ancient embroiderers made
+the silk a series of vivid pictures; the collar and the narrow stripes
+on the front of a cape were large enough to reproduce all the scenes
+of the biblical creation and the passion of Jesus. Brocade and silk
+unrolled the magnificence of their textures. One cape was a garden
+of flame-coloured carnations, another was a bed of roses and other
+fantastic flowers with twisted stamens and metallic petals. The
+sacristans produced from the deep shelves, as though they were books,
+the splendid and famous frontals of the high altar. There were special
+ones for each festival; that for St. John's Day was brightly coloured
+with verbenas, purple bunches of grapes, and golden lambs that fat
+little angels were caressing with their chubby hands. The most
+ancient, of soft and rather faded colours, showed Persian gardens with
+blue waters in which fabulous reddish beasts were drinking.
+
+The visitors were bewildered seeing all this vast collection of
+stuffs and embroideries unrolled piece after piece--all the past of
+a Cathedral which, having millions of revenue, employed for its
+embellishment armies of embroiderers, acquiring the richest textures
+of Valencia and Seville, reproducing in gold and colours all the
+episodes from the Holy books, and the torments of the martyrs, all the
+glorious legends of the Church, immortalised by the needle, before
+printing had been able to do so.
+
+Gabriel returned every evening to the upper cloister, wearied out with
+walking the length and breadth of the Cathedral. During the first few
+days he was delighted with the novelty of seeing fresh faces, to hear
+the rustle of the visitors who, branching off from the great stream of
+travellers who inundated Europe, came as far as Toledo. But after a
+little while the people he saw every afternoon seemed to him just the
+same. There were the same questions, the same stiff and hard-featured
+Englishwomen, and the same o-o-o-h's of cold and conventional
+admiration, and the same identical way of turning their backs with
+rude pride when there was nothing else to be shown. Returning to
+the quiet of the upper cloister after the daily exhibition of the
+Treasury, Gabriel thought the poverty of the Claverias even more
+revolting and intolerable. The shoemaker seemed sadder and yellower in
+the rank atmosphere of his den, bending over his bench hammering the
+soles, his wife more feeble and ill, the miserable slave of maternity,
+weakened by hunger, and offering to her little son as his only hope of
+food those flaccid breasts in which there was nothing left but a drop
+of blood. The little child was dying! Sagrario, who had left her
+machine to spend the greater part of the day in the shoemaker's room
+said so in a low voice to her uncle. She did all the work of the
+house, while the poor mother, motionless in a chair, with the little
+one in her lap, looked at it with weeping eyes. When the baby woke
+from its stupor it would wearily raise its head from its little neck,
+which had become a mere thread; the mother to stifle its feeble moans
+would press it to her breast, but the child would turn away its mouth
+guessing the inutility of expending its strength on that rag of flesh
+from which it could only succeed in extracting the last drop.
+
+Gabriel examined the child, noting its extreme emaciation and the
+spots that scrofula had spread over its straw-coloured skin. He shook
+his head incredulously when the neighbours who had gathered round the
+invalid each diagnosed some particular ailment, and recommended every
+imaginable sort of household remedy, from decoctions of rare herbs and
+stinking ointments to applications on the chest of miracle working
+prints, and tracing seven crosses on the navel with as many
+paternosters.
+
+"It is hunger," said Luna to his niece, "nothing but hunger." And
+depriving himself of part of his own food, he sent to the shoemaker's
+house the milk that had been brought up for himself. But the child's
+stomach could not retain the liquid too substantial for its weakness,
+and threw it up as soon as swallowed. The Aunt Tomasa, with her
+energetic and enterprising character, brought a woman from outside the
+Cathedral to nourish the child, but after two days, and before the
+effects became visible, she came no more, as if she had felt disgusted
+at the miserable and corpse-like little body touching her. In vain the
+gardener's widow searched; it was not easy to find generous breasts
+who would give their milk for very little pay.
+
+In the meanwhile the child was dying. All the women came in and out of
+the shoemaker's house, and even Don Antolin would stand at the door in
+the mornings.
+
+"How is the little one? Just the same? It is all in God's hands."
+
+And he would retire, doing the shoemaker the great charity of not
+speaking to him about the pesetas he owed him, on account of the sick
+child.
+
+"Virgin's Blue" was annoyed by this incident, which upset the calm of
+the cloister, and disturbed the bliss of his digestion as a happy and
+well-fed servant of the Church. It was a shame that that shoemaker
+should be allowed to live in the Claverias with all that flock of
+wretched and scurvy children; one would die every month; all sorts
+of illness would lay hold on them. By what right were they in the
+Cathedral when they drew no wage from the Obreria? Such stinking
+excrescences ought to remain outside the Lord's house.
+
+His mother-in-law was furious.
+
+"Silence, you thief of the saints!" she cried. "Silence, or I will
+throw a dish at you! We are all sons of God, and if things were as
+they should be, all the poor ought to live in the Cathedral. Instead
+of saying such things it would be much better if you gave those
+unhappy people part of what you have stolen from the Virgin."
+
+The sacristan shrugged his shoulders with contempt. If they had not
+enough to eat they should not have children. There he was himself with
+only one daughter--he did not think he had any right to more--and so
+thanks to Our Lady he was able to save a scrap for his old age.
+
+Tomasa spoke of the shoemaker's child to the good gentlemen of the
+Chapter when they came into the garden for a few minutes after choir.
+They listened absently, putting their hands in their cassocks.
+
+"It is all God's will! What poverty!"
+
+And some gave her ten centimes, others a real, one or two even a
+peseta. The old woman went one day to the Archbishop's palace. Don
+Sebastian was engaged and unable to see her, but he sent her two
+pesetas by one of the servants.
+
+"They don't mean badly," said the gardener's widow, giving her
+collection to the poor mother, "but each one lives for himself, and
+his neighbour may manage as he can. No one divides his cloak with
+another--take this, and see how you can get out of your trouble."
+
+They fed a little better in the shoemaker's house; the miserable
+scrofulous children collected in the cloister profited most by the
+baby's illness; it was growing daily weaker, lying motionless for
+hours, with almost imperceptible breathing, on its mother's lap.
+
+When the unhappy child died, all the people of the Claverias rushed
+to the home. Inside could be heard the mother's wailings, strident,
+interminable, like the bellowing of a wounded beast; outside the
+father wept silently, surrounded by his friends.
+
+"It died just like a bird," he said with long pauses, his words broken
+by sobs. "His mother held him on her knees--I was working--'Antonio,
+Antonio!' she called, 'see, what is the matter with the child, it is
+moving its mouth and making grimaces?' I ran up quickly, its face
+was quite dusky--as if it had a veil over it. It opened its mouth, a
+couple of twitches with its eyes staring, and its neck fell over--just
+the same as a bird, just the same."
+
+He wept, repeating constantly the resemblance between his son and
+those birds who die in winter from the cold.
+
+The bell-ringer looked gloomily at Gabriel.
+
+"You who know everything, is it true that it died of hunger?"
+
+And the Tato with his scandalous impetuosity shouted loudly--
+
+"There is no justice in the world! All this must be altered! Fancy a
+child dying of hunger in this house, where money runs like water, and
+where all those creatures are dressed in gold!"
+
+When the little corpse was carried to the cemetery, the cloister
+seemed quite deserted; all its life was concentrated in the
+shoemaker's house, all the women surrounded the mother. Despair had
+rendered that sick and feeble woman furious. She no longer wept: her
+child's death had made her ferocious--she wished to bite or to dash
+her skull against the wall.
+
+"Ay! my s-o-o-o-n! my Antonio!"
+
+At night Sagrario and the other women remained in the house to look
+after her. In her desperation she wished to make some one responsible
+for her misfortune, and she fixed on those highest in the cloister.
+Don Antolin had not helped her with the smallest alms; his affected
+niece had scarcely been in to see the little one, nothing interested
+her but men.
+
+"It is all Silver Stick's fault," wailed the poor mother--"he is
+a thief. He grinds our poverty with his usurer's snares. Never a
+farthing did he give for my son. And that Mariquita is just the same.
+Yes, señor, I do say so. She only thinks of decking herself out so
+that the cadets may see her."
+
+"For mercy's sake, woman, they will hear you," begged some of the
+terrified women.
+
+But others scouted this fear. "Let Don Antolin and his niece hear
+them! What did it matter? The Claverias were tired of the rapacity
+of the uncle, and the magnificent airs that ugly woman gave herself!
+Because they were poor they were not going to spend their lives
+trembling before that couple. God only knew what the uncle and niece
+did when they were alone in the house together!"
+
+A breath of rebellion had passed over that sleepy world. It was the
+unconscious influence of Gabriel. What he had said to his friends had
+been passed on to all the men in the Claverias, getting even to the
+women. They were confused and garbled ideas, that very few could
+understand, but they cherished them like fresh pure air reviving
+their minds. They sounded in their ears like a pleasant echo from the
+outside world. It was sufficient for them to know that this quiet life
+of submission they had led up to now was not immutable--they had
+a right to something better--and that human beings ought to rebel
+against injustice and oppression.
+
+Don Antolin, who knew well enough the crew confided to his care,
+was not long in perceiving this moral upturn. He felt hostility and
+rebellion on every side. The debtors answered him haughtily, alleging
+their poverty as a reason for no longer enduring his avarice; his
+imperious orders were tardily executed, and he had a clear perception
+that they were laughing behind his back as he walked through the
+cloister, and making threatening gestures. One day his legs trembled
+beneath him and his eyes were dimmed, hearing how the Perrero replied
+to one of his reprimands, having returned late to the Cathedral, and
+obliging him to descend and open the door after he had gone to bed.
+The Tato made him understand, with an insolent expression, that he had
+bought a knife, and that he intended its first fleshing to be in the
+bowels of some priest or other who ground down the poor.
+
+His niece complained to Don Antolin, they paid no attention to her and
+flouted her, no woman now ever came to help her gratuitously in her
+household duties. They replied insolently that those who wanted
+servants must pay for them. What was her uncle thinking about? It was
+certainly time to assert his authority and to lay a heavy hand on
+these people.
+
+She herself, so lively and energetic in her own house, was now obliged
+to retire snorting with rage or weeping, whenever she stationed
+herself at her door. All the women of the Claverias wished to revenge
+themselves for their former thraldom, standing already on the
+declivity of disrespect.
+
+"Look at her!" screamed the shoemaker's wife to her neighbours,
+"always so dressed up, the ugly jade. She decks herself with the blood
+that vampire of an uncle sucks from the poor."
+
+And from the iron gratings of the upper Claverias, giving on the
+roofs, there was generally a voice singing the ancient couplet, no
+doubt inspired by the Cathedral garden--
+
+  "Las amas de los curas y los laureles
+  Como nunca dan fruto siempre estan verdes." [1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Priest's housekeepers--like laurels--never have any
+fruit, because they are evergreens.]
+
+It was this that ended the patience of Don Antolin; this insulting
+conjecture about himself and his niece that disturbed his miserly
+chastity. He visited the cardinal to complain of the inhabitants of
+the cloister, but His Eminence, who lived in a perpetual rage, grew
+furious listening to him and very nearly thrashed him. Why did he
+come to him with such tales? For what reason had he been given any
+authority? Was there nothing left of a man beneath his cassock? He who
+was wanting in the good discipline of the house--turn him out into the
+street at once! More energy, and be careful never to trouble him again
+with such insignificant tales, otherwise the person who would be
+turned into the street would be Silver Stick himself.
+
+Don Antolin felt a little braver after this interview, although he
+swore mentally never again to visit that terrible prelate. He was
+determined to reassert his authority, by punishing the weakest, whom
+he considered as the origin of all these scandals. The shoemaker
+should be expelled from the Claverias, as he was there through
+no other right but that his wife had been born there. Mariquita,
+bewildered by her uncle's energy, must needs speak to some one about
+these intentions, and so the news circulated through the cloister.
+
+Don Antolin did not dare to move a step further, terrified by the
+silent unanimity with which the whole population rose against him.
+
+The Tato looked at him with mocking and threatening eyes, in which
+Silver Stick could plainly read "Remember the knife"; but what
+terrified Don Antolin more than anything was the silence of the
+bell-ringer, and the savage and hostile glance with which he responded
+to his words.
+
+Even the good Wooden Staff, Esteban, protested in his own way, saying
+quietly to Don Antolin:
+
+"Is it really true that you intend turning out the shoemaker? You will
+do wrong, very wrong, for after all he is very poor, and his wife was
+born in the cloister. These innovations always bring misfortune, Don
+Antolin."
+
+So the priest, finding he had no support, and seeing hostility on
+every side, put off his energetic resolutions till the following day,
+even reproving his niece when she threw his weakness in his face.
+
+The Canon Obrero, from whom he had implored help, did not care to
+disturb the blessed peace of his existence by mixing himself up in the
+quarrels of the smaller people. It was Silver Stick's own affair; he
+could punish or expel any one he thought fit without fear of anybody.
+But Don Antolin, dreading the responsibility that might accrue from
+energetic action, ended by delivering himself over to Gabriel and
+begging for his assistance. That man was the one who wielded the real
+authority in the upper cloister; all those who had listened to him
+followed his advice blindly.
+
+"Help me, Gabrielillo," said the priest with an agonised expression.
+"If you cannot restore order, this will end badly; they even insult my
+poor niece, and some day I shall turn half the people of the Claverias
+out into the street, as I hold authority from His Eminence for
+everything. Ay, señor! I do not know what has happened here; surely
+the devil must have got loose in our upper cloister! How these people
+have changed to me!"
+
+Luna guessed Don Antolin's thoughts and his allusions to the devil who
+had got loose in the cloister. That devil was himself. No doubt Silver
+Stick was right. Without intending it he had introduced discord into
+the Cathedral. He had sought calm and forgetfulness in that refuge,
+and the spirit of rebellion had followed him even into this
+concealment. He recalled his thoughts on the first day, when he was
+alone in the silent cloister; he wished to be another stone in the
+Cathedral, without thought, without feeling, to spend the rest of his
+life fixed to that ruin, with the embryonic life of the fungus on the
+buttress, but the spirit of the outside world had entered in with him.
+
+Luna remembered how travellers in time of plague had crossed the
+sanitary cordon--they were well and happy, nothing betrayed the
+infection in their bodies; but the poisonous germs travelled in the
+folds of their clothes and in their hair, carrying death without
+knowing it, helping it to leap all barriers and obstacles, without
+being in the least aware of it. He was the same, but instead of
+spreading death, he spread tumultuous and rebellious life. The protest
+of the lower orders that had been surging throughout the world, for
+more than a century, had entered with him into this still remaining
+fragment of the sixteenth century. He had awakened those men, who had
+been like the sleepers in the legend, motionless in their cave for
+ages, while the centuries rolled on and the world was transformed.
+
+The awakening of these people was sudden and violent, like that of a
+people in revolution. They were ashamed of the old errors that they
+had worshipped, and this made them receive as gospel everything that
+was new, without quailing before the consequences.
+
+It was the faith of a people which, once it takes form, rushes
+onwards, accepting everything, justifying everything, the only
+requirement being its novelty, and casting aside contemptuously those
+traditional principles which it had just abandoned.
+
+The cowardly submission of Silver Stick was the first victory of those
+more daring souls who formed Luna's surrounding. The avaricious and
+despotic priest lowered his eyes before them, smilingly anxious to
+make himself agreeable. This they owed to the master, for he was now
+the true ruler of the upper cloister. Don Antolin consulted him before
+making any arrangements, and his ugly niece smiled on Gabriel as the
+daughters of the conquered might smile on a triumphant hero.
+
+They now no longer hid themselves in the bell-ringer's house for their
+meetings; they formed a circle in the cloister during the evenings,
+discussing the audacious doctrines taught by Luna, without now being
+intimidated by the religious atmosphere. They sat with the look of
+lords, surrounding their master, while in the opposite gallery walked
+Silver Stick like a black phantom, reading his book of hours, and
+casting now and then an uneasy glance on the group. Even his ancient
+vassal, the chaplain of the nuns, had dared to leave him to go and
+listen to Gabriel.
+
+Don Antolin with the keenness of his ecclesiastical training, guessed
+the intensity of the evil produced by Luna. But for the moment his
+egoism was stronger than his reflection. Let them talk--what did it
+matter? It was only a little ebullition of pride in those people,
+nothing more. All words and wind in the head. Meanwhile they had
+better not ask for any more money! In exchange he had a very good
+auxiliary in Luna, who, sharing his authority, spared him many
+annoyances, and the Cathedral disposed of his services gratuitously as
+interpreter to the foreigners.
+
+These already began to talk of the great intelligence and education
+of the Toledan sacristans, a praise Don Antolin received as though it
+were entirely deserved by himself.
+
+Gabriel was far more alarmed than Don Antolin at the effect of his
+words; he bitterly repented having been led to speak of his past and
+of his ideals. He had sought for peace and silence, but he was
+still surrounded, though in a smaller degree, by the atmosphere of
+proselytism and blind enthusiasm, as in the days of his martyrdom.
+He had wished to efface himself and to disappear on entering the
+Cathedral, but fate mocked him, reviving the agitation in the midst
+of his concealment, to disturb the peace of that ruin. Society had
+forgotten him, but he unconsciously was agitating, and drawing to
+himself the attention of the outside world.
+
+The enthusiasm of these neophytes was a danger, and his brother, the
+Wooden Staff, without understanding the full extent of the evil,
+warned him with his usual good sense.
+
+"You are turning the heads of these poor men, with the things you
+tell them. Be careful; they are very well meaning, but they are very
+ignorant. And having been ignorant all their lives, it is dangerous to
+turn such men into sages at one blow. It is as if I, being accustomed
+to the homely stew, were taken to-day to His Eminence's table. I
+should gorge myself and drink too much; at night I should have a
+colic, and should probably hop the twig."
+
+Gabriel acknowledged the truth of this prudent advice, but he could
+not draw back--he was driven on by the affection of his disciples and
+his own ardour as propagandist. It was a great delight to him to see
+the wonder in those virgin minds, entering tumultuously into the
+luminous palaces constructed by human thought during the last century.
+
+The description of the future of humanity inflamed all Luna's ardour.
+He spoke of the happiness of men, after a revolutionary crisis which
+would change all the organisation of humanity with mystic rapture,
+like a Christian preacher describing heaven.
+
+"Man ought to seek happiness solely in this world, for after death
+there only existed the infinite life of matter with its endless
+combinations, but the human being was effaced as entirely as a plant
+or an animal--he fell into oblivion when he sank into the tomb.
+Immortality of the soul was one of the illusions of human pride worked
+up by religions, who laid their foundations on this lie. It was
+only in this life that man could find heaven. Everyone embarked on
+immensity in the same ship, the earth. We were all comrades in our
+dangers and our struggles, and we ought to look upon one another
+as brothers seeking the common welfare. And what about the unequal
+distribution of goods, the division of classes, the ability to work,
+and, above all, the struggle for existence, that the philosophers and
+poets of the oppressing classes paint as an indispensable condition of
+progress? Communism is the holiest aspiration of humanity, the
+divine dream of man since he began to think in the first dawn of
+civilisation. Religions had endeavoured to establish it, but religion
+had been shipwrecked and was moribund, and only science could enforce
+it in the future. They must stop on the way they were going, as
+humanity was marching on the road to perdition, therefore it was
+necessary to return to the point of departure. The first man who had
+cultivated a portion of the earth and garnered the fruits of his
+toil, thought it was his for ever, and left it to his sons as their
+property; they engaged other men to cultivate it for them--so these
+men became robbers, appropriators of the universal heritage. It was
+the same with those who possessed themselves of the invention of
+human genius, machines, etc., for the benefit of a small majority,
+subjecting the rest of mankind to the law of hunger. No, everything
+was for everyone. The earth belonged to all human beings without
+exception, like the sun and the air; its products ought to be divided
+between everyone with due regard to their necessities. It was shameful
+that man, who only appeared for an instant on this planet--a minute,
+a second, for his life was no more than this in the life of
+immensity--should spend this mere breath of existence fighting with
+his kin, robbing them, excited by the fever of plunder, not even
+enjoying the majestic calm of a wild beast, which when it has eaten,
+rests, without ever thinking of doing harm from vanity or avarice.
+There ought to be neither rich nor poor--nothing but men. The only
+inevitable division must be that between brains more or less highly
+organised. But the wise, from the fact of being so, ought to show
+their greatness, sacrificing themselves for the more simple, without
+seeking to assist the greatness of their minds by material advantages;
+for in stomachs there were no categories or ranks. Everything that
+exists, even the smallest production that man considers his exclusive
+work, is the work of the past and present generations. By what right
+can anyone say 'This is mine, mine only'? Man is not consulted before
+he is formed if he wishes to burst forth into life. He is born--and
+from the fact of being born he has a right to well-being." Gabriel
+proclaimed his supreme formula, "Everything for everyone, and
+well-being for all."
+
+His friends listened in profound silence. The right to well-being
+sank profoundly into their minds; it was the saying that most cruelly
+touched their poverty, taunted by the contrast of the wealth of the
+Church.
+
+Don Martin, the young chaplain, was the only one who timidly raised
+any objections to the master's sayings. He wished to know if, when
+everything was for everyone, when man should have recognised his
+right to happiness, without laws or compulsion to force him to
+production--would he work? seeing that work was a necessity, and not a
+virtue, as those who employ labour say, to glorify it.
+
+Gabriel loudly affirmed the necessity of work in the future. The
+man of the future would work without being forced to do so by his
+necessities; he would not be ruled by the body and its imperious
+requirements; his conscience would be inspired with the clear
+understanding of solidarity with his fellows and the certainty that
+if one abandoned social duties others would follow the example, thus
+rendering life in common impossible and so returning to the actual
+times of poverty and robbery.
+
+"Why do not the few men of culture and sound conscience living at
+present kill and rob?" exclaimed Gabriel. "It is not through fear of
+the law and its representatives, for a clear intelligence, if it takes
+the trouble, can easily find ways of evading both; neither can it be
+through fear of eternal penalties and divine punishment, as such
+men do not believe in these inventions of the past. It is from that
+respect to his fellows which is felt by every elevated mind, from the
+consideration that all violence should be avoided, for if everyone
+gave themselves over to it, all social life must disappear. When this
+understanding, which now only belongs to a few, embraces all humanity,
+men will live ruled by their own consciences without laws or police,
+working from social duty, without requiring man to be the only spring
+of activity, and sweating without compassion to be the only way to
+ease."
+
+Throughout all his revolutionary raptures Luna had no illusions as to
+the present. Humanity was at present an infected land, in which the
+best seeds rotted, or which at best produced only poisonous fruits; we
+must wait till the equalising revolution begun in the human conscience
+a century ago should be completed, after that it would be possible
+and easy to change the basis of society; he had a blind faith in
+the future. Man must progress in the same way as communities; these
+reckoned their evolutions by centuries, but man by millions of
+years. How could a man of to-day be compared to the biped animal of
+prehistoric times, though bearing visibly the traces of the animalism
+from which he had lately emerged? Living in fellowship with his
+ancestors the monkeys, the principal difference being the first
+babblings of speech, and the first trembling spark that began to burn
+in his brain.
+
+From the ravenous beast of former days, suffering from all the cruel
+forces of nature and living in fraternal misery with the lower
+animals, the man of to-day was evolved, asserting his superiority to
+his ancestors, dominating all nature. From the men of to-day, in whom
+the passions of their former animalism are finding their equilibrium
+with the gradual unfolding of the mind, will arise that superior and
+perfect being indicated by philosophers, pure from all animal egoism,
+and endeavouring to change the actual cruel, restless, and uncertain
+life, into a period of happy and prosperous equality.
+
+The animalism at present dominant in man exasperated Gabriel; it was
+the great stumbling-block to all his generous views of the future,
+and he explained to his astonished listeners the transformations of
+natural creatures and of the origin of man, and the wondrous poem of
+the evolution of nature from the original protoplasm to the infinite
+varieties of life. We still carry in us the marks of our origin. One
+could not help laughing at the God of the Jews, who had modelled a man
+from clay, like a sculptor. Unlucky artist! Science pointed out much
+carelessness and bungling in His work, without being able to justify
+such mistakes. The skin of our bodies did not serve us as a covering
+like the fur of an animal. How could we then believe it? Why were
+nipples given to human males, if they were of no use for milk giving?
+Why was the vertebral column at the back of the body as in quadrupeds,
+when it would have been more logical, in creating a man who stands on
+his feet, to place it in the centre of the body as a strong support,
+thus avoiding the curvatures and weakness of the spine that are now
+suffered by this disequilibrium in the support of its weight?
+
+Gabriel enumerated the various inexplicable inconsistencies and
+incongruities found in the human body, presuming it to be of divine
+origin.
+
+"I feel prouder," said he, "of my animal origin; to be a lineal
+descendant of inferior beings than to have emerged imperfect from the
+hand of a stupid God. I feel the same satisfaction that a nobleman
+feels in speaking of his ancestors when I think of our remote
+forefathers, those men-beasts, exposed like the animals to all the
+cruel severity of nature, who, little by little, through hundreds of
+centuries, have transformed themselves, triumphing in the unfolding of
+their minds, their brains, and their social instincts. Making clothes,
+edible foods, arms, tools and houses, neutralising the exterior
+influences of nature. What hero or discoverer in the four thousand
+years comprising our history can compare with those elementary men who
+have slowly evolved and maintained on the earth the existence of our
+species, exposed thousands of times to annihilation. The day on which
+our ancestors cared for the sick and wounded, instead of abandoning
+them as all animals had previously done; on which the first seed was
+planted, the first arrow shot, brought nature face to face with the
+greatest of her revolutions. Only one in the future will be able to
+equal it; if man in remote times was able to free his body, now he
+requires the great revolution to free his mind. The races who go
+furthest in their intellectual development will be the ultimate
+survivors; they will be masters of the earth, destroying all others.
+The least wise in those days will probably be far superior to the most
+cultivated intellects of the present times. Each individual will find
+his happiness in the happiness of his fellows, and no one will try to
+exercise compulsion on his neighbour. No laws or penalties will exist,
+and voluntary associations will supply through the influence of reason
+the present power of authority. This will be in the future--far, very
+far off. But what do centuries matter in the life of humanity! They
+are like seconds in our existence. On the day when man shall be
+transformed into this superior being, with the full development of
+all his intellectual faculties, now so embryonic, this earth will no
+longer be the vale of tears spoken of by religion, but the paradise
+dreamed of by the poets."
+
+In spite of the enthusiasm with which Gabriel spoke, his hearers did
+not appear to share these illusions. They were silent, and their
+attitude was one of coldness before the immense distance of that
+future to which their master confided all his hopes of universal
+prosperity. They wished for it at once, with the eagerness of a child
+who is shown a dainty which is afterwards put out of its reach. The
+sacrifices, the slow work for the future, struck no chord in their
+minds. From Gabriel's explanations they only drew the fact that they
+were unhappy, but that they had the same right to happiness and
+comfort as those privileged few whom they had formerly respected in
+their ignorance. As a certain portion of human felicity belonged to
+them they wished to possess it at once, without delay or resistance,
+with all the fervour of one claiming what belongs to him. Luna
+remarked in this silence a certain rebellion, like those ironical
+gestures with which his companions in Barcelona had received his
+illusions about the future and his anathemas against violence of
+action.
+
+These ardent neophytes outdistanced their teacher; they listened to
+him with respect, but they were obliged to isolate themselves from him
+in order to digest his teachings in their own fashion. Don Martin was
+the only one who followed him in his visionary excursions into the
+future. The bell-ringer, the organ-blower, the shoemaker and the Tato
+now went up nightly to the bell-ringer's house, without summoning
+the master, and there they gave vent to their hatred of everything
+existing, under the forgotten old prints, yellow and wrinkled, which
+pictured the inglorious episodes of the Carlist war.
+
+This nocturnal reunion was a continual complaint against social
+injustice. They thought themselves even more unfortunate when they
+took an exact review of their situation. The shoemaker recalled with
+tearful eyes the little child who had died of hunger, and spoke of the
+misery of his offspring, so numerous as to render his work useless.
+The organ-blower spoke of his miserable old age, the six reals daily
+during his life, without any hope of earning more. The Tato, in the
+fits of rage of a bullying coxcomb, proposed to behead all the canons
+in the choir some evening and then to set fire to the Cathedral. And
+the bell-ringer, gloomy and scowling, said aloud, following up the
+course of his thoughts:
+
+"And below so much wealth that is of no use to anybody--amassed from
+pure pride--thieves! robbers!"
+
+Gabriel returned to pass his days by Sagrario's side. His disciples
+hid themselves daily more carefully in their isolation in the tower.
+Don Martin had his mother ill, and could not leave the convent.
+
+Silver Stick felt quite satisfied with Luna seeing him alone,
+believing that it was he who had alienated his disciples, cutting
+short in this way his dangerous conversations so as to restore order
+in the cloister. One day he addressed him smilingly with a patronising
+manner.
+
+"You will be rewarded for your good conduct, Gabrielillo, much sooner
+than you expect. Did I not say I would look out for something for you
+in exchange for the help you gave me in showing the treasury? Well,
+now you have it. From next week two pesetas daily will fall into
+your purse like two suns. Are you equal to staying all night in the
+Cathedral? The older watchman, the one who was a civil guard, is tired
+of it, and is going home to his own village. It appears that since his
+dog died he has taken a dislike to the duties. The other watchman is
+very poorly and wants a companion. Will you undertake it? If it were
+winter I should not say anything about it, as you cough too much to
+spend the night down there; but in summer the Cathedral is the coolest
+place in Toledo. What lovely nights! And by the time bad weather comes
+on we will have found you some better place. You are trustworthy,
+though your head is rather light; but you come of an honoured and
+well-known family, which is what is wanted. Do you accept?"
+
+Luna accepted, declaring his intention to Esteban, when the latter
+objected on account of his weak health. He would only undertake the
+watchman's duties during the summer; besides, two pesetas a day were
+even more than Wooden Staff earned; the income of the family would be
+doubled, and it would be a pity to lose such a good opportunity.
+
+That evening Sagrario spoke to her uncle praising the energy which
+prompted him to undertake any sort of work so as not to be a charge on
+the family.
+
+They were in the cloister leaning on the balustrade; below was the
+dark garden with its waving branches, above a summer sky veiled by the
+heat haze which dulled the brightness of the stars. They were alone
+in the four-sided gallery. The lighted windows of the Chapel-master's
+little room threw a square of red on the opposite roofs. They could
+hear the harmonium playing slowly and sadly, and when it stopped the
+shadow of the musician passed and repassed over the square of light
+with his nervous gestures, which, enlarged by the reflection, appeared
+the most grotesque contortions.
+
+The nocturnal calm and darkness surrounded Gabriel and Sagrario with a
+gentle caress; that mysterious freshness was falling from above which
+seems to revive drooping spirits and magnify old remembrances. The
+Church seemed to them as an immense sleeping beast, in whose lap they
+had found peace and protection.
+
+Gabriel spoke of his past, in order to convince the young woman that
+his work in the Cathedral would not be very arduous. He had suffered
+much; there was no bitterness that he had not tasted; he had endured
+hunger, terrible hunger, in his peregrinations through the world.
+He did not know which were the most painful, his martyrdom in the
+dungeons of the gloomy castle, or his days of despair in the streets
+of crowded cities, seeing food and gold through the glass windows of
+the shops while his head was swimming with the dizziness of hunger.
+He could endure his misery while he wandered alone through the cruel
+selfishness of civilisation; but the most horrible days were those
+in which he shared his vagabond poverty with Lucy, his gentle and
+melancholy companion.
+
+Gabriel spoke of the Englishwoman as of a dead sister.
+
+"Had you known her, Sagrario, you would have loved her. She was a
+strong woman, a brave companion, united to me more by the community of
+thought than by carnal attraction. I loved her when I first saw her.
+I hardly know if it was love that we felt; poets have written so many
+lies about love, and have falsified it in such an exaggerated way,
+that I do not for certain know what it is."
+
+He spoke to the young woman of love, explaining it according to his
+beliefs. Goethe had defined it as an "elective affinity," speaking
+as a man of science and not as a poet, using the term that chemistry
+gives to the tendency of two substances to unite and form a distinct
+product. Two beings between whom no affinity existed could meet
+through false laws of life in perpetual contact, but they could not
+mix or merge into one another. This happened more often than not
+between the individuals of different sexes who peopled the earth; a
+passing sentimentality could exist, or carnal caprice, but seldom
+love. The poor invalid Lucy was his affinity; they met and they loved.
+In their pity for human miseries, their hatred of inequalities and
+injustice, their self-abnegation in the cause of the humble and
+unfortunate they were equal; they were not only united by their hearts
+but by their brains.
+
+She was plain, with a soft and sad plainness that seemed to Luna the
+supreme ideal of beauty in the midst of that struggling world of
+unfortunates and victims. She was the image of a woman of the people
+reared in the workmen's slums of great cities, anaemic from the
+mephitic air of the den in which she was born and from bad and
+insufficient food, with a wretched body, all feminine graces paralysed
+in their development by the rough work done in her childhood. Her
+lips, that great ladies paint red, were violet; the only beauty of her
+face lay in her eyes, those windows of sorrow, made larger by the cold
+nights passed in the street from horror of the scenes she saw in her
+childhood; her father, drunken, with the brutal wish of a workman to
+forget, who, after imagining that his tavern was a paradise, would
+become infuriated with the poverty of his home and beat the whole
+family.
+
+"She was like all you women of the lower orders, Sagrario. Your beauty
+only lasts an instant; in fact, it can only exist in the first flush
+of youth. A woman of the poor cannot be beautiful unless she gets
+out of her class. Daily labour makes her lose all her freshness and
+strength, and maternity in the midst of poverty absorbs even the
+marrow in her bones. When her daily work is ended and she returns
+home, she has to sweep and wash, and shrivel herself to a mummy before
+the smoky kitchen stove. I loved Lucy for that reason, because she was
+consumed and drained by sweating, because she was the girl worker
+in all her melancholy decadence, born beautiful and made hideous by
+social injustice."
+
+He recalled the unbending and deadly hatred with which that little
+woman spoke so quietly of the supreme vengeance of the fallen, of the
+revenge for long years of oppression. She showed herself more firmly
+rooted and fiercer in her illusions than Gabriel, and he would praise
+her daring as a propagandist, her perilous expeditions into the great
+towns, running the gauntlet of watchful police, carrying on her arm
+that old bonnet-box full of pamphlets that might have sent her to
+prison. She was the "miss" animated by evangelical propaganda, who
+travels over the globe distributing Bibles with a cold smile, fearless
+alike of the mockery of civilisation, or the brutality of savages; but
+what Lucy distributed were incitements to revolution; she did not seek
+out the happy but the despairing, in the factories and infected
+slums. The two endured hunger, finding themselves often separated by
+persecution and prison, but they met again, continuing their romantic
+career, till poverty and consumption ended her life.
+
+Gabriel wept, remembering their last interview in an Italian hospital,
+clean and sweet, but with the frozen atmosphere of charity. As he was
+not her husband he could only visit her twice a week. He presented,
+himself ragged and downcast, seeing her in an armchair daily paler
+and weaker, her skin of a waxen transparency and her eyes immensely
+enlarged. He knew a little about everything, and he could not conceal
+from himself the gravity of her illness. She waited quietly for death.
+"Bring me some roses," she said, smiling to Gabriel, as if in the last
+moment of her life she wished to acknowledge the natural beauty of the
+world made hideous and darkened by man. The "companion" lived on dry
+bread, refusing the help of his comrades only a little less poor than
+himself, sleeping on the ground, in order to take her on his next
+visit a bunch of flowers.
+
+"She died, Sagrario," groaned Luna, "and I know not where they buried
+her; possibly she may have served for a lecture at the school of
+anatomy; she fell into the common grave like those soldiers whose
+heroism remains in obscurity. But I still see her; she has followed me
+in all my misfortunes, and I think she lives again in you."
+
+"But uncle," said Sagrario, gently, touched by his recital, "I cannot
+do what she did. I am an unhappy woman, without strength or will."
+
+"Call me Gabriel," said Luna, vehemently. "You are my Lucy, who again
+crosses my path; I knew it from the first, and for a long while I have
+been searching my feelings, analysing my will, and I have arrived at
+one certainty--that I love you, Sagrario."
+
+The young woman made a gesture of surprise, drawing further from him.
+
+"Do not draw away, do not fear me. I am a feeble man, you are a weak
+woman; you have suffered much, and have bid good-bye to the joys of
+the earth, but you are strong through misfortune and can look the
+truth in the face. We are both wrecks of life, and the only hope
+left us is to wait and die quietly in the desert island which is our
+refuge. We are undone, rent and swept away; Death has laid his hand
+upon us; we are fallen and shapeless rags after having passed through
+the mills of an absurd society. For this reason I love you, because
+you are my equal in misfortune; elective affinity unites us. Poor Lucy
+was the work-girl enfeebled by sweating, weakened from her birth by
+poverty. You were the girl of the people drawn from her home by the
+attraction of the well-being of the privileged; seduced, not by love,
+but by the caprices of the happy; the girl offered as a sacrifice to
+the Minotaur whose remains were afterwards thrown on to the dunghill.
+I love you, Sagrario; we are two fugitives from society, whose paths
+must join; I am hated as dangerous, you are despised as an outcast;
+misfortune has laid hold on us. Our bodies are weakened and we bear
+the wounds of the conquered, but before death claims us, let us make
+our lives sweet by love. Let us seek for roses as did poor Lucy."
+
+He pressed the young woman's hands, who, bewildered by Gabriel's
+words, knew not what to say, and wept softly. Upstairs, in the upper
+storey of the Claverias, the Chapel-master played his harmonium.
+Gabriel knew the music: it was Beethoven's last lament, the "Must it
+be," that the great genius sang before his death with a melancholy
+that made one shiver.
+
+"I love you, Sagrario," continued Gabriel, "ever since I saw you
+return to this house, bravely facing the odious curiosity of the
+people around. I have spent weeks and months by the side of your
+machine, seeing how industriously you worked. I have studied you and
+read you. You are a sincere and simple creature; your mind has none
+of the doublings and hidden corners of those complicated and tortuous
+souls used to the artifices of civilisation. I guessed day by day, by
+your gentle glance and the attention with which you listened to me,
+your gratitude for the little I was able to do for you. I remembered
+the dark period of your life, your slavery to the flesh; and finding
+me always gentle with you, protecting you from your father's anger,
+your gratitude has grown and grown, till to-day you love me, Sagrario.
+You yourself have not realised it, you know not how to explain it, but
+your being responds to mine like those chemical substances I spoke of.
+That single and eternal love is a lying invention of the poets, of
+which facts often make a mockery. One can love several people with
+equal warmth: the indispensable thing is the affinity. You who
+formerly loved a man to madness, what do you feel for me? Have I
+deceived myself? You really love me?"
+
+Sagrario continued weeping, with her head bent, as though she did
+not dare to look at Luna. He reassured her gently: she must call
+him Gabriel, speak to him as "thou." Were they not companions in
+misfortune?
+
+"I am ashamed," murmured the young woman. "So much happiness disturbs
+me. Yes, I like you. No, I love you, Gabriel. I would never have
+confessed it; I would have died sooner than reveal my secret. What am
+I that anyone should love me? For many days I have not looked in the
+glass, for I should weep at the remembrance of my lost youth. And
+then my story--my terrible story. How could I imagine that you--or, I
+should say, that thou, wouldst read my thoughts so clearly? See how
+I tremble; the shock has not yet ceased, the surprise of finding my
+secret discovered. A man like you to descend to me, ugly and sick for
+ever. No, do not speak of the other man; I forgot him long ago. And am
+I going to remember him now that you give me the charity of your love?
+No, Gabriel, you are the greatest and best of men; you are like a god
+to me."
+
+They remained silent a long while with their hands clasped, looking
+into the darkness of the murmuring garden. From above still sounded
+the lament of the genius at his fading life.
+
+Sagrario leant on Gabriel as though her strength were failing, and as
+if terrified at so much happiness, she wished to take refuge in his
+arms.
+
+"Why have I known you so late!" she said in a low voice. "I should
+have wished to love you in my youth, to be beautiful and healthy only
+for you, to have the beauty and charm of a great lady to soften the
+rest of your life. But my gratitude can offer you little, nothing but
+ill-health; the seeds of death are in me, and slowly I shall fade
+away. Gabriel, why did you set your heart on me?"
+
+"Because you are an invalid, and unfortunate as I am. Our misery is
+the loving affinity. Besides, I have never loved like most men. In my
+travels I have seen the most beautiful women in the world without the
+slightest glow of desire. I am not of an amorous temperament. From my
+adventures in Paris when I was young I always returned with a feeling
+of disgust. My love for the unfortunate has mastered me to the point
+of blunting my feelings. I am like a drunkard or a gambler, who,
+obsessed by their passion, feel nothing before a woman. A studious
+man, buried in his books, feels very little the calls of sex. My
+passion is pity for the disinherited, and hatred of injustice
+and inequality. It has so entirely absorbed me, enslaving all my
+faculties, that I have never had time to think of love. The female
+does not attract me, but I worship a woman when I see her sad and
+unfortunate. Ugliness makes more impression on me than beauty, because
+it speaks to me of social infamies, it shows me the bitterness of
+injustice, it is the only wine which revives my strength. I loved Lucy
+because she was unfortunate and dying. I love you, Sagrario, because
+in your early youth you were a wanderer in life, one whom no one would
+love. My love is for you, to brighten what remains to you of life."
+
+Sagrario leant on Gabriel's breast.
+
+"How good you are!" she sighed; "what a beautiful soul!"
+
+"Yours is the same, poor Sagrario. Your life has been a snare. You
+sold yourself through hunger and despair as do thousands of others;
+you thought to find bread in the false pretences of love. Everything
+is for the privileged of this world: the arms of the father, the sex
+of the daughter, and when those arms are weakened, or the youthful
+body loses its charms, they are thrown on one side and replaced. The
+market is abundant; I love you for your misfortunes. Had I seen you
+young and beautiful as in former times, I should not have felt the
+slightest attraction. Beauty is a bar to sentiment. The Sagrario of
+former times, with her dreams of being a great lady flattered by the
+words of youthful lovers, brightly dressed like brilliant birds, would
+never have thought of a vagabond aged by misery, ugly and sick. We
+understand each other because we are unfortunate; misery allows us to
+see into each other's souls; in full happiness we should never have
+met."
+
+"It is true," she murmured, leaning her head on Gabriel's shoulder. "I
+love that misery which has allowed us to know, each other."
+
+"You will be my companion," continued Luna, in a soft tone. "We will
+pass our lives together till death breaks the chain. I will protect
+you, although the protection of a sick and persecuted man is not worth
+much."
+
+He passed his arm round the woman, raising her head with his other
+hand, fixing his eyes on those of Sagrario, which were shining in the
+starlight bright with tears.
+
+"We shall be two souls, two minds who cherish one another without
+giving rein to passion, and with a purity such as no poets have
+imagined. This night in which we have mutually confessed one to
+another, in which our souls have been laid open to one another is our
+wedding night; kiss me, companion of my life!"
+
+And in the silence of the cloister they kissed each other noiselessly,
+slowly, as though with their lips joined they were weeping over the
+misery of their past, and the brevity of a love around which death was
+circling. Above, the lament of Beethoven went on unfolding its sad
+modulations, which floated through the cloister and round the sleeping
+Cathedral.
+
+Gabriel stood erect sustaining Sagrario, who seemed almost fainting
+from the strength of her feelings; he looked up at the luminous space
+with almost priestly gravity, and said, whispering close to the young
+woman's ear:
+
+"Our life will be like a deserted garden, where amid fallen trunks and
+dead branches fresh foliage springs up. Companion, let us love one
+another. Above our misery as pariahs let spring arise. It will be a
+sad spring, without fruit, but it will have flowers. The sun shines
+for those who are in the open, but for us, dear companion, it is very
+far. But from the black depths of our well we will clasp each other,
+raising our heads, and though his heat will not revive us, we will
+adore him like a distant star."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+In the beginning of July Gabriel began his nocturnal watch in the
+Cathedral.
+
+At nightfall he went down into the cloister, and at the Puerta del
+Mollete, joined the other watchman, a sickly-looking man who coughed
+as badly as Luna, and who never left off his cloak even in the height
+of summer.
+
+"Come along, we are going to lock up!" said the bell-ringer, rattling
+his bunch of keys.
+
+After the two men had entered the church, he locked the doors from
+outside and walked away.
+
+As the days were long, there still remained two hours of daylight
+after the watchmen entered the Cathedral.
+
+"All the church is ours, companion," said the other watchman.
+
+And like a man used to the imposing appearance of the deserted church,
+he settled himself comfortably in the sacristy as in his own house,
+opening his supper basket on the chests, and spreading out his
+eatables between candelabras and crucifixes.
+
+Gabriel wandered about the fane. After many nights of watching, the
+impression produced when he first saw the immense church deserted and
+locked up had not yet faded. His footsteps resounded on the pavement,
+his strides shortened by the tombs of prelates and great men of former
+days. The silence of the church was disturbed by the strange echoes
+and mysterious rustlings; the first day Gabriel had often turned his
+head in alarm, thinking he heard footsteps following him.
+
+Outside the church the sun was still shining, the coloured wheel
+of the rose window above the great doorway glowed like a luminous
+flower-bed; below, among the pillars, the light seemed overcome by the
+darkness; the bats began to descend, and with their wings made the
+dust fall from the shafts in the vaulting. They fluttered round about
+the pillars, circling as in a forest of stone; in their blind flight
+they often struck the cords of the hanging lamps, or shook the old red
+hats with dusty and ragged tassels that hung high above the cardinals'
+tombs.
+
+Gabriel made his rounds throughout the church. He shook the iron
+railings in front of the altars to make sure they were securely
+locked, pushed the doors of the Muzarabe Chapel, and that of the
+Kings, threw a glance into the Chapter-house, and finally stopped
+before the Virgin del Sagrario; through the grating he could see the
+lamps burning, and above, the image covered with jewels. After this
+examination he went in search of his comrade, and they both sat down
+in the crossways, either on the steps of the choir or of the high
+altar; from there you could take in the whole of the church at one
+glance.
+
+The two watchmen began by carefully putting on their caps.
+
+"They will probably have ordered you," said Gabriel's companion, "to
+respect the Church, and that if you want to smoke a cigar you must go
+up to the gallery of the Locum; and that if you wish to sup you must
+go into the sacristy. They said the same to me when I first entered
+into the service of the Church. But these are only the words of people
+who sleep comfortably and quietly in their own houses. Here the
+principal thing is to keep good watch, and beyond that, each one may
+do as seems best to him to pass the night. God and the saints sleep
+during these hours; they really must want some rest after spending the
+whole day listening to prayers and hymns, receiving incense, and being
+scorched by wax tapers close to their faces. We watch their sleep,
+and, the devil! we are surely not wanting in respect if we allow
+ourselves a little liberty. Come along, companion, it is getting dark;
+let us club our suppers."
+
+So the two watchmen supped in the crossways, spreading the contents of
+their baskets on the marble steps.
+
+Gabriel's comrade carried at his belt, as his only arm, an ancient
+pistol, a present to the Obreria which had never been fired; to Luna,
+Silver Stick pointed out a carbine, a legacy to the sacristy from the
+ex-civil guard, in memory of his years of service. Gabriel made a
+gesture of repulsion. It was all right standing there, he would get it
+if it were wanted; so he left it in the corner with some packets of
+cartridges, mouldy from the damp and covered with cobwebs.
+
+As the night fell the colours from the windows above became obscured,
+and in the darkness of the naves all the lights from the various lamps
+began to shine like wavering stars; all the outlines of the church
+were lost, and Gabriel fancied himself once more sleeping at night on
+the open ground. It was only when he went the rounds with his lantern
+in his hand that the outlines of the Cathedral rose out of the shadow
+ever vaster and more mysterious. The pillars seemed to start out to
+meet him, rising suddenly up to the roof with the flashes of light
+from the lantern, the squares in the tiled floor seemed to dance with
+every swing of the light, and every now and then Gabriel could feel on
+his head the flutter of passing wings. To the screams of the bats
+were added the hooting of other frightened birds, who in their flight
+knocked against the pilasters; they were the owls who came down
+attracted by the oil in the lamps, and who nearly extinguished them
+with the sweep of their wings.
+
+Every half-hour the silence was disturbed by the sound of rusty wheels
+and springs, and then a bell with a silvery tone struck; these were
+the gilded giants of the Puerta del Reloj, marking the passing of time
+with their hammers.
+
+Gabriel's companion complained greatly of the innovations introduced
+by the cardinal for the annoyance of poor folks. In former times he
+and his old comrade, once they were locked up, could sleep as they
+pleased without fear of being reproved by the Chapter. But His
+Eminence, who was always endeavouring to find some means of annoying
+his neighbour, had placed in different parts of the Cathedral certain
+little clocks brought from abroad, and now they had to go every
+half-hour, open them and record their visit. The following day they
+were examined by Silver Stick, and if any carelessness was discovered
+he imposed a fine.
+
+"An invention of the demon not to allow us to sleep, comrade. But
+all the same we might manage a nap if we help one another. While one
+sleeps a bit the other must undertake to check these cursed machines.
+No carelessness, eh, fresh man? The pay is short and hunger great, and
+we cannot afford fines."
+
+Gabriel, always good-natured, was the one who made most rounds,
+looking scrupulously after the markers, while his companion, the Señor
+Fidel, rested quietly, praising his generosity. They had given him a
+good companion; he liked him much better than the old one, with his
+imperious manners of an old guard, always squabbling as to whose turn
+it was to get up and make the round.
+
+The poor man coughed as much as Gabriel; his catarrhs disturbed
+the silence, echoing through the naves till it seemed like several
+monstrous dogs barking.
+
+"I do not know how many years I have had this hoarseness," said the
+old man; "it is a present from the Cathedral. The doctors say I ought
+to give up this employment; but what I say is--who is to support me?
+You, companion, have begun at the best time. There is a coolness here
+that all those would envy who are generally perspiring about this time
+in the cafes of the Zocodover. We are still in summer, but you can
+imagine the damp which penetrates everything; and you should see what
+it is in winter! we must really dress up as maskers, covered with
+caps, shawls and cloaks. They have the charity to leave us a little
+fire in the sacristy, but many mornings they find us almost frozen.
+Those of the Chapter call the choir 'kill canon,' and if those
+gentlemen complain of one hour's stay in this ice-house, having eaten
+well and drunk better, you may just fancy what it is for us. You have
+had the good luck to begin in summer, but when the winter comes on you
+will just have a good time of it!"
+
+But even though it was the best part of the year, Gabriel coughed
+much, his illness increasing from the dampness of the Cathedral.
+
+On moonlight nights the church was strangely transfigured, and Gabriel
+remembered sundry operatic effects he had seen during his travels.
+The white tracery of the windows stood out against the blackness with
+milky whiteness, splashes of light glided down the pilasters, some
+even from the vaulting. These mocking spectres moved slowly along the
+pavement, mounting the opposite pillars and losing themselves in the
+darkness; those rays of cold and diffused light made the shadows seem
+even darker as they brought out of the darkness here a chapel, beyond,
+a sepulchral stone or the outline of some pilaster; and the great
+Christ, who crowned the railings of the high altar, glowed against its
+background of shadow with the brilliancy of its old gilding, like some
+miraculous apparition floating in space in a halo of light.
+
+When the cough would not allow the old watchman to sleep, he told
+Gabriel of the many years he had carried on this nocturnal life in the
+Primacy. The office had some resemblance to that of a sexton, for he
+spent most of it among the dead in the silence of desertion, never
+seeing anyone till his watch was finished. He had ended by becoming
+used to it, and it had cured him of many fears he had in his youth.
+Before, he had believed in the resurrection of the dead, in souls, and
+the apparitions of saints. But now he laughed at all that. Whole years
+he had carried on this night work in the Cathedral, and if he heard
+anything it was only the scampering of rats, who respected neither
+saints nor altars, for after all they were only wood!
+
+He only feared men of flesh and blood, those robbers who in former
+times had more than once entered the Cathedral, obliging the Chapter
+to establish this night vigilance.
+
+He entertained Gabriel with the account of all the attempts at robbery
+which had happened during the century. In the Cathedral was enough
+wealth to tempt a saint, Madrid was near, and he much feared the
+"swell" thieves. But thieves would have to be clever and fortunate
+to get the better of them. Silver Stick, the bell-ringer, and the
+sacristan made their nightly inspection before locking up, Mariano
+then taking the keys away with him to the belfry. No one could
+think of breaking the locks and bolts, for they were of antique and
+extremely strong work; besides, they two were there inside to give the
+alarm on hearing the slightest noise. Formerly, by the help of the
+dog, the watching had been more complete, for the animal was so alert
+that no passer-by could approach the doors for an instant without his
+barking. After its death the Señor Obrero spoke month after month of
+getting another, but he had never fulfilled his promise. But all the
+same, without the dog, they two were there and that meant something,
+eh! He with his old pistol which had never been fired, and Gabriel
+with his carbine, which was still standing in the corner where his
+predecessor had left it. He plumed himself upon the fear he and his
+companion would excite, but, called back to reality by Luna's smile,
+he added:
+
+"At any rate, in case of emergency we can reckon on the bell that
+summons the canons; the rope hangs down in the choir, and we have
+only to ring it. And just imagine what would happen if it rang in
+the silence of the night! All Toledo would be on foot, knowing that
+something serious was taking place in the Cathedral. With this and
+those cursed markers that will not let one sleep, one might say that
+even the king was not so well guarded at night as this church."
+
+In the morning when the watch was ended, Gabriel would return to his
+house, perished with cold, longing to stretch himself in bed. He would
+find Sagrario in the kitchen, warming the milk he was to drink before
+turning in. His gentle companion still called him "uncle" in the
+presence of the household, and only used the loving "thou" when they
+were alone. When he was in bed she would bring the steaming milk,
+making him drink it with maternal caresses, smoothing the pillows;
+after which she would carefully close the windows and doors so that no
+ray of light should disturb him.
+
+"Those nights in the Cathedral!" said she complainingly. "You are
+killing yourself, Gabriel. It is not fit for you. My father says the
+same. As it is certain there is nothing beyond death, and that we
+shall not see one another, do try and prolong your life by being
+careful. Now that we know each other, and are so happy, it would be so
+sad to lose you!"
+
+Gabriel reassured her. This would not go on beyond the summer; after
+that they would give him something better. She must not be so sad;
+such a little thing did not kill one. He would cough just as much
+living in the Claverias as passing the night in the Cathedral.
+
+After dinner he would go into the cloister, completely rested by his
+morning's sleep. It was the only time of the day in which he could see
+his friends; they either came to find him, or he went in search of
+them, going to the shoemaker's house or up into the tower.
+
+They greeted him respectfully, listening to his words with the same
+attention as before; but he noted in them a certain air of proud
+independence, and at the same time of pity, as if, although grateful
+to him for having transmitted his ideas to them, they pitied him for
+his gentle character, so inimical to all violence.
+
+"Those birds," said Gabriel to his brother, "are flying on their own
+account. They do not want me, and wish to be alone."
+
+Wooden Staff shook his head sadly.
+
+"God grant, Gabriel, that some day you may not repent of having spoken
+to them of things they cannot understand! They have greatly changed,
+and no one can endure our nephew, the Perrero. He says that if he is
+not allowed to kill bulls in order to get rich, he will kill men to
+get out of his poverty; that he has as much right to enjoyment as any
+gentleman, and that all the rich are robbers. Really, brother, by the
+Holy Virgin! have you taught them such horrible things?"
+
+"Let them alone," said Gabriel, laughing; "they have not yet digested
+their new ideas, and are vomiting follies. All this will pass, for
+they are good souls."
+
+The only thing that vexed him was that Mariano withdrew from him. He
+fled his company as if he were afraid. He seemed to fear that Gabriel
+would read his thoughts, with that irresistible power that from
+boyhood he had held over him.
+
+"Mariano, what is the matter with you?" said he, seeing him pass
+through the cloisters.
+
+"Much that is out of gear," answered his surly friend.
+
+"I know it, man--I know it; but you seem to avoid me. Why is this?"
+
+"Avoid you--I?--never. You know I always love you. When you come to
+my house you see how we all welcome you. We owe you a great deal; you
+have opened our eyes and we are no longer brute beasts. But I am tired
+of knowing so much and being so poor, and my companions are thinking
+the same. We do not care to have our heads full and our bellies
+empty."
+
+"Well, then, what remedy have we? We have all been born too-soon.
+Others will come after us, finding things better arranged. What can
+you do to right the present, when there are millions of workers in
+the world more wretched than yourselves, who have not succeeded in
+finding a better way out even at the cost of their blood, fighting
+against authority?"
+
+"What shall we do?" grumbled his companion. "That is what we shall
+see, and you will see also. We are not such fools as you think. You
+are very clever, Gabriel, and we respect you as our master, for
+everything you say is true. But it seems to us that when you have to
+do with things--practical things: you understand me? when one must
+call bread, bread, and wine, wine: am I explaining myself?--you are,
+begging your pardon, rather soft, like all those who live much in
+books. We are ignorant, but we see more clearly."
+
+He walked away from Gabriel, who-was quite unable to understand the
+true bearing of this aberration among his disciples. Several times
+when he went up to the tower to spend a few moments with his friends,
+they would suddenly cease their conversation, looking anxiously at him
+as though they feared he might have overheard their words.
+
+It was several days since Don Martin had been in the cloister. Gabriel
+knew through Silver Stick that the chaplain's mother had died, and a
+week afterwards he saw him one evening in the Claverias. His eyes were
+bloodshot, his cheeks thin, and his skin drawn as though he had wept
+much.
+
+"I come to take farewell, Gabriel. I have spent a month of sorrow and
+sleeplessness nursing my mother. The poor thing is dead; she was
+far from young, and I expected this ending, but however strong and
+resigned one may be, these blows must be felt. Now the poor old woman
+is gone I am free; she was the only tie that bound me to this Church,
+in which I no longer believe. Its dogma is absurd and puerile, its
+history a tissue of crimes and violence. Why should I lie like others,
+feigning a faith I do not feel? To-day I have been to the palace to
+tell them they may dispose of my seven duros monthly and my chaplaincy
+of nuns. I am going away. I wish not only to fly the Church, I wish
+to get out of her atmosphere; and a renegade priest could not live in
+Toledo. You see this masquerade? I wear it to-day for the last time;
+to-morrow I shall taste the first joy of my life, tearing this shroud
+into shreds, such small shreds that no one will be able to use them.
+I shall be a man. I will go far away, as far as I can. I wish to know
+what the world is like as I have to live in it. I know no one, I shall
+have no assistance. You are the most extraordinary man I have ever
+known, and here you are hidden in this dungeon by your own free will,
+concealed in a Church which to your views must be empty. I am not
+afraid of poverty. When one has been God's representative on six reals
+a day one can look hunger in the face. I will be a workman; I will dig
+the earth, if necessary. I will get employment on something--but I
+shall be a free man."
+
+As the two friends walked up and down the cloister Gabriel counselled
+Don Martin in determining the place to which he should direct his
+steps, as his thoughts wavered between Paris and the American
+republics, where emigration was most needed.
+
+As the evening fell, Gabriel took leave of his disciple; his
+fellow-watchman was waiting for him in the cloister ready for
+locking-up time.
+
+"Probably we shall never meet again," said the chaplain sadly. "You
+will end your days here, in the house of a God in whom you do not
+believe."
+
+"Yes, I shall die here," said Gabriel, smiling. "He and I hate one
+another, but all the same it seems as if He could not do without me.
+If He goes out into the streets it is I who guide His steps, and again
+at night, it is I who guard His wealth. Good-bye, and good-luck,
+Martin. Be a man without weakness. Truth is well worth poverty."
+
+The disappearance of the chaplain of nuns was effected without
+scandal. Don Antolin and the other priests thought the young man
+had moved to Madrid through ambition, to help swell the number of
+place-hunting clerics. Gabriel was the only one who knew Don Martin's
+real intentions. Besides, an astonishing piece of news, that fell on
+the Cathedral like a thunderbolt, soon caused the young priest to be
+forgotten, throwing all the gentlemen of the choir, all the smaller
+folk in the sacristies, and the whole population of the upper cloister
+into the greatest commotion.
+
+The quarrels between the Archbishop and his Chapter had ended,
+everything that had been done by the cardinal was approved of in Rome,
+and His Eminence fairly roared with joy in his palace, with the fiery
+impetuosity of his usual feelings.
+
+As the canons entered the choir they walked with bent heads, looking
+ashamed and frightened.
+
+"Well, have you heard?" they said to one another as they disrobed in
+the sacristy.
+
+In a great hurry, with flying cloaks they all left the church, every
+man his own way, without forming groups or circles, each one anxious
+to free himself from all responsibility, and to appear free from all
+complicity with the prelate's enemies.
+
+The Tato laughed with joy seeing the sudden dispersion, and the
+agitation of the gentlemen of the choir.
+
+"Run! run I The old gossip will give you something to think about!"
+
+The same preparations were made every year in the middle of August for
+the festival of the Virgin del Sagrario. In the Cathedral they spoke
+of this year's festival with mystery and anxiety, as though they were
+expecting great events. His Eminence, who had not been into the church
+for many months, in order not to meet his Chapter, would preside in
+the choir on the feast day. He wished to see his enemies face to
+face, crushed by his triumph, and to enjoy their looks of confused
+submission. And accordingly, as the festival drew near many of the
+canons trembled, thinking of the harsh and proud look the angry
+prelate would fix on them.
+
+Gabriel paid very little attention to these anxieties of the clerical
+world; he led a strange life, sleeping the greater part of the
+day, preparing himself for the fatiguing night watch, which he now
+undertook alone. The Señor Fidel had fallen ill, and the Obreria to
+avoid expense, and not to deprive the old man of his wretched pay, had
+not engaged a new companion for him. He spent the nights alone in the
+Cathedral as calmly as if he had been in the upper cloister, quite
+accustomed to the grave-like silence. In order not to sleep, he read
+by the light of his lantern any books he could get in the Claverias,
+uninteresting treatises on history in which Providence played the
+principal _rôle_; lives of the saints, amusing from their simple
+credulity, bordering on the grotesque; and that family Quixote of the
+Lunas', that he had so often spelt out when little, and in which he
+still found some of the freshness of his childhood.
+
+The Virgin's feast day arrived; the festival was the same as in
+other years. The famous image had been brought out of its chapel and
+occupied on its foot-board a place on the high altar. They brought out
+her mantle kept in the Treasury and all her jewels, that scintillated
+kissed by the innumerable lights, glittering and flashing with endless
+brilliancy.
+
+Before the commencement of the festival, the inquisitive of the
+Cathedral, pretending absent-mindedness, strolled between the choir
+and the Puerta del Perdon. The canons in their red robes assembled
+near the staircase lighted by the famous "stone of light." His
+Eminence would come down this way, and the canons grouped themselves,
+timidly whispering, asking each other what was going to happen.
+
+The cross-bearer appeared on the first step of the staircase, holding
+his emblem horizontally with both hands so that it should pass under
+the arch of the doorway. After, between servitors, and followed by the
+mulberry-coloured robe of the auxiliary bishop, advanced the cardinal,
+dressed in his purple, which quenched the reddish-violet of the
+canons.
+
+The Chapter were drawn up in two rows with bowed heads, offering
+homage to their prince. What a glance was Don Sebastian's! The canons,
+bending, thought they felt it on the nape of their necks with the
+coldness of steel. He held his enormous body erect in its flowing
+purple with a gallant pride, as if at the moment he felt himself
+entirely cured of the malady which was tearing his entrails, and of
+the weak heart which oppressed his lungs. His fat face quivered with
+delight, and the folds of his double chin spread out over his lace
+rochet. His cardinal's biretta seemed to swell with pride on his
+little, white and shining head. Never was a crown worn with such pride
+as that red cap.
+
+He stretched out his hand, gloved in purple, on which shone the
+episcopal emerald ring, with such an imperious gesture that one after
+another of the canons found themselves forced to kiss it. It was the
+submission of churchmen, accustomed from their seminary to an apparent
+humility which covered rancours and hatreds of an intensity unknown in
+ordinary life. The Cardinal guessed their disinclination, and gloated
+over his triumph.
+
+"You have no idea what our hatreds are," he had often said, to his
+friend, the gardener's widow. "In ordinary life few men die of
+ill-humour; he who is annoyed gives vent to it, and recovers his
+equanimity. But in the Church you may count by the hundred men who
+die in a fit of rage, because they are unable to revenge themselves;
+because discipline closes their mouths and bows their heads. Having no
+families, and no anxieties about earning their bread, most of us only
+live for self-love and pride."
+
+The Chapter formed their procession accompanied by His Eminence. The
+scarlet Perrero headed the march, then came the black vergers and
+Silver Stick, making the tiles of the pavement ring with the blows of
+their staffs. Behind came the archiepiscopal cross and the canons in
+pairs, and finally the prelate with his scarlet train spread out at
+full length, held up by two pages. Don Sebastian blessed to the right
+and to the left, looking with his penetrating eyes at the faithful who
+bowed their heads.
+
+His imperious character and the joy of his triumph made his glance
+flash. What a splendid victory! The Church was his home, and he
+returned to it after a long absence with all the majesty of an
+absolute master, who could crush the evil-speaking slaves who dared to
+attack him.
+
+The greatness of the Church seemed to him at that moment more glorious
+than ever. What an admirable institution! The strong man who arrived
+at the top was an omnipotent god to be feared. Nothing of pernicious
+and revolutionary equality. Dogma exalted the humility of all before
+God; but when you came to examples, flocks were always spoken of, and
+shepherds to direct them. He was that shepherd because the Omnipotent
+has so ordered it. Woe to whoever attempted to dethrone him!
+
+In the choir his delighted pride tasted an even greater satisfaction.
+He was seated on the throne of the archbishops of Toledo, that seat
+which had been the star of his youth, the remembrance of which had
+disturbed him in his Episcopacy, when the mitre had travelled through
+the provinces, waiting for the hour to rise to the Primacy. He stood
+erect under the artistic canopy of the Mount Tabor, at the top of four
+steps, so that all in the choir could see him and recognise that he
+was their prince. The heads of the dignitaries seated at his side were
+thus on a level with his feet. He could trample on them like vipers
+should they dare to rise again, striking at his most intimate
+affections.
+
+Fired by the appreciation of his own grandeur and triumph, he was the
+first to rise, or to sit down; as is directed in the rubric of the
+services, he joined his voice to those in the choir, astonishing them
+all by the harsh energy of his singing; the Latin words rolled from
+his mouth like blows upon those hated people, and his eyes passed with
+a threatening expression over the double row of bent heads.
+
+He was a fortunate man, who had risen from place to place, but he
+never felt a satisfaction so deep, so complete as at that moment. He
+himself was startled at his own delight, at that orgy of pride that
+had extinguished his chronic ailments; it seemed to him as though he
+were spending in a few hours the stores of enjoyment of his whole
+life.
+
+As the mass was ending, the singers and lower people in the choir, who
+were the only ones who dared to look at him, were alarmed, seeing him
+suddenly grow pale, rise with his face discomposed, pressing his hands
+to his breast. The canons noticing it, rushed towards him, forming a
+crowded mass of red vestments in front of his throne. His Eminence was
+suffocating, fighting against that circle of hands who instinctively
+clutched at him.
+
+"Air!" he moaned, "air! Get out from before me with a thousand curses!
+Take me home!"
+
+Even in the midst of his agony, he recovered his majestic gesture
+and his old soldiering oaths to drive away his enemies. He was
+suffocating, but he would not allow the canons to see it: he guessed
+the delight many of them must feel beneath their compassionate manner.
+Let no one touch him! He could manage for himself! So leaning on two
+faithful servants, he began his march, gasping, towards the episcopal
+staircase, followed by great part of the Chapter.
+
+The religious function ended hurriedly. The Virgin Would forgive it,
+she should have a better solemnity next year; and all the authorities
+and invited guests left their seats to run in search of news to the
+archiepiscopal palace.
+
+When Gabriel woke, past mid-day, every one in the upper cloister was
+talking of His Eminence's health. His brother inquired of the Aunt
+Tomasa who had just come from the palace.
+
+"He is dying, my sons," said the gardener's widow; "he cannot escape
+from it. Doña Visitacion signalled it to me from afar, weeping, poor
+thing! He cannot be put to bed, for his chest is heaving like a
+broken bellows. The doctors say he will not last till night. What a
+misfortune! And on a day like this!"
+
+The agony of the ecclesiastical prince was received in funereal
+silence. The women of the Claverias went backwards and forwards with
+news from the palace to the upper cloister; the children were shut up
+in the houses, frightened by their mothers' threats if they attempted
+to play in the galleries.
+
+The Chapel-master, who was generally indifferent to events in the
+Cathedral, went nevertheless to inquire of His Eminence's condition.
+He had a plan which he quickly explained to the family during dinner.
+The funeral of a cardinal deserved the execution of a celebrated mass,
+with a full orchestra recruited in Madrid. He had already cast his
+eyes on the famous Requiem of Mozart; that was the only reason for
+which he was interested in the prelate's fate.
+
+Gabriel, looking at his companion, felt the gentle selfishness that a
+living man feels when a great man dies.
+
+"So the great fall, Sagrario, and we, the sickly and wretched, have
+still some life before us."
+
+At the hour of locking up the church he went down to begin his watch.
+The bell-ringer was waiting for him with the keys.
+
+"How about the Cardinal?" inquired Gabriel.
+
+"He will certainly die to-day, if he is not already dead."
+
+And afterwards he added:
+
+"You will have a great illumination to-night, Gabriel. The Virgin is
+on the high altar till to-morrow morning, surrounded by wax tapers."
+
+He was silent for a moment, as if undecided about Something.
+
+"Possibly," he added, "I may come down and keep you company a little.
+You must be dull alone; expect me."
+
+When Gabriel was locked into the church, he caught sight of the high
+altar, resplendent with lights. He made his usual trial of doors and
+railings; visited the Locum and the large lavoratories, where once
+some thieves had concealed themselves, and after he was quite certain
+that there was no human being in the church except himself, he seated
+himself in the crossways with his cloak round him, and his basket of
+supper.
+
+He sat there a long while, looking through the railings at the Virgin
+del Sagrario. Born in the Cathedral and brought up as a child by his
+mother, who knelt with him before the image, he had always admired it
+as the most perfect type of beauty. Now he criticised it coldly with
+his artistic eye. She was ugly and grotesque like all the very rich
+images; sumptuous and wealthy piety had decked her out with their
+treasures. There was nothing about her of the idealism of the Virgin
+painted by Christian artists; she was much more like an Indian idol
+covered with jewels. The embroidered dress and mantle stood out with
+the stiffness of stone folds, and over the head-dress sparkled a crown
+as large as a helmet, diminishing the face. Gold, pearls and diamonds
+shone on every part of her vestments, and she wore pendants and
+bracelets of immense value.
+
+Gabriel smiled at the religious simplicity which dressed heavenly
+heroes according to the fashions of the earth.
+
+The faint twilight glimmering through the windows and the wavering
+flame of the tapers animated the face of the image as if she were
+speaking.
+
+"Even as I am!" said Gabriel to himself. "If a holy person were in my
+place he would think the Virgin was laughing one moment and crying the
+next; with a little imagination and faith, behold here is a miracle!
+These flickerings of light have been an inexhaustible mine for the
+priests, even the Venus' of former times changed the expression of
+their faces at the pleasure of the faithful, just like a Christian
+image."
+
+He thought a long time about miracles, the invention of all religions,
+and as old as human ignorance and credulity.
+
+It was now quite dark. After supping frugally, Gabriel opened a book
+that he carried in his basket and began to read by the light of his
+lantern. Now and then he raised his head, disturbed by the fluttering
+and screams of the night birds, attracted by the extraordinary
+brilliancy of the countless wax tapers. The time passed slowly in the
+darkness; the silvery sound of the warriors' hammers re-echoed through
+the vaulting. Luna got up and visited the markers to record his visit.
+
+Ten o'clock had struck when Gabriel heard the wicket of the Puerta de
+Santa Catalina open quickly but without violence, as though a key had
+been used. Luna remembered the bell-ringer's offer, but soon he heard
+the sound of many steps magnified by the echo as if a whole host were
+advancing.
+
+"Who goes there?" shouted Gabriel, rather alarmed.
+
+"It is us, man," answered from the darkness the husky voice of
+Mariano. "Did I not tell you we should come down?"
+
+As they came into the crossways, the light from the high altar fell
+full upon them, and Gabriel saw the Tato and the shoemaker with the
+bell-ringer. They wished to keep Luna company part of the night, so
+that his watch should not be so wearisome, and they produced a bottle
+of brandy, of which they offered him some.
+
+"You know I do not drink," said Gabriel. "I have never cared for
+alcohol; wine sometimes, and very little of that. But where are you
+all going to, dressed out as for a feast day?"
+
+The Tato answered hurriedly. Silver Stick locked up the Claverias at
+nine, and they wished to spend the night out of bounds. They had been
+some time at a cafe in the Zocodover, feasting like lords. They
+had had all sorts of adventures, that was a night quite out of the
+ordinary way, more especially as all the town was in commotion about
+the Archbishop.
+
+"How is he going on?" inquired Gabriel.
+
+"I believe he died half-an-hour ago," said the bell-ringer. "When
+I went up to my house for the keys, a doctor was coming out of the
+palace and he told one of the canons. But let us sit down."
+
+They all sat down, in their embroidered caps, on the steps of the high
+altar railing. Mariano put his bunch of keys on the ground, a mass of
+iron as big as a club. There were keys of every age, some of iron,
+very large, rough and rusty, showing the old hammer marks and with
+coats of arms near the bows; others, more modern were clean and bright
+as silver, but they were all very large and heavy, with powerful
+indented teeth, proportionate to the size of the edifice.
+
+The three friends seemed extraordinarily happy, with a nervous gaiety
+which made them catch hold of each other and laugh. They cast sidelong
+looks at the Virgin and then looked at each other, with a mysterious
+gesture that Gabriel was quite unable to understand.
+
+"You have all drunk a good deal, is it not so?" said Luna. "You do
+wrong, for you know that drink is the degradation of the poor."
+
+"A day is a day, uncle," said the Perrero; "it delights us that the
+great ones are dying. You see, I esteem His Eminence highly, but let
+him go to the devil! The only satisfaction a poor man has is to see
+that the end comes also to the rich."
+
+"Drink," said the bell-ringer, offering him the bottle. "It is a
+pleasure to find ourselves here, well and happy, while to-morrow His
+Eminence will find himself between four boards; we shall have to ring
+the little bell all day!"
+
+The Tato drank, passing the bottle to the shoemaker, who held it a
+long time glued to his gullet. Of the three he seemed the most tipsy;
+his eyes were bloodshot, he stared stonily on every side and remained
+silent, he only gave a forced laugh when anyone spoke to him, as if
+his thoughts were very, very far off.
+
+On the other hand, the bell-ringer was far more loquacious than usual.
+He spoke of the cardinal's fortune, at the wealth that would fall to
+Doña Visitacion, of the joy many of the Chapter must feel that night.
+He interrupted himself to take a pull at the brandy bottle, passing it
+afterwards to his companions. The smell of the alcohol spread through
+that atmosphere impregnated with incense and the smoke of wax tapers.
+
+More than an hour passed in this way. Mariano had stopped the
+conversation several times as if he had something serious to say and
+was vacillating, wanting courage.
+
+"Gabriel, time is passing and we have much to do and to talk about.
+It is a little past eleven, but we have still several hours to do the
+thing well."
+
+"What do you mean to say?" asked Luna, surprised.
+
+"Few words--in a nut-shell. It concerns your becoming rich and us
+also; we intend to get out of this poverty. You have noticed for
+some time that we have avoided you, that we preferred talking among
+ourselves to the pleasure of listening to you. We all know that you
+are very learned, but as far as things of this life go you are not
+worth a farthing. We have learnt a great deal from you, but that does
+not get us out of our poverty. We have spent months thinking how to
+make a lucky stroke. These revolutions of which you speak seem to us
+very far off; our grandchildren may see them, but we never shall. It
+is all right for clever people to look to the future, but ignorant
+people like us look to the present. We have employed our time
+discussing all sorts of schemes, to kidnap Don Sebastian and require
+a million of ransom, to break into the palace one night, and I don't
+know what besides! All wild ideas started by your nephew. But this
+morning in my house, while we were lamenting our poverty, we suddenly
+saw our salvation close at hand. You as the sole guardian of the
+Cathedral. The Virgin on the high altar, with the jewels that are
+locked up in the Treasury all the rest of the year, and I with the
+keys in my power. The easiest thing in the world. Let us clean out the
+Virgin and take the road to Madrid, where we shall arrive at dawn; the
+Tato knows a lot of people there among cloak stealers. We will hide
+ourselves there for a little while, and then you, who know the world,
+will guide us. We will go to America, sell the stones, and we shall be
+rich. Get up, Gabriel! We are going to strip the idol, as you say."
+
+"But this is a robbery that you are proposing!" exclaimed Luna,
+alarmed.
+
+"A robbery?" said the bell-ringer. "Call it so, if you like--and, what
+then? Are you afraid of it? More has been robbed from us, who were
+born with the right to a share of the world, but however much we look
+round we cannot find a vacant place. Besides, what harm do we do to
+anybody? These jewels are of no use to the bit of wood they cover, it
+does not eat, it does not feel the cold in winter, and we are poor
+miserable creatures. You yourself have said it, Gabriel, seeing our
+poverty. Our children die of hunger on their mother's knees, while
+these idols are covered with wealth, come along, Gabriel, do not let
+us lose any more time."
+
+"Come along, uncle," said the Tato, "have a little courage. You must
+admit we ignorant people know how to manage things when it comes to
+the point."
+
+Gabriel was not listening to them; surprise had made him fall into a
+reverie of self-examination. He thought--terrified of the great error
+he had committed--he saw an immense gulf opening between himself and
+those he had believed to be his disciples. He remembered his brother's
+words. Ah, the good sense of the simpleminded! He, with all his
+reading, had never foreseen the danger of teaching these ignorant
+people in a few months what required a whole life of thought and
+study. What happened to people stirred up by revolution was happening
+here on a small scale. The most noble thoughts become corrupted
+passing through the sieve of vulgarity; the most generous aspirations
+are poisoned by the dregs of poverty.
+
+He had sown the revolutionary seed in these outcasts of the Church,
+drowsing in the atmosphere of two centuries ago. He had thought to
+help on the revolution of the future by forming men, but on awaking
+from his dreams he found only common criminals. What a terrible
+mistake! His ideas had only tended to destruction. In removing from
+the dulled brains the prejudices of ignorance, and the superstitions
+of the slave, he had only succeeded in making them daring for evil.
+Selfishness was the only passion vibrating in them. They had only
+learnt that they were wretched and ought not to be so. The fate of
+their companions in misfortune, of the greater part of humanity,
+wretched and sad, had no interest for them. If they could get out of
+their present state, bettering themselves in whatever way they could,
+they cared very little if the world went on just as it did before;
+that tears, and pain and hunger should reign below, in order to ensure
+the comfort of those above. He had sown his thoughts in them hoping
+to accelerate the harvest, but like all those forced and artificial
+cultivations, that grow with astonishing rapidity only to give rotten
+fruit, the result of his propaganda was moral corruption. Men in the
+end, like all of them! The human wild beast, seeking his own welfare
+at the cost of his fellow, perpetuating the disorders of pain for the
+majority, as long as he can enjoy plenty during the few years of his
+life. Ah! Where could he meet with that superior being, ennobled by
+the worship of reason, doing good without hope of reward, sacrificing
+everything for human solidarity, that man-God who would glorify the
+future!
+
+"Come along, Gabriel," continued the bell-ringer. "Do not let us lose
+time it is only a few minutes' work; and then--flight!"
+
+"No," said Luna firmly, coming out of his reverie, "you shall not do
+this; you ought not to do it. It is a robbery you suggest to me, and
+my pain is great, seeing that you reckoned on me; others rob from
+fatal instinct or from corruption of soul, you have come to it because
+I tried to enlighten you, because I tried to open your minds to the
+truth. Oh! it is horrible, most horrible!"
+
+"What is the use of all these objections, Gabriel? Is it not a bit of
+wood? Whom do we harm by taking its jewels? Do not the rich rob, and
+everyone who possesses anything? Why should we not imitate them?"
+
+"For this very reason, because what you propose doing is a suggestion
+of evil, because it perpetuates once more that system of violence and
+disorder which is the root of all misery. Why do you hate the rich,
+if what they do in sweating the poor is just the same as what you are
+doing in taking possession of a thing for yourselves--understand me
+well--for yourselves--and not for all. The robbery does not scare me,
+for I do not believe in ownership nor in the sanctity of things, but
+for this very reason I detest this appropriation to yourselves and
+I oppose it. Why do you wish to possess all this? You say it is to
+remedy your poverty. That is not true. It is to be rich, to enter into
+the privileged group, to be three individual men of that detested
+minority which desires to enjoy prosperity by enslaving humanity. If
+all the poor of Toledo were now shouting outside the doors of the
+Cathedral, rebellious and emboldened, I would open the way for them, I
+would point out those jewels that you covet, and I would say, 'Possess
+yourselves of those, they are so many drops of sweat and blood wrung
+from your ancestors; they represent the servile work on the land of
+the lords, the brutal plundering of the king's cavaliers, so that
+magnates and kings may cover with jewels those idols which can open to
+them the gates of heaven. These things do not belong to you because
+you happen to be the most daring; they belong to all, as do all the
+riches of the earth. For men to lay their hands on everything existing
+in the world would be a holy work, the redeeming revolution of the
+future. To possess yourselves of some portion of what by moral right
+is not yours, would only be for you a crime against the laws of the
+land, for me it would be a crime against the disinherited, the only
+masters of the existing----"
+
+"Silence, Gabriel," said the bell-ringer harshly; "if I let you, you
+would go on talking till dawn. I do not understand you, nor do I wish
+to. We came to do you a good turn, and you treat us to a sermon. We
+wish to see you as rich as ourselves, and you answer us by talking of
+others, of a lot of people that you don't know, of that humanity who
+never gave you a scrap of bread when you wandered like a dog. I must
+treat you as I did in our youth when we were campaigning. I have
+always loved you and I admire your talents, but we must really treat
+you like a child. Come along, Gabriel! Hold your tongue, and follow
+us! We will lead you to happiness! Forward, companions!" The Tato
+and the shoemaker stood up, walking towards the railings of the high
+altar, the Tato seized one of its gates, and half opened it.
+
+"No!" shouted Gabriel with energy. "Stop! Mariano, you do not know
+what you are doing. You believe your happiness will be accomplished
+when you have possessed yourselves of those jewels. But afterwards?
+Your families remain here. Tato, think of your mother. Mariano, you
+and the shoemaker have wives--you have children."
+
+"Bah!" said the bell-ringer. "They will come and join us when we are
+in safety far away. Money can do everything--the thing is to get it."
+
+"And your children? Shall they be told their fathers were thieves!"
+
+"Bah! they will be rich in other countries. Their history will not be
+worse than that of other rich men's sons."
+
+Gabriel understood the fierce determination that animated those men.
+His endeavours to restrain them were useless. Mariano seized him,
+seeing he was trying to push between them and the altar.
+
+"Stand aside, little one," he said. "You are no use for anything. Let
+us alone. Are you afraid of the Virgin? Undeceive yourself, even if we
+carry off all she has, she will work no miracle."
+
+Gabriel attempted one final effort.
+
+"You shall do nothing. If you pass the railings, if you approach the
+high altar, I will ring the call bell, and before ten minutes all
+Toledo will be at the gates."
+
+And opening the iron gate of the choir, he entered with a decision
+that surprised the bell-ringer.
+
+The shoemaker in tipsy silence was the only one who followed him.
+
+"My children's bread!" he murmured in thickened speech. "They wish to
+rob them! They wish to keep them poor!"
+
+Mariano heard a metallic clatter, and saw the shoemaker raise his hand
+armed with the bunch of keys which had fallen on the marble steps of
+the railing, then he heard a strangely sonorous sound, as if something
+hollow was being struck.
+
+Gabriel gave one scream, and fell forwards on the ground; the
+shoemaker continued striking his head.
+
+"Do not give him any more--stop!"
+
+These were the last words Gabriel heard confusedly, as he lay
+stretched at the entrance of the choir; a warm and sticky liquid ran
+over his eyes; afterwards--silence, darkness and--nothing!
+
+His last thought was to tell himself he was dying--that probably he
+was already dead, and that only the last vital struggle remained to
+him, the last struggle of a life vanishing for ever.
+
+Still he came back to life. He opened his eyes with difficulty and saw
+the sun coming through a barred window, white walls, and a dirty and
+darned cotton counterpane. After great wandering and stumbling, he
+could collect his thoughts sufficiently to' form one idea: they had
+placed the Cathedral on his temples--the huge church was hanging over
+his head crushing him. What terrible pain! He could not move; he
+seemed fastened by his head. His ears were buzzing, his tongue seemed
+paralysed. His eyes could see feebly, as though the light were muddy
+and a reddish haze enveloped all things.
+
+He thought that a face with whiskers, surmounted by the hat of a civil
+guard, bent over him, looking into his eyes. He moved his lips, but
+no one heard a sound. No doubt it was the nightmare of his old
+persecutions returning again.
+
+They looked at him, seeing that he opened his eyes. A gentleman
+dressed in black advanced towards his bed, followed by others who
+carried papers under their arms. He guessed they were speaking to him
+by the movement of their lips, but he could hear nothing. Was he in
+another world? Were all his beliefs false, and after death did another
+life exist the same as the one he had left?
+
+He fell again into darkness and unconsciousness. A long time passed--a
+very long time. Again he opened his eyes, but now the haze was denser,
+it was not red but black.
+
+Through this veil he thought he saw his brother's face, horrified
+and drawn with fear; and the cocked hats of the civil guards, those
+nightmares, surrounding poor Wooden Staff. Afterwards, more misty,
+more uncertain, the face of his gentle companion, Sagrario, looking
+at him with weeping eyes in terrible grief, caressing him with her
+glance, fearless of the black, armed men who surrounded her.
+
+This was his last look, uncertain and clouded, as though seen by
+the light of a flying spark. Afterwards, eternal darkness and
+annihilation.
+
+As his eyes were closing for ever, a voice close to him said:
+
+"We have followed your scent, rascal; you were well hidden, but we
+have discovered you through one of your own. Now we shall see what
+account you can give of the Virgin's jewels, thief!"
+
+But the terrible enemy of God and social order could give no account
+to man.
+
+The following day he was carried out of the prison infirmary on men's
+shoulders to disappear in the common grave.
+
+The earth kept the secret of his death, that frowning Mother who
+watches men's struggles impassively, knowing that all grandeur and
+ambitions, all miseries and follies must rot in her breast, with no
+other object than the fertilisation and renovation of life.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+N.B.--The jewels were stolen from the sacristy of Toledo Cathedral in
+1868.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Shadow of the Cathedral
+by Vicente Blasco Ibañez
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12041 ***
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+Project Gutenberg's The Shadow of the Cathedral, by Vicente Blasco Ibañez
+
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+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
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+Title: The Shadow of the Cathedral
+
+Author: Vicente Blasco Ibañez
+
+Release Date: April 15, 2004 [EBook #12041]
+
+Language: English
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+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SHADOW OF THE CATHEDRAL ***
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+
+THE SHADOW OF THE CATHEDRAL
+
+BY
+
+VICENTE BLASCO IBAÑEZ
+
+
+1919
+
+
+Translated From The Spanish By
+Mrs. W.A. Gillespie
+
+With A Critical Introduction By
+W.D. Howells
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+There are three cathedrals which I think will remain chief of the
+Spanish cathedrals in the remembrance of the traveller, namely the
+Cathedral at Burgos, the Cathedral at Toledo, and the Cathedral at
+Seville; and first of these for reasons hitherto of history and art,
+and now of fiction, will be the Cathedral at Toledo, which the most
+commanding talent among the contemporary Spanish novelists has made
+the protagonist of the romance following. I do not mean that Vincent
+Blasco Ibañez is greater than Perez Galdós, or Armando Palacio Valdés
+or even the Countess Pardo-Bazan; but he belongs to their realistic
+order of imagination, and he is easily the first of living European
+novelists outside of Spain, with the advantage of superior youth,
+freshness of invention and force of characterization. The Russians
+have ceased to be actively the masters, and there is no Frenchman,
+Englishman, or Scandinavian who counts with Ibañez, and of course no
+Italian, American, and, unspeakably, no German.
+
+I scarcely know whether to speak first of this book or the writer of
+it, but as I know less of him than of it I may more quickly dispatch
+that part of my introduction. He was born at Valencia in 1866, of
+Arragonese origin, and of a strictly middle class family. His father
+kept a shop, a dry-goods store in fact, but Ibañez, after fit
+preparation, studied law in the University of Valencia and was
+duly graduated in that science. Apparently he never practiced his
+profession, but became a journalist almost immediately. He was
+instinctively a revolutionist, and was imprisoned in Barcelona, the
+home of revolution, for some political offence, when he was eighteen.
+It does not appear whether he committed his popular offence in the
+Republican newspaper which he established in Valencia; but it is
+certain that he was elected a Republican deputy to the Cortes, where
+he became a leader of his party, while yet evidently of no great
+maturity.
+
+He began almost as soon to write fiction of the naturalistic type, and
+of a Zolaistic coloring which his Spanish critics find rather stronger
+than I have myself seen it. Every young writer forms himself upon some
+older writer; nobody begins master; but Ibañez became master while he
+was yet no doubt practicing a prentice hand; yet I do not feel very
+strongly the Zolaistic influence in his first novel, _La Barraca_,
+or The Cabin, which paints peasant life in the region of Valencia,
+studied at first hand and probably from personal knowledge. It is
+not a very spacious scheme, but in its narrow field it is strictly a
+_novela de costumbres_, or novel of manners, as we used to call the
+kind. Ibañez has in fact never written anything but novels of manners,
+and _La Barraca_ pictures a neighborhood where a stranger takes up a
+waste tract of land and tries to make a home for himself and family.
+This makes enemies of all his neighbors who after an interval of pity
+for the newcomer in the loss of one of his children return to their
+cruelty and render the place impossible to him. It is a tragedy such
+as naturalism alone can stage and give the effect of life. I have read
+few things so touching as this tale of commonest experience which
+seems as true to the suffering and defeat of the newcomers, as to the
+stupid inhumanity of the neighbors who join, under the lead of the
+evillest among them, in driving the strangers away; in fact I know
+nothing parallel to it, certainly nothing in English; perhaps _The
+House with the Green Shutters_ breathes as great an anguish.
+
+At just what interval or remove the novel which gave Ibañez worldwide
+reputation followed this little tale, I cannot say, and it is not
+important that I should try to say. But it is worth while to note here
+that he never flatters the vices or even the swoier virtues of his
+countrymen; and it is much to their honor that they have accepted him
+in the love of his art for the sincerity of his dealing with their
+conditions. In _Sangre y Arena_ his affair is with the cherished
+atrocity which keeps the Spaniards in the era of the gladiator
+shows of Rome. The hero, as the renowned _torrero_ whose career it
+celebrates, from his first boyish longing to be a bull-fighter, to
+his death, weakened by years and wounds, in the arena of Madrid, is
+something absolute in characterization. The whole book in fact is
+absolute in its fidelity to the general fact it deals with, and the
+persons of its powerful drama. Each in his or her place is realized
+with an art which leaves one in no doubt of their lifelikeness, and
+keeps each as vital as the _torrero_ himself. There is little of the
+humor which relieves the pathos of Valdés in the equal fidelity of his
+_Marta y Maria_ or the unsurpassable tragedy of Galdós in his _Doña
+Perfecta_. The _torrero's_ family who have dreaded his boyish ambition
+with the anxiety of good common people, and his devotedly gentle and
+beautiful wife,--even his bullying and then truckling brother-in-law
+who is ashamed of his profession and then proud of him when it has
+filled Spain with his fame,--are made to live in the spacious scene.
+But above all in her lust for him and her contempt for him the unique
+figure of Doña Sol astounds. She rules him as her brother the marquis
+would rule a mistress; even in the abandon of her passion she does not
+admit him to social equality; she will not let him speak to her in
+thee and thou, he must address her as ladyship; she is monstrous
+without ceasing to be a woman of her world, when he dies before her in
+the arena a broken and vanquished man. The _torrero_ is morally better
+than the aristocrat and he is none the less human though a mere
+incident of her wicked life,--her insulted and rejected worshipper,
+who yet deserves his fate.
+
+_Sangre y Arena_ is a book of unexampled force and in that sort must
+be reckoned the greatest novel of the author, who has neglected no
+phase of his varied scene. The _torrero's_ mortal disaster in the
+arena is no more important than the action behind the scenes where the
+gored horses have their dangling entrails sewed up by the primitive
+surgery of the place and are then ridden back into the amphitheatre to
+suffer a second agony. No color of the dreadful picture is spared; the
+whole thing passes as in the reader's presence before his sight and
+his other senses. The book is a masterpiece far in advance of that
+study of the common life which Ibañez calls _La Horda_; dealing with
+the horde of common poor and those accidents of beauty and talent
+as native to them as to the classes called the better. It has the
+attraction of the author's frank handling, and the power of the
+Spanish scene in which the action passes; but it could not hold me to
+the end.
+
+It is only in his latest book that he transcends the Spanish scene and
+peoples the wider range from South America to Paris, and from Paris to
+the invaded provinces of France with characters proper to the times
+and places. _The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse_ has not the rough
+textures and rank dyes of the wholly Spanish stories, but it is the
+strongest story of the great war known to me, and its loss in the
+Parisian figures is made more than good in the novelty and veracity of
+the Argentinos who supply that element of internationality which the
+North American novelists of a generation ago employed to give a fresh
+interest to their work. With the coming of the hero to study art and
+make love in the conventional Paris, and the repatriation of his
+father, a cattle millionaire of French birth from the pampas, with his
+wife and daughters, Ibañez achieves effects beyond the art of Henry
+James, below whom he nevertheless falls so far in subtlety and beauty.
+
+The book has moments of the pathos so rich in the work of Galdós and
+Valdés, and especially of Emilia Pardo-Bazan in her _Morriña_ or _Home
+Sickness_, the story of a peasant girl in Barcelona, but the grief of
+the Argentine family for the death of the son and brother in battle
+with the Germans, has the appeal of anguish beyond any moment in _La
+Catedral_. I do not know just the order of this last-mentioned novel
+among the stories of Ibañez, but it has a quality of imagination, of
+poetic feeling which surpasses the invention of any other that I have
+read, and makes me think it came before _Sangre y Arena_, and possibly
+before _La Horda_. I cannot recall any other novel of the author which
+is quite so psychological as this. It is in fact a sort of biography,
+a personal study, of the mighty fane at Toledo, as if the edifice were
+of human quality and could have its life expressed in human terms.
+There is nothing forced in the poetic conception, or mechanical in
+the execution. The Cathedral is not only a single life, it is a
+neighborhood, a city, a world in itself; and its complex character
+appears in the nature of the different souls which collectively
+animate it. The first of these is the sick and beaten native of it who
+comes back to the world which he has never loved or trusted, but in
+which he was born and reared. As a son of its faith, Gabriel Luna was
+to have been a priest; but before he became a minister of its faith,
+it meant almost the same that he should become a Carlist soldier, and
+fight on for that cause till it was hopeless. In his French captivity
+he loses the faith which was one with the Carlist cause, and in
+England he reads Darwin and becomes an evolutionist of the ardor which
+the evolutionists have now lost. He wanders over Europe with the
+English girl whom he worships with an intellectual rather than
+passionate ardor, and after her death he ends at Barcelona in time to
+share one of the habitual revolutions of the province and to spend
+several years in one of its prisons. When he comes out it is into a
+world which he is doomed to leave; he is sick to death and in hopeless
+poverty; he has lost the courage of his revolutionary faith if not his
+fealty to it; all that he asks of the world is leave to creep out of
+it and somewhere die in peace. He thinks of an elder brother who like
+himself was born in the precincts of the Cathedral where generations
+of their family have lived and died, and his brother does not deny
+him. In fact the kind, dull gardener welcomes him to a share of his
+poverty, and Gabriel begins dying where he began living. The kindness
+between the brothers is as simple in the broken adventurer whose wide
+world has failed him as in the aging peasant, pent from his birth in
+the Cathedral close, with no knowledge of anything beyond it. All
+their kindred who serve in their several sort the stepmother church,
+down to the gardener's son whose office is to keep dogs out of the
+Cathedral and has the title of _perrero_, are good to the returning
+exile. They do not well understand what and where he has been; the
+tradition of his gifted youth when he was dedicated to the church and
+forsook her service at the altar for her service in the field, remains
+unquestioned, and he is safe in the refuge of his family who can offer
+mainly their insignificance for his protection. The logic of the fact
+is perfect, and Gabriel's emergence from the quiet of his retreat
+inevitably follows from the nature of the agitator as the logic of
+his own past and has the approval at least of the _perrero_ and the
+allegiance of the rest. What is very important in the affair is that
+most of the inhabitants of this Cathedral-world, rich and poor, good,
+bad, and indifferent, mean and generous, are few of them wicked
+people, as wickedness is commonly understood; they all have their
+habitual or their occasional moments of good will.
+
+The refugee is tired of his past but he does not deny his faith in
+humanity; his doctrine only postpones to a time secularly remote the
+redemption of humanity from its secular suffering. He begins at once
+to do good; he rescues his kind elder brother from the repudiation of
+the daughter whom he has cast off because her seduction has condemned
+her to a life of shame; he wins back the poor prostitute to her home,
+and forces her father to tolerate her in it.
+
+Most of the Cathedral folk are of course miserably poor, but willing
+to be better than they are if they can keep from starving; the fierce
+and prepotent Cardinal who is over them all, has moments of the common
+good will, when he forgives all his enemies except the recalcitrant
+canons. He likes to escape from these, and talk with the elderly
+widow of the gardener whom he has known from his boyhood, and to pity
+himself in her presence and smoke himself free from, his rancor and
+trouble. He is such a prelate as we know historically in enough
+instances; but he is pathetic in that simplicity which survives in him
+and almost makes good the loss of innocence in Latin souls. He keeps
+with him the young girl who is the daughter of his youth, and whom
+it cuts him to the soul to have those opprobrious canons imagine his
+mistress. He is one out of the many figures that affirm their veracity
+in the strange world where they have their being; and he is only the
+more vivid as the head of a hierarchy which he rules rather violently
+though never ignobly.
+
+But the populace, the underpaid domestics and laborers of the strange
+ecclesiastical world in their wretched over-worked lives and hopeless
+deaths are what the author presents most vividly. There is the death
+of the cobbler's baby which starves at the starving mother's breast
+which the author makes us witness in its insupportable pathos, but his
+art is not chiefly shown in such extremes: his affair includes the
+whole tragical drama of the place, both its beauty and its squalor of
+fact, but he keeps central the character of the refugee, Gabriel Luna,
+in the allegiance to his past which he cannot throw off. When he
+begins to teach the simple denizens of the Cathedral, some of them
+hear him gladly, and some indifferently, and some unwillingly, but
+none intelligently. He fails with them in that doctrine of patience
+which was his failure, as an agitator, with the proletariat wherever
+he has been; they could not wait through geological epochs for the
+reign of mercy and justice which he could not reasonably promise the
+over-worked and underfed multitude to-morrow or the day after. His
+brother, who could not accept his teachings, warns him that the
+people of the Cathedral will not understand him and cannot accept
+his scientific gospel, and for a while he desists. In fact he takes
+service in the ceremonial of the Cathedral; he even plays a mechanical
+part in the procession of Corpus Christi, and finally he becomes one
+of the night-watchmen who guard the temple from the burglaries always
+threatening its treasures.
+
+The story is quite without the love-interest which is the prime
+attraction of our mostly silly fiction. Gabriel's association with the
+English girl who wanders over Europe with him is scarcely passionate
+if it is not altogether platonic; his affection for the poor girl for
+whom he has won her father's tolerance if not forgiveness becomes
+a tender affection, but not possibly more; and there is as little
+dramatic incident as love interest in the book. The extraordinary
+power of it lies in its fealty to the truth and its insight into
+human nature. The reader of course perceives that it is intensely
+anti-ecclesiastical, but he could make no greater mistake than to
+imagine it in any wise Protestant. The author shares this hate or
+slight of ecclesiasticism with all the Spanish novelists, so far as I
+know them; most notably with Perez Galdós in _Doña Perfecta_ and _Lean
+Rich_, with Pardo-Bazan in several of her stories, with Palacio
+Valdés in the less measure of _Marta y Maria_, and _La Hermana de San
+Sulpicio_ and even with the romanticist Valera in _Pepita Jimenez_.
+But it may be said that while Ibañez does not go any farther than
+Galdós, for instance, he is yet more intensively agnostic. He is the
+standard bearer of the scientific revolt in the terms of fiction which
+spares us no hope of relief in the religious notion of human life here
+or hereafter that the Hebraic or Christian theology has divined.
+
+It is right to say this plainly, but the reader who can suffer it from
+the author will find his book one of the fullest and richest in modern
+fiction, worthy to rank with the greatest Russian work and beyond
+anything yet done in English. It has not the topographical range of
+Tolstoy's _War and Peace_, or _Resurrection_; but in its climax it
+is as logically and ruthlessly tragical as anything that the Spanish
+spirit has yet imagined.
+
+Whoever can hold on to the end of it will find his reward in the full
+enjoyment of that "noble terror" which high tragedy alone can
+give. Nothing that happens in the solemn story--in which something
+significant is almost always happening--is of the supreme effect of
+the socialist agitator's death at the hands of the disciples whom he
+has taught to expect mercy and justice on earth, but forbidden to
+expect it within the reach of the longest life of any man or race of
+men. His rebellious followers come at night into the Cathedral where
+Gabriel is watching, to rob an especially rich Madonna, whom he has
+taught them to regard as a senseless and wasteful idol, and they
+will not hear him when he pleads with them against the theft. The
+inevitable irony of the event is awful, but it is not cruel, rather it
+is the supreme touch of that pathos which seems the crowning motive of
+the book.
+
+W.D. HOWELLS.
+
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+THE SHADOW OF THE CATHEDRAL
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+The dawn was just rising when Gabriel Luna arrived in front of the
+Cathedral, but in the narrow street of Toledo it was still night. The
+silvery morning light that had scarcely begun to touch the eaves and
+roofs, spread out more freely in the little Piazza del Ayuntamiento,
+bringing out of the shadows the ugly front of the Archbishop's Palace,
+and the towers of the municipal buildings capped with black slate, a
+sombre erection of the time of Charles V.
+
+Gabriel walked for some time up and down the deserted square, wrapping
+himself up to his eyes in the muffler of his cloak, while at intervals
+his hollow cough shook him painfully. Without daring to stop walking
+on account of the bitter cold, he looked at the great doorway called
+"del Perdon," the only part of the church able to present a really
+imposing aspect. He recalled other famous cathedrals, isolated,
+occupying commanding situations, showing themselves freely in the full
+pride of their beauty, and he compared them with this Cathedral
+of Toledo, the mother-church of Spain, smothered by the swarm of
+poverty-stricken buildings that surrounded it, clinging closely to its
+walls, permitting it to display none of its exterior beauties, beyond
+what could be seen from the narrow streets that closed it in on every
+side. Gabriel, who was acquainted with its interior magnificence,
+thought of the deceptive oriental houses, outwardly squalid and
+miserable, but inwardly rich in alabasters and traceries. Jews and
+Moors had not lived in Toledo for centuries in vain, their aversion to
+outward show seemed to have influenced the building of the Cathedral,
+now suffocated by the miserable hovels, pushed and piled up against
+it, as though seeking its protection.
+
+The little Piazza del Ayuntamiento was the only open space that
+allowed the Christian monument to display any of its grandeur; under
+this little patch of open sky the early morning light showed the three
+immense Gothic arches of its principal front, the hugely massive bell
+tower, with its salient angles, ornamented by the cap of the Alcuzon,
+a sort of black tiara, with three crowns, almost lost in the grey mist
+of the wintry dawn.
+
+Gabriel looked affectionately at the closed and silent fane, where his
+family lived, and where he himself had spent the happiest days of his
+life. How many years had passed since he had last seen it! And now he
+waited anxiously for the opening of its doorways.
+
+He had arrived in Toledo by train the previous night from Madrid.
+Before shutting himself up in his miserable little room in the Posada
+del Sangre (the ancient Messon del Sevillano, inhabited by Cervantes)
+he had felt a feverish desire to revisit the Cathedral, and had spent
+nearly an hour walking round it, listening to the barking of the
+Cathedral watch-dog, who growled suspiciously, hearing the sound of
+footsteps in the surrounding streets. He had been unable to sleep; the
+fact of returning to his native town after so many years of misery and
+adventures had taken from him all desire to rest, and, while it was
+still night, he again stole out to await near the Cathedral the moment
+that it should be opened.
+
+To while away the time he paced up and down the front, admiring again
+the beauties of the porch, and noting its defects aloud, as though he
+wished to call the stone benches of the Piazza and its wretched little
+trees as witnesses to his criticisms.
+
+An iron grating surmounted by urns of the seventeenth century ran in
+front of the porch, enclosing a wide, flagged space, where in former
+times the sumptuous processions of the Chapter had assembled, and
+where the multitude could admire the grotesque giants on high days and
+festivals.
+
+The first storey of the façade was broken in the centre by the great
+Puerta del Perdon, an enormous and very deeply-recessed Gothic arch,
+which narrowed as it receded by the gradations of its mouldings,
+adorned by statues of apostles, under open-worked canopies, and by
+shields emblazoned with lions and castles. On the pillar dividing the
+doorway stood Jesus in kingly crown and mantle, thin and drawn out,
+with the look of emaciation and misery that the imagination of
+the Middle Ages conceived necessary for the expression of Divine
+sublimity. In the tympanum a relievo represented the Virgin surrounded
+by angels, robed in the habit of St. Ildefonso, a pious legend
+repeated in various parts of the building as though it were one of its
+chief glories.
+
+On one side was the doorway called "de la Torre,"[1] on the other side
+that called "de los Escribanos,"[2] for by it entered in former days
+the guardians of public religion to take the oath to fulfil the duties
+of their office. Both were enriched with stone statues on the jambs,
+and by wreaths of little figures, foliage, and emblems that unrolled
+themselves among the mouldings till they met at the summit of the
+arch.
+
+[Footnote 1: Of the Tower.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Of the Scribes.]
+
+Above these three doorways with their exuberant Gothic rose the second
+storey of Greco-Romano and almost modern construction, causing Gabriel
+the same annoyance as would a discordant trumpet interrupting a
+symphony. Jesus and the twelve apostles, all life size, seated at the
+table, each under his own canopied niche, could be seen above the
+central porch, shut in by the two tower-like buttresses which divided
+the front into three parts. Beyond, two rows of arcades of inferior
+design, belonging to the Italian palace, extended as far as those
+under which Gabriel had so often played as a child when living in the
+house of the bell-ringer.
+
+The riches of the Church, thought Luna, were a misfortune for art; in
+a poorer church the uniformity of the ancient front would have been
+preserved. But, then, the Archbishop of Toledo had eleven millions of
+yearly revenue, and the Chapter as many more; they did not know what
+to do with their money, so started works and made reconstructions,
+and the decadent art produced monstrosities like that one of the Last
+Supper.
+
+Above, again, rose the third storey, two great arches that lighted the
+large rose of the central nave. The whole was crowned by a balustrade
+of open-worked stone following the sinuosities of the frontage, between
+the two salient masses that guarded it, the tower and the Musarabé
+chapel.
+
+Gabriel ceased his contemplation, seeing that he was no longer alone
+in front of the church. It was nearly daylight, and several women with
+bowed heads, their mantillas falling over their eyes, were passing in
+front of the iron grating. The crutches of a lame man rang out on the
+fine tiles of the pavement, and, out beyond the tower, under the
+great arch of communication between the archbishop's palace and the
+Cathedral, the beggars were gathering in order to take up their
+accustomed positions at the cloister door. The faithful and "God's
+creatures" [1] knew one another; every morning they were the first
+occupants of the church, and this daily meeting had established a kind
+of fraternity, and with much coughing and hoarseness they all lamented
+the cold of the morning and the lateness of the bell-ringer in coming
+down to open the doors.
+
+[Footnote 1: _Pordioseres_.]
+
+A door opened beyond the archbishop's arch, that of the tower and
+the staircase leading to the dwellings in the upper cloister. A man
+crossed the street rattling a huge bunch of keys, and, followed by the
+usual morning assemblage, he proceeded to open the door of the lower
+cloister, narrow and pointed as an arrow-head. Gabriel recognised him,
+it was Mariano, the bell-ringer. To avoid being noticed he remained
+motionless in the _Piazza_, allowing those to pass first through
+the Puerta del Mollete,[1] who seemed so anxious to hurry into the
+Metropolitan church, lest their usual places should be stolen from
+them and occupied by others.
+
+[Footnote 1: Door of the rolls, or loaves.]
+
+At last he decided to follow them, and slowly descended the same steps
+leading down into the cloister, for the Cathedral, being built in a
+hollow, is much lower than the adjacent streets.
+
+Everything appeared the same. There on the walls were the great
+frescoes of Bayan y Maella, representing the works and great deeds
+of Saint Eulogio, his preaching in the land of the Moors, and the
+cruelties of the infidels, who, with big turbans and enormous
+whiskers, were beating the saint. In the interior of the Mollete
+doorway was represented the horrible martyrdom of the Child de la
+Guardia; that legend born at the same time in so many Catholic towns
+during the heat of anti-Semitic hatred, the sacrifice of the Christian
+child, stolen from his home by Jews of grim countenance, who crucified
+him in order to tear out his heart and drink his blood.
+
+The damp was rapidly effacing this romantic fresco, that filled the
+sides of the archway like the frontispiece of a book, causing it to
+scale off; but Gabriel could still see the horrible face of the judge
+standing at the foot of the cross, and the ferocious gesture of the
+man, who with his knife in his mouth, was bending forward to tear out
+the heart of the little martyr; theatrical figures, but they had often
+disturbed his childish dreams.
+
+The garden in the midst of the cloister showed even in midwinter its
+southern vegetation of tall laurels and cypresses, stretching their
+branches through the grating of the arches that, five on each side,
+surrounded the square, and rising to the capitals of the pillars.
+Gabriel looked a long time at the garden, which was higher than the
+cloister; his face was on a level with the ground on which his father
+had laboured so many years ago; at last he saw again that charming
+corner of verdure--the Jews' market converted into a garden by the
+canons centuries before. The remembrance of it had followed him
+everywhere--in the Bois de Boulogne, in Hyde Park; for him the garden
+of the Toledan Cathedral was the most beautiful of all gardens, for it
+was the first he had even known in his life.
+
+The beggars seated on the doorsteps watched him curiously, without
+daring to stretch out their hands; they could not tell if this early
+morning visitor with the worn-out cloak, the shabby hat, and the old
+boots, was simply an inquisitive traveller, or whether he was one of
+their own order, choosing a position about the Cathedral from whence
+to beg alms.
+
+Annoyed by this curiosity, Luna walked down the cloister, passing
+by the two doors that opened into the church. The one called del
+Presentacion is a lovely example of Plateresque art, chiselled like a
+jewel, and adorned with fanciful and happy trifles. Going on further,
+he came to the back of the staircase by which the archbishops
+descended from their palace to the church; a wall covered with Gothic
+interlacings, and large escutcheons, and almost on the level of the
+ground was the famous "stone of light," a thin slice of marble as
+clear as glass, which gave light to the staircase, and was the
+admiration of all the countryfolk who came to visit the cloister. Then
+came the door of Santa Catalina, black and gold, with richly-carved
+polychrome foliage, mixed with lions and castles, and on the jambs two
+statues of prophets.
+
+Gabriel went on a few steps further as he saw that the wicket of the
+doorway was being opened from inside. It was the bell-ringer going
+his rounds and opening all the doors; first of all a dog came out,
+stretching his neck as though he was going to bark with hunger, then
+two men with their caps over their eyes, wrapped in brown cloaks; the
+bell-ringer held up the curtain to let them pass out.
+
+"Well, good-day, Mariano," said one of them by way of farewell.
+
+"Good-night to the caretakers of God.... May you sleep well."
+
+Gabriel recognised the nocturnal guardians of the Cathedral; locked
+into the church since the previous night, they were now going to their
+homes to sleep.
+
+The dog trotted off in the direction of the seminary to get his
+breakfast off the scraps left by the students, free till such time as
+the guardians came to look for him, to lock themselves in the church
+once more.
+
+Luna walked down the steps of the doorway into the Cathedral. His feet
+had scarcely touched the pavement before he felt on his face the cold
+touch of the clammy air, like an underground vault. In the church
+it was still dark, but above the stained glass of the hundreds of
+different-sized windows glowed in the early dawn, looking like magic
+flowers opening with the first splendours of day. Below, among the
+enormous pillars that looked like a forest of stone, all was darkness,
+broken here and there by the uncertain red spots of the lamps burning
+in the different chapels, wavering in the shadows. The bats flew in
+and out round the columns, wishing to prolong their possession of the
+fane, till the first rays of the sun shone through the windows; they
+fluttered over the heads of the devotees, who, kneeling before the
+altars, were praying loudly, as pleased to be in the Cathedral at that
+early hour as though it were their own house. Others chattered with
+the acolytes and other servants of the church, who were coming in by
+the different doors, sleepy and stretching themselves like workmen
+coming to their work. In the twilight, figures in black cloaks glided
+by on their way to the sacristy, stopping to make genuflections before
+each image; and in the distance, invisible in the darkness, you
+could still divine the presence of the bell-ringer, like a restless
+hobgoblin, by the rattle of his bunch of keys and the creaking of the
+doors he opened on his round.
+
+The Cathedral was awake. Echo repeated the banging of the doors from
+nave to nave; a large broom, making a saw-like noise, began to sweep
+in front of the sacristy; the church vibrated under the blows of
+certain acolytes engaged in removing the dust from the famous carved
+stalls in the choir; it seemed as though the Cathedral had awoke
+with its nerves irritated, and that the slightest touch produced
+complaints.
+
+The men's footsteps resounded with a tremendous echo, as though the
+tombs of all the kings, archbishops and warriors hidden under the
+tiled floor were being disturbed.
+
+The cold inside the church was even more intense than that outside;
+this, together with the damp of its soil traversed by underground
+water drains, and the leakage of subterranean and hidden tanks
+that stained the pavement, made the poor canons in the choir cough
+horribly, "shortening their lives," as they complainingly said.
+
+The morning light began to spread through the naves, bringing out of
+the darkness the spotless whiteness of the Toledan Cathedral, the
+purity of its stone making it the lightest and most beautiful of
+temples. One could now see all the elegant and daring beauty of the
+eighty-eight pillars soaring audaciously into space, white as frozen
+snow, and the delicate ribs interlacing to carry the vaulting. In the
+upper storey the sun shone through the large stained-glass windows,
+making them look like fairy gardens.
+
+Gabriel seated himself on the base of one of the pilasters between two
+columns; but he was soon obliged to rise and move on, the dampness
+of the stone, and the vault-like cold throughout the whole building
+penetrated to his very bones.
+
+He strolled through the naves, attracting the attention of the
+devotees, who stopped in their prayers to watch him. A stranger at
+that early hour, which belonged specially to the familiars of the
+Cathedral, excited their curiosity.
+
+The bell-ringer passed him several times, following him with uneasy
+glance, as though this unknown man, of poverty-stricken aspect, who
+wandered aimlessly about at an hour when the treasures of the church
+were, as a rule, not so strictly watched, inspired him with little
+confidence.
+
+Another man met him near the high altar. Luna recognised him also: it
+was Eusebio, the sacristan of the chapel of the Sagrario, "Azul de la
+Virgen,"[1] as he was called by the Cathedral staff, on account of the
+celestial colour of the cloak he wore on festival days.
+
+[Footnote 1: Virgin's blue.]
+
+Six years had passed since Gabriel had last seen him, but he had not
+forgotten his greasy carcase, his surly face with its narrow, wrinkled
+forehead fringed with bristly hair, his bull neck that scarcely
+allowed him to breathe, and that made every breath like the blast of a
+bellows. All the servants of the Cathedral envied him his post, which
+was the most lucrative of all, to say nothing of the favour he enjoyed
+with the archbishop and the canons.
+
+"Virgin's blue" considered the Cathedral as his own peculiar property,
+and he often came very near turning out those who inspired him with
+any antipathy.
+
+He fixed his bold eyes on the vagabond he saw walking about the
+church, making an effort to raise his overhanging brows. Where had he
+seen this strange fellow before? Gabriel noted the effort he made
+to recall his memory, and turned his back to examine with pretended
+interest a coloured panel hanging on a pillar.
+
+Flying from the curiosity excited by his presence in the fane, he went
+out into the cloister; there he felt more at his ease, quite alone.
+The beggars were chattering, seated on the doorsteps of the Mollete;
+many of the clergy passed through them, entering the church hurriedly
+by the door of the Presentacion; the beggars saluted them all by name,
+but without stretching out their hands. They knew them, they all
+belonged to the "household," and among friends one does not beg. They
+were there to fall on the strangers, and they waited patiently for the
+coming of the English; for, surely, all the strangers who came from
+Madrid by the early morning train could only be from England.
+
+Gabriel waited near the door, knowing that those coming from the
+cloister must enter by it. He crossed the archbishop's arch, and,
+following the open staircase of the palace, descended into the street,
+re-entering the church by the Mollete door. Luna, who knew all the
+history of the Cathedral, remembered the origin of its name. At first
+it was called "of justice," because under it the Vicar-General of
+the Archbishopric gave audience. Later it was called "del Mollete,"
+because every day after high mass the acolytes and vergers assembled
+there for the blessing of the half-pound loaves, or rolls of bread
+distributed to the poor. Six hundred bushels of wheat--as Luna
+remembered--were distributed yearly in this alms, but this was in the
+days when the yearly revenues of the Cathedral were more than eleven
+millions.
+
+Gabriel felt annoyed by the curious glances of the clergy, and of the
+devout entering the church. They were people accustomed to seeing each
+other daily at the same hour, and they felt their curiosity excited by
+seeing a stranger breaking in on the monotony of their lives.
+
+He drew back to the further end of the cloister, then some words from
+the beggars made him retrace his steps.
+
+"Ah! here comes old 'Vara de palo.'"[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Wooden staff.]
+
+"Good-day, Señor Esteban!"
+
+A small man dressed in black, and shaved like a cleric, came down the
+steps.
+
+"Esteban! Esteban!" cried Luna, placing himself between him and the
+door of the Presentacion.
+
+"Wooden Staff" looked at him with his clear eyes like amber, the quiet
+eyes of a man used to spending long hours in the Cathedral, with never
+a rebellious thought arising to disturb his immovable beatitude. He
+stood doubting for some time, as though he could scarcely credit the
+remote resemblance in this thin, pale face, to another that lived in
+his memory, but at last, with a pained surprise, he became convinced
+of its identity.
+
+"Gabriel! my brother! is it really you?"
+
+And the rigidly set face of the Cathedral servant, which seemed to
+have acquired the immobility of its pillars and statues, relaxed with
+an affectionate smile.
+
+"When did you come? Where have you been? What is your life? Why have
+you come?"
+
+"Wooden Staff" expressed his surprise by incessant questions, never
+giving his brother time to answer.
+
+Gabriel at length explained, that he had arrived the previous night,
+and that he had waited outside the church since early dawn in the
+hopes of seeing his brother.
+
+"I have now come from Madrid, but before that I was in many places:
+in England, in France, in Belgium, who knows where besides. I have
+wandered from one town to another, always struggling against hunger
+and the cruelty of men. My footsteps have been dogged by poverty and
+the police. When I rest a little, worn out by this Wandering Jew's
+existence, Justice, inspired by fear, orders me to move on, and so
+once again I begin my march. I am a man to be feared, Esteban, even as
+you now see me, with my body ruined before old age, and the certainty
+before me of a speedy death. Again, yesterday in Madrid, they told me
+I should be sent once more to prison if I stayed there any longer, and
+so in the evening I took the train. Where shall I go? The world is
+wide; but for me and other rebels it is very small, and narrows till
+it does not leave a hand's breadth of ground for our feet. In all the
+world nothing was left me but you, and this peaceful silent corner
+where you live so happily, and so, I came to seek you. If you turn me
+out, nothing will be left me but to die in prison, or in a hospital,
+if indeed they would take me in when they know my name."
+
+And Gabriel, spent with his words, coughed painfully, a hollow
+cavernous cough that seemed to tear his chest. He expressed himself
+vehemently, moving his arms freely, with the gestures of a man used to
+speaking in public, burning with the zeal of his cause.
+
+"Ah! brother, brother!" said Esteban, with an accent of mild reproof,
+"what has it profited you reading so many books and newspapers? What
+is the use of trying to disturb and upset things that are all right;
+and if they are all wrong, is there no other means of righting them
+possible? If you had followed your own path quietly, you would have
+been a beneficiary of the Cathedral, and, who knows, you might have
+had a seat in the choir among the canons, for the honour and profit of
+the family! But you were always wrong-headed, although you were the
+cleverest of us all. Cursed talent that leads to such misery! What
+I have suffered, brother, trying to hear about your affairs! What
+bitterness have I not gone through since you last came here! I thought
+you were contented and happy in the printing office in Barcelona,
+receiving a salary that was a fortune compared to what we earn here.
+I was disturbed at reading your name so often in the papers, at those
+meetings, where the division of everything is advocated, the death of
+religion and of the family, and I do not know what follies besides.
+The 'companion' Luna said this, or the 'companion' Luna has done the
+other, and I tried to hide from the people of the 'household' that
+this 'companion' could be you, guessing that such madness must turn
+out ill--furiously ill--and after--after came the affairs of the
+bombs."
+
+"I had nothing to do with that," said Gabriel sadly. "I am only a
+theorist; I condemned the action as premature and inefficacious."
+
+"I know it, Gabriel. I always thought you innocent. You so good, so
+gentle, who since you were a little one always astonished us by your
+kindness; you who seemed like a saint, as our poor mother used to say!
+You kill, and so treacherously, by means of such infernal artifices!
+Holy Jesus!"
+
+And the "Wooden Staff" was silent, overcome by the recollection of
+those attempts that had overwhelmed his brother.
+
+"But what is certain is," he continued after a little, "that you fell
+into the trap spread by the Government after those affairs. What I
+suffered for a while! Now and again I heard firing in the castle ditch
+beyond there, and I searched anxiously in the papers for the names
+of those executed, always fearing to find yours. There were rumours
+current of horrible tortures inflicted on those taken to make them
+confess the truth, and I thought of you, so frail, so delicate, and
+I feared that some day you would be found dead in a dungeon. And I
+suffered even more from my anxiety that no one here should know of
+your situation; you a Luna! a son of Señor Esteban, the old gardener
+of the Primate, with whom all the canons and even the archbishop
+talked. You mixed up with those infernal scoundrels who wish to
+destroy the world. For this reason when Eusebio the 'Virgin's Blue,'
+asked me if you could possibly be the Luna of whom he read in the
+papers, I replied that my brother was in America, that I heard from
+him now and again, but that he was occupied with a big business--you
+see what pain! Fearing from one moment to another that they would
+kill you, unable to speak, unable to complain, fearful of telling
+my distress even to my family. How often have I prayed in there!
+Accustomed as we of the 'household' are to associate daily with
+God and the saints, we may be a little hard and narrow-minded, but
+misfortune softens the heart, and I addressed myself to Her who can do
+everything, to our patroness the Virgin of the Sagrario, begging her
+to remember you, who used to kneel at her shrine as a little child
+when you were preparing to enter the seminary."
+
+Gabriel smiled gently as though admiring the simplicity of his
+brother.
+
+"Do not laugh, I pray you--your smile wounds me. The Divine Lady did
+all she could for you. Months afterwards I learnt that you and others
+had been put on board ship with orders never to return to Spain, and,
+up to the present time, never a letter or a scrap of news, good or
+ill. I thought you had died, Gabriel, in those distant lands, and more
+than once I have prayed for your poor soul, that I am sure wanted it."
+
+The "companion" showed in his eyes his gratitude for these words.
+
+"Thanks, Esteban. I admire your faith, but I did not come out of that
+dark adventure as well as you imagine. It would have been far better
+to have died. The aureole of a martyr is worth more than to enter a
+dungeon a man and come out of it a limp rag. I am very ill, Esteban,
+my sentence is irrevocable. I have no stomach left, my lungs are gone,
+and this body that you see is like a dislocated machine that can
+hardly move, creaking in every joint, as though all the bits intended
+to fall apart. The Virgin who saved me at your recommendation might
+really have interceded a little more in my favour, softening my
+jailors. Those wretches think to save the world by giving free rein
+to those wild beast instincts that slumber in us all, relics of a
+far-away past. Since then, at liberty, life has been more painful than
+death. On my return to Spain, pressed by poverty and persecution, my
+life has been a hell. I dare stop in no place where men congregate;
+they hunt me like dogs, forcing me to live out of the towns, driving
+me to the mountains, into the deserts, where no human beings live. It
+appears I am still a man to be feared, more to be feared than those
+desperadoes who throw bombs, because I can speak, because I carry in
+me an irresistible strength which forces me to preach the Truth if
+I find myself in the presence of miserable and trodden-down
+wretches--but all this is coming to an end. You may be easy, brother,
+I am a dead man; my mission is drawing to a close, but others will
+come after me, and again others. The furrow is open and the seed is in
+its bowels--'GERMINAL!'[1] as a friend of my exile shouted as he saw
+the last rays of the setting sun from the scaffold of the gibbet. I am
+dying, and I think I have the right to rest for a few months. I wish
+to enjoy for the first time in my life the sweets of silence, of
+absolute quiet, of incognito; to be no one, for no one to know me; to
+inspire neither sympathy nor fear. I should wish to be as a statue
+on the doorway, as a pillar in the Cathedral, immovable, over whose
+surface centuries have glided without leaving the slightest trace or
+emotion. To wait for death as a body that eats or breathes, but cannot
+think or suffer, nor feel enthusiasm; this to me would be happiness,
+brother. I do not know where to go; men are waiting for me out beyond
+these doors to drive me on again. Will you let me stay with you?"
+
+[Footnote 1: "It will sprout."]
+
+For all answer the "Wooden Staff" laid his hand affectionately on
+Gabriel's arm.
+
+"Let us come upstairs, madman--you shall not die, I will nurse you;
+what you want is care and quiet. We will cure that hot head, which
+seems like that of Don Quixote. Do you remember when you were a child
+reading us his history in the long evenings? Go along, dreamer, what
+does it signify to you if the world is better or worse regulated?
+As we found it, so it has always been. What does signify is that we
+should live like Christians, with the certainty that the other life
+will be a better one, as it will be the work of God and not of man. Go
+up--let us go up."
+
+And taking hold of the vagabond affectionately, they passed out of
+the cloister through the beggars, who had followed the interview with
+curious eyes, without, however, being able to hear a single word. They
+crossed the street and entered the staircase of the tower. The steps
+were of red brick, worn and broken; the whitewashed walls were covered
+on all sides with grotesque drawings and various inscriptions,
+scrawled by those who had ascended the tower, attracted by the fame of
+the big bell.
+
+Gabriel went up slowly, gasping, and stopping at every step.
+
+"I am ill, Esteban, very ill; these bellows let out the wind in every
+part."
+
+Then, as though repenting his forgetfulness, he suddenly asked:
+
+"And Pepa, your wife? I hope she is all right."
+
+The brows of the Cathedral servant contracted, and his eyes became
+bright as though full of tears.
+
+"She died," he said with laconic sadness.
+
+Gabriel stopped suddenly, clinging to the handrail, struck with
+surprise; then, after a short silence, he went on, wishing to console
+his brother.
+
+"But, Sagrario, my niece, she must have grown a beauty. The last time
+I saw her she looked like a queen, with her crown of auburn hair and
+her smiling face, with its golden bloom, like a ripe apricot. Did she
+marry the cadet, or is she still with you?"
+
+The "Wooden Staff" appeared even more sad, and he looked grimly at his
+brother.
+
+"She also died," he said drily.
+
+"Sagrario also dead!" exclaimed Gabriel astounded.
+
+"She is dead to me, which is the same thing. Brother, by all you love
+best in the world, do not speak to me of her."
+
+Gabriel understood that he had opened some deep wound by his
+inquiries, and so said no more, beginning once more his ascent. During
+his absence a terrible event had happened in his brother's life--one
+of those events that break up a family and separate for ever those
+that survive.
+
+They crossed the gallery covered by the archbishop's archway and
+entered the upper cloister called "the Claverias": four arcades
+of equal length to those of the lower cloister, but quite bare of
+decoration, and with a poverty-stricken aspect. The pavement was
+chipped and broken, the four sides had a balustrade running round
+between the flat pillars that supported the old beams of the roof. It
+had been a provisional work three hundred years ago, and had always
+remained in the same state. All along the whitewashed walls, the doors
+and windows belonging to the "habitacions" of the Cathedral servants
+opened without order or symmetry. These were transmitted with the
+office from father to son. The cloister, with its low arcade, looked
+like a street having houses on one side only; opposite was the flat
+colonnade with its balustrade, against which the pointed branches of
+the cypresses in the garden rested. Above the roof of the cloister
+could be seen the windows of another row of "habitacions," for nearly
+all the dwellings in the Claverias had two stories.
+
+It was the population of a whole town that lived above the Cathedral,
+on a level with its roofs; and when night fell, and the staircase of
+the tower was locked, it remained quite isolated from the city. This
+semi-ecclesiastical tribe was born and died in the very heart of
+Toledo without ever going down into the streets, clinging with
+traditional instinct to the carved mountain of stone, whose arches
+served it as a refuge. They lived saturated with the scent of incense,
+breathing the peculiar smell of mould and old iron belonging to
+ancient buildings, and with no more horizon than the arches of the
+bell tower, whose height soared into the small patch of blue sky
+visible from the cloister.
+
+The "companion" Luna thought he was returning with one step to the
+days of his childhood. Little children like the Gabriel of former days
+were playing about the four galleries, and sitting in that part of the
+cloister bathed by the first rays of the sun. Women, who reminded
+of his mother, were shaking the bedclothes out over the garden, or
+sweeping the red bricks opposite their dwellings; everything seemed
+the same. Time had left it quite alone, evidently thinking there was
+nothing there that he could possibly age. The "companion" could now
+see two sketches of lay brothers that he had drawn with charcoal when
+he was eight years old; had it not been for the children one might
+have thought that life had been suspended in that corner of the
+Cathedral, as though this aerial population could neither be born nor
+die.
+
+The "Wooden Staff," frowning and gloomy since the last words were
+spoken, tried to give some explanation to his brother.
+
+"I live in our same old house. They left it to me out of respect to
+the memory of my father. I am grateful to the clergy of the Chapter,
+taking into consideration that I am nothing but a sad old 'Wooden
+Staff.' Since my misfortune happened I have had an old woman to keep
+house, and Don Luis, the Chapel-master, lives with me. You will come
+to know him, a young priest of great talent, but quite hidden here:
+one of God's souls, whom they think crazy in the Cathedral, but who
+lives like an angel."
+
+They entered into the house of the Lunas, which was one of the best in
+the Claverias. By the door two rows of flower vases in the shape of
+a clock-case fastened to the walls were filled with hanging plants;
+inside, in the sitting room, Gabriel found everything the same as
+during his father's lifetime. The white walls that with years had
+become like ivory, were still decorated with the old engravings of
+saints, the chairs of mahogany, bright with constant rubbing, looked
+like new, in spite of their curves, which showed them to belong to
+a previous century, and their seats almost ready to drop through.
+Through a half-open door he could see into the kitchen, where his
+brother had gone to give some orders to a timid-looking old woman. In
+one corner of the room, half hidden, was a sewing machine. Luna had
+seen his niece working at it the last time he came to the Cathedral.
+It was the permanent remembrance the "little one" had left behind her
+after that catastrophe which had filled her father with such gloomy
+sadness. Through a back window of the room Gabriel could see the inner
+court, which made this "habitacion" one of the most charming in the
+Claverias, the open expanse of sky, and the upper rooms on all four
+sides, supported by rows of slender pillars, that made the courtyard
+look like a little cloister.
+
+Esteban came back and rejoined his brother.
+
+"You must say what you would like for breakfast. It would soon be
+ready; ask, man, ask for what you want, for though I am poor I shall
+take little credit to myself unless I can make you pick up a little
+and lose that look of a resuscitated corpse."
+
+Gabriel smiled sadly.
+
+"It is useless your troubling; my stomach is quite gone; a little milk
+is enough for it, and I am thankful if it retains it."
+
+Esteban ordered the old woman to go into the town in search of the
+milk, and he had hardly seated himself by his brother's side when the
+door giving into the cloister opened, and the head of a young man
+appeared.
+
+"Good-day, uncle!" he exclaimed.
+
+His face was unhealthy and currish, the eyes were malicious, and above
+his ears were combed two large tufts of glossy hair.
+
+"Come in, vagabond, come in," said the "Wooden Staff."
+
+And he added, turning to his brother:
+
+"Do you know who this is? No? It is the son of our poor brother, whom
+God has taken to his glory. He lives in the upper dwellings of the
+cloister with his mother, who washes the linen of the choir, and of
+the señores canons; and it is a delight to see how she crimps the
+surplices. Thomas, lad, bow to the gentleman; it is your uncle
+Gabriel, who has just arrived from America, and from Paris, and I
+don't know from where else besides! From very far off countries, very
+far off."
+
+The young man saluted Gabriel, though he seemed rather scared by the
+sad and suffering face of their relative, whom he had heard his mother
+speak of as a mysterious and romantic being.
+
+"Here, as you see him," proceeded Esteban, speaking to his brother,
+and pointing to his nephew, "he is the worst lot in the Cathedral.
+The Señor Obrero[1] would more than once have turned him out into
+the street, were it not for respect to the memory of his father and
+grandfather, and also to the name he bears, for everybody knows the
+Lunas are as ancient in the Cathedral as the stones in its walls. No
+escapade enters his head but he hastens to carry it out, and he swears
+like a pagan even in full sacristy, under the very noses of the
+beneficiaries. Don't dare to deny it! Grumbler!"
+
+[Footnote 1: Canon in charge of the fabric.]
+
+And he shook his first at the lad, half severely, half smiling, as
+though in the bottom of his heart he felt some pride in his nephew's
+scrapes, who received his reprimand with grimaces that made his face
+twitch like that of a monkey, while his eyes retained their fixed and
+insolent stare.
+
+"It is a real shame," continued the uncle, "that you should comb your
+hair in that fashion, like the Merry Andrews that come to Toledo from
+the Court on great festivals. In the good old times of the Cathedral
+they would have shaved your head for you. But in these days of
+alienation, of universal licence and misfortunes, our holy church is
+as poor as a rat, and poverty does not give the señores canons much
+inclination to examine details. It is a grievous pity to see how
+everything is going down. What desolation, Gabriel! If you could only
+see it! The Cathedral is as beautiful as ever, but we do not now see
+the former beauty of the Lord's worship. The Chapel-master says the
+same thing, and he is indignant to see that on great festivals only
+about half-a-dozen musicians take their place in the middle of the
+choir. The young people who live in the Claverias have not our great
+love for the mother-church; they complain of the shortness of their
+salaries without considering that it is the temporalities that support
+religion. If this goes on I should not be surprised to see this
+popinjay and other rascals like him playing at 'Rayuelo'[1] in the
+crossways in front of the choir. May God forgive me!"
+
+[Footnote 1: A game of drawing lines.]
+
+And the simple "Wooden Staff" made a gesture as though scandalised at
+his own words. He went on:
+
+"This young fellow you see here is not satisfied with his position in
+life, and yet, though he is only a youth, he occupies the place his
+poor father could only attain to after thirty years' service. He
+aspires to be a toreador, and often on a Sunday he dares to take part
+in the bull-fight in the bull-ring of Toledo. His mother came down,
+dishevelled like a Magdalen, to tell me all about it, and I, thinking
+that as his father was dead I ought to act in his place, I watched for
+our gentleman as he returned tricked out smartly from the bull-ring,
+and I thrashed him up the tower staircase to his rooms with the same
+wooden staff that I use in the Cathedral, and he can tell you if I
+have not a heavy hand when I am angry. Virgin of the Sagrario! A Luna
+of the Holy Metropolitan Church lowering himself to be a bull-fighter!
+The canons did laugh, and even the Lord Cardinal himself, as I have
+been told, when they heard about the affair! A witty beneficiary has
+since nicknamed him the 'Tato,'[1] and so they all call him now in
+the Cathedral. So you see, brother, how much respect this rascal pays
+to his family."
+
+[Footnote 1: _Tato_--Armadillo.]
+
+The "Silenciario"[1] attempted to annihilate the "Tato" with his
+glance, but this latter only smiled without paying much attention,
+either to his uncle's words or looks.
+
+[Footnote 1: _Silenciario_--Officer appointed to keep silence.]
+
+"You would hardly believe, Gabriel," he continued, "that this creature
+often wants a bit of bread, and it is for this reason he commits all
+these follies. In spite of his wrong-headedness, since the age of
+twenty he has occupied the position of 'Perrero'[3] in the holy
+church, he has obtained what in better times only those could obtain
+who had served well and striven hard for years. He gets his six reals
+a day, and as he can go freely about the church he can show the
+curiosities to strangers; and so with the salary and the tips he
+gets, he is much better off than I am. The foreigners who visit the
+Cathedral, excommunicated people who look upon us as strange monkeys,
+and who think that anything interesting of ours is only worthy of a
+laugh, take a fancy to him. The English ask him if he is a toreador,
+and he--what does he want better than that! When he sees they pay him
+according as he pleases them, he brings out his pack of lies, for,
+unfortunately, no one has any check on the deceit, and he tells them
+about all the great bull-fights in which he has taken part in Toledo,
+and all about the bulls he has killed; and these blockheads from
+England make a note of it in their albums, and even some coarse hand
+may make a sketch of this imposter's head; all he cares for is that
+they should believe all his lies and give him a peseta on leaving. It
+matters very little to him, if when these heretics return to their
+own country they spread the report that in Toledo, in the Holy
+Metropolitan Church of all Spain, the Cathedral servants are
+bull-fighters, and assist in the ceremonies of worship between the
+bull runs. The sum total is, that he earns more than I do, but in
+spite of this he considers his employment beneath him. And such
+beautiful duties, too. To walk in the great processions before
+everyone, close to the Primate's great banner, with a staff covered
+with red velvet to support him should he chance to fall, and wearing a
+robe of scarlet brocade like a cardinal. Our Chapel-master, who knows
+a great deal about such things, says that when he wears that robe
+he looks like a certain Diente, or some name of the sort, who
+lived hundreds of years ago in Italy, and went down into hell, and
+afterwards described his journey in poetry."
+
+[Footnote 3: _Perrero_--Beadle whose special duty it is to chase the
+dogs out of church.]
+
+Sounds of footsteps were heard on the narrow circular staircase in the
+thickness of the wall that led from the sitting-room to the storey
+above.
+
+"It is Don Luis," said the "Wooden Staff," "he is going to say his
+mass in the chapel of the Sagrario, and afterwards to the choir."
+
+Gabriel rose from his sofa to salute the priest. He was feeble and
+small of stature, but the thing about him that struck you at first
+sight was the disproportion between his shrunken body and his immense
+head. The forehead, round and prominent, seemed to crush with its
+weight the dark and irregular features, much pitted by smallpox.
+He was very ugly, but still the expression of his blue eyes, the
+brilliancy of his white and regular teeth, and the ingenuous smile,
+almost childlike, that played on his lips, gave his face that
+sympathetic expression which showed him to be one of those simple
+souls wrapped up in their artistic fancies.
+
+"And so this gentleman is the brother of whom you have spoken to me so
+often," said he, hearing the introduction made by Esteban.
+
+He held out his hand in a friendly way to Gabriel. They both looked
+very sickly, but their bodily infirmities seemed to be a bond of
+attraction.
+
+"As the señor has studied in the seminary," said the Chapel-master,
+"he will know something about music."
+
+"It is the only thing that I remember of all those studies."
+
+"But having travelled so much all over the world, you must have heard
+a great deal of good music."
+
+"That is so. Music is to me the most pleasing of all the arts. I do
+not know much about it, but I feel it."
+
+"Very well, very well, we shall be good friends. You must tell me all
+sorts of things; how I envy you having travelled so much."
+
+He spoke like a restless child, without sitting down. Although the
+"Silenciario" offered him a chair at each of his flirtings round the
+room, he wandered from side to side in his shabby cloak, his hat in
+his hand--a poor worn-out hat with not a trace of pile left, knocked
+in, with a layer of grease on its flaps, miserable and old, like the
+cassock and the shoes. But in spite of this poverty the Chapel-master
+had a certain refinement about him. His hair, rather too long for his
+ecclesiastical dress, curled round his temples, and the dignified way
+in which he folded his cloak round his body reminded one of the cloak
+of a tenor at the opera. He had a sort of easy grace that betrayed the
+artist who, under the priestly robes, was longing to get rid of them,
+leaving them at his feet like a winding sheet.
+
+Some deep notes from the bell, like distant thunder, floated into the
+room through the cloister.
+
+"Uncle, they are calling us to the choir," said the "Tato." "We ought
+to have been in the Cathedral before now; it is nearly eight o'clock."
+
+"It is true, lad. I am glad you were here to remind me; let us be
+going."
+
+Then he added, speaking to the musical priest:
+
+"Don Luis, your mass is at eight o'clock. You can talk with Gabriel
+later on; now we must fulfil our obligations, for those who are late
+will, as you say, be turned out, even though our office hardly gives
+us enough to eat."
+
+The Chapel-master assented sadly with a movement of his head, and
+went out, following the two Cathedral servants. He seemed to go
+unwillingly, as though forced to a task that was to him both irksome
+and painful. He hummed absently while giving his hand to Gabriel, who
+thought he recognised a fragment of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony in
+the low and uneven tones that came from the lips of the young priest.
+
+Now that he was alone Luna stretched himself on the sofa, giving
+himself up to the fatigue he felt from his long wait before the
+Cathedral. His brother's old servant placed a little pitcher of
+milk by his side, and filling a cup, Gabriel drank, endeavouring to
+overcome the repugnance of his weak stomach, which almost refused to
+retain the liquid. His body, fatigued by his restless night and the
+long morning wait, at last assimilated the nourishment, and a soft,
+dreamy languor spread over him that he had not felt for a long time.
+He soon fell asleep, remaining for more than an hour motionless on the
+sofa, and though his breathing was disturbed, and his chest racked by
+his hollow cough, they were unable to wake him from his slumber.
+
+When he did awake, it was suddenly, with a nervous start that shook
+him from head to foot, making him bound from the sofa as though a
+spring had been touched. It was the wariness produced by his ever
+present danger, that had become habitual to him; the habit of
+restlessness formed in dark dungeons, expecting hourly to see the door
+open, to be beaten like a dog, or led off between a double file of
+muskets to the square of execution; the habit of living perpetually
+watched, of feeling in every country the espionage of the police
+around him, the habit of being awoke in the middle of the night in his
+wretched room in some inn by the order to leave at once; the unrest of
+the ancient Asheverus, who, as soon as he could enjoy a moment's rest,
+heard the eternal cry--"Go on. Go on."
+
+He did not try to sleep again, he preferred the present reality, the
+silence of the Cathedral which was to him as a gentle caress, the
+noble calm of the temple, that immense pile of worked stone, which
+seemed to press on him, enveloping him, hiding for ever his weakness
+and his persecutions.
+
+He went out into the cloister, and, resting his elbows on the
+balustrade, looked down into the garden.
+
+The Claverias seemed quite deserted. The children who had enlivened
+them in the early morning had gone to school, the women were inside
+their houses preparing their mid-day meal, there seemed to be no one
+in the cloister except himself; the sunlight bathed all one side,
+and the shadow of the pillars cut obliquely the great golden spaces
+flooding the pavement. The majestic silence, the holy calm of the
+Cathedral overpowered the agitator like a gentle narcotic. The seven
+centuries surrounding those stones seemed to him like so many veils
+hiding him from the rest of the world. In one of the dwellings of the
+Claverias you could hear the incessant tap, tap, of a hammer; it was
+that of a shoemaker whom Gabriel had seen through the window-panes,
+bending over his bench. In the square of sky framed by the roofs some
+pigeons were flying, lazily moving their wings, soaring in the vault
+of intense blue; some flew down into the cloister, and, perching on
+the balustrade, broke the religious silence with their gentle cooing;
+now and again the heavy door-curtains of the church were lifted, and
+a breath of air charged with incense floated over the garden of the
+Claverias, together with the deep notes of the organ, and the sound of
+voices chanting Latin words and solemnly prolonging the cadences.
+
+Gabriel looked at the garden surrounded by its arcades of white stone,
+with its rough buttresses of dark granite, in the chinks of which the
+rain had left an efflorescence of fungus, like little tufts of black
+velvet. The sun struck on one angle of the garden, leaving the rest
+in cool green shade, a conventual twilight. The bell-tower hid one
+portion of the sky, displaying on its reddish sides, ornamented with
+Gothic tracery and salient buttresses, the fillets of black marble
+with heads of mysterious personages, and the shields with the arms of
+the different archbishops who had assisted at its building; above,
+near the pinnacles of white stone, were seen the bells behind enormous
+gratings; from below they looked like three bronze birds in a cage of
+iron.
+
+Three deep strokes from a bell, echoing round the Cathedral, announced
+that the High Mass had arrived at its most solemn moment, the mountain
+of stone seemed to tremble with the vibration, which was transmitted
+through the naves and galleries, to the arcades and down to the lowest
+foundations.
+
+Again there was silence, which seemed even deeper after the bronze
+thunders; the cooing of the pigeons could again be heard, and, down in
+the garden, the twittering of the birds, warmed by the sun's rays that
+began to gild its cool twilight.
+
+Gabriel felt himself deeply moved; the sweet silence, the absolute
+calm, the feeling almost of non-existence overpowered him; and beyond
+those walls was the world, but here it could not be seen, it could not
+be felt; it remained respectful but indifferent before that monument
+of the past, that splendid sepulchre, in whose interior nothing
+excited its curiosity. Who would ever imagine he was there? That
+growth of seven centuries, built by vanished greatness for a dying
+faith, should be his last refuge. In the full tide of unbelief the
+church should be his sanctuary, as it had been in former days to
+those great criminals of the Middle Ages, who, from the height of the
+cloister mocked at justice, detained at the doors like the beggars.
+Here should be consummated in silence and calm the slow decay of his
+body, here he would die with the serene satisfaction of having died to
+the world long before. At last he realised his hope of ending his days
+in a corner of the sleepy Spanish Cathedral, the only hope that had
+sustained him as he wandered on foot along the highways of Europe,
+hiding himself from the civil guards and the police, spending his
+nights in ditches, huddled up, his head on his knees, fearing every
+moment to die of cold.
+
+He clung to the Cathedral as a shipwrecked and drowning man clings
+to the spar of a sinking ship; this had been his hope, and he was
+beginning to realise it. The church would receive him, like an old and
+infirm mother, unable to smile, but who could still stretch out her
+arms.
+
+"At last! At last!" murmured Luna.
+
+And he smiled, thinking of the world of sorrows and persecutions that
+he was leaving behind him, as though he were going to some remote
+place, situated in another planet, from which he would never return;
+the Cathedral would shelter him for ever.
+
+In the profound stillness of the cloister, that the sound of the
+street could not reach, the "companion" Luna thought he heard far off,
+very far off, the shrill sound of a trumpet and the muffled roll
+of drums, then he remembered the Alcazar of Toledo, dominating the
+Cathedral from its height, intimidating it with the enormous mass of
+its towers; they were the drums and trumpets of the Military Academy.
+
+These sounds were painful to Gabriel; the world had faded from his
+sight, and when he thought himself so very far from it, he could still
+feel its presence only a little way beyond the roof of the temple.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+Since the times of the second Cardinal de Bourbon Senior Esteban Luna
+had been gardener of the Cathedral, by the right that seemed firmly
+established in his family. Who was the first Luna that entered the
+service of the Holy Metropolitan Church? As the gardener asked himself
+this question he smiled complacently, raising his eyes to heaven, as
+though he would inquire of the immensity of space. The Lunas were as
+ancient as the foundations of the church; a great many generations
+had been born in the abode in the upper cloister, and even before the
+illustrious Cisneros built the Claverias the Lunas had lived in houses
+adjacent, as though they could not exist out of the shadow of the
+Primacy. To no one did the Cathedral belong with better right than
+to them. Canons, beneficiaries, archbishops passed; they gained the
+appointment, died, and others came in their places. It was a constant
+procession of new faces, of masters who came from every corner of
+Spain to take their seats in the choir, to die a few years afterwards,
+leaving the vacancies to be filled again by other newcomers; but the
+Lunas always remained at their post, as though the ancient family were
+another column of the many that supported the temple. It might happen
+that the archbishop who to-day was called Don Bernardo, might next
+year be called Don Caspar, or again another Don Fernando. But what
+seemed utterly impossible was that the Cathedral could exist without
+Lunas in the garden, in the sacristy, or in the crossways of the
+choir, accustomed as it had been for centuries to their services.
+
+The gardener spoke with pride of his descent, of his noble and
+unfortunate relative the constable Don Alvaro, buried like a king in
+his chapel behind the high altar; of the Pope Benedict XIII., proud
+and obstinate like all the rest of his family; of Don Pedro de Luna,
+fifth of his name to occupy the archiepiscopal throne of Toledo, and
+of other relatives not less distinguished.
+
+"We are all from the same stem," he said with pride. "We all came
+to the conquest of Toledo with the good King Alfonso VI. The only
+difference has been, that some Lunas took a fancy to go and fight
+the Moors, and they became lords, and conquered castles, whereas my
+ancestors remained in the service of the Cathedral, like the good
+Christians they were."
+
+With the satisfaction of a duke who enumerates his ancestors, the
+Señor Esteban carried back the line of the Lunas till it became misty
+and was lost in the fifteenth century. His father had known Don
+Francisco III. Lorenzana, a magnificent and prodigal prince of the
+church, who spent the abundant revenues of the archbishopric in
+building palaces and editing books, like a great lord of the
+Renaissance. He had known also the first Cardinal Bourbon, Don Luis
+II., and used to narrate the romantic life of this Infante. Brother of
+the King Carlos III., the custom that dedicated some of the younger
+branches to the church had made him a cardinal at nine years old. But
+that good lord, whose portrait hung in the Chapter House, with white
+hair, red lips and blue eyes, felt more inclination to the joys of
+this world than to the grandeurs of the church, and he abandoned the
+archbishopric to marry a lady of modest birth, quarrelling for ever
+with the king, who sent him into exile. And the old Luna, leaping
+from ancestor to ancestor through the long centuries, remembered the
+Archduke Alberto, who resigned the Toledan mitre to become Governor of
+the Low Countries, and the magnificent Cardinal Tavera, protector
+of the arts, all excellent princes, who had treated his family
+affectionately, recognising their secular adhesion to the Holy
+Metropolitan Church.
+
+The days of his youth were bad ones for the Señor Esteban; it was the
+time of the war of Independence. The French occupied Toledo, entering
+into the Cathedral like pagans, rattling their swords and prying into
+every corner at full High Mass. The jewels were concealed, the canons
+and beneficiaries, who were now called _prebendaries_, were living
+dispersed over the Peninsula. Some had taken refuge in places that
+were still Spanish, others were hidden in the towns, making vows for
+the speedy return of "the desired." It was pitiful to hear the choir
+with its few voices; only the very timid, who were bound to their
+seats and could not live away from them, had remained, and had
+recognised the usurping king. The second Cardinal de Bourbon, the
+gentle and insignificant Don Luis Maria, was in Cadiz, the only one of
+the family remaining in Spain, and the Cortes had laid their hands
+on him to give a certain dynastic appearance to their revolutionary
+authority.
+
+When the war was over and the poor cardinal returned to his seat, the
+Señor Esteban was moved to pity to see his sad and childlike face,
+with the small round head, and insignificant appearance; he returned
+discouraged and disheartened, after receiving his nephew Ferdinand
+VII. in Madrid. All his colleagues in the regency were either in
+prison or in exile, and that he did not suffer a like fate was solely
+due to his mitre and to his name. The unfortunate prelate thought
+he had done good service in maintaining the interests of his family
+during the war, and now he found himself accused of being Liberal, an
+enemy to religion and the throne, without being able to imagine how he
+had conspired against them. The poor Cardinal de Bourbon languished
+sadly in his palace, devoting his revenues to works in the Cathedral,
+till he died in 1823 at the beginning of the reaction, leaving his
+place to Inguanzo, the tribune of absolutism, a prelate with iron-grey
+whiskers, who had made his career as deputy in the Cortes at Cadiz,
+attacking as deputy every sort of reform, and advocating a return to
+the times of the Austrians as the surest means of saving his country.
+
+The good gardener saluted with equal cordiality the Bourbon Cardinal,
+hated by the kings, as the prelate with the whiskers, who made all
+the diocese tremble with his bitter and harassing temper, and his
+arrogance as a revolutionary Absolutist. For him, whoever occupied the
+throne of Toledo was a perfect man, whose acts no one should dare to
+discuss, and he turned a deaf ear to the murmurs of the canons and
+beneficiaries, who, smoking their cigarettes in the arbour of his
+garden, spoke of the genialities of this Señor de Inguanzo, and were
+indignant at the Government of Ferdinand VII. not being sufficiently
+firm, through fear of the foreigners, to re-establish the wholesome
+tribunal of the Inquisition.
+
+The only thing that troubled the gardener was to watch the decadence
+of his beloved Cathedral. The revenues of the archbishop and of the
+Chapter had been greatly wasted during the war. What had occurred was
+what happens after a great flood, when the waters begin to subside
+and carry everything away with them, leaving the land bare and
+uninhabited. The Primacy lost many of its rights, the tenants made
+themselves masters, taking advantage of the disorders of the State;
+the towns refused to pay their feudal services, as though the
+necessity of defending themselves and helping in the war had freed
+them for ever from vassalage; further, the turbulent Cortes had
+decreed the abolition of all lordships, and had very much curtailed
+the enormous revenues of the Cathedral, acquired in the centuries when
+the archbishops of Toledo put on their casques, and went out to fight
+the Moors with double-handed swords.
+
+Even so, a considerable fortune remained to the church of the Primacy,
+and it maintained its splendour as if nothing had happened, but the
+Señor Esteban scented danger from the depths of his garden, hearing
+from the canons of the Liberal conspiracies, the executions by
+shooting and hanging, and the exiling, to which the king Señor Don
+Fernando appealed, in order to repress the audacity of the "Negros,"
+the enemies of the Monarchy and of religion.
+
+"They have tasted the sweets," said he, "and they will return--see if
+they do not return, and take what is left! During the war they took
+the first bite, taking from the Cathedral more than half that was
+hers, and now they will come and take the rest; they will try and
+catch hold of the handle of the fryingpan."
+
+The gardener was angry at the possibility of such a thing happening.
+Ay! and was it for this that so many lord archbishops of Toledo fought
+against the Moors? Conquering towns, assaulting castles and annexing
+pasture lands, which all came to be the property of the Cathedral,
+contributing to the great splendour of God's worship! And was
+everything to fall into the dirty hands of the enemies of anything
+that was holy? Everything that so many faithful souls had willed to
+them on their deathbeds, queens and magnates, and simple country
+gentlemen, who left the best part of their fortunes to the Holy
+Metropolitan Church, in the hope of saving their souls! What would
+happen to the six hundred souls, big and little, clerics and seculars,
+dignitaries and simple servants who lived from the revenues of the
+Cathedral?.... And was this called liberty? To rob what did not
+belong to them, leaving in poverty innumerable families who were now
+supported by the "great pot" of the Chapter?
+
+When the sad forebodings of the gardener began to be realised, and
+Mendizabal decreed the dismemberment, the Señor Esteban thought he
+would have died of rage. But the Cardinal Inguanzo did better. Placed
+in his seat by the Liberals as his predecessor had been by the
+Absolutists, he thought it best to die in order to take no part in
+these attempts against the sacred revenues of the Church.
+
+The Señor Luna, who was only a humble gardener, and who therefore
+could not imitate the illustrious Cardinal, went on living. But every
+day he felt more and more sorrowful, knowing that for shamefully low
+prices, many of the Moderates, who still came to High Mass, were
+stealthily acquiring to-day a house, to-morrow a farm, another day
+pasture lands, properties all belonging to the Primacy, but which had
+lately been put on the list of what was called national property.
+
+Robbers! this slow subversion and sale, that rent in pieces the
+revenues of the Cathedral, caused the Señor Esteban as much
+indignation as though the bailiffs had entered his house in the
+Claverias to remove the family furniture, each piece of which embalmed
+the memory of some ancestor.
+
+There were times in which he thought of abandoning his garden, and
+going to Maestrazgo, or to the northern provinces, in search of some
+of the loyal defenders of the rights of Charles V. and of the return
+to the old times. He was then forty years of age, strong and active,
+and though his temperament was pacific and he had never touched a
+musket, he felt himself fired by the example of certain timid and
+pious students, who had fled from the seminary, and were now, so it
+was said, fighting in Catalonia behind the red cloak of Don Ramon
+Cabrera.
+
+But the gardener, in order not to be alone in his big "habitacion" in
+the Claverias, had married three years previously the daughter of the
+sacristan, and he had now one son; besides, he could not tear himself
+away from the church, he was another square block in the mountain of
+stone, he moved and spoke as a man, but he felt a certainty that he
+should perish at once if he left his garden. Besides, the Cathedral
+would lose one of the most important props if a Luna were wanting in
+its service, and he felt terrified at the bare thought of living out
+of it. How could he wander over the mountains fighting, and firing
+shots, when years had passed without his treading any other profane
+soil beyond the little bit of street between the staircase of the
+Claverias and the Puerta del Mollete?
+
+And so he went on cultivating his garden, feeling the melancholy
+satisfaction that he was at least sheltered from all the wicked
+revolutionaries under the shadow of that colossus of stone, which
+inspired awe and respect from its majestic age. They might curtail
+the revenues of the temple, but they would be powerless against the
+Christian faith of those who lived under its protection.
+
+The garden, deaf and insensible to the revolutionary tempests that
+broke over the church, continued to unfold its sombre beauty between
+the arcades, the laurels grew till they reached the balustrade of the
+upper cloister, and the cypresses seemed as though they aspired
+to touch the roofs; the creepers twined themselves among the iron
+railings, making thick lattices of verdure, and the ivy mantled the
+wall of the central arbour, which was surmounted by a cap of black
+slate with a rusty iron cross. After the evening choir the clergy
+would come and sit in here and read, by the soft green light that
+filtered through the foliage, the news from the Carlist Camp, and
+discuss enthusiastically the great exploits of Cabrera, while above,
+the swallows quite indifferent to human presence, circled and screamed
+in the clear blue sky. The Señor Esteban would watch, standing
+silently, this bat-like evening club, which was kept quietly hidden
+from those belonging to the National Militia of Toledo.
+
+When the war terminated, the last illusions of the gardener vanished,
+he fell into the silence of despair and wished to know of nothing
+outside the Cathedral. God had abandoned the good and faithful, and
+the traitors and evil-doers were triumphant; his only consolation
+was the stronghold of the temple, which had lived through so many
+centuries of turmoil, and could still defy its enemies for so many
+more.
+
+He only wished to be the gardener, to die in the upper cloister like
+his forefathers, and to leave fresh Lunas to perpetuate the family
+services in the Cathedral. His eldest son, Tomas, was now twelve years
+old, and able to help him in the care of the garden. After an interval
+of many years a second son had been born, Esteban, who, almost before
+he could walk, would kneel before the images in the "habitacion,"
+crying for his mother to carry him down into the church to see the
+saints.
+
+Poverty entered into the Cathedral, reducing the number of canons and
+prebendaries; at the death of any of the old servants, their places
+were suppressed, and a great many carpenters, masons, and glaziers
+who previously had lived there as workmen specially attached to the
+Primacy, and were continually working at its repairs, were dismissed.
+If from time to time certain repairs were indispensable, workmen were
+called in from outside, by the day; many of the "habitacions" in the
+Claverias were unoccupied, and the silence of the grave reigned where
+previously the population of a small town had gathered and crowded.
+The Government of Madrid (and you should have seen the expression of
+contempt with which the old gardener emphasised those words) was in
+treaty with the Holy Father to arrange something called the Concordat.
+The number of canons was limited as though the Holy Metropolitan was
+a college, they were to be paid by the Government the same as the
+servants, and for the maintenance of worship in this most famous
+Cathedral of all Spain--which, when it formerly collected its tithe,
+scarcely knew where to lock up such riches--a monthly pension of
+twelve hundred pesetas was now granted.
+
+"One thousand two hundred pesetas, Tomas!" said he to his son, a
+silent boy, who took very little interest in anything but his garden.
+"One thousand two hundred pesetas, when I can remember the Cathedral
+having more than six millions of revenue! Bad times are in store for
+us, and were I anyone else I would bring you up to an office, or
+something outside the church; but the Lunas cannot desert the cause of
+God, like so many traitors who have betrayed it. Here we were born,
+here we must die, to the very last one of the family." And furious
+with the clergy, who seemed to put a good face on the Concordat and
+their salaries, thankful to have come out of the revolutionary tumults
+even as well as they had done, he isolated himself in his garden,
+locking the door in the iron railing, and shrinking from the
+assemblies of former times!
+
+His little floral world did not change, its sombre verdure was like
+the twilight that had enveloped the gardener's soul. It had not the
+brilliant gaiety, overflowing with colours and scents of a garden in
+the open, bathed in full sunlight, but it had the shady and melancholy
+beauty of a conventual garden between four walls, with no more light
+than what came through the eaves and the arcades, and no other birds
+but those flying above, who looked with wonder at this little paradise
+at the bottom of a well. The vegetation was the same as that of the
+Greek landscapes, and of the idylls of the Greek poets--laurels,
+cypress and roses, but the arches that surrounded it, with their
+alleys paved with great slabs of granite in whose interstices wreaths
+of grass grew, the cross of its central arbour, the mouldy smell of
+the old iron railings, and the damp of the stone buttresses coloured a
+soft green by the rain, gave the garden an atmosphere of reverend age
+and a character of its own.
+
+The trees waved in the wind like censers, the flowers, pale and
+languid with an anaemic beauty, smelt of incense, as though the air
+wafted through the doors of the Cathedral had changed their natural
+perfumes.
+
+The rain, trickling from the gargoyles and gutters of the roofs, was
+collected in two large and deep stone tanks; sometimes the gardener's
+pail would disturb their green covering, letting one perceive for an
+instant the blue-blackness of their depths, but as soon as the circles
+disappeared, the vegetation once more drew together and covered them
+over afresh, without a movement, without a ripple, quiet and dead as
+the temple itself in the stillness of the evening.
+
+At the feast of Corpus, and that of the Virgin of the Sagrario in the
+middle of August, the townspeople brought their pitchers into the
+garden, and the Señor Esteban allowed them to be filled from these two
+cisterns. It was an ancient custom and one much appreciated by the
+old Toledans, who thought much of the fresh water of the Cathedral,
+condemned as they were during the rest of the year to drink the red
+and muddy liquid of the Tagus. At other times people came into the
+garden to give little presents to Señor Esteban, the devout entrusted
+him with palms for their images, or bought little bunches of flowers,
+believing them to be better than those they could buy at the farms,
+because they came from the Metropolitan Church, and the old women
+begged branches of laurel for flavouring and for household medicines.
+These incomings, and the two pesetas that the Chapter had assigned to
+the gardener after the final dismemberment, helped the Señor Esteban
+and his family to get on. When he was getting well on in years his
+third son Gabriel was born, a child who from his fourth year attracted
+the attention of all the women in the Claverias; his mother affirmed
+with a blind faith that he was a living image of the Child Jesus that
+the Virgin of the Sagrario held in her arms. Her sister Tomasa, who
+was married to the "Virgin's Blue," and was the mother of a numerous
+family which occupied nearly the half of the upper cloister, talked a
+great deal about the intelligence of her little nephew, when he could
+hardly speak, and about the infantile unction with which he gazed at
+the images.
+
+"He looks like a saint," she said to her friends. "You should see how
+seriously he says his prayers.... Gabrielillo will become somebody;
+who knows if we may not see him a bishop! Acolytes that I knew when
+my father had charge of the sacristy now wear the mitre, and possibly
+some day we may have one of them in Toledo."
+
+The chorus of caresses and praises surrounded the first years of the
+child like a cloud of incense; the family only lived for him, the
+Señor Esteban, a father in the good old Latin style who loved his
+sons, but was severe and stern with them in order that they might grow
+up honourable, felt in the presence of the child a return of his own
+youth; he played with him, and lent himself smilingly to all his
+little caprices; his mother abandoned her household duties to please
+him, and his brother hung on his babbling words. The eldest, Tomas,
+the silent youth who had taken the place of his father in the care of
+the garden, and who even in the depths of winter went barefooted over
+the flower-beds and rough stones of the alleys, came up often bringing
+handfuls of sweet-scented herbs, so that his little brother might play
+with them. Esteban, the second, who was now thirteen and who enjoyed
+a certain notoriety among the other acolytes on account of his
+scrupulous care in assisting at the mass, delighted Gabriel with his
+red cassock and his pleated tunic, and brought him taper ends and
+little coloured prints, abstracted from the breviary of some canon.
+
+Now and then he carried him in his arms to the store-room of the
+giants, an immense room between the buttresses and the arches of the
+nave, vaulted with stone. Here were the heroes of the ancient
+feasts and holidays. The Cid with a huge sword, and four set pieces
+representing as many parts of the world: huge figures with dusty and
+tattered clothes and broken faces, which had once rejoiced the streets
+of Toledo, and were now rotting under the roofs of its Cathedral. In
+one corner reposed the Tarasca, a frightful monster of cardboard,
+which terrified Gabriel when it opened its jaws, while on its wrinkled
+back sat smiling, idiotically, a dishevelled and indecent doll, whom
+the religious feeling of former ages had baptised with the name of
+Anne Boleyn.
+
+When Gabriel went to school all were astonished at his progress. The
+youngsters of the upper cloister who were such a trial to "Silver
+Stick," the priest charged with maintaining good order among the tribe
+established in the roofs of the Cathedral, looked upon the little
+Gabriel as a prodigy. When he could scarcely walk he could read
+easily, and at seven he began to recite his Latin, mastering it
+quickly, as though he had never spoken anything else in his life, and
+at ten he could argue with the clergy who frequented the gardens, and
+who delighted in putting before him questions and difficulties.
+
+The Señor Esteban, growing daily more bent and feeble, smiled
+delightedly before his last work; he was going to be the glory of his
+house! His name was Luna, and therefore he could aspire to anything
+without fear, because even Popes had come from that family.
+
+The canons would take the boy into the sacristy after choir, and
+question him as to his studies. One of the clergy belonging to the
+archbishop's household presented him to the cardinal, who, after
+hearing him, gave him a handful of sugared almonds and the promise of
+a scholarship, so that he could continue his studies at the seminary
+gratuitously.
+
+The Lunas and all their relations more or less distant, who were
+really nearly the whole population of the upper cloister, were
+rejoiced at this promise; what else could Gabriel be but a priest? For
+these people, attached to the church from the day of their birth, like
+excrescences of its stones, who considered the archbishops of Toledo
+as the most powerful beings in the world after the Pope, the only
+profession worthy of a man of talent was the Church.
+
+Gabriel went to the Seminary, and to all the family the Claverias
+seemed quite deserted. The long, pleasant evenings in the house of
+the Lunas came to an end, at which the bell-ringer, the vergers, the
+sacristans and other church servants had been used to assemble, and
+listen to the clear and well modulated voice of Gabriel, who read like
+an angel--sometimes the lives of the saints, at other times Catholic
+newspapers that came from Madrid, or chapters from a Don Quixote with
+pages of vellum and antiquated writing--a venerable copy which had
+been handed down in the family for generations.
+
+Gabriel's life in the Seminary was the ordinary and monotonous life of
+a hard-working student: triumphs in theological controversies, prizes
+in heaps, and the satisfaction of being held up to his companions as a
+model.
+
+Sometimes one of the canons who lectured in the seminary would come
+into the garden:--
+
+"The lad is getting on very well, Esteban; he is first in everything,
+and besides, is as steady and pious as a saint. He will be the comfort
+of your old age."
+
+The gardener, always growing older and thinner, shook his head. He
+should only be able to see the end of his son's career from the
+heavens, should it please God to call him there. He would die before
+his son's triumph; but this did not sadden him, for the family
+would remain to enjoy the victory and to give thanks to God for His
+goodness.
+
+Humanities, theology, canons, everything, the young man mastered with
+an ease which surprised his masters, and they compared him to the
+Fathers of the Church, who had attracted attention by their precocity.
+He would very soon finish his studies, and they all predicted that his
+Eminence would give him a professorship in the seminary, even before
+he sang his first mass. His thirst for learning was insatiable, and it
+seemed as though the library really belonged to him. Some evenings he
+would go into the Cathedral to pursue his musical studies, and talk
+with the Chapel-master and the organist, and at other times in the
+hall of sacred oratory he would astound the professors and the Alumni
+by the fervour and conviction with which he delivered his sermons.
+
+"He is called to the pulpit," they said in the Cathedral garden. "He
+has all the fire of the apostles; he will become a Saint Bernard or
+a Bossuet. Who can tell how far this youth will go, or where he will
+end?"
+
+One of the studies which most delighted Gabriel was that of the
+history of the Cathedral, and of the ecclesiastical princes who had
+ruled it. All the inherent love of the Lunas for the giantess who was
+their eternal mother surged up in him, but he did not love it blindly
+as all his belongings did. He wished to know the why and the wherefore
+of things, comparing in his books the vague old stories that he had
+heard from his father, that seemed more akin to legends than to
+historical facts.
+
+The first thing that claimed his attention was the chronology of the
+archbishops of Toledo--a long line of famous men, saints, warriors,
+writers, princes, each with his number after his name, like the kings
+of the different dynasties. At certain times they had been the real
+kings of Spain. The Gothic kings in their courts were little more than
+decorative figureheads that were raised or deposed according to the
+exigencies of the moment. The nation was a theocratic republic, and
+its true head was the Archbishop of Toledo.
+
+Gabriel grouped the long line of famous prelates by characters. First
+of all the saints, the apostles in the heroic age of Christianity,
+bishops as poor as their own people, barefooted, fugitives from the
+Roman persecution, and bowing their heads at last to the executioner,
+firm in the hope of gaining fresh strength to the doctrine for which
+they sacrificed their lives--Saint Eugenio, Melancio, Pelagio, Patruno
+and other names that shone in the past scarcely breaking through the
+mists of legend. Then came the archbishops of the Gothic era; those
+kingly prelates who exercised that superiority over the conquering
+kings by which the spiritual power succeeded in dominating the
+barbarian conquerors. Miracles accompanied them to confound the
+Arians, and celestial prodigies were at their orders to terrify and
+crush those rude men of war. The Archbishop Montano, who lived with
+his wife, and was indignant at the consequent murmurs, placed red-hot
+coals in his sacred vestments the while he said mass, and did not
+burn, demonstrating by this miracle the purity of his life. Saint
+Ildefonso, not content with only writing books against heretics,
+induced Santa Leocadia to appear to him, leaving in his hands a piece
+of her mantle, and he enjoyed the further honour of this same Virgin
+descending from heaven to present him with a chasuble embroidered by
+her own hands. Sigiberto, many years after, had the audacity to
+vest himself in this chasuble, and was in consequence deposed,
+excommunicated and exiled for his temerity.
+
+The only books that were produced in those times were written by the
+prelates of Toledo. They compiled the laws, they anointed the heads
+of the monarchs with the holy oil, they set up Wamba as king, they
+conspired against the life of Egica, and the councils assembled in
+the basilica of Santa Leocadia were political assemblies in which the
+mitre was on the throne and the crown of the king at the feet of the
+prelate.
+
+At the coming of the Saracen invasion the series of persecuted
+prelates begins again. They did not now fear for their lives as during
+the time of Roman intolerance; for Mussulmen as a rule do not martyr,
+and furthermore, they respect the beliefs of the conquered.
+
+All the churches in Toledo remained in the hands of the Christian
+Muzarabés[1] with the exception of the Cathedral, which was converted
+into the principal mosque.
+
+[Footnote 1: Muzarabés--Christians living among the Moors and mixing
+with them; also an ancient form of service still continued in one
+chapel in Toledo and in one at Salamanca.]
+
+The Catholic bishops were respected by the Moors, as were also the
+Hebrew rabbis; but the Church was poor, and the continual wars between
+the Saracens and the Christians, together with the reprisals which set
+a seal on the barbarities of the reconquest, made the continuance and
+life of worship extremely difficult.
+
+Having arrived at this point Gabriel read the obscure names of Cixila,
+Elipando and Wistremiro. Saint Eulogio termed this last "the torch of
+the Holy Spirit, and the light of Spain"; but history is silent as to
+his deeds, and Saint Eulogio was martyred and killed by the Moors
+in Cordova on account of his excessive religious zeal. Benito,
+a Frenchman who succeeded to the chair, not to be behind his
+predecessors, made the Virgin send him down another chasuble to a
+church in his own country before he came to Toledo.
+
+After these, came the interesting chronology of the warrior
+archbishops, warriors of coat-of-mail and two-edged sword, the
+conquerors who, leaving the choir to the meek and humble, mounted
+their war-horses and thought they were not serving God unless during
+the year they added sundry towns and pasture lands to the goods of the
+Church. They arrived in the eleventh century, with Alfonso VI., to the
+conquest of Toledo. The first were French monks from the famous Abbey
+of Cluny, sent by the Abbot Hugo to the convent of Sahagun, and they
+were the first to use the "don" as a sign of lordship. To the pious
+tolerance of the preceding bishops, accustomed to friendly intercourse
+with Arabs and Jews in the full liberty of the Muzarabé worship,
+succeeded the ferocious intolerance of the Christian conqueror. The
+Archbishop Don Bernardo was scarcely seated in the chair before he
+took advantage of the absence of Alfonso VI. to violate all his
+promises. The principal mosque had remained in the hands of the Moors
+by a solemn compact with the king, who, like all the monarchs of the
+reconquest, was tolerant in matters of religion. The archbishop,
+using his powerful influence over the mind of the queen, made her
+the accomplice of his plans, and one night, followed by clergy and
+workmen, he knocked down the doors of the mosque, cleansed it and
+purified it, and next morning when the Saracens came to pray towards
+the rising sun, they found it changed into a Catholic cathedral. The
+conquered, trusting in the word given by the conqueror, protested,
+scandalised, and that they did not rise was solely due to the
+influence of the Alfaqui Abu-Walid, who trusted that the king would
+fulfil his promises. In three days Alfonso VI. arrived in Toledo from
+the further end of Castille, ready to murder the archbishop and even
+his own wife for their share in this villainy that had compromised his
+word as a cavalier, but his fury was so great that even the Moors were
+moved, and the Alfaqui went out to meet him, begging him to condone
+the deed as it was accomplished, as the injured parties would agree to
+it, and in the name of the conquered he relieved him from keeping his
+word, because the possession of a building was not a sufficient reason
+for breaking the peace.
+
+Gabriel admired as he read the prudence and moderation of the good
+Moor Abu-Walid; but with his enthusiasm as a seminarist he admired
+still more those proud, intolerant and warlike prelates, who trampled
+laws and people under foot for the greater glory of God.
+
+The Archbishop Martin was Captain-General against the Moors in
+Andalusia, conquering towns, and he accompanied Alfonso VIII. to the
+battle of Alarcos. The famous prelate Don Rodrigo wrote the chronicle
+of Spain, filling it with miracles for the greater prosperity of the
+Church, and he practically made history, passing more time on his
+war-horse than on his throne in the choir. At the battle de las Navas
+he set so fine an example, throwing himself into the thick of the
+fight, that the king gave him twenty lordships as well as that of
+Talavera de la Reina. Afterwards, in the king's absence, he drove
+the Moors out of Quesada and Cazorla, taking possession of vast
+territories, which passed under his sway, with the name of the
+Adelantamiento.[1] Don Sancho, son of Don Jaime of Aragon, and brother
+to the Queen of Castille, thought more of his title of "Chief Leader"
+than of his mitre of Toledo, and on the advance of the Moors went out
+to meet them in the martial field. He fought wherever the fighting was
+fiercest, and was finally killed by the Moslems, who cut off his hands
+and placed his head on a spear.
+
+[Footnote 1: _Adelantamiento_--Advancement.]
+
+Don Gil de Albornoz, the famous cardinal, went to Italy, flying from
+Don Pedro the Cruel, and, like a great captain, reconquered all the
+territory of the Popes, who had taken refuge in Avignon. Don Gutierre
+III. went with Don Juan II. to fight against the Moors. Don Alfonso de
+Acuna fought in the civil war during the reign of Enrique IV.; and as
+a fitting end to this series of political and conquering prelates,
+rich and powerful as true princes, there arose the Cardinal Mendoza,
+who fought at the battle of Toro, and at the conquest of Granada,
+afterwards governing that kingdom; and Jimenez de Cisneros, who,
+finding no Moors left in the Peninsula to fight, crossed the sea and
+went to Oran, waving his cross and turning it into a weapon of war.
+
+The seminarist admired these men, magnified by the mists of ancient
+history and the praises of the Church. For him they were the greatest
+men in the world after the Popes, and, indeed, often far superior to
+them. He was astonished that the Spaniards of the present times were
+so blind that they did not entrust their direction and government to
+the archbishops of Toledo, who in former centuries had performed
+such heroic deeds. The glory and advancement of the country was so
+intimately connected with their history, their dynasty was quite as
+great as that of the kings, and on more than one occasion they had
+saved these latter by their counsels and energy.
+
+After these eagles came the birds of prey; after the prelates with
+their iron morions and their coats-of-mail came the rich and luxurious
+prelates, who cared for no other combats but those of the law courts,
+and were in perpetual litigation with towns, guilds, and private
+individuals in order to retain the possessions and the vast fortune
+accumulated by their predecessors.
+
+Those who were generous like Tavera built palaces, and encouraged
+artists like El Greco, Berruguete and others, creating a Renaissance
+in Toledo, an echo from Italy. Those who were miserly, like Quiroga,
+reduced the expenses of the pompous church, to turn themselves into
+money-lenders to the kings, giving millions of ducats to those
+Austrian monarchs on whose dominions the sun never set, but who,
+nevertheless, found themselves obliged to beg almost as soon as their
+galleons returned from their voyages to America.
+
+The Cathedral was the work of these priestly ecclesiastics; each one
+had done something in it which revealed his character. The rougher
+and more warlike its framework, that mountain of stone and wood which
+formed its skeleton; those who were more cultivated, elevated to the
+See in times of greater refinement, contributed the minutely-worked
+iron railings, the doors of lace-like stonework, the pictures, and
+the jewels which made its sacristy a veritable treasure house. The
+gestation of the giantess had lasted for three centuries; it seemed
+like those enormous prehistoric animals who slept so long in their
+mother's womb before seeing the light.
+
+When its walls and pilasters first rose above the soil Gothic art was
+in its first epoch, and during the two and a half centuries that its
+building lasted architecture made great strides. Gabriel could follow
+this slow transformation with his mind's eye as he studied the
+building, discovering the various signs of its evolution.
+
+The magnificent church was like a giantess whose feet were shod with
+rough shoes, but whose head was covered with the loveliest plumes. The
+bases of the pillars were rough and devoid of ornament, the shafts of
+the columns rose with severe simplicity, crowned by plain capitals
+at the base of the arches, on which the Gothic thistle had not yet
+attained the exuberant branching of a later florid period; but the
+vaulting which was finished perhaps two centuries after the first
+beginning, and the windows with their multi-coloured ogives, displayed
+the magnificence of an art at its culminating point.
+
+At the two extreme ends of the transepts Gabriel found the proof
+of the immense progress made during the two centuries in which the
+Cathedral had been rising from the ground. The Puerta del Reloj[1],
+called also de la Feria[2], with its rude sculptures of archaic
+rigidity, and the tympanum, covered with small scenes from the
+creation, was a great contrast to the doorway at the opposite end
+of the crossway, that of Los Leones[3], or by its other name, de la
+Alegria[4], built nearly two hundred years afterwards, elegant and
+majestic as the entrance to a palace, showing already the fleshly
+audacities of the Renaissance, endeavouring to thrust themselves into
+the severity of Christian architecture, a siren fastened to the door
+by her curling tail serving as an example.
+
+[Footnote 1: _Reloj_--Clock.]
+
+[Footnote 2: _Feria_--Of the fair.]
+
+[Footnote 3: _Los Leones_--Lions.]
+
+[Footnote 4: _Alegria_--Joy.]
+
+The Cathedral, built entirely of a milky white stone from the quarries
+close to Toledo, rose in one single elevation from the base of the
+pillars to the vaulting, with no triforium to cut its arcades and to
+weaken and load the naves with superimposed arches. Gabriel saw in
+this a petrified symbol of prayer, rising direct to Heaven, without
+assistance or support. The smooth, soft stone was used throughout
+the building, harder stone being used for the vaultings, and on
+the exterior the buttresses and pinnacles, as well as the flying
+buttresses like small bridges between them, were of the hardest
+granite, which from age had taken a golden colour, and which protected
+and supported the airy delicacy of the interior. The two sorts of
+stone made a great contrast in the appearance of the Cathedral, dark
+and reddish outside, white and delicate inside.
+
+The seminarist found examples of every sort of architecture that had
+flourished in the Peninsula. The primitive Gothic was found in the
+earliest doorways, the florid in those del Perdon and de los Leones,
+and the Arab architecture showed its graceful horseshoe arches in the
+triforium running round the whole abside of the choir, which was the
+work of Cisneros, who, though he burnt the Moslem books, introduced
+their style of architecture into the heart of the Christian temple.
+The plateresque style showed its fanciful grace in the door of the
+cloister, and even the chirruguesque showed at its best in the famous
+lanthorn of Tome, which broke the vaulting behind the high altar in
+order to give light to the abside.
+
+In the evenings of the vacation Gabriel would leave the seminary,
+and wander about the Cathedral till the hour at which its doors were
+closed. He delighted in walking through the naves and behind the high
+altar, the darkest and most silent spot in the whole church. Here
+slept a great part of the history of Spain. Behind the locked gates of
+the chapel of the kings, guarded by the stone heralds on pedestals,
+lay the kings of Castille in their tombs, their effigies crowned, in
+golden armour, praying, with their swords by their sides. He would
+stop before the chapel of Santiago, admiring through the railings of
+its three pointed arches the legendary saint, dressed as a pilgrim,
+holding his sword on high, and tramping on Mahomedans with his
+war-horse. Great shells and red shields with a silver moon adorned the
+white walls, rising up to the vaulting, and this chapel his father,
+the gardener, regarded as his own peculiar property. It was that of
+the Lunas, and though some people laughed at the relationship, there
+lay his illustrious progenitors, Don Alvaro and his wife, on their
+monumental tombs. That of Doña Juana Pimental had at its four corners
+the figures of four kneeling friars in yellow marble, who watched over
+the noble lady extended on the upper part of the monument. That of
+the unhappy constable of Castille was surrounded by four knights of
+Santiago, wrapped in the mantle of their Order, seeming to keep guard
+over their grand master, who lay buried without his head in the stone
+sarcophagus, bordered with Gothic mouldings. Gabriel remembered what
+he had heard his father relate about the recumbent statue of Don
+Alvaro. In former times the statue had been of bronze, and when mass
+was said in the chapel, at the elevation of the Host, the statue, by
+means of secret springs, would rise and remain kneeling till the
+end of the ceremony. Some said that the Catholic queen caused the
+disappearance of this theatrical statue, believing that it disturbed
+the prayers of the faithful; others said that some soldiers, enemies
+of the constable, on a day of disturbance, had broken in pieces the
+jointed statue. On the exterior of the church the chapel of the Lunas
+raised its battlemented towers, forming an isolated fortress inside
+the Cathedral.
+
+In spite of his family considering this chapel as their own, the
+seminarist felt himself more attracted by that of Saint Ildefonso
+close by, which contained the tomb of the Cardinal Albornoz. Of all
+the great past in the Cathedral, that which excited his greatest
+admiration was the romantic figure of this warlike prelate; lover of
+letters, Spanish by birth, and Italian by his conquests. He slept in a
+splendid marble tomb, shining and polished by age, and of a soft
+fawn colour; the invisible hand of time had treated the face of the
+recumbent effigy rather roughly, flattening the nose, and giving the
+warlike cardinal an expression of almost Mongolian ferocity. Four
+lions guarded the remains of the prelate. Everything in him was
+extraordinary and adventurous even to his death. His body was brought
+back from Italy to Spain with prayers and hymns, carried on the
+shoulders of the entire population, who went out to meet it in order
+to gain the indulgences granted by the Pope. This return journey to
+his own country after his death lasted several months, as the good
+cardinal only went by short journeys from church to church, preceded
+by a picture of Christ, which now adorns his chapel, and spreading
+among the multitude the sweet scent of his embalming.
+
+For Don Gil de Albornoz nothing seemed impossible; he was the sword of
+the Apostle returned to earth in order to enforce faith. Flying from
+Don Pedro the Cruel, he had taken refuge in Avignon, where lived
+exiles even more illustrious than himself. There were the Popes driven
+out of Rome by a people who, in their mediaeval nightmare, tried to
+restore at the bidding of Rienzi the ancient republic of the Consuls.
+Don Gil was not a man to live long in the pleasant little Provençal
+court; like a good archbishop of Toledo, he wore the coat-of-mail
+underneath his tunic, and as there were no Moors to fight he wished to
+strike at heretics instead. He went to Italy as the champion of the
+Church; all the adventurers of Europe and the bandits of the country
+formed his army. He killed and burnt in the country, entered and
+sacked the towns, all in the name of the Sovereign Pontiff, so that
+before long the exile of Avignon was again able to return and occupy
+his throne in Rome. The Spanish cardinal after all these campaigns,
+which gave half Italy to the Papacy, was as rich as any king, and he
+founded the celebrated Spanish college in Bologna. The Pope, well
+aware of his robberies and rapacity, asked him to give some sort of
+accounts. The proud Don Gil presented him with a cart laden with keys
+and bolts.
+
+"These," said he proudly, "belong to the towns and castles I have
+gained for the Papacy. These are my accounts."
+
+The irresistible glamour that a powerful warrior throws over a man
+physically feeble was strongly felt by Gabriel, and it was augmented
+by the thought that so much bravery and haughtiness had been joined
+in a servant of the Church. Why could not men like this arise now, in
+these impious times, to give fresh strength to Catholicism?
+
+In his strolls through the Cathedral Gabriel greatly admired the
+screen before the high altar, a wonderful work of Villalpando, with
+its foliage of old gold, and its black bars with silvery spots like
+tin. These spots made the beggars and guides in the church declare
+that all the screen was made of silver, but that the canons had had
+it painted black so that it might not be plundered by Napoleon's
+soldiers.
+
+Behind it shone the majestic decorations of the high altar, splendid
+with soft old gilding, and a whole host of figures under carved
+canopies representing various scenes from the Passion. Behind the
+altar and the screen the gilding seemed to spring spontaneously from
+the white walls, marking with brilliant lights the divisions between
+the stalls. Beneath highly-decorated pointed arches were the tombs of
+the most ancient kings of Castille, and that of the Cardinal Mendoza.
+
+Under the arches of the triforium an orchestra of Gothic angels with
+stiff dalmatics and folded wings sang lauds, playing lutes and flutes,
+and in the central parts of the pillars the statues of holy bishops
+were interspersed with those of historical and legendary personages.
+
+On one side the good Alfaqui Abu-Walid, immortalised in a Christian
+church for his tolerant spirit, on the opposite side the mysterious
+leader of Las Navas who, after showing the Christians the way to
+victory, suddenly disappeared like a divine envoy--a statue of
+exceeding ugliness with a haggard face covered by a rough hood. At
+either end of the screen stood as evidences of the past opulence of
+the church two beautiful pulpits of rich marbles and chiselled bronze.
+
+Gabriel cast a glance at the choir, admiring the beautiful stalls
+belonging to the canons, and he thought enthusiastically that perhaps
+some day he might succeed in gaining one to the great pride of his
+family. In his wanderings about the church he would often stop before
+the immense fresco of Saint Christopher, a picture as bad as it
+was huge--a figure occupying all one division of the wall from the
+pavement to the cornice, and which by its size seemed to be the
+only fitting inhabitant of the church. The cadets would come in the
+evenings to look at it; that colossus of pink flesh, bearing the child
+on its shoulders, advancing its angular legs carefully through the
+waters, leaning on a palm tree that looked like a broom, was for them
+by far the most noticeable thing in the church. The light-hearted
+young men delighted in measuring its ankles with their swords and
+afterwards calculating how many swords high the blessed giant could
+be. It was the readiest application that they could make of those
+mathematical calculations with which they were so much worried in the
+academy. The apprentice of the church was irritated at the impudence
+with which these dressed up popinjays, the apprentices of war,
+sauntered about the church.
+
+Many mornings he would go to the Muzarabé Chapel, following
+attentively the ancient ritual,[1] intoned by the priests especially
+devoted to it. On the walls were represented in brilliant colours
+scenes from the conquest of Oran by the great Cisneros. As Gabriel
+listened to the monotonous singing of the Muzarabe priests he
+remembered the quarrels during the time of Alfonso VI. between the
+Roman liturgy and that of Toledo--the foreign worship and the national
+one. The believers, to end the eternal disputes, appealed to the
+"Judgment of God." The king named the Roman champion, and the Toledans
+confided the defence of their Gothic rite to the sword of Juan Ruiz,
+a nobleman from the borders of Pisuerga. The champion of the Gothic
+breviary remained triumphant in the fight, demonstrating its
+superiority with magnificent sword thrusts, but, in spite of the will
+of God having been manifested in this warlike way, the Roman rite by
+slow degrees became master of the situation, till at last the Muzarabé
+ritual was relegated to this small chapel as a curious relic of the
+past.
+
+[Footnote 1: The Muzarabé ritual is still sung in Arabic both in
+Toledo and Salamanca.]
+
+Sometimes in the evenings, when the services were ended and the
+Cathedral was locked up, Gabriel would go up to the abode of the
+bell-ringer, stopping on the gallery above the door del Perdon.
+Mariano, the bell-ringer's son, a youth of the same age as the
+seminarist, and attached to him by the respect and admiration his
+talents inspired, would act as guide in their excursions to the upper
+regions of the church; they would possess themselves of the key of the
+vaultings and explore that mysterious locality to which only a few
+workmen ascended from time to time.
+
+The Cathedral was ugly and commonplace seen from above. In the very
+early days the stone vaultings had remained uncovered, with no other
+concealment beyond the light-looking carved balustrade, but the rain
+had begun to damage them, threatening their destruction, and so the
+Chapter had covered the Cathedral with a roof of brown tiles, which
+gave the Church the appearance of a huge warehouse or a great barn.
+The pinnacles of the buttresses seemed ashamed to appear above this
+ugly covering, the flying buttresses became lost and disappeared among
+the bare-looking buildings, built on to the Cathedral, and the little
+staircase turrets became hidden behind this clumsy mass of roofing.
+
+The two youths climbing along the cornices, green and slippery from
+the rain, would mount to quite the upper parts of the building. Their
+feet would become entangled in the plants that a luxuriant nature
+allowed to grow amid the joints of the stones, flocks of birds would
+fly away at their approach; all the sculptures seemed to serve as
+resting-places for their nests, and every hollow in the stone where
+the rain-water collected was a miniature lake where the birds came
+to drink; sometimes a large black bird would settle on one of the
+pinnacles like an unexpected finial; it was a raven who settled there
+to plume his wings, and it would remain there sunning itself for
+hours; to the people who saw it from below it appeared about the size
+of a fly.
+
+These vaultings caused Gabriel a strange impression; no one could
+guess the existence of such a place in the upper regions of the
+building. He would walk through the forest of worm-eaten posts which
+supported the roof, through narrow passages between the cupolas of the
+vaulting that arose from the flooring like white and dusty tumours;
+sometimes there would be a shaft through which he could see down into
+the Cathedral, the depth of which made him giddy. These shafts were
+like narrow well-mouths at the bottom of which could be seen people
+walking like ants on the tile flooring of the church. Through these
+shafts were lowered the ropes of the great chandeliers, and the golden
+chains that supported the figure of Christ above the railing of the
+high altar. Enormous capstans showed through the twilight their cogged
+and rusty wheels, their levers and ropes like forgotten instruments
+of torture. This was the hidden machinery belonging to the great
+religious festivals; by these artifices the magnificent canopy of the
+holy week was raised and fastened.
+
+As the sun's rays shone in between the wooden posts the dust of ages
+that lay like a thick mantel on the roof of the vaulting would rise
+and dance in them for a few seconds, and the huge old spiders' webs
+would wave like fans in the wind, while the footsteps of the intruders
+would occasion wild and precipitous scrambles of rats from all the
+dark corners. In the furthest and darkest corners roosted those black
+birds who by night flew down into the church through the shafts in
+the vaulting, and the eyes of the owls glowed with phosphorescent
+brilliancy, while the bats flew sleepily about sweeping the faces of
+the lads with their wings.
+
+The bell-ringer's son would examine the deposits dropped in the dust,
+and would enumerate all the different birds who took refuge in the
+summit of the mountains of stone: this belonged to the hooting owl,
+and that to the red owl, and this again to the raven, and he spoke
+with respect of a certain nest of eagles that his father had seen as a
+young man, fierce birds who had endeavoured to tear out his eyes,
+and who had so thoroughly frightened him that he had been obliged to
+borrow the gun belonging to the night watchers on each occasion that
+his duties took him to the roof.
+
+Gabriel loved that strange world, harbouring above the Cathedral with
+its silence and its imposing solitude. It was a wilderness of wood,
+inhabited by strange creatures who lived unnoticed and forgotten under
+the roof-tree of the church. Truly the good God had a house for the
+faithful down below, and an immense garret above for the creatures of
+the air.
+
+The savage solitude of the higher regions was a great contrast to the
+wealth of the chapel of the Ochava, full of relics in golden vessels
+and caskets of enamel and precious marbles, to the quantities of
+pearls and emeralds in the magnificent treasury, heaped up as though
+they had been peas, and to the elegant luxury of the wardrobe, full
+of rare and costly stuffs and vestments exquisitely embroidered with
+every colour of the rainbow.
+
+Gabriel was just eighteen when he lost his father. The old gardener
+died quietly, happy in seeing all his family in the service of the
+Cathedral and the good old tradition of the Lunas continued without
+interruption. Thomas, the eldest son, remained in the garden, Esteban,
+after serving many years as acolyte and assistant to the sacristans,
+was Silenciario, and had been given the Wooden Staff and seven reals
+a day, the height of all his ambition; and as far as regarded the
+youngest, the good Señor Esteban had the firm conviction that he
+had begotten a Father of the Church, for whom a place in heaven was
+especially reserved at the right hand of God Omnipotent.
+
+Gabriel had acquired in the seminary that ecclesiastic sternness that
+turns the priest into a warrior more intent on the interest of the
+Church than on the concerns of his family. For this reason he did
+not feel the death of his father very greatly; besides, much greater
+misfortunes soon occurred to preoccupy the young seminarist.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+There was great excitement both in the Cathedral and in the seminary,
+everyone discussing from morning till night the news from Madrid, for
+these were the days of the September revolution. The traditional and
+healthy Spain, the Spain of the great historical tradition had fallen.
+The Cortes Constituyentes were a volcano, a breath from the infernal
+regions, to those gentlemen of the black cassock who crowded round the
+unfolded newspaper, and, if they found comfort and satisfaction in a
+speech of Maesterola's they would suffer the agonies of death at the
+revolutionary harangues, which dealt such terrible blows at the olden
+days. The clergy had turned their eyes towards Don Carlos, who
+was beginning the war in the northern provinces; the king of the
+Vascongados[1] mountains would be able to remedy everything when he
+came down into the plains of Castille. But years passed by, Amadeus
+had come and gone, they had even proclaimed a republic! And yet the
+cause of God did not seem to advance much, and Heaven seemed deaf. A
+republican deputy proclaimed a war against God, challenging Him to
+silence him; and so impiety stalked along immune and triumphant, and
+its eloquence flowed abroad like a poisonous spring.
+
+[Footnote 1: Provinces of Alava, Guipuscoa, and the lordship of
+Biscay.]
+
+Gabriel lived in a state of bellicose excitement--he forgot his books,
+he disregarded his future, he never thought now of singing his mass.
+What would happen to his career now that the Church was in peril, and
+that the sleepy poetry of past ages, that had enveloped him from his
+cradle like a perfumed cloud of old incense and dried roses, was on
+the point of vanishing?
+
+Often some of the pupils disappeared from the seminary, and the
+professors would reply to the inquiries of the curious with a sly
+wink.
+
+"They have gone out--with the good sort. They could not see quietly
+what was happening--'child's play,' 'follies.'"
+
+But nevertheless such follies made them smile with paternal
+satisfaction.
+
+He thought to be himself among those who fled, as the world seemed
+to be coming to an end. In certain towns the revolutionary mob had
+invaded and profaned the churches; as yet they had not murdered any of
+the ministers of God as in other revolutions, but still the priests
+were unable to go about the streets in their cassocks for fear of
+being hooted and insulted. The remembrance of the archbishops of
+Toledo, those brave ecclesiastical princes, implacable warriors
+against the infidels, fired his warlike feelings. As yet he had never
+been away from Toledo, away from the shadow of its Cathedral; Spain
+seemed to him as vast as all the rest of the world put together, and
+he began to feel the ardent desire of seeing something new, of seeing
+closer all the wonderful things he had read about in his books,
+stirring within him.
+
+One day he kissed his mother's hand, without feeling any very great
+emotion towards the trembling and nearly blind old woman, for the
+seminary had for him more tender memories than the house of his
+fathers, smoked his last cigar with his brothers in the garden without
+revealing his intentions to them, and that night he fled from Toledo
+with a scapulary of the Heart of Jesus sewed into his waistcoat, and a
+beautiful silk scarf in his wallet, one of those worked by white hands
+in the convents of the city. The son of the bell-ringer went with
+him. They joined one of the insignificant bands who were devastating
+Murcia, but they soon went on to Valencia and Catalonia, anxious to
+perform greater exploits for the cause of God than merely stealing
+mules and extorting contributions from the rich.
+
+Gabriel felt an intense delight in this wandering life, with its
+continual alarms owing to the proximity of the troops.
+
+He had been made an officer at once, on account of his education, and
+because of the letters of recommendation that certain of the prebends
+of the Metropolitan Church had given him; letters lamenting greatly
+that a youth of so much theological promise should go and risk his
+life like a simple sacristan.
+
+Luna enjoyed the free and lawless life of war with the zest of a
+collegian out of bounds; but he could not hide the feeling of painful
+disillusion that the sight of those armies of the Faith caused him.
+He had expected to find something akin to the ancient crusading
+expeditions: soldiers who fought for an ideal, who bent the knee
+before beginning the fight, so that God might be on their side, and
+who at night, after a hard-fought field, slept the pure sleep of an
+ascetic; instead of which he found an armed mob, mutinous to their
+leaders, incapable of that fanaticism which rushes blindfold to death,
+anxious only that the war might last as long as possible, so that they
+might continue the life of lawless wandering at the expense of the
+country, which they considered the best life possible; people who
+at the sight of wine, women or plunder would disband themselves,
+hungering, turning against their leaders.
+
+It was the ancient life of the horde, surging up through civilisation,
+the atavic custom of stealing the stranger's bread and women by force
+of arms, the ancient Celtiberic love of factions and internal strife,
+that only caught hold of a political pretext in order to revive.
+
+Gabriel, with very rare exceptions, found none in those badly-armed
+and worse-clothed bands who fought with a fixed idea; they were
+adventurers who wished for war for the sake of war; visionaries
+anxious for fortune; country lads from the fields, who in their
+passive ignorance had joined the factions, just as they would have
+stayed at home if they had had better counsels; simple souls who
+firmly believed that in the towns they were burning and destroying
+God's ministers, and who had thrown themselves into the fray so that
+society should not lapse into barbarism.
+
+The common danger, the misery of the interminable marches to deceive
+the enemy, the scarcity suffered in the barren fields and on the rough
+hilltops on which they took refuge, made them all equals, enthusiasts,
+sceptics or rustics. They all felt the same desire to compensate
+themselves for their privations, to appease the ravenous beast they
+felt inside, awakened and irritated by a life of such sudden changes;
+as much by the wild abundance and plundering of a sack as by the
+distress endured in the long marches over interminable plains without
+ever seeing the slightest sign of life. On entering a town they would
+shout, "Long live religion," but on the slightest provocation they
+would do this, that and the other in the name of God and all the
+saints, not omitting in their filthy oaths to swear by everything most
+sacred in that same religion.
+
+Gabriel, who soon became accustomed to this wandering life, ceased
+to feel shocked. The former scruples of the seminarist vanished,
+smothered under the crust of the fighting man, which became hardened
+with war.
+
+The romantic figure of Doña Blanca, the king's sister-in-law passed
+before him, like a person in a novel; in her romantic energy this
+princess wished to emulate the deeds of the heroines of La Vendeé, and
+mounted on a small white horse, her pistol in her belt, and the white
+scarf tied over her floating tresses, she put herself at the head of
+these armed bands, who revived in the centre of the Peninsula
+the strife of almost prehistoric times. The flutter of the dark
+riding-habit of this heroine served as a standard to the battalions of
+Zouaves, to the troop of French, German, and Italian adventurers, the
+scum of all the wars on the globe, who found it pleasanter to follow
+a woman anxious for fame than to enlist themselves into the foreign
+legion of Algeria.
+
+The assault of Cuenca, the sole victory of the campaign, made a deep
+impression on Gabriel's memory; the troops of men wearing the scarf,
+after they had knocked down the ramparts as weak as mud walls, rushed
+like overflowing streams through the streets. The firing from the
+windows could not stop them; they rushed in pale, with discoloured
+lips and eyes brilliant with homicidal mania, the danger overcome, and
+the knowledge that they were at length masters of the place drove them
+mad; the doors of the houses fell under their blows, terrified men
+rushed out to be pierced with bayonets in the streets, and in the
+houses you could see women struggling in the arms of the assailants,
+striking them in the face with one hand, while with the other they
+struggled to retain their clothes.
+
+Gabriel saw how the roughest of the mountaineers destroyed in the
+Institute all the apparatus of the Cabinet of Physical Science,
+breaking it in pieces. They were furious with these inventions of the
+evil one, with which they thought the unbelievers communicated with
+the Government of Madrid, and they smashed on the ground with the butt
+ends of their muskets, and trampled with their feet, all the
+gilt wheels of the apparatus, and all the discs and batteries of
+electricity.
+
+The seminarist was delighted at all this destruction; he also hated,
+but it was with a calm, reflective hate bred in the seminary, all
+positive and material sciences, for the sum total of his reasoning was
+that they came perilously near to the negation of God; those sons of
+the mountains in their blessed ignorance, had without knowing it done
+a great deed. Ah! if only the whole nation would imitate them! In
+former times there were none of these ridiculous inventions of
+science, and Spain was far happier. To live a holy life, the learning
+of the priests and the ignorance of the people was sufficient, for
+both together produced a blessed tranquillity; what did they want
+more? For so the country had existed for centuries, all through the
+most glorious period of its existence.
+
+The war came to an end, the closely pursued rebels passed through the
+centre of Catalonia and were finally driven over the frontier, where
+they were compelled to give up their arms to the French custom-house
+officers. Many availed themselves of the amnesty, anxious to return to
+their own homes. Mariano, the bell-ringer, was one of these. He did
+not wish to live in a foreign land; besides, during his absence his
+father had died, and it was extremely probable that he might succeed
+to the charge of the Cathedral tower if he laid due stress on the
+merits of his family, his three years' campaigning for the sake of
+religion, and a wound he had received in his leg; he would really be
+able to compare himself with the martyrs for Christianity.
+
+Gabriel preferred emigration. "He was an officer and therefore
+could not take the oath of allegiance to a usurping dynasty." This
+declaration he made with all the pride learnt in this caricature of an
+army, which emphasised all the ceremonies of ancient warfare, and who,
+ragged and shoeless as they were, with their swords by their sides,
+never failed to transmit orders to each other as "high-born officer."
+But the real reason which prevented Luna from returning to Toledo was
+that he wished to follow the course of events, to see new countries
+and different customs. To return to the Cathedral would mean to remain
+there for ever, to renounce everything in life, and he, who during the
+war had tasted of worldly delights, had no desire to turn his back on
+them quite so soon; also he was not yet of age, so he had plenty of
+time before him in which to finish his studies; the priesthood was a
+sure retreat, but one to which he was in no hurry to return just at
+present; besides, his mother was dead, and his brother's letters told
+him of no alteration in the sleepy life of the upper cloister, beyond
+that the gardener was married and that the "Wooden Staff" was courting
+a girl in the Claverias, it being against all the good traditions of
+these people to ally themselves with anyone outside the Cathedral.
+
+Luna lived for more than a year in the emigrants' cantonments; his
+classical education and the sympathy aroused by his youth smoothed his
+path to a certain extent; he talked Latin with the French abbés, who
+were delighted to hear about the war from the young theologian, and
+at the same time they taught him the language of the country. These
+friends procured for him Spanish lessons among the upper middle
+classes who were friendly to the Church. In these days of penury he
+was saved by his friendship with an old legitimist Countess, who
+invited him to spend several days in her country house, introducing
+the warlike seminarist to all the grave and pious friends at her
+assemblies as though he had been a crusader newly returned from
+Palestine.
+
+Gabriel's great desire was to go to Paris; his life in France had
+radically changed his ideas, he really felt as though he had fallen
+into a new planet. Accustomed to the monotonous life in the seminary,
+and to the nomadic existence during that mountainous and inglorious
+war, he was astonished at the material progress, the refinement of
+civilisation, the culture and the well-being of the people in France.
+He remembered now with shame his Spanish ignorance, all that Castilian
+phantasmagoria, fed by lying literature, that had made him believe
+that Spain was the first country in the world, and its people the
+noblest and bravest, and that all the other nations were a sort of
+wretched mob, created by God to be victims of heresy, and to receive
+overwhelming punishment each time that they ventured to interfere with
+this privileged country, which, though it eats little and drinks less,
+has yet produced the holiest saints and the greatest captains of
+Christendom.
+
+When Gabriel could express himself fluently in French and had
+contrived to save a few francs for his journey, he went to Paris. A
+friendly abbé had procured him employment as corrector of proofs in a
+religious library close to Saint Sulpice. In this priestly quarter of
+Paris, with its hostels for the clergy and for religious families, as
+gloomy as convents, with its shops full of pious images, which flood
+the globe with varnished and smiling saints, was accomplished the
+great transformation of Gabriel.
+
+This quarter of Saint Sulpice with its streets almost Spanish in their
+silence and peacefulness, with the sisters in black veils gliding by
+the walls of the seminary, drawn by the sound of the bells, was for
+the Spanish seminarist what the road to Damascus had been for the
+Apostle. The French Catholicism, cultivated, reasoning and respectful
+to human progress, bewildered Gabriel, whose fierce Spanish bigotry
+had taught him to despise all profane science. There was only one true
+learning in the world, and that was theology. The other sciences were
+only toys, only fit to amuse the eternal infancy of humanity. To know
+God and to meditate on the greatness of His power, this was the only
+serious study to which men could devote themselves; machinery, the
+discoveries of the positive sciences, in fact everything which did not
+treat of divinity and the future life, was only a bagatelle for the
+amusement of fools and people of no faith.
+
+The former seminarist, who from his earliest childhood had despised
+all human progress, was stupefied when he perceived how earnestly all
+French Catholicism spoke of it. In correcting the proofs of so many
+religious works he could not but notice the profound respect which
+this despised science inspired in the good French priests, men of such
+far superior culture to that of the canons down there. And moreover he
+noticed a certain humble shrinking in the representatives of religion
+when they came face to face with science--a desire to please, not
+to be censorious, to help on with their sympathy any conciliatory
+solutions, so that dogma should not fall to the ground, finding no
+place in the rapid march of events that was hurrying humanity into
+the future with the whirl of its new discoveries. Entire books were
+written by eminent priests with the view of adjusting and bringing
+into line the revelations of the holy books and the discoveries of
+modern science, even at the risk of doing some violence to the former.
+The ancient and venerable Church that Gabriel had seen in his own
+country, immovable in its antiquated majesty, unwilling to move a
+single fold of its mantle for fear of losing some of the dust of ages,
+was stirring in France, endeavouring to renew itself, throwing on one
+side the ancient garments of tradition, like old rags that would turn
+it into ridicule, and stretching out its hands with almost despairing
+strength to catch hold of the modern achievements of science; the
+great enemy of yesterday, whose appearance had been ushered in with
+bonfires and shameful abjurations was triumphant to-day.
+
+What had that fatal apple of Paradise contained, that after six
+thousand years of malediction that same Church had begun to venerate
+it, striving to make it forget its ancient persecutions? Why was
+religion, firm as a rock throughout the centuries, which had defied
+persecutions, schisms and wars, beginning to dissolve before the
+discoveries of a few men, and entering into that wild current which
+sought for the cause and explanation of everything? If it had the
+secular support of faith, why should it seek the assistance of reason
+to maintain its traditions and to justify its dogmas?
+
+Gabriel felt the same fever of curiosity which had obliged him as a
+child to bend his back over the old volumes, bound in parchment, in
+the library of the seminary; he wished to be acquainted with the
+mysterious perfume of that hated science which had so disturbed God's
+priests, and had made them indirectly deny the beliefs of nineteen
+centuries. He wished to know why the sacred books were being
+dislocated and tortured in order to explain by geological periods the
+creation which God had accomplished in six days. What danger did they
+hope to avoid by making the divinity appear before science in order to
+explain its acts and fit them into the decisions of the latter?
+Whence came the instinctive fear of the religious authors of roundly
+affirming miracles? attempting instead to justify them by intricate
+and tentative reasonings, without daring to adduce as the decisive
+proof the incomprehensibility of supernatural prodigies.
+
+For the time being Gabriel abandoned the tranquil atmosphere of the
+religious library. His reputation as a humanist had reached the ears
+of an editor living near the Sorbonne, so, without leaving the left
+bank of the Seine, he moved into the Latin quarter to undertake the
+correction of proofs in Latin and Greek. He earned in this way twelve
+francs a day--far more than those canons of Toledo, who formerly had
+appeared to him as great dukes. He lived in a small inn for students
+near to the School of Medicine, and his vehement discussions at night
+with his fellow-lodgers over the smoke of their pipes taught him as
+much as the books of that hated science. Those students who lent him
+books, or who told him of those he should search for in his free
+hours in the library on the hill of Saint Genevieve, laughed like
+pagans at the exalted ideas of the former seminarist.
+
+For two years young Luna did little else but read; now and again he
+accompanied his friends in some escapade, throwing himself into the
+free and joyous life of the Quartier, wearing out the elbows of his
+sleeves on the tables of the beershops. The Mimi of Murger often
+passed before him, but less melancholy than the creation of the poet,
+and the ex-seminarist found his Sunday evening idylls in the woods
+surrounding Paris. But Gabriel was not of an amorous temperament;
+curiosity and the thirst for knowledge mastered him, and after these
+escapades from which he returned fresher, and with his brain keener,
+he threw himself with greater ardour into his studies.
+
+History, true history, whose cold clearness contrasted so strongly
+with that intricate morass of miracles in the chronicles that he had
+read in his childhood, beat down the greater part of his beliefs.
+Catholicism was no longer for him the only religion, neither could
+he any longer divide the history of humanity into two periods, that
+before and that after the appearance in Judea of a handful of obscure
+men, who, spreading themselves over the world, preached a cosmopolitan
+morality drawn from the maxims of Orientals, and from the teachings of
+Greek philosophy.
+
+Religions were for him human inventions, subject to the conditions of
+existence belonging to all organisms, its generous infancy capable of
+blind sacrifices, its self-contained and masterful manhood, in which
+the early sweetness was changed by the authoritative imposition of its
+power, and its inevitable age, with a long agony, in which the sick
+man, guessing his speedy end, clings to life with all the energy of
+desperation.
+
+His faith in Catholicism as the only religion disappeared completely;
+losing his belief in dogmas he lost also, by inevitable logic, that
+belief in the monarchy which had driven him to fight in the mountains,
+and he understood clearly now the history of his country without
+prejudices of race. The foreign historians showed him the sad fate of
+Spain, arrested in the most critical period of her development, when
+she was emerging young and strong during the most fertile period of
+the Middle Ages, by the fanaticism of priests and inquisitors, and the
+folly of some of her kings, who, with utterly inadequate means, wished
+to revive the empire of the Caesars, draining the country for this mad
+enterprise. Those people who had broken with the Papacy, turning their
+backs for ever on Rome, were far happier and more prosperous than that
+Spain, which slept like a beggar at the door of the Church.
+
+At this period of his intellectual development Gabriel had an ideal,
+and often of an evening he would leave his work to go and listen to
+him for an hour at the College of France: this was Ernest Renan;
+Gabriel admired him for a double reason, for his talent and for his
+history. The great man had also passed through a seminary, and even
+now had a priestly look as though he had suffered deeply from the
+pressure of the ecclesiastical yoke; he was a rebel, and Gabriel felt
+as though he belonged to his own family. "Truly the hammers to destroy
+the temple are forged within the temple," and the law fatal to all
+religions was being accomplished, when faith vanishes, and the
+multitude no longer feel the fervour of early days.
+
+Gabriel was astonished to hear how the teacher could penetrate the
+intellectual development of the Hebrew people, which had served as the
+basis of Christianity, as he heard him demolish bit by bit the
+immense altarpiece, before which humanity had knelt for over nineteen
+centuries. The Spanish seminarist revolted against his old faith with
+all the impetuosity of his vehement temperament. How could he have
+believed all that and have considered it the height of human wisdom!
+Certainly Christianity had exercised a beneficial influence at one
+period of the infancy of humanity, it had filled men's lives in the
+Middle Ages when there was little to think of beyond religion, and, in
+a land desolated by strife, there was no other refuge for intellectual
+thought but the cathedral in the towns and the monastery in the
+country. "The fairs--the assemblies for business and pleasure," said
+the master, "were religious feasts; the scenic representations were
+mysteries, the journeys were pilgrimages and the wars crusades." After
+this the ways of life divided--religious life took one way and human
+life the other. Art placed nature above the ideal, and men thought
+more of earth than of heaven. Reason was born, and every advance that
+it made was one step backward for faith, and at last the time arrived
+when the clear-sighted, those who were anxious about the future, began
+to ask themselves what the new belief was likely to be which would
+replace the moribund religion. Luna had no doubts on the point--it was
+science, and science alone, which could fill the vacuum caused by that
+religion now dead for ever.
+
+Influenced by the Hellenism of his master, which he assimilated
+easily, being accustomed to daily intercourse with the Greek authors,
+he dreamed that the humanity of the future would be an immense Athens,
+an artistic and learned democracy governed by great thinkers, with
+no strifes but those of the mind, with no ambition but that of
+cultivating the intellect, of gentle manners, and devoted to the joys
+of the mind and the culture of reason.
+
+Of all his old beliefs, Gabriel only retained that of a creative
+God from a certain superstitious scruple. His ideas were rather
+disconcerted by astronomy, which he had taken up with an almost
+childish eagerness, attracted by the charm of the marvellous.
+That infinite space in which in olden days legions of angels had
+manoeuvred, and which had served the Virgin as a pathway in her
+terrestrial descents, he suddenly found to be peopled with thousands
+of millions of worlds, and the more powerful men's instruments became
+the more numerous they seemed to be, the distances being infinitely
+prolonged to immensities that were inconceivable. Bodies were
+attracted to one another travelling in space at the rate of millions
+of miles a minute, and all this cloud of worlds revolved without ever
+passing twice over the same spot in this immensity of silence, in
+which fresh stars, and again others and others, were continually being
+discovered as the instruments of observation became more perfect.
+
+This God of Gabriel's having lost the corporeal form given to Him by
+religion, and as divulged in the history of the creation, lost at once
+all His attributes, and being magnified to fill the infinite and being
+absorbed into it, became so impalpable and subtle to the intellect as
+to appear a phantasm.
+
+Nothing remained to Gabriel of all his ancient beliefs. His mind was
+like a bare field over which the whirlwind had passed, for his last
+belief, which had remained standing like a monolith in the midst of
+ruins, the belief in the history of creation, had now fallen.
+
+But it was impossible to the former seminarist to remain inactive with
+his cargo of new ideas. He felt obliged to believe in something, to
+devote to the defence of some ideal all the faith in his character, to
+make some use of that fervour of proselytising which had been so
+much admired in the class of eloquence in the seminary, and so
+revolutionary sociology took possession of him. First of all it was
+Proudhon with his audacious writings, and afterwards the work was
+completed by some "militantes" who were working in the same printing
+office as himself--old soldiers of the Commune, who had lately
+returned from their exile in the prisons of Oceania, and were renewing
+their campaign against social organisation with an ardour increased
+tenfold by their painful sufferings and their desire of vengeance.
+With them he went to the anarchist meetings; there he heard Reclus
+and Prince Kropotkine, and the words of the since deceased Miquel
+Bakronhine came to him as the gospel of a Saint Paul of the future.
+
+Gabriel had met with his new religion, and he gave himself over to
+it entirely, dreaming of the regeneration of humanity through its
+stomach. Believing in a future life, misfortunes gave the false
+consolation of happiness after death; but all religion was a lie,
+there was no other life but that of the present, and Luna rose in
+anger against the social injustice that condemned millions of beings
+to poverty and misery for the happiness of a few privileged thousands.
+Authority, which was the fount of all evil, was to him the greatest
+enemy; it must be destroyed, but men must be created who were capable
+of living without masters, priests or soldiers. The natural gentleness
+of his character, and the horror of violence with which his three
+years' campaigning had filled him, caused him rather to draw back from
+his new companions, who, dreaming of hecatombs from dynamite and the
+dagger to reform the world, obliged him to accept these new doctrines
+through fear. No; he believed in the strength of the "idea," and in
+the innocent evolution of humanity; he had only to work like the first
+apostles of Christianity certain of the future, but without hurrying,
+to see his ideas realised; he had only to fix his eyes on the day's
+work, without thinking of the long years and centuries before it would
+bear its fruit.
+
+The ardour of his proselytising made him leave Paris at the end of
+five years. He was anxious to see the world, to study for himself all
+these social miseries, so as to judge what forces these disinherited
+could command for their great transformation. Besides, he began to
+find himself incommoded by the vigilance of the French police, on
+account of his intimacy with the Russian students of the Quartier
+Latin--young men with cold eyes and limp and dishevelled hair who were
+endeavouring to implant in Paris the vengeances of Nihilism. In London
+he came to know a young Englishwoman of weak health, but burning like
+himself with all the ardour of revolutionary propaganda, who would
+walk from morning till night in the lanes and surroundings of
+workshops and laboratories, distributing pamphlets and printed
+leaflets that she kept in a band-box that was always hanging on her
+arm. In a short time Lucy became Gabriel's companion; they loved each
+other without excitement, with a cold and quiet passion, more from
+community of ideas than anything else, for the love of revolutionists,
+dominated with the thought of rebellion against everything existing,
+has not much room for any other feeling.
+
+Luna and his companion went to Holland and thence to Belgium, settling
+afterwards in Germany, always travelling from group to group of
+"companions," taking up different work with that facility of
+adaptation which seems universal among revolutionaries, who wander
+over the world penniless, enduring every sort of privation, but
+finding always in their difficulties some brotherly hand to raise them
+and set them again on the path.
+
+After eight years of this life Gabriel's friend died of consumption.
+They were then in Italy, and Luna, finding himself alone, understood
+for the first time how much support the gentle companion of his life
+had given him. In his sorrow for the loss of Lucy he forgot for a
+while his revolutionary enthusiasm, lamenting only the void left in
+his life. He had not loved her as most men love, but she was his
+companion, his sister, they were alike in their pleasures and their
+sorrows, and their common poverty had welded them into one will.
+Moreover, Gabriel felt himself aged before his time by this life
+of soul-stirring adventures and painful privations. He had been
+imprisoned in many places in Europe, being suspected of complicity
+with the terrorists, he had often been beaten by the police, and he
+began to find a difficulty in travelling about the Continent, as his
+photograph figured with that of several other "companions" in the
+central police offices of the principal nations. He was a vagabond and
+dangerous dog, who would end by being kicked out of every place.
+
+Gabriel could not live alone; he was accustomed to see those kind blue
+eyes near him, and to hear the caressing voice with its bird-like
+inflexions which had so much encouraged him in times of trial and
+difficulty, and he could not endure the solitude in a strange land
+after Lucy's death. A great longing for his native land awoke in him,
+he wished to return to Spain, to that land he had so often ridiculed,
+and which now in spite of its backwardness seemed to him so
+attractive. He thought of his brothers, fixed like plants to the
+stones of the Cathedral, never interesting themselves with what took
+place in the world, never seeking for news of him, as though they had
+entirely forgotten him.
+
+With a sudden impulse, as though he were afraid of dying away from
+his native land, he returned to Spain. In Barcelona some of the
+"companions" had obtained for him the management of a printing press,
+but before taking up his post he wished to spend a few days in Toledo.
+He returned an old man, though he was barely forty, speaking four or
+five languages, and poorer than when he had left it. He found that
+his brother the gardener had died, and that the widow and her son had
+taken refuge in a garret in the Claverias, where she supported herself
+by washing the canon's linen. Esteban, the "Wooden Staff," received
+him with the same admiration he had felt for him while in the
+seminary. He talked a great deal about his travels, gathering together
+all the people in the upper cloister, so that they should listen to
+this man who had travelled all over the world, just as though he were
+going about his own house. In their inquiries they painfully entangled
+geography, as they could only comprehend two divisions in it, the
+countries of heretics, and the countries of Christians.
+
+Gabriel pitied the great poverty of these people, and admired the
+humbleness of these Cathedral servants, content to live and die in the
+same place, without any curiosity as to what was taking place outside
+the walls. The church seemed to him a huge derelict. It was like the
+petrified skeleton of one of those immense and powerful animals of
+former days, that had been dead for ages, its body decayed, its soul
+evaporated, and nothing left but this framework, like to the shells
+found by geologists in prehistoric strata by whose structure they can
+guess at the soft parts of the vanished being. Seeing the ceremonies
+of worship which in former days had so moved him, he felt roused to
+protest, a longing to shout to the priests and acolytes to stop, and
+withdraw, as their times were passed, and faith was dead, and it was
+only from routine and the fear of outside opinion that people now
+frequented these places, which formerly religious fervour had filled
+from morning till night.
+
+On his arrival in Barcelona Gabriel's life was a whirlwind of
+proselytising, of struggles, and of persecutions. The "companions"
+respected him, seeing in him the friend of all the great propagandists
+of "the idea," and one who might himself rank among the most famous
+revolutionists. No meeting could be held without the "companion" Luna;
+that natural eloquence which had caused such wonder on his entry into
+the seminary, bubbled up and spread like an intoxicating gas in these
+revolutionary assemblies, firing that ragged, hungry, and miserable
+crowd, making them tremble with emotion at the description of future
+societies set forth by the apostle, that celestial city of the
+dreamers of all ages, without property, without vices, without
+inequalities, where work would become a pleasure, and where there
+would be no other worship but that of science and art. Some of his
+hearers, the darker spirits, would smile with a compassionate gesture,
+listening to his maledictions against authority, and his hymns to
+the sweetness and triumph to be won by passive resistance. He was an
+idealist, one to whom they must listen because he had served the cause
+well; they who were the strong men, the fighters, knew well enough how
+to crush in silence that cursed society if it should show itself deaf
+to the voice of Truth.
+
+When they exploded bombs in the streets the "companion" Luna was the
+first to be surprised at the catastrophe, he was also the first to be
+taken to prison on account of the popularity of his name. Oh! those
+two years passed in the castle of Montjuich! They had ploughed a deep
+furrow in Gabriel's memory, a deep wound that could not heal, that
+made him tremble at the slightest remembrance, disturbing his calm,
+and making him hot and cold with terror.
+
+The madness of fear had taken possession of society, and all laws and
+regard to humanity, were trampled under foot to defend it. The justice
+of former ages, with its violent procedure was resuscitated in full
+civilisation. The judge was distrusted as being too cultured and
+scrupulous, and a free hand was given to the petty officers of
+justice, ordering them to introduce afresh all the old instruments of
+torture.
+
+In the darkness of the night Gabriel saw his Moorish dungeon lighted
+up; some men in uniform seized him and dragged him down the staircase
+to a room where others were waiting with huge cudgels. A young man
+with a soft voice, in the uniform of a lieutenant, and with the lazy
+manners of a Creole, questioned him as to the various attempts that
+had occurred months before down in the town. Gabriel knew nothing, had
+seen nothing. But all the same these men were your companions; but
+he, having fixed his eyes on high, contemplating his visions of the
+future, had never realised that all around him this violence was
+surging and germinating. His reiterated negative rendered the men
+furious; the soft voice of the Creole became harsh with anger, and
+with menaces and blasphemies they all threw themselves upon him, and
+the cruel hunt of the man round and round the dungeon began, the
+cudgels falling on his body, beat his head or his legs indifferently,
+pursuing him into corners, following him as with a desperate bound he
+reached the opposite wall, opening the way with his bent head, his
+back resounding like an empty box beneath the blows. Now and then the
+desperation of pain inflamed the victim, the lamb turned into a wild
+beast, and before falling to the ground, cowering like a child before
+superior numbers, he would throw himself on the executioners, tearing
+them, and trying to bite them. Gabriel kept a button from the
+lieutenant's uniform which had remained in his fingers after one of
+these revolts of his weakness.
+
+Afterwards, his tormentors, wearied by the inutility of their
+violence, left him forgotten in the dungeon. A loaf of bread and some
+bits of dry salt cod were his only food. Thirst, an infernal thirst,
+racked his bowels, contracted his throat, and burnt his mouth. At
+first he called piteously under the door for water, but afterwards he
+would beg no more, knowing beforehand what the answer would be. It was
+a calculated torture; they promised him as much water as he wished,
+after he should have disclosed the names of the guilty, confessing
+things of which he had no knowledge. Hunger strove in him against
+thirst, but fearing this latter most, he would throw this salted food
+into a corner as though it were poison. He was delirious with the
+delirium of a shipwrecked man tormented with visions of fresh water
+in the midst of the salt waves. In his nightmare he saw clear and
+murmuring brooks, great rivers; and seeking freshness for his mouth
+he would pass his tongue over the filthy walls, finding a certain
+alleviation in the lime of the whitewash.
+
+The privations and the incarceration disturbed his mind with horrible
+ravings; often Gabriel was surprised at finding himself on all fours,
+growling and barking opposite the door without knowing how or why.
+
+His tormentors seemed to forget him; they had other prisoners to look
+after. The jailors gave him water, but whole months passed without
+anyone entering his cell. Some nights he would hear vaguely and
+far off through the greasy walls wailing and sobs in the adjacent
+dungeons. One morning he was awoke by sounds as of thunder, in spite
+of a tiny ray of sunlight filtering through his loophole; hearing the
+jailors in the corridors near, he understood the mystery. They had
+been shooting some of the prisoners.
+
+Luna received as a happiness this hope of death; he would renounce
+with pleasure that shadow of a life in a small stone box, tormented by
+physical pain and the fear of men's ferocity. His stomach, weakened by
+all these privations, refused for many days, with horrible nausea, to
+receive the bitter bread and the coppery mess. His want of exercise,
+the want of air, and the bad and scanty nourishment had made him
+fall into a mortal anaemia; he coughed continually, suffering great
+oppression on his chest. The knowledge he had acquired of the human
+body in his thirst for knowing everything did not admit of his being
+mistaken; he would die as poor Lucy had died.
+
+After a year and a half of imprisonment he appeared before a council
+of war, mixed up with a mob of old men, women, and even quite young
+people, all weakened and broken by imprisonment, with their skin white
+and thick as chewed paper, and that dazed look in their eyes that
+comes from solitary confinement. Gabriel hoped he would be executed.
+When the fiscal came to the name of Luna on the long list he stopped
+an instant, shooting a ferocious glance at him--this man was among the
+theorists. It appeared from the declarations of witnesses that he took
+no direct part in the deeds of violence, and that in his speeches he
+had always deprecated them; still it must be remembered that he was
+one of the principal propagandists of anarchism, and that he had
+delivered speeches in all the workmen's societies frequented by the
+authors of the attempts.
+
+An elderly captain bent towards another member of the council,
+speaking in his ear, but Gabriel caught his words:
+
+"It is on these gentlemen who make speeches that we must lay our hand,
+so that they may be warned not to lecture any more on Tolstoi or
+Ibsen, or any of those foreign worthies who advocate throwing bombs."
+
+Gabriel spent many months of solitary confinement in his prison.
+From words now and then dropped by his jailors he could guess at the
+fluctuations of his fate. Sometimes he would gather that he and all
+his companions in misfortune were to be sent to the jail in Africa, or
+again they would hint at his immediate liberation, or would prophesy
+that they were all to be shot _en masse_. When at the end of two
+years he left this gloomy castle, it was to be embarked with all his
+companions for exile. He was only the shadow of a man; his weakness
+made his walk as uncertain and tremulous as that of a child, but he
+forgot his own misery in trying to assist those of his companions who
+were even weaker than himself, and who bore the cruel scars of the
+torments they had endured.
+
+The return to liberty recalled all his former gentleness and the
+philosophic pity with which he surrounded all men, pitying and
+pardoning their faults. On landing in England the more violent of
+his companions spoke of future vengeance on their persecutors, while
+Gabriel asked pardon for them, as blind instruments employed by
+society in a moment of terror, thinking they had saved it by their
+barbarity.
+
+The climate of London aggravated Gabriel's illness, and in about two
+years he was obliged to move to the Continent, although England with
+its absolute liberty was the only land where he could have lived
+quietly and ignored.
+
+His existence was a cruel one, always a fugitive through the different
+countries of Europe, driven from one place to another by the vigilance
+of the police, thrown into prison, or expelled on the slightest
+suspicion. It was a return to the ancient persecution of the gipsies,
+the constant hunting of independent people, leading vagabond lives, of
+the Middle Ages. His illness and his desire for rest and peace made
+him return to Spain. Time had produced a certain amount of tolerance
+towards the exiles, and in Spain everything is soon forgotten, and
+though the authorities are harder and less scrupulous than in other
+countries, still they interfere less on account of their improvidence
+and the carelessness natural to the race.
+
+Sick and without any work by which he could earn his living, precluded
+from seeking work among the printers, as his name was encircled by
+a halo which terrified the masters, Gabriel fell into such extreme
+poverty that the little help and succour his companions could afford
+were unable to relieve it, and he travelled from end to end of the
+Peninsula begging from his fellows and hiding from the police.
+
+His spirit was broken, he was conquered, and he had no longer strength
+to continue the struggle. Nothing remained for him but to die, but
+merciful death came slowly to his call. He thought of his brother, the
+only affection remaining to him in the world; he remembered the quiet
+family in the Claverias, of which he had caught a glimpse on his last
+visit to the Cathedral, and he turned to seek them as his last hope.
+
+On his return to Toledo, he found the happy family dissolved;
+misfortune had come even to that silent and stagnant corner.
+
+But the Cathedral, insensible to all human vicissitudes was there,
+the same as ever, and to it he clung, hiding himself in its recesses,
+hoping to die there in peace, with no other hope but to be forgotten;
+dying before his proper time, tasting the bitter happiness of
+annihilation, leaving behind him at the door, like an animal who sheds
+its skin, all that rebellion which had drawn upon him the hatred of
+society.
+
+His happiness was not to think, not to speak, to mould himself to that
+dead world; he would be among the living statues peopling the upper
+cloister, one more automaton; he would imitate those beings who seemed
+to have absorbed into themselves something of the austerity of the
+granite buttresses, he would inhale like a healing balsam the scent
+of the rusty iron railings and the incense that spread through the
+church, the ancient perfume of the past centuries.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+On leaving the cloister in the mornings soon after daybreak, the first
+person Gabriel would see was Don Antolin, the "Silver Stick." This
+priest exercised an authority like that of Governor of the Cathedral,
+for all the lay servants were under his orders, and all the repairs of
+little importance were done under his supervision.
+
+Down below, in the church, he watched the sacristans and the acolytes,
+careful that the canons and beneficiaries should have no cause of
+complaint in the services. Upstairs, in the cloister, he watched over
+the good behaviour and cleanliness of the families, being by the grace
+of the cardinal archbishop a sort of magistrate over that little town.
+
+He occupied the best "habitacion" in the Claverias. At the great
+ceremonies he walked in front of the Chapter in his pluvial, carrying
+a silver stick nearly as tall as himself, making the tiles of the
+pavement re-echo with its blows. During High Mass and the choir in the
+evening he walked about the naves to check any irreverence on the part
+of the congregation or any inattention on that of the staff. At eight
+o'clock at night in the winter, and at nine in summer, he locked the
+door of the staircase leading to the upper cloister, putting the key
+in his pocket, and so all the people in the cloister remained quite
+isolated from the town. If now and again anyone was taken ill in the
+night, it was necessary to wake Don Antolin who, plunging his hand
+into the depths of his cassock, would produce his key, and deign to
+restore communication with the outer world.
+
+He was about seventy years of age, small and wizened; age had scarcely
+tinged his shaven crown with grey, his forehead was broad and square,
+and rose straight beneath the silk cap he wore in winter. His features
+were rather drawn out, without a single wrinkle, and devoid of any
+expression that showed emotion, the jaw-bone narrow and sharp, and the
+eyes as inexpressive and motionless as the rest of the face, but with
+a cold, penetrating glance that was extremely disconcerting.
+
+Gabriel had known him from his childhood; he was, to use his own
+expression, like a private soldier of the church, who by reason of his
+years and services had attained the rank of sergeant, but who could
+rise no further. When Luna first entered the seminary Don Antolin had
+just been ordained priest, and since then had passed his life in the
+sacristy of the Primacy where he had begun as acolyte.
+
+On account of his absolute and irrational faith and his unbending
+adhesion to the Church, the professors in the seminary had pushed him
+on in his career, in spite of his ignorance; he was a son of the soil,
+having been born in a village in the mountains round Toledo. The Holy
+Metropolitan Church was to him the second house of God in the world,
+only ranking after Saint Peter's in Rome, and all ecclesiastical
+learning was to him like rays emanating from the Divine wisdom, which
+blinded him, and were to be adored with the profound respect of
+ignorance.
+
+He had that blessed and entire want of education so appreciated by the
+Church in former years. Gabriel felt sure that if Silver Stick had
+been born in the flourishing times of Catholicism he would have become
+a saint on dedicating himself to the spiritual life, or he would have
+played an excellent part in the Inquisition on the arrival of that
+militant society. Having come into the world at the wrong time, when
+faith was weakened and the Church could no longer impose its laws
+by violence, the good Don Antolin had remained hidden in the lower
+administration of the Cathedral, assisting the Canon Obrero in the
+division and assignment of the money that the State allowed to the
+Primacy, giving long thought over the spending of each handful of
+farthings, endeavouring that the holy house, like the ruined families,
+should keep up its good outward appearance without revealing the
+poverty inside.
+
+He had been promised several times a chaplaincy of nuns, but he was
+one of those faithful to the Cathedral, one of those quite in love
+with the great establishment. He was proud of the confidence that the
+Lord Archbishop placed in him, and of the frank friendliness
+with which the canons and beneficiaries spoke to him, and of his
+administrative conferences with the Obrero and the Treasurer. For this
+reason he could not repress a gesture of contemptuous superiority when
+having donned his pluvial, and clutching his silver stick, he advanced
+and spoke to any strange clergy from the neighbouring villages who
+visited the Primacy.
+
+His faults were purely ecclesiastic; he saved in secret, with that
+cold, determined avarice so usual at all times in people attached to
+the Church. His greasy skull cap had been discarded as too old by its
+former owner, one of the canons; his cassock of a greenish black and
+his shoes had also belonged to some one of the beneficiaries; in the
+Claverias they all whispered of the monies hoarded by Don Antolin,
+and of his savings that were devoted to usury--loans that never went
+beyond two or three duros to the poorer servants of the church ground
+down by poverty, and which he recovered with interest at the beginning
+of every month when they were paid by the Canon Obrero. In him avarice
+and usury were joined to the most implicit honesty in regard to the
+interests of the church; he would punish relentlessly the smallest
+pilfering in the sacristy, and he made up his accounts for the Chapter
+with a minuteness that annoyed the Obrero. To every one his own, the
+church was poor and it would be a sin worthy of hell to deprive her of
+a single farthing; he, as a good servant of God was poor also, and he
+thought he was doing no wrong in drawing a certain profit from the
+money he had gathered together by dint of bargaining, and by many
+painful privations in the midst of his poverty.
+
+His niece, Mariquita, lived with him, an ugly woman with masculine
+features and a fresh colour, who had come from the mountains to look
+after her uncle, of whose riches and power in the Primacy all his
+relations and friends in the village talked a great deal. She rode
+roughshod over all the other women in the Claverias, taking undue
+advantage of Don Antolin's supreme authority. The more timid formed
+round her a circle of adulation, endeavouring to evoke her protection
+by cleaning her house and cooking for her, while Mariquita, dressed in
+the habit, and with her hair most carefully combed--the only luxury
+allowed by her uncle--loitered about the cloister hoping to meet there
+some cadet, or that some of the foreigners visiting the tower or the
+hall of the giants would take notice of her. She made sheep's eyes
+at every man; and she, so hard and imperious to all the women, would
+smile sweetly on all the bachelors living in the Claverias. The "Tato"
+was a great friend of hers; he would come and visit her when her uncle
+was absent in order to air his graces as apprentice to a Torrero.
+Gabriel, with his delicate looks, his mysterious self-containment, and
+the confused story of all his great travels about the world interested
+her not less; she would even speak with marked deference to the
+"Wooden Staff," as he was both a man and a widower, and, as the
+"Perrero" wickedly said, the very sight of a pair of trousers nearly
+drove the poor woman mad in that establishment where the greater part
+of the men wore petticoats.
+
+Don Antolin had known Gabriel since his childhood, and spoke to him in
+the second person. The ignorant priest still retained the remembrance
+of Luna's great triumphs obtained in the seminary, and though he saw
+him so poor and ailing, taking refuge in the Cathedral almost on
+charity, his "tuteo" of superiority was not free from admiration.
+Gabriel, on his side, feared Silver Stick, knowing his intolerant
+fanaticism. For this reason he confined himself to listening to him,
+careful in their conversation that not a single word should slip in
+which could betray his past. He would be the first to demand his
+expulsion from the Cathedral, where he wished to live unknown and
+silent.
+
+On meeting each other in the cloister, the two men began with the same
+questions every morning:
+
+"How is your health to-day?"
+
+Gabriel showed himself an optimist. He knew that his illness had
+no remedy; still, that quiet life free from all emotions, and his
+brother's care, feeding him at all hours, like a bird and almost by
+force, had arrested the decay of his health. The course of the illness
+was slower--death was meeting with obstacles.
+
+"I am better, Don Antolin. And yesterday, what sort of a day had you?"
+
+Silver Stick plunged his dirty and horny hands into the recesses of
+his cassock, and produced three greasy little ticket-books, one red,
+one green and the third white. He turned over the leaves, considering
+the counterfoils of those he had torn out; he took the most respectful
+care of these little books, as though they were far more important
+than the big music books in the choir.
+
+"A very slack day, Gabriel! Being in the winter, so few people travel.
+Our best time is in the spring, when they say the English come in by
+Gibraltar. They go first to the fair in Seville, and afterwards they
+come to have a look at our Cathedral. Besides, in milder weather the
+people come from Madrid, and although they grumble, the flies crowd
+to see the giants and the big bell, then I have to hurry with the
+tickets; one day, Gabriel, I took eighty duros. I remember it was at
+the last 'Corpus'; Mariquita had to sew up the pockets of my cassock,
+for they tore with the weight of so many pesetas; it was a blessing
+from the Lord."
+
+He looked sadly at the little books, as though regretting that many
+days passed in winter when he only tore out one or two leaves. This
+plan of selling entrance tickets to see the treasures and curiosities
+of the Cathedral filled all his thoughts. It was the salvation of the
+church, the modern proceeding to help it on, and he felt proud of
+fulfilling this function, which made him one of the most important
+persons in the life of the temple.
+
+"You see these green tickets?" said he to Gabriel. "These are the
+dearest, they cost two pesetas each. With these you can see everything
+that is most important--the treasury, the chapel of the Virgin, and
+the Ochavo with its relics which are unique in the world. The other
+cathedrals are dirt compared with ours, and their relics lies, many of
+them invented on account of the envy that our Holy Metropolitan Church
+inspired. You see these red ones? These only cost six reals, and with
+them you can visit the sacristies, the wardrobe, the chapels of Don
+Alvaro de Luna and of Cardinal Albornoz, and the Chapter-house, with
+its two rows of portraits of the archbishops which are wonders. Who
+would not scrape their purse to see such prodigies?"
+
+Afterwards he added, showing the last ticket book with contempt:
+
+"These white ones are only worth two reals. They are to see the giants
+and the bells. We sell a great many of those to the lower class who
+come to the Cathedral on feast days. Could you believe it, but many
+of the Protestants and Jews call this a robbery? The other day three
+soldiers came from the Academy with some country folks to see the
+giants, and they made quite a scandalous scene because we would not
+let them in for an old song. As if we were asking their charity! Many
+of them commit all sorts of nuisances about the Cathedral, just as
+if they were heretics, to say nothing of their drawing all sorts
+of abominable things and writing obscene words on the walls of the
+staircase. What shocking times, eh, Gabriel? What shocking times!"
+
+Luna smiled silently, and Silver Stick, encouraged by what seemed to
+him acquiescence, went on with pride:
+
+"And about these tickets, I invented them--that is to say, I am not
+really their inventor, but their introduction into this house is owing
+to me. You have travelled so much, and must have seen in those foreign
+countries that everything is shown on payment. The Lord Cardinal
+before this one, who is now in blessed glory (and he raised his hand
+to his skull cap) had also travelled a great deal--he was quite a
+'modern,' and had he lived would have ended by putting electric light
+in the naves of the Cathedral. I heard him on one occasion speak of
+what was done in the museums and other interesting places in Rome
+and other towns; unrestricted entrance at all hours--on payment, an
+immense convenience to the public, who required to get no tickets
+beforehand to visit these things. So one day when the Obrero and I
+were biting our nails, seeing that this miserable thousand and odd
+pesetas (God forgive me!) that this unhappy State allows us, could not
+possibly suffice for our monthly expenses, I propounded my idea. Now,
+could you believe that some of the gentlemen in the Chapter opposed
+it? Some of the young canons spoke of the sellers in the Temple, you
+know who they were--certain Jews who drove the Lord out with scourges
+in their hand, for I know not what misdemeanours. The older ones said
+the Cathedral had always had its treasures open to all for centuries,
+and so it ought to go on. All the gentlemen were quite right, but
+you cannot do anything with a stupid canon, and at last the defunct
+cardinal, who is now in the enjoyment of God (another tug at his cap)
+interfered, and the Chapter were obliged, though with much grumbling,
+to accept the reform, and they ended by praising it. In all bitter
+there is a sweet! Do you know how much money I handed to the Lord
+Cardinal last year? More than three thousand duros, nearly as much as
+this sinful State allows us, and this without prejudice to anybody.
+The public pays, they admire and they go; in any case they are only
+birds of passage who come once, and when they go they do not return.
+And what are four wretched pesetas, when for that money you can see
+one of the most glorious churches in Christendom, the cradle of
+Spanish Catholicism, the Cathedral of Toledo!"
+
+The two men were walking in the cloister on the side warmed by the sun
+at that early hour, the cleric had put away his ticket books, and his
+eyes were fixed on Gabriel, who thought that to smile in his enigmatic
+way, which Don Antolin accepted as assent, quite met the situation,
+and it encouraged him to continue his confidences.
+
+"Ay, Gabriel! You cannot think that my heavy duties can be fulfilled
+without hard work; the Cardinal trusts me, the Chapter distinguish
+me with their regard, and the Obrero has no other hope but in my
+assistance. Thanks to these tickets we can carry the Cathedral along,
+and keep up its ancient appearance of grandeur, so that the public
+will come and admire. But we are poorer than rats, and we must be
+thankful that even some crumbs are left us from the past. If the wind
+or the hail break some of our glass in the naves, we can still lay our
+hands on some of the stores left by the Obreros of former days. Ay,
+señor! And to think there was a time when the Chapter maintained at
+its own expense inside the church, cutters and painters of glass,
+plumbers, and I know not what beside, so that any great works could be
+undertaken without seeking any help outside the house! If one of the
+tombs gets broken, even now we have quantities of borderings carved
+with saints and flowers that are wonderful to see. But what will
+happen when all these are finished? When the last pane of glass in
+the stores has been broken, and the last fragments of carving in the
+Obreria used up? We shall have to put cheap white panes in the windows
+to prevent the rain and wind coming in. The Cathedral will look like
+an inn--may God forgive me the comparison--and the priests of the
+Primacy will praise God dressed like the chaplain of a hermitage."
+
+And Don Antolin laughed sarcastically, as though this future that he
+was anticipating was an absurd contradiction of the eternal laws.
+
+"You will easily believe," he went on, "that they do not waste
+anything, and that they make money out of every possible thing. The
+garden that was for so many years in your family is now leased out by
+the Chapter, since your brother's death; twenty duros a year your Aunt
+Tomasa pays for her son to cultivate it, and this only because, as you
+know, the old woman is such a great friend of His Eminence, as they
+have known each other since they were children. I go about like a
+water carrier, all round the church and the cloisters, watching that
+no one plays tricks, for there are a lot of young light-hearted
+people, whom you cannot trust. One minute I am in the Ochavo, watching
+that your nephew the 'Tato' has sold the tickets to the foreigners
+(for he is quite capable of letting them in gratis if they tip him
+on leaving), and the next I am up in the cloister looking after that
+shoemaker who repairs the giants; they cannot deceive me, no one
+escapes me without paying; but, ay! it is a long while since I have
+sung mass. You can see me at mid-day when the Cathedral is closed
+reading my hours hurriedly in the cloisters, watching the clock in
+order to go down the moment the church is opened, when the strangers
+begin to come to see the treasury. This is not the life of a good
+Catholic, and if God does not lay it to my account that I am doing it
+all for the glory of His house, I fear that I shall lose my soul."
+
+The two men walked up and down some time in silence, but Don Antolin
+could not hold his tongue for long when the subject was the economic
+life of the Primacy.
+
+"And to think, Gabriel," he continued, "that having been what we were
+in former times, we should have come to this! You and most of those
+alive have no idea how rich this house used to be--as rich as a king,
+and often far richer. From a child no one has known as you have the
+history of our glorious archbishops, but of the fortune they amassed
+for God, you know nothing. Of course these temporalities do not
+interest learned people like you. Have you any idea what donations the
+kings and great lords gave in their lifetime to our Cathedral, or the
+legacies they left her on their deathbeds? You have a great deal to
+learn! I know all about it, I have searched in the Obreria, in the
+archives, in the library; everyone does what interests them, and I and
+the Señor Obrero have often raged at the indigence of the house, but I
+console myself by thinking of what we had, long before any of us were
+born. We were very rich, Gabriel--very, very rich. The archbishops of
+Toledo could have placed one or two crowns on their mitre, I dare not
+say three, for I think of the Supreme Pontiff. First of all, there is
+the Deed of Gift to the Cathedral, made by the King Alfonso VI., by
+reason of his having conquered Toledo. It was made a hermitage, after
+the election of the Bishop Don Bernardo, and I have seen it in the
+archives with my own sinful eyes, a parchment with Gothic letters, and
+at the head is written, 'The privileges of this Holy Church.' The good
+king gave to the Cathedral nine towns--if I wished I could tell you
+their names--several mills, and vineyards innumerable, houses and
+shops in the town, and he ends by saying with all the munificence of
+a Christian cavalier, 'This, therefore, in such a way I give, and I
+grant to this church and to you, Bernard, Archbishop, in free and
+perfect gift, that neither by homicide, nor any other calumny, shall
+it ever be forfeited. Amen.' Afterwards, Don Alfonso VII. gave us
+eight towns on the other side of the Guadalquiver, several ovens, two
+castles, the salt works of Belinchon, and a tenth of all the money
+coined in Toledo, for the vestments of the prebendaries. The VIII. of
+the name showered on the Cathedral a perfect rain of gifts, towns,
+villages, and mills. Illescas is ours, and a great part of Esquivias,
+as also the mortgage on Talavera. Afterwards came the fighting
+prelate, Don Rodrigo, who took much land from the Moors, and the
+Cathedral possesses one principality, the Adelantamiento de Cazorla,
+with towns like Baza, Niebla, and Alcaraz. And besides the kings there
+is a great deal to be said about the nobles, great princes who showed
+their generosity to the Holy Metropolitan Church. Don Lope de Haro,
+Lord of Vizcaya, not content with paying the cost of the building from
+the Puerta de los Escribanos as far as the choir, gave us the town of
+Alcubilete, with its mills and fisheries, and he also left a legacy
+so that in the choir when complines are sung, that lamp called the
+Preciosa should be lighted, which is placed by the great bronze eagle
+belonging to the big missal. Don Alfonso Tello de Meneses gave us
+four towns on the banks of the Guadiana, granted us tithes and bridge
+tolls, and I know not what riches besides. We have been very powerful,
+Gabriel; the territory of this diocese is larger than a principality.
+The Cathedral had property on the earth, in the air, and in the sea!
+Our dominions extended throughout the whole nation from end to end;
+there was not a single province in which we did not hold possessions.
+Everything contributed to the glory of the Lord, and to the comfort
+and welfare of His ministers; everything paid to the Cathedral: bread
+when it was baked in the ovens, the casting of the net, wheat as it
+passed through the mill, money as it came from the Mint, the traveller
+as he went on his way; the country people who then paid no taxes or
+contributions served their king and saved their own souls, giving
+the best sheaf in every ten, so that the granaries of the Holy
+Metropolitan Church were quite insufficient to contain such abundance.
+What times were those, Gabriel! There was faith, Gabriel, and faith
+is the chief thing in life--without faith there is no virtue nor
+decency--nor nothing."
+
+He stopped for a moment, quite out of breath with talking. The priest
+was so saturated with the atmosphere of the Cathedral, that in himself
+he seemed to unite all the various scents of the church; his cassock
+had collected the mouldy smell of the old stones and the rusty iron
+railings, and his mouth seemed to breathe of the gutters and the
+gargoyles, and the rank damp of the garrets.
+
+With the rapid enumeration of all the past wealth Don Antolin warmed,
+even to indignation.
+
+"And having been so rich, now we find ourselves in extreme poverty.
+And I, my son, a priest of the Lord, am obliged to go hither and
+thither with those tickets so that we may all live, just as though
+I were a seller of entrance tickets to a bull-fight, and the Lord's
+house were a theatre, having to endure all those foreign heretics,
+who come in without blessing themselves, and who look at everything
+through opera-glasses. And I have to smile at them because they pay us
+and provide us with some dessert for our poor stew! Carape! Jesus have
+mercy on me! I was going to say a sacrilege."
+
+Don Antolin continued his angry complaints till, in passing the front
+of his house, Mariquita of the scowling and ugly countenance appeared
+at the door.
+
+"Uncle, enough of walking. Your chocolate is getting cold."
+
+But before the priest disappeared into his house, she went on, smiling
+amiably at Luna:
+
+"Will you have some, Don Gabriel?"
+
+And with her bold eyes, like a hungry wolf, she invited Luna to enter.
+She liked the masterful ways of the man, she said, and the ease which
+his former intercourse with the world had given him, and, moreover,
+for her woman's imagination Gabriel's mysterious past possessed
+a great attraction; his proud silence, the vague reports of his
+adventures, and the smile, as much compassionate as disdainful, with
+which he listened to the people of the upper cloister.
+
+The insinuating Mariquita withdrew, and Gabriel continued his walk
+through the cloister, after finishing the little jar of milk that his
+brother brought him up every morning.
+
+At eight o'clock, Don Luis, the Chapel-master, came out, his cloak
+wrapped as usual theatrically round him, and his big hat well tilted
+back, like a glory, round his enormous head; he was humming absently,
+restless with perpetual nervous movements; he inquired anxiously if
+the bell had yet rung for the choir, frightened by the threats of a
+fine in case he were late. Gabriel felt himself very much attracted
+by this poor priestly musician, who lived so despised in the furthest
+corner of the church, thinking far more of music than of dogma.
+
+In the evenings Gabriel would often go up to the little room inhabited
+by the Chapel-master, on the tipper floor of the Lunas' house; the
+room contained all the priest's fortune--a little iron bed, which had
+belonged formerly to the seminarist, two plaster busts of Beethoven
+and Mozart, and an enormous pile of bundles of music, bound scores,
+loose sheets of ruled paper, so big and so piled up and disorderly
+that every now and then a pile would slip down, covering the floor of
+the little room with white sheets to its furthest corner.
+
+"That is how all his money goes," said the Wooden Staff with an air of
+good-natured reproof, "he will never have a farthing. As soon as he
+gets his pay he orders more music from Madrid. It would be far better
+for Don Luis if he were to buy himself a new hat, even if it were a
+cheap one, so that the gentlemen of the choir should not laugh at the
+covering he has on his head."
+
+In the winter evenings, after the choir, the musician and Gabriel took
+refuge in this little room. The canons, wishing to avoid the cold
+winds and the rain, took their daily walk in the galleries of the
+upper cloister, not wishing to forego this exercise to which their
+methodical existence had accustomed them. The rain would beat on the
+window of the little room, and in the dull grey twilight the musician
+would turn over his portfolios, or letting his hands wander over the
+harmonium, he would talk the while with Gabriel, who was seated on the
+bed.
+
+The musician would grow excited, speaking of his love of art. In the
+midst of some peroration he would become suddenly silent, and bending
+over the instrument its melodies would fill the room, and floating
+down the staircase would reach the ears of the walkers in the cloister
+like a distant echo. Suddenly he would cease playing and resume his
+chattering, as though afraid that with his absent-mindedness his ideas
+would evaporate.
+
+The silent Luna was the only listener he had met with in the
+Cathedral; the first who would listen to him for long hours without
+ridiculing him or thinking him crazy, and who often showed by his
+short interruptions and questions the pleasure with which he listened.
+
+The end of the evening's conversation was always the same--the
+greatness of Beethoven, the idol of the poor musician.
+
+"I have loved him all my life," said the Chapel-master, "I was
+educated by a Jeronomite friar, an old man driven from his convent
+who, after leaving it, had wandered over the world as a professor
+of the violoncello. The Jeronomites were the great musicians of the
+Church. You did not know this, neither should I have known it if this
+holy man had not taken me under his protection soon after I was born,
+and been to me a real father. It appears that in olden days each order
+devoted itself to some special thing. One, I think the Benedictines,
+copied and annotated old books; others made sweet liqueurs for the
+ladies, others were wonderfully clever in training cage birds, and
+the Jeronomites studied music for seven years, each one playing the
+instrument of his choice, and to these we owe that there has been
+preserved in the Spanish churches a little, but very little, good
+musical taste. And from what my little father told me, what wonderful
+orchestras these Jeronomites must have had in their convents! For the
+ladies it was a great delight to go on Sunday evenings to the parlour,
+where they met the good fathers, each one a master of his own
+particular instrument. These were the only concerts in those days, and
+with their pittance assured, and no anxiety as to housing or clothing
+themselves, and with the love of art as their only duty, you may
+imagine, Gabriel, what musicians they could become. For this reason,
+when the friars were expelled from their convents the Jeronomites were
+not the worst off. There was no need to beg masses in the churches
+or to live on the charity of devout families; they were able to earn
+their bread by an art conscientiously studied, and consequently they
+soon got places as organists and Chapel-masters; the Chapters really
+fought for them. Some were more venturesome, and, anxious to see more
+of that musical world which had seemed to them while in their convents
+a vision of Paradise, entered the orchestras of theatres, many
+travelling even to Italy, transforming themselves so entirely that
+even their own former prior could not have recognised them. One of
+these was my little father. What a man! He was a good Christian, but
+he had thrown himself so thoroughly into music that he retained
+very little of the former friar. When he was told that probably the
+convents would be re-established, he shrugged his shoulders with
+indifference, a new sonata interested him much more. He sometimes said
+things that have always lived in my memory. I remember one day when I
+was a child he took me to a meeting of musical friends in Madrid, who
+played, for their own pleasure only, the famous 'Seventh Symphony.' Do
+you know it? It is the freshest and most graceful of all Beethoven's
+works. I remember my little father leaving the room quite wrapped up
+in himself, with his head bent, dragging me along, for I could hardly
+keep up with his long footsteps, and when we got home he looked at me
+fixedly, as though I had been a grown-up person. 'Listen, Luis,' he
+said, 'and remember this well. There is only one Lord in the world,
+Our Lord Jesus Christ, and there are two lesser lords, Galileo and
+Beethoven.'"
+
+The musician looked lovingly at the plaster bust which faced the room
+from one corner, with its leonine brows and the diffident eyes of a
+deaf person.
+
+"I do not know much about Galileo," continued Don Luis. "I know that
+he was a very wise man, and a scientific genius. I am only a musician
+and I know very little about other things, but I adore Beethoven,
+and I think my little father did the same--he is a god; the most
+extraordinary man the world has ever produced. Don't you think so,
+Gabriel?"
+
+His nerves were quivering with his excitement, and getting up, he
+walked rapidly up and down the room, trampling on all the loose sheets
+of music.
+
+"Ay! how I envy you, Gabriel, having travelled so much, and having
+heard so many good things! The other night I could not sleep for
+thinking of all you had told me about your life in Paris--those
+beautiful Sunday afternoons when you would go to the Lamoureax
+concerts, or sometimes to Colonnas, giving yourself a surfeit of
+sublimity! And here am I, shut up, my only hope being perhaps to
+conduct a Mass of Rossini's at one of the great festivals! My only
+comfort is to read music, instructing myself thoroughly in those great
+works that so many fools in the towns can listen to half asleep and
+bored. Here I have, in this pile, the nine symphonies of the great
+man--his innumerable sonatas, his masses, and together with him,
+Haydn, Mozart, Mendelssohn, in fact all the great writers. I have even
+Wagner. I read them, and I play what is possible on the harmonium.
+But--it is just as if you were to describe the drawing and colours of
+a picture to a blind man, buried in this cloister. I know, blindly,
+that there are most beautiful things in this world--for those who can
+hear them."
+
+The Chapel-master kept from the previous year the remembrance of a
+great happiness, and he spoke of it enthusiastically. He had been
+chosen by the Cardinal Archbishop to go to Madrid, to be one of a
+board of examiners for organists.
+
+"That was the best time I ever had in my life, Gabriel. One evening
+I listened to Wagner, dressed in the clothes of a friend of mine, a
+violinist, who plays here in Toledo at the great festivals. I heard
+the Walkyria in the pit of the Real Theatre, another night I went to
+a concert; but the greatest night of all was the one on which I heard
+the Ninth Symphony of that ugly old fellow, of that deaf, bad-tempered
+genius who is listening to us."
+
+And with one bound the musician rushed to the bust, kissing it
+with childish humility, just as a child would caress a stern and
+domineering father.
+
+"You know the Ninth Symphony; true, Gabriel? And what did you feel as
+you listened to it? When I listen to music strange things happen to
+me. I close my eyes and I see unknown countries and strange faces, and
+whenever I hear the same works the same visions are repeated. If I
+speak about this with any of the people down below they say I am mad,
+but I know that you feel as I do, and I am not afraid that you will
+laugh at me. There are musical passages that make me see the sea, blue
+and boundless, with silvery waves, and this, though I have never seen
+the ocean; other works bring before me woods and castles, or groups
+of shepherds with white flocks; with Schubert I always see two lovers
+sighing at the foot of a linden tree, and certain French composers
+bring before my mind's eye beautiful women walking among beds of
+roses, dressed in violet, always violet. And you, Gabriel, do not you
+see these things?"
+
+The anarchist assented--yes, music awoke in him also a world of
+fantastic visions, far more beautiful than reality.
+
+"I remember," went on the priest, "what the Ninth Symphony made me
+see. I see it still if I only hum some of its passages. Oh! that
+graceful Scherzo with its strange tremolos! I thought, hearing it,
+that God and his court of saints had left the heavens to take a
+walk, leaving the little angels masters of the house, full liberty!
+Universal gambols! The heavenly children, without any restraint,
+sported from cloud to cloud, amusing themselves by scattering on the
+earth the garlands of flowers that the saints had left behind them;
+one let loose the rain and made it fall on the earth; another seized
+the key of the thunder and touched it, fearful peals which frightened
+all the revellers and made them fly. But they returned again to
+continue their graceful play, beginning afresh their noisy games that
+the thunder had disturbed. And the Adagio! What do you say about that?
+Do you know anything softer, more loving or so divinely peaceful?
+Human beings will never speak like this again, however much progress
+they make. Hearing it, I thought of those fresco-painted ceilings with
+mythological figures--gods and goddesses with pink flesh and flowing
+curves, Apollo and Venus reclining on a mountain of pink and gold
+clouds, like a lovely dawn."
+
+"Chaplain, what has come to you?" said Gabriel; "this is not very
+Christian."
+
+"No, but it is artistic," said the musician simply. "I do not trouble
+myself much about religion, I believe what I was taught, and I have
+never taken the trouble to inquire any further. Music alone occupies
+me, of which someone has said 'that it will be the religion of the
+future,' the purest manifestation of the ideal. Everything that is
+beautiful delights me, and I believe in it as a work of God. 'I
+believe in God and in Beethoven,' as his pupil said--and besides, how
+much religion the grandeur of music contains! Do you know the last
+quartet that Beethoven wrote? He felt he was dying, and he wrote on
+the edge of the score this terrible question: 'Must it be?' and lower
+down he added, 'Yes, it must be, it must be.' It was necessary to die,
+even for such a genius to leave life, while he still carried in his
+mind such glorious things, to pay the tribute of human renovation;
+and then he wrote that lament, that farewell to life, whose greatness
+cannot be equalled by any song, or by any words of religion."
+
+The musician sat down to the harmonium, and for a long while played
+that last lament of the genius, his sorrowful complaint on crossing
+the threshold, not despairing and trembling through fear of the
+unknown, but with a brave melancholy, sinking into the eternal shadow,
+confident that nothing could obscure his genius.
+
+These evenings of artistic communion in that corner of the sleepy
+Cathedral drew the two men together with an ever increasing affection.
+The musician talked, turning over his scores, or playing his
+harmonium; the revolutionist listened silently, only interrupting his
+friend by his painful cough. They were evenings of sweet sadness that
+these two men spent together, one dreaming of leaving the stone prison
+of the Cathedral to see the world, the other returning from life
+wounded and breathless, content with the obscure repose of the
+beautiful church, and guarding with prudent silence the secret of his
+past. Art shone for them like the rays of the sun in the grey and
+monotonous atmosphere of the Cathedral.
+
+When they met in the early mornings in the cloister the conversation
+between the two friends generally ran on the same lines.
+
+"This evening, eh?" the Chapel-master would say mysteriously. "I have
+some fresh music, we shall enjoy something new that I have been sent
+to-day, and besides, I wrote a little thing last night."
+
+The anarchist nodded affirmatively, quite ready to serve as
+entertainment for this pariah of art, who saw in him his only
+audience, and who took so much kindly trouble to interest him.
+
+While the services lasted Gabriel would walk alone in the cloisters;
+all the men were in the Cathedral, except the shoemaker, who was
+mending the giants. Tired of the chattering of the women who stood
+at the doors of the Claverias, he would go up to the dwelling of the
+bell-ringer, his old companion in arms, or he would go down into the
+garden by the remarkable staircase del Tenorio when it was open, or by
+the archbishop's archway crossing the street.
+
+He delighted in passing an hour under the trees; he found in the
+garden as many memories of his family as in the "habitacion" upstairs.
+Besides, he was tired of always finding his walks bounded by stone
+walls, which reminded him of his prison, and he wanted the movement of
+the vegetation caressed by the breeze to foster the illusion that he
+was living in complete liberty in the open country.
+
+In the arbour, where he had formerly so often seen his father, infirm
+and crippled with age, directing his eldest son, who received all his
+orders impassively, he would now meet his Aunt Tomasa, knitting her
+stockings, and watching with vigilant eyes the work of a boy whom she
+had taken into her service.
+
+Gabriel's aunt was by far the most important person in the Claverias;
+her word was worth quite as much as Don Antolin's, the Silver Stick
+was afraid of her, bending before the powerful protection that they
+all guessed stood behind the poor old woman. In the days when her
+father, Gabriel's maternal grandfather, was sacristan in the Cathedral
+the functions of acolyte were exercised by a small boy, nephew of one
+of the beneficiaries of the Cathedral, who ended by paying for his
+education in the seminary. This little acolyte of half a century
+before was now a prince of the church, and the Cardinal Archbishop of
+Toledo. Old Tomasa and he had known each other as children, fighting
+over trifles in the upper cloister, or playing tricks on the beggars
+who sat at the Puerta del Mollete. The imposing Don Sebastian, whose
+look alone made the Chapter and all the clergy in the diocese tremble,
+became happy, fraternal and confidential, when now and then in the
+evenings he saw Tomasa. She was the only living reminder of his
+childhood in the Cathedral. The old woman would kiss his ring with
+great reverence, but very soon she would lapse into talking to him as
+one of her own family, often very nearly speaking to him in the second
+person. The cardinal, always surrounded by fear and adulation, often
+felt the necessity of the old woman's careless and frank conversation.
+The people belonging to the Cathedral declared that the Señora Tomasa
+was the only person who dared to tell the cardinal home-truths face to
+face, and the neighbours in the Claverias felt their pride flattered
+when they saw the prince of the church sweeping down the stone steps
+in his brilliant scarlet robes to sit in the arbour and gossip for
+a good hour with the old woman, while his attendants remained
+respectfully standing at the gate of the iron railings.
+
+Tomasa was not puffed up with this honour; to her this ecclesiastical
+prince was only the friend of her childhood, who had had a certain
+amount of good luck; and in the end, he was only Don Sebastian,
+without going any further into ceremonies and formulas of respect. But
+her family knew how to take advantage of this friendship, especially
+her son-in-law, "Virgin's Blue," a hypocrite, as the old woman
+declared, who would make money out of the very cobwebs of the
+Cathedral; an insatiable locust who, profiting by the friendship of
+the cardinal and his mother-in-law, went on continually obtaining
+fresh privileges, without the priests and sacristans daring to make
+the slightest protest, seeing him so well protected.
+
+Gabriel much enjoyed his aunt's talk. She was the only person born
+in the cloister who seemed to have freed herself from the soporific
+influence of the church. She loved the Cathedral, as being her ancient
+roof-tree, but she did not retain much respect for the saints in the
+chapels, nor for the human dignitaries who sat in the choir. She
+laughed with the happiness of a healthy and placid old woman, her
+seventy years being, as she said, quite free from any evil done to her
+neighbour. Her language was free and easy, like that of a woman who
+has seen much, and does not believe in human majesty or irreproachable
+virtues; but the bed-rock of her character was its tolerance, her
+compassion for all faults, but she Was indignant with those who
+attempted to hide them.
+
+"They are all men, Gabriel," she would say to her nephew, speaking of
+the clergy of the Cathedral. "Don Sebastian is only a man; all sinners
+who have much to answer for before God. They cannot be anything else,
+and so I forgive them. But believe me, nephew, I often feel inclined
+to laugh when I see the people kneeling before them. I believe in the
+Virgin of the Sagrario, and a little in God; but in these gentlemen!
+If you only knew them as I do! But, when all is said and done, we must
+all live, and the evil is not in having faults, but in attempting to
+hide them; playing a farce with the shamelessness of my son-in-law
+who, here as you see him, is as proud as a castle, beats his breast,
+kisses the ground like the Beatas,[1] and yet he is anxious for my
+death, thinking I have something laid away in my chest; he filches
+what he can from the Virgin's poor-box, steals the wax tapers, and
+plays tricks with what is paid for masses, and yet he would be in
+the street if it were not for me, who always think of my poor sick
+daughter and my poor little grandchildren."
+
+[Footnote 1: _Beata_--woman engaged in works of charity who wears the
+religious habit.]
+
+When Gabriel went down to see her in the garden, she always received
+him with the same salutation:
+
+"Hola, you ghost! but to-day you are looking better, you are being
+patched up. I believe your brother will pull you through with all his
+care."
+
+And then followed a comparison between her healthy and vigorous old
+age and his ruined youth, which was fighting so tenaciously against
+death.
+
+"Here you see my seventy years, and never an illness in all my life.
+Summer and winter I never hear four o'clock strike in bed, and all my
+teeth are as sound as in the days when Don Sebastian came in his red
+dress as server in the church and wanted to steal half my breakfast.
+You Lunas have always been delicate; your father, long before he was
+my age, could barely walk, and was always complaining of rheum and of
+the damp in this garden. Here am I in it constantly, and I feel just
+the same as when I am upstairs in the Claverias. We, the Villalpandos,
+are made of iron; for, of course, we are descended from that famous
+Villalpando who made the screen of the high altar, the custodia, and
+an innumerable quantity of other things. He really must have been a
+giant, to judge by the ease with which he twisted and moulded every
+sort of metal."
+
+Gabriel's ill-health awoke in her the deepest compassion, but all the
+same not quite free from malicious suggestions.
+
+"How much you must have amused yourself about the world, eh, nephew?
+But that war was your perdition; without it you would now have had
+your stall in the choir, and who knows if you might not have come to
+be another Don Sebastian. The truth is, that from his childhood no one
+spoke half as much about him in the seminary as they did of you, and
+he certainly was no prodigy of learning. But you saw the world, and
+you took a fancy to those countries where they say the ladies are
+very pretty, and wear hats as large as parasols. You are a monster of
+ugliness now, but you were very smart, though I, who am your aunt, say
+so. And now you have come back so lean and suffering! You must have
+lived very fast; who knows what you have done in the world--sly boots!
+And your poor mother, who thought you would be a saint! God have mercy
+on us! Don't deny it; you have done no good and I hate lies. You did
+right to enjoy yourself and to take advantage of every opportunity,
+but the misfortune is that you should have returned as you are, for it
+is pitiful to see you, but I have known a great many like you. I don't
+know what evil spirit possesses people belonging to the church, but
+once they throw themselves into life, they don't know where to stop,
+and they burn the candle at both ends till there is next to nothing
+left; many of them, like you, have passed through the seminary."
+
+One morning Gabriel asked a question of his aunt that he had been long
+thinking about, but that he had never before dared to put into words.
+He wanted to know all about his niece, Sagrario, and what had happened
+in his brother's house.
+
+"You who are so kind, aunt, you will tell me; everyone seems afraid to
+speak about it; even my nephew the Tato, who is such a chatterer
+and skins everyone in the Claverias, is silent when I ask him. What
+happened, aunt?"
+
+The old woman's face grew very sad.
+
+"A great misfortune, my son, such as was never known before in the
+upper cloister. The madness of the world came into the Cathedral, and
+made a nest in the most honoured, most ancient, and most respectable
+house in the Claverias. We are all good people, though we have never
+seen as much of the world as can be seen from a skylight, and live
+here as though wrapped in cotton wool, but you Lunas have always been
+the best among the best, to say nothing of us Villalpandos, who come
+close behind. Ay! if your mother could raise her head! If your father
+were alive! But I lay all the blame on your brother, as being weak and
+a simpleton, having that cursed blindness of all fathers, who ignore
+the danger in the hope of marrying their daughters well."
+
+"Well, but how was it, aunt? What passed between my niece and the
+cadet?"
+
+"What happens frequently in the world, but what has never happened
+here before. A thousand times I said to my brother, 'See, Esteban,
+this young gentleman is not for your daughter'--very sympathetic,
+very lively, and wearing the uniform of the Academy like no one else,
+leader of a group of the wildest cadets in all their escapades about
+the town, besides a son of a great family--wealthy people who did not
+allow him to come to Toledo with his purse empty. And she--the poor
+Sagrario, crazy with love, flattered by her cadet, as proud as
+possible when she walked on Sundays through the Zocodover and the
+Miradero between her mother and that handsome young lover, that all
+the girls in the place envied her. The beauty of your niece was
+the talk of all Toledo; the girls in the college for noble ladies,
+nicknamed her the 'sacristana' of the Cathedral; but the poor girl
+lived only for her cadet, and she seemed to devour him with her
+beautiful blue eyes. That idiot, your brother, let him come to the
+house, proud of the honour that was being done to the family. You
+know, Gabriel, the eternal blindness of those middle-class Toledans,
+who encourage with pride the courtship of one of their girls by a
+cadet, though they are perfectly well aware that it is most rare that
+one of these courtships should end in marriage. There is no woman here
+with the slightest pretence to a pretty face who has escaped without
+her mouthful of love for one of those red pantaloons. Even I remember
+when I was a girl how I would smooth my hair and pull out my dress
+when I heard the rattle of a sword on the flags of the cloister. It is
+a blindness that descends from mothers to daughters, and the worst
+is, that those cursed ones have all their cousins and their lovers in
+their own country, and to them they return as soon as they leave the
+Academy."
+
+"That is true, aunt, but what happened to my niece?"
+
+"When the young man passed out a lieutenant, his family decided he
+ought to return to Madrid. The farewells were like a scene at the
+theatre. I believe that even your brother and that simpleton his wife,
+who is now in glory, wept as though the lover were theirs. The young
+people sat for hours with clasped hands, gazing into each other's
+eyes, as though they would devour each other. He was the calmest; he
+promised to come every Sunday and to write every day, and at first he
+did so, but before long many weeks passed without his coming, and the
+postman came up less often to the Claverias, and at last did not come
+at all--it was ended, the young lieutenant found other amusements in
+Madrid. Your poor niece was like one demented; the colour in her face
+faded, she was no longer like the beautiful ripe apricot, with the
+soft skin that made you long to bite it. She wept like a Magdalen in
+every corner--and one day the foolish girl fled--and up to now--"
+
+"But where was she? Did no one search for her?"
+
+"Your brother seemed quite dazed. Poor Esteban! several nights we
+found him half dressed in the upper cloister, as stiff as a post,
+gazing up at the heavens with eyes that looked like glass. He became
+furious if any of us spoke of searching for the child; the scandal
+was past remedy, and he did not wish to aggravate it by her return,
+bringing back a lost one to the Holy Metropolitan Church, and to the
+honoured house of the Lunas. For more than a year everyone in the
+Claverias seemed crushed by this blow; it seemed as though we were all
+in mourning. You see, that such a thing should occur in the Cathedral
+where the years pass by in blessed peace without any of us saying
+one word louder than the other! And then I remembered you. It seemed
+impossible that from these Lunas, so quiet and steady, should have
+sprung a girl with sufficient pluck to run away to Madrid, where she
+had never been before, to join a man, without fear of God or of her
+own people. To whom could I liken the unhappy child? To her uncle, to
+Gabriel who passed for a saint, but who, nevertheless, after fighting
+like a wolf, wandered all over the world just like a gipsy."
+
+Gabriel made no protest at the conception his aunt had formed of his
+past.
+
+"And after her flight? What did you know about the child?"
+
+"At first a good deal, but latterly not a word. The two were living
+in Madrid together, peacefully and quietly, away from the world, as
+though they were man and wife. This lasted for a good while, and I,
+hearing about it, began to wonder if I had not been mistaken, and that
+the man we had blamed so much had repented and would end by marrying
+Sagrario. But at the end of the year everything was ended; he grew
+tired, and the family intervened, in order that the escapade should
+not cut short the career they had marked out for the young man. They
+even sought the aid of the police, to frighten the child, so that she
+should not molest the young officer in the first angry transports of
+her desertion. Afterwards--nothing certain is known. Now and again
+those who have gone to Madrid told me a little; some of them had seen
+her, but it would have been far better if they had not seen her. It is
+a disgrace, Gabriel; a dishonour for your family which is mine. This
+unhappy girl is the worst of the worst. I heard that she had been very
+ill, and I believe that she is so still. Just imagine, what a life!
+And for five years! What will have happened to the unfortunate girl!
+And to think that she is my sister's daughter!"
+
+The Señora Tomasa spoke with deep feeling.
+
+"Afterwards, Gabriel, you know what happened here; your poor
+sister-in-law died, we hardly knew why, it was only a matter of a few
+days; possibly she may have died of the shame, as she died saying that
+the fault was entirely hers. It broke one's heart to see the state
+your brother was in after all this. Esteban has never been good for
+much, and now after this affair of his daughter he seemed to become
+quite imbecile. Ay, nephew! I also have felt it greatly, even though
+you see me so happy, and so satisfied with life, every now and then
+the remembrance of that unhappy girl strikes me here, in my head, and
+I eat badly and sleep worse, thinking that a girl who, after all, is
+of our own blood, is wandering lost over the world, a plaything for
+men, without anyone sheltering her, as though she were all alone, as
+though she had no family."
+
+The Señora Tomasa wiped her eye with the point of her forefinger, her
+voice shook and the tears fell over her wrinkled old cheeks.
+
+"Aunt, you are very kind," said Gabriel, "but you ought to have
+searched more for this poor girl; you ought to have recovered her, to
+have saved her, to have brought her back here. We must be merciful to
+the weakness of others, especially when that other is one of our own
+flesh."
+
+"Ay, son! Who do you say it to? A thousand times I have thought this,
+but I was afraid of your brother. He is like a bit of dough, but he
+turns into a wild beast if you speak to him of his daughter. Even if
+we found her and brought her here he would not receive her; he would
+be as angry as if you were proposing some sacrilege to him. He could
+not calmly bear her presence in the house which was that of your
+forefathers. Besides, though he does not say so, he fears the scandal
+among the neighbours in the Claverias who know what had happened. This
+is the easiest part to arrange, as they would be very careful not to
+open their mouths when I am among them. But your brother frightens me,
+and I do not dare."
+
+"I will help you," said Gabriel firmly. "Let us seek for the child,
+and once we have found her I will undertake to manage Esteban."
+
+"It will be most difficult to find her. For a long time we have heard
+nothing. Doubtless those who do see her are careful to say nothing
+for fear of paining us. But I will try and find out--we will see,
+Gabriel--we will think about her."
+
+"And the canons? and the cardinal? Will they not oppose the return of
+the poor girl to the Claverias?"
+
+"Bah! The thing happened some time ago, and few of them will remember
+it; besides, we might place the girl in a convent, where she would be
+looked after and quiet, and cause scandal to no one."
+
+"No, not that, aunt. It is a cruel remedy. We have no right to try and
+save this poor girl at the cost of her liberty."
+
+"You are right," said the old woman, after a few moments' reflection.
+"I don't care much for these nuns myself. Where would she be more
+likely to follow a good example than in the heart of her own family?
+We will bring her back to this house if she repents and wishes for
+peace. And I will scratch out the eyes of the first woman in the
+Claverias who dares to say anything against her. My son-in-law will
+probably pretend to be scandalised, but I will settle him. It would be
+much better if he did not wink at the walks that Juanito, that
+cadet nephew of Don Sebastian's, takes in the cloister whenever my
+granddaughter stands at the door. The crackbrained fellow dreams of
+nothing less than becoming related to the cardinal, and seeing his
+daughter a general's wife; he might remember poor Sagrario. And as far
+as regards Don Sebastian, you may be quite easy, Gabriel. He will say
+nothing but that we ought to bring the child back--and what should he
+say? People ought to be charitable one to another, and none more than
+they; for after all, Gabriel, believe me--they are only men, nothing
+but men!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+The people of the Primacy always received with obstinate silence the
+slightest allusion to the reigning prelate. It was a traditional
+custom in the Claverias, and Gabriel remembered to have noticed the
+same in his childhood.
+
+If they spoke of the preceding archbishop, these people, so used to
+grumbling, like all those who live in solitude, would loose their
+tongues and comment on his history and his defects. There was nothing
+to fear from a dead prelate, and besides, it was an indirect praise to
+the living archbishop and his favourites to speak ill of the defunct.
+But if during the conversation the name of His reigning Eminence
+arose, they were all silent, raising their hands to their caps to
+salute, as though the prince of the church were able to see them from
+the neighbouring palace.
+
+Gabriel, listening to his companions of the upper cloister, remembered
+the funeral judgment of the Egyptians. In the Primacy no one dared to
+speak the truth about the prelates, or to discuss their faults till
+death had taken possession of them.
+
+The most that they dared to do was to comment on the disagreements
+among the canons, to compare their lists of those who saluted one
+another in the choir, or who glared at one another between versicle
+and antiphon like mad dogs ready to fly at one another, or to speak
+with wonder about a certain polemic discussed by the Doctoral and the
+Obrero in the Catholic papers in Madrid, which had lasted for three
+years, as to whether the deluge was partial or universal; answering
+each other's articles with an interval of four months.
+
+A group of friends had collected round Gabriel. They sought him,
+feeling the necessity of his presence, experiencing that attraction
+exercised by those who are born to be leaders of men even though they
+remain silent. In the evenings they would meet in the dwelling of the
+bell-ringer, or when it was fine weather they would go out into the
+gallery above the Puerta del Perdon. In the mornings the assembly
+would be in the house of the shoemaker who mended the giants, a yellow
+little man, who suffered from continual pains in his head, which
+obliged him to wear sundry coloured handkerchiefs tied round his head
+in the fashion of a turban.
+
+He was the poorest in all the Claverias; he had no appointment, and
+mended the giants without any remuneration in the hopes of succeeding
+to the first vacant place, feeling very grateful to those gentlemen of
+the Chapter who gave him his house rent free, on account of his wife
+being the daughter of a former old servant of the church. The smell
+of the paste and of the damp floor infected his house with the rank
+atmosphere of poverty. A hopeless fecundity aggravated this poverty;
+his sad, placid wife with her big yellow eyes appeared every year with
+a new baby tugging at her flabby breast, and several children crept
+along the cloister walls, dull and inert with hunger, with enormous
+heads and thin necks, always sickly, though none of them managed to
+die; afflicted by all the pains of anaemia, by boils that arose and
+vanished on their faces, and watery eruptions covering their hands.
+The shoemaker worked for the shops in the town, without, however,
+earning much money. From the rising of the sun one could hear the
+sound of his hammer in the cloister. This sole evidence of profane
+work attracted all the unoccupied to the miserable and evil-smelling
+dwelling. Mariano, the Tato, and a verger who also lived in the
+cloister, were those who most frequently met Gabriel, seated on the
+shoemaker's ragged and broken chairs, so low that one could touch the
+floor of red and dusty bricks with one's hands.
+
+Often the bell-ringer would run to his tower to ring the usual
+bells, but his vacant place would be immediately occupied by an old
+organ-blower, or some of the servants from the sacristy, all attracted
+by what they heard of these meetings of the lower servants of the
+Primacy. The object of the assembly was to listen to Gabriel. The
+revolutionary wished to keep silence, and listened absently to their
+grumblings at the daily round of worship; but his friends longed to
+hear about those countries in which he had travelled, with all the
+curiosity of people who lived confined and isolated; listening to his
+descriptions of the beauties of Paris and the grandeur of London they
+would open their eyes like children listening to a fairy tale.
+
+The shoemaker with his head bent, never ceasing his work, listened
+attentively to the recital of such marvels; when Gabriel was silent
+they all agreed on one point, those cities must be far more beautiful
+than Madrid; and just think how beautiful Madrid was! Even the
+shoemaker's wife, standing in the corner forgetful of her sickly
+children, would listen to Luna with wonder, her face enlivened by a
+feeble smile, which showed the woman through the animal resigned to
+misery, when Luna described the luxury of the women in foreign parts.
+
+All these servants of the church felt their narrowed and dulled minds
+stirred by these descriptions of a distant world that they were never
+likely to see; the splendours of modern civilisation touched them much
+more nearly than the beauties of heaven as described in the sermons,
+and in the pungent and dusty atmosphere of the dirty little house they
+would see unrolled before their mind's eye beautiful and fantastic
+cities, and they would ask questions in all innocence as to the food
+and habits of those distant people, as though they believed them
+beings of a different species.
+
+Towards evening, at the hour of the choir, when the shoemaker was
+working alone, Gabriel, tired of the monotonous silence of the
+cloister, would go down into the church.
+
+His brother, in a woollen cloak with a white neck band, and a staff as
+long as an ancient alguacil's, stood as sentry in the crossways, to
+prevent the inquisitive passing between the choir and the high altar.
+
+Two tablets of old gold with Gothic letters, hung on to one of the
+pilasters, set forth that anyone talking in a loud voice or making
+signs in the church would be excommunicated; but this menace of former
+centuries failed to impress the few people who came to vespers and
+gossiped behind one of the pillars with some of the church servants.
+The evening light, filtering through the stained glass, threw on the
+pavement great patches of colour, and the priests as they walked
+over this carpet of light would appear green or red according to the
+colours flashed from the windows.
+
+In the choir the canons sang for themselves only in the emptiness of
+the church; the shutting of the iron gates of the screen, opened to
+admit some late-coming priest, echoed like explosions throughout the
+building, and above the choir the organ joined in at times between the
+plain song, but it sounded lazily, timidly, as though from necessity,
+and seemed to lament its feebleness in the gathering twilight.
+
+Gabriel had not completed the round of the Cathedral before he was
+joined by his nephew, the Perrero, who left his conversation with
+the servers and acolytes, and with the errand boy belonging to the
+Secretary of the Chapter, whose fixed seat was at the door of the
+Chapter-house. Luna was always very much diverted by the pranks of the
+Tato, and the confidence and carelessness with which he moved about
+the temple, as though having been born in it deprived him of all
+feeling of respect The entry of a dog into the nave caused great
+excitement.
+
+"Uncle," said he to Luna, "you shall see how I can open my cloak."
+
+Seizing the two ends of his garment he advanced towards the dog with
+the contortions and bounds of a wrestler; the animal, knowing this of
+old, endeavoured to escape through the nearest door, but the Tato,
+cutting off his retreat, drove him into the nave, and, pretending to
+pursue him, drove him from chapel to chapel, finally rounding him up
+where he could give him some good sound whacks. The dismal howlings
+disturbed the singing of the canons, and the Tato laughed more than
+ever to see behind the iron railing of the choir, the angry gesture of
+the good Esteban threatening him with his wooden staff.
+
+"Uncle," said the depraved Perrero one evening, "you, who think you
+know the Cathedral so well, have you ever seen the lively things in
+it?"
+
+The wink of his eye, and the gesture accompanying the words showed
+that the things might very well be more than lively.
+
+"I am always very much interested," he went on, "with the jokes the
+ancients allowed themselves. Come along, uncle, it will amuse you for
+a little; you, like all those who think they know the Cathedral, will
+have passed many times by these things without noticing them."
+
+Going along the outside of the choir, the Tato led Gabriel to the
+front opposite the door del Perdon. Under the great medallion, which
+serves as a back to the Mount Tabor, the work of Berruguete, opens the
+little chapel of the Virgin of the Star. "Look well at that image,
+uncle. Is there another like it in all the world? She is a courtezan,
+a siren who would drive men mad if she only fluttered her eyelids."
+
+For Gabriel this was no new discovery; from his childhood he had known
+that beautiful and sensual figure, with its worldly smile, its rounded
+outlines, and its eyes with their expression of wanton gaiety as
+though she were just going to dance.
+
+The child in her arms was also laughing and placing his hand on the
+bosom of the beautiful woman, as though he intended to tear the
+covering from her breast. The image of painted stone, stuffed and
+gilt, wore a blue mantle strewn with stars, from whence its name.
+
+"Even you, who have read so much, uncle, may possibly not know the
+history of this chapel, which is far more ancient than the Cathedral.
+The woolstaplers, carders, and weavers of Toledo had their patroness
+here long before the church was built, and they only gave up their
+right to the ground on the condition that they should be entire
+masters of the chapel, and do in it whatever they pleased and in all
+this piece of the Cathedral as far as those nearest pillars. Oh! the
+trouble this wrought! On the days they held their feasts to the Virgin
+they never paid any heed to the canons in the choir, and they greatly
+disturbed all the offices with 'rabeles,'[1] lutes and disorderly
+songs. If the canons begged them to be silent, they replied that it
+was they in the choir who ought to keep silence, considering that
+they were in their own chapel, which was far more ancient than the
+Cathedral. Did you know this, uncle?"
+
+[Footnote 1: An ancient instrument with three strings, played with a
+bow.]
+
+"Yes, I remember it now. The Archbishop Valero Loza brought a suit
+against them at the beginning of the eighteenth century; you can see
+his tomb at the foot of the altar. He lost his suit, and died from
+disappointment. He desired to be buried in that place, so that the
+insolent wool merchants should trample on him in death, even as
+they had vanquished him in his lifetime. The haughtiness of these
+ecclesiastical princes drove them to the proudest humility. But is
+this all you wished to show me?"
+
+"You shall see better things than this. Let us say good-bye to the
+Virgin. But do look at her! What a face! What alluring eyes! The
+beautiful woman! I spend hours looking at her; she is my sweetheart.
+Oh! the many nights I have dreamt of her."
+
+They walked on a little towards the great doorway of the Cathedral, so
+as to obtain a better view of the exterior face of the choir. Above
+the three hollows or chapels that pierce it runs a frieze of ancient
+relievos, the work of some obscure mediaeval artist. Gabriel
+recognised these coarse sculptures as being contemporaneous with the
+Puerta del Reloj, and by far the most ancient work in the Cathedral.
+
+"Look you, in the first medallion Adam and Eve are as naked as worms;
+but the Lord drives them out of Paradise, and they are obliged to
+dress themselves to appear in the world; and see what they do directly
+they get their clothes. But look at the fifth medallion on our right
+hand; the old gossip who cut that had a lively turn of mind."
+
+Gabriel looked for the first time attentively at these forgotten
+sculptures. They were carved with all the naturalistic simplicity
+of the Middle Ages, with all the directness with which the artists
+represented their profane conceptions, with the desire to perpetuate
+the triumph of the flesh in some ignored corner of the mystical
+buildings, in order to testify that human life was not dead.
+
+The Tato was delighted at the surprise on his uncle's face.
+
+"Eh! what do you think of that? I discovered it wandering about the
+church. The canons sing every day on the other side of this wall
+without ever suspecting what gay doings they have over their heads.
+And the stained glass, uncle, look at it well. At first so many
+colours blind one and the forms are indistinct; besides, the lead cuts
+the figures and it is difficult to make out anything, but I know them
+to my fingers' ends. They are stories, things of their own times, that
+these glass-workers painted; the intrigues have been forgotten, and no
+one has disentangled them."
+
+He pointed to the windows of the second nave, through which the
+evening light was shining with a ruddy glow.
+
+"Look up there," went on the Perrero. "A gallant in a red cape and
+sword mounts by a rope ladder; at the window a nun is waiting for him.
+It seems something like the Don Juan Tenorio that they represent at
+All Saints'. Further on, you see those two in bed, and people knocking
+at the door. They must be the same pair of birds with the family
+surprising them. Then in the next window--look well at it--lovers,
+with scarcely any clothes beyond bare skin. These things belong to the
+days when people had no shame, when they went with their heads covered
+and the rest of their flesh bare."
+
+Gabriel smiled at the whimsical ideas with which ancient art inspired
+the Perrero.
+
+"But in the choir, uncle, there is also something to see. Let us go
+there; the service is over and the canons are coming out."
+
+Luna felt overpowered by admiration as he always did on entering the
+choir. Those magnificent stalls, the work on one side of Philip of
+Burgundy, and on the other side of Berruguete, bewildered him with
+their profusion of marbles, jaspers, gildings, statues and medallions.
+It was the genius of Michael Angelo reviving in the Toledan Cathedral.
+
+The Perrero examined the lower stalls, ferreting out among the Gothic
+relievos the discoveries enjoyed by his unwholesome curiosity. This
+first row of stalls, almost on a level with the ground, were occupied
+by the inferior clergy, and were anterior by half a century to the
+upper stalls; but in those fifty years art had made a great stride,
+from the hard and rigid Gothic to the flowing lines and good taste of
+the Renaissance. They had been carved by Maestre Rodrigo at the time
+when Christian Spain, roused to enthusiasm, was helping the Catholic
+kings with all its strength to complete the reconquest. On the backs
+of the stalls, and on the entablature of the frieze fifty-four carved
+pictures represented the principal incidents of the conquest of
+Granada.
+
+The Tato did not look at these carvings of walnut or oak, with troops
+of horsemen and companies of soldiers scaling the walls of Moorish
+towns. What interested him most were the arms of the stalls, the
+handrails of the steps leading to the upper seats, and the salients
+dividing the stalls which served to rest the head, all covered with
+animals, grotesque beings, dogs, monkeys, big birds, friars, and
+little birds, all in difficult postures, some beautiful, some obscene.
+Hogs and frogs wound themselves up together in inextricable tangles,
+monkeys with ignoble gestures were mixed up with interlaced birds in
+never ending variety--it was a world of caricatures of voluptuousness,
+of monkey-like actions and satirical suggestions, in which appeared
+carnal passion with the most grotesque animal grimaces.
+
+"Look here, uncle. Is not this capital--it is far the best."
+
+And the Tato showed Gabriel the little chubby figure of a preaching
+friar with enormous donkey's ears.
+
+When they came out of the choir Gabriel spied the Chapel-master close
+to the fresco of Saint Christopher. He had just emerged from a little
+door close to the giant, which led by a circular staircase to the
+musical archives. He was carrying under his arm a big book with dusty
+pages which he showed to Gabriel.
+
+"I am taking it upstairs. You shall hear something out of it; it is
+worth the trouble."
+
+And turning his eyes from the book to the little door close by he
+exclaimed:
+
+"Ay! these archives, Gabriel, how it pains one! Each time I visit them
+I come out sadder. The vandals have been at work there; nearly all the
+music books have pages torn out, pieces cut out wherever there was an
+illuminated letter, a vignette or anything pretty. The señor canons
+do not care for music, neither do they understand it, and they are
+incapable of devoting a few pesetas so that it might be heard on
+festival days. It is quite enough for them to walk in procession to
+some piece of Rossini's; and as far as regards the organ, all they
+care about is that it must play slowly, very slowly. The slower it
+plays, the more religious they think it, even though the organist may
+be playing a Habanera."
+
+He continued looking at the little door with melancholy eyes as though
+he were ready to weep over the decay of music.
+
+"In there, Gabriel, are many beautiful works, that ought not to be
+forgotten as long as art lives in the world. In profane music we have
+not been great, but believe me that Spain has been far otherwise with
+religious authors. That is, provided that profane music and religious
+music really exist, which I doubt; for me there is only--music--and I
+think he will be a clever man who draws the line where one ends and
+where the other begins. Behind this wall of Saint Christopher's, the
+works of all the great Spanish musicians sleep, mutilated and covered
+with dust. Perhaps it is better they do sleep, when you hear what is
+sung in this choir! Here you will find Christobal Morales, who three
+hundred years ago was Chapel-master here, and began the reform of
+music twenty years before Palestrina. In Rome he shares the glory
+with the famous master; his portrait is in the Vatican, and his
+lamentations, his motets, and his Magnificat rest here, forgotten for
+centuries. And Victoria? Do you know him? Another of the same period;
+his jealous contemporaries called him 'Palestrina's monkey' taking
+all his works to be imitations, in consequence of his long sojourn in
+Rome; but, believe me, instead of being plagiarisms from the Italian,
+they are far superior. Here also is Rivera, a Toledan master who no
+one remembers, but in the archives there is a whole volume of his
+masses, and Romero de Avila, who more than anyone had studied the
+Muzarabé chants, and Ramos de Pareja, not the least musician of
+the fifteenth century, who wrote in Bologna his book 'De Musica
+Tractatus,' and destroyed the ancient system of Guido de Arezzo,
+discovering the tonality of sound; and the Monk Urena, who added the
+note 'si' to the scale, and Javier Garcia, who in the last century
+reformed music, leading it towards Italy (God forgive him!), a beaten
+track from which we have not yet emerged; and Nebra, the great
+organist of Carlos III., who, a century before Wagner was born, used
+musical discords. When he wrote the Requiem for the funeral of Dona
+Barbara di Braganza, foreseeing the surprise and difficulties that the
+musicians and singers would meet with in the innovations in his score,
+he wrote on the margin, 'This is to give notice that there are no
+mistakes in the score.' His Litany became so celebrated that it was
+forbidden to copy it, under pain of excommunication; but I think
+to-day the persons who remember it would be the excommunicated.
+Believe me, Gabriel, these archives are a pantheon of great men, but a
+pantheon, unluckily, from which no one emerges."
+
+Then he added, lowering his voice:
+
+"The Church has never been a great lover of music. To feel and
+understand it you must be born a musician, and you know well enough
+that these gentlemen who are paid to sing in the choir know nothing
+about music. When I see you, Gabriel, smiling at religious things,
+I guess by your manner how much you conceal, and I am sure you are
+right. I was interested to know the history of music in the Church.
+I have followed step by step the long Calvary of this unhappy art,
+carrying the cross of worship uphill through the long centuries. You
+have heard people often talk of religious music, as if it were a thing
+apart, believed in by the Church; but it is all a lie, for religious
+music does not exist."
+
+The Perrero had moved off when he heard that the Chapel-master, whose
+loquacity was indefatigable when he spoke of his art, had started on
+the theme of music. He had formed his own opinion of Don Luis and told
+it to everyone in the upper cloister. He was a simpleton who only knew
+how to play melancholy ditties on his harmonium, without ever thinking
+of enlivening the poor people in the Claverias by playing something to
+which they could dance, as the niece of Silver Stick had asked him.
+
+The priest and Gabriel walked slowly through the silent naves talking
+the while; the only people to be seen were a group of the household at
+the door of the sacristy, and two women kneeling before the railing
+of the high altar praying aloud. The early twilight of the winter
+evenings was beginning to darken the Cathedral, and the first bats
+were coming down from the vaulting and fluttering through the columns.
+
+"Ecclesiastical music," said the artist, "is a real anarchy; but in
+the Church everything is anarchy. I believe there is a great deal to
+be said for the unity of the Catholic worship throughout the world.
+When Christianity began to form itself into a religion it did not
+invent even a single bad melody; it borrowed its hymns and the manner
+of singing them from the Jews, a primitive and barbarous music that
+would shock our ears if we heard it now. Out of Palestine, and where
+there were no Jews, the earliest Christian poets--Saint Ambrose,
+Prudencio and others--adopted their new hymns and psalms to the
+popular songs that were then in vogue in the Roman world, or possibly
+to Greek music. It seems as though that word 'Greek music' ought to
+mean a great deal; is it not so, Gabriel? The Greeks were so great in
+their poetry and in the plastic arts that anything that bears their
+name would seem to be surrounded by an atmosphere of undying beauty.
+But it is not so: the march of the arts has not been parallel in human
+life; when sculpture had its Phidias, and had reached its climax,
+painting had hardly passed that rudimentary stage that we see in
+Pompeii, and music was only a childish babbling. Writing could not
+perpetuate music, for there seemed as many musical styles as there
+were peoples, and everything was left to the judgment of the
+executant. You could not fix on parchment what mouths and instruments
+played, and so progress was impossible. For this reason, though there
+was a Renaissance for sculpture, for painting, for architecture, at
+the revival of the arts after the Middle Ages, music was found in the
+same elementary stage in which it was at the break-up of the ancient
+world."
+
+Gabriel nodded his head assenting to the words of the Chapel-master.
+
+"This was the first Christian music," continued Don Luis. "Confided
+to tradition and transmitted orally, the religious songs soon became
+disfigured and corrupt. In every church they sang in a different way,
+and religious music became a hotch-potch. The mystics leaned to
+rigid unity, and in the sixth century Saint Gregory published his
+'Antifonario,' a collection of all liturgic melodies, purifying them
+according to his ideas. They were a mixture of two elements: the
+Greek, rather oriental and florid, very much like the present debased
+style; and the grave and rough Roman. The notes were expressed
+by letters, the Phrygian and Lydian styles followed, and so the
+intricacies of Greek music continued though much altered, with
+fioriture, rests, and breathing pauses. The collection became lost,
+and many who think a return to the old style would be best, much
+regret it. To judge by the fragments that remain, if such music was
+now executed it would have very little that was religious about it, as
+we understand religion in art to-day; it would more resemble the songs
+of the Moors, or the Chinese, or those of some schismatic Greeks who
+still use the ancient liturgies. The harp was the principal instrument
+in the churches till the organ appeared in the tenth century, a rough
+and barbarous instrument that had to be played with blows, and was
+supplied with wind from inflated skins. Guido di Arezzo made a musical
+rule on the basis of Gregory's collection, and this was sufficient for
+the invention of the pentagramma[1] to be assigned to the Benedictine.
+They continued to use the letters of Boccio and Saint Gregory as
+notes, but they placed them on lines of three different colours. The
+imbroglio continued; to learn music badly took twelve years, and then
+they could not manage that singers from different towns could read
+from the same score. Saint Bernard, dry and austere as his times,
+ridiculed this music as not being solemn enough; he was a man
+antagonistic to all art; he would have liked to see the churches
+dismantled and without any architectural adornments; and the slower
+the music was, the better it seemed to him. He was the father of plain
+song, and he maintained that the more drawn out the music was, the
+more religious it became. But in the thirteenth century Christians
+found this chant most wearisome. The cathedrals in those days were the
+point of attraction: the theatre, the centre of all life. People went
+to the church to pray to God and to amuse themselves, forgetting for
+the moment all the wars and the violence and confusion outside. Once
+again popular music came into the churches, and you could hear intoned
+in the cathedrals all the songs most in vogue, and which were often
+obscene. The people took part in the religious music, singing in
+different tones, each one as seemed best to him, and these were the
+first beginnings of concerted singing. In those days religion was
+joyful, popular--democratic as you would say, Gabriel; there was
+no Inquisition, nor suspicion of heresy to embitter the soul with
+fanaticism and fear. All the coarse wind and stringed instruments that
+the artisans had in the towns, or the labourers in the fields, came
+into the churches, and the organ was accompanied by violas, violins,
+bagpipes, flutes, guitars and lutes. The plain song was the
+established liturgy almost throughout Europe; but the people disliked
+it, and interspersed it with songs, and at the great festivals,
+religious hymns were sung, adapted to the popular melodies then in
+fashion, such as 'The song of the armed man,' 'Morencia, give me a
+kiss,' 'I know not what confuses me,' 'Weep for me, lady,' 'Bad luck
+to him who married you,' and others in the same style. And Rome, you
+will ask, and the Church? What did it say about such disorders? The
+Church lived without artistic perception: it never had any. What are
+the boundaries between religious and profane music? From the sixteenth
+to the seventeenth century all critics have asked themselves this
+question, but the Church let them talk, accepting everything without
+remark. Now and again Rome made itself heard by a Papal bull, to which
+no one paid any attention, because the Pontiff was incapable of saying
+this is religious art, and the other is profane. Palestrina was
+entrusted with the task of reforming church music; the Pope showed
+himself disposed not to leave anything but plain song, and to suppress
+even that if necessary. The mass of Papa Marcelo and other melodies
+was the result of this, but things did not advance much. It was
+necessary in order that music should be purified inside the Church
+that the great secular musical movement should begin with the Italian
+Monteverde, with the Frenchman Rameau, and with the Germans Sebastian
+Bach and Handel; what splendid times, Gabriel! And just think what
+genius followed: Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Mehül, Boieldieu, and, above
+all, our good friend Beethoven."
+
+[Footnote 1: The stave.]
+
+The Chapel-master was silent for a little as though the name of his
+idol imposed on him a religious silence. Presently he continued.
+
+"All this avalanche of art passed over the Church, and she, according
+to her habit, appropriated everything that was most to her taste; in
+any country the Catholic religion adopted the music most in accordance
+with its traditions--in Spain we have been saturated with the Italian
+style since the days of Palestrina, and German or French music never
+came to us. We were first of all fuguists and contrapuntists; but
+after the 'Stabat Mater' of Rossini we felt the attraction of
+theatrical melody so strongly that we have never wished to taste a
+fresh dish. Religious music in Spain has run parallel with Italian
+opera, a thing of which the canons are ignorant; they would be furious
+if at the mass you played them anything by Beethoven, which they would
+consider profane, but they listen with mystic unction to fragments
+which have gone the round of all the theatres in Italy. And about the
+plain song, you will ask? The plain song had its nest in this Primacy.
+It was preserved here for centuries and purified; all the best was
+collected in Toledo, and from the books in this Cathedral have gone
+forth the chorales of all the churches in Spain and America. Poor
+plain song! it has long been dead. You see for yourself, Gabriel, who
+comes to the Cathedral at the hour of the choir? No one, absolutely no
+one. The matins are recited, and all the offices are intoned in the
+midst of perfect solitude. The people who still believe know nothing
+of the liturgy; they do not prize it and have forgotten all about it;
+they are only attracted by the novenas, the triduos and retreats, all
+that is termed tolerated and extra-liturgic worship. The Jesuits, with
+their cunning, guessed that they must give their services a theatrical
+attraction, and for this reason their churches--gilt, carpeted, and
+decked with flowers like dressing-rooms--are always full, whereas the
+old cathedrals are as empty as tombs. They have not proclaimed the
+necessity for this reform aloud, but they have put it into practice
+by abolishing the singing in Latin, and substituting all sorts of
+romances and songs. In the churches, with the exception of the
+Tantum-ergo, nothing is sung in Latin, sermons and hymns are in the
+language of the country, just as in a Protestant church. For the mass
+of devout people, who believe without thinking, religions only differ
+in their exterior forms. It would be impossible to consign such a
+multitude to the bonfires, or that half Europe should again be in the
+clutches of the thirty years' war, or that the Popes should launch
+excommunication after excommunication, only to find in the end that
+the only difference between a Catholic or an evangelical church is a
+few images and a few wax tapers, but that the worship in both is the
+same. But we must go, Gabriel; they are going to lock up."
+
+The bell-ringer was hurrying through the naves, shaking his bunch
+of keys and startling the bats which were becoming more and more
+numerous. The two devout women had disappeared; no one remained in the
+Cathedral save Gabriel and the Chapel-master. From the farther end of
+the nave were coming the night watchmen, to take up their charge till
+the following morning, preceded by the dog.
+
+The two friends went out into the cloister, guided through the dusk by
+the rich glow from the stained glass windows; outside, the last rays
+of the sun were touching both the garden and the cloister of the
+Claverias with crimson.
+
+"I repeat," continued the musical priest, looking back at the door
+from which they had come out, "that in there they do not love music
+and they do not understand it. The Church has only rendered one
+service to music, and that without wishing it: they have been obliged
+to have instrumentalists and vocalists for the services, and that
+made them support the chapels and choir-schools that have served for
+musical education in default of schools. We who represent art in the
+cathedrals are as much despised as were the minstrels in the old
+chapels, players of the clarion and bassoon. For the canons, all that
+sleeps in the musical archives is so much Greek, and we, the artistic
+priests, form a race apart, and are only just a step above the
+sacristans. The Chapel-master, the organist, the tenor, contralto, and
+the bass form the chapel. We are clergy like the canons, we become
+beneficiaries by appointment, we have studied religious science as
+they have, and, moreover, we are musicians; but in spite of this
+we receive less than half the salary of a canon, and to remind us
+constantly of our inferior position we have to sit in the lower
+stalls. We, the only ones in the choir who know anything about music,
+have to occupy the lowest places. The precentor is by right the chief
+of the singers, and the precentor is a canon named by Rome without
+competition, probably not knowing a note of the pentagramma. Oh! the
+anarchy, friend Gabriel! Oh! the contempt of the Church for music
+which has always been its slave and never its daughter! In many
+convents of nuns the organist and the singers are despised and called
+sergeants. There seems money for everything in the Church: the
+revenues of the building are ample for everything except for music.
+The canons look upon us as fools masking in ecclesiastical robes. When
+the feast of Corpus or that of the Virgin of the Sagrario comes round,
+and I dream of a fine mass worthy of the Cathedral, the Canon Obrero
+attacks me and begs for something Italian and simple, an affair of
+half-a-dozen musicians that I must pick up in the town, and then I
+have to conduct a few bungling musicians, raging to hear how the
+miserable orchestra sounds under these vaults, which were built for
+something grander. In the end, friend Luna, it is dead, quite dead."
+
+The complaint of the Chapel-master did not surprise Gabriel. Everyone
+in the Cathedral complained of the miserable and sordid way in which
+the services were conducted. Some, like the Silver Stick, declared
+that it was due to the impiety of the age, others, like the musician,
+made that same religion responsible, but they did not dare to say so
+aloud. Respect to the Church and to the higher powers, instilled since
+their childhood, kept the population of the Cathedral silent. The
+greater part of the servitors of the Church were living morally in the
+sixteenth century, in an atmosphere of servility and superstitious
+fear of their superiors, feeling the injustice of their position, but
+without daring to give form, even in their thoughts, to their vague
+notions of protest.
+
+Only at night, in the silence of the upper cloister, in the privacy
+of those families who were born and died among the stones of the
+Cathedral, did they dare to repeat the murmurs of the Church,
+the interminable tangle of tattle which grew over the monotonous
+ecclesiastical existence, the complaints of the canons against His
+Eminence, and what the cardinal said about the Chapter, an underground
+war which was reproduced at every archiepiscopal elevation, intrigues
+and heart-burnings of celibates, embittered by ambition and
+favouritism, primitive hatreds that reminded one of the time when the
+clergy elected their own prelates and ruled over them, instead of
+groaning as now under the iron rule of the archbishop's will.
+
+Everyone in the cloister knew of these quarrels, and the remarks that
+the canons allowed themselves to make in the sacristy reached their
+ears; but these humble servitors kept silence when these murmurs were
+repeated in their presence, fearing to be reported by their neighbour,
+who possibly might covet their post. It was the terror of the
+Inquisition still alive amidst this little stagnant world.
+
+The Perrero was the only one who seemed to have no fear, and who spoke
+openly about the Chapter and the cardinal. What did it matter to him!
+Possibly he may have wished to be turned out of "that den" to give
+himself up to his favourite pursuit, going to the bull-ring without
+any objections from the household. Moreover, he delighted in speaking
+evil of the gentlemen of the Chapter, who had given him more than one
+cuff when he was an acolyte.
+
+He gave nicknames to all the canons, and pointing them out one by one
+to Gabriel, related the most intimate secrets of their lives. He knew
+the houses where each prebendary passed the evening after the choir
+time, and the names of all the ladies and nuns who crimped their
+surplices, and could tell of the fierce and deadly rivalries between
+these admirers of the Chapter, endeavouring to vanquish each other
+by the exquisite way in which they washed and ironed the canonical
+batiste. As the choir were coming out he pointed out the precentor, an
+obese prebendary with his face covered with red spots.
+
+"Look at him, uncle," he said to Gabriel, "that rash on his face is a
+record of the past. He was a great gallant, never fixing himself long
+anywhere. The other evening he said to a chaplain of the chapel of the
+kings, 'Those captain professors at the Academy think that in point
+of women they cull the best in Toledo, but where is the Church! The
+seculars must lower their flag!'"
+
+He laughed as he pointed out a group of young priests, carefully
+shaved, with their cheeks blue and shining, dressed in silk mantles
+that diffused a strong scent of musk as they moved. These were the
+dandies of the Chapter, the young canons, who often made journeys to
+Madrid to confess their patronesses--ancient marchionesses who, by
+dint of influence, had gained for them a seat in the choir. At the
+Puerta del Mollete they stopped a few moments to arrange the folds of
+their cloaks before they went into the street.
+
+"They are going out to court the ladies," said the Tato. "Brrrum! make
+way for Don Juan Tenorio!"
+
+When they had watched all the canons come out, the Perrero spoke to
+his uncle about the cardinal.
+
+"In these days he is given over to the fiends. No one in the palace
+can manage him; his internal complaint nearly drives him mad."
+
+"But is it true he is so very ill?" asked Gabriel.
+
+"Everyone says so; ask your Aunt Tomasa. They say they are such great
+friends because she makes a lotion that calms him like an angel's
+hand. In the morning when he wakes in a bad temper all the palace
+trembles, and very soon all the diocese. He is a good man, but when
+the mad dog bites him everyone must fly. I have seen him on pontifical
+days wearing his mitre, looking at us with such eyes, as though he
+were ready to seize his crozier and belabour us all with it, from what
+the aunt says--if he did not drink!"
+
+"Then the complaints of the Chapter are true."
+
+"He does not get drunk. No, señor, give the devil his due, but a glass
+now, and another presently, and a third if a friend comes to see him,
+must obfuscate him. It is a habit he brought with him from Andalusia,
+where he was bishop before coming here. But nothing common, a fine and
+refreshing drink, only to keep up his strength, nothing more. And the
+wine is first class, uncle; I know it from one of his household. He
+gives as much as fifty duros the arroba![1] They keep him the best in
+all la Mancha, a vintage from the time of the French, a syrup that
+warms the stomach and tempers it as though it were an organ. From what
+the Aunt Tomasa says, the doctors patch him up, and then he does his
+best to get ill again with this glorious wine."
+
+[Footnote 1: _Arroba_--Measure containing thirty-two pints.]
+
+The Tato, in the midst of his cynical mockery, still showed a regard
+for the prelate.
+
+"Do not believe, uncle, that he is a nonentity. Apart from his bad
+temper he is really a strong man, even as you see him here, with his
+small white and shining head like a baby's, that seems even smaller
+above his immense corporation; but it carries something in it! He has
+spoken a great deal in Madrid, and all the newspapers took as much
+notice of him as though he were Guerra. His wisdom finds a remedy for
+everything. If they speak of the poverty and misery in the world, he
+sings the old song: bread for the poor, charity from the rich, and
+much Christian doctrine for everyone; that men ought not to quarrel
+because I have more than you, and there ought to be patience and
+decency in the world, for that is what is wanting. What nonsense, eh,
+uncle? You laugh at it? But His Eminence's recipe rather pleases me,
+especially that about the bread; but the cursed Catechism is in fault
+as we have all learnt from our childhood."
+
+The Perrero grew quite excited speaking about his prince:
+
+"And as a man? A masterful man; no hypocrisy about him, nor hiding his
+head. Everyone knows he was a soldier in his younger days. The Aunt
+Tomasa remembers seeing him in the cloister with his helmet with
+horse-hair crest, his sergeant's epaulets, and his rattling broad
+sword. He is not afraid of anything, is not easily scandalised, and
+does not make a fuss about things. Last year a Portuguese lady arrived
+here, who nearly drove all the cadets out of their senses with her
+silk stockings and her big hats. You know Juanito, and you are aware
+that he is the son of a nephew of His Eminence who died some years
+ago. Well, the youngster paraded up and down the Zocodover in his
+uniform with the Portuguese lady on his arm to arouse the jealousy
+of his companions in the Academy. One day the young woman presented
+herself at the palace, and the servants, seeing her so beautifully
+dressed, made no difficulty about letting her in, thinking she was
+some lady from Madrid. His Eminence received her with a paternal
+smile, and listened to her without winking. A friend of mine, one of
+the pages who was present, told me about it. She came to complain to
+the cardinal that his nephew, the cadet, had entertained her for two
+days without giving her a farthing. His Eminence smiled modestly:
+'Lady, the Church is poor, but I do not wish that for this misfortune
+the good name of the family should suffer. Take this and it will be
+remedied,' and he handed her two duros. The Portuguese, encouraged by
+her good reception, began to bawl and complain, thinking she would
+terrify Don Sebastian by making a scandal. But you should have seen
+the fury of His Eminence as he shouted to the page, 'Boy, call the
+police'; and the look on his face was such that the Portuguese lady
+vanished as quickly as she could, leaving the two pieces of silver on
+the table."
+
+Gabriel laughed, listening to the story.
+
+"He is a strong man, believe me, uncle. I like him because he holds
+the Chapter in his fist. He is not like his predecessor, who was like
+a sop in milk, who only knew how to pray, and trembled before the
+last-made canon. He is quite capable of going down into the choir one
+evening and turning them all out with blows from his crozier. It
+is more than two months since he has been down into the Cathedral,
+neither has he seen the canons. The last time they sent a deputation
+to the palace everybody trembled. They went to propose I know not what
+reform to the Primate, and they began by saying, 'My lord, the Chapter
+thinks--.' Don Sebastian, turned into a basilisk, interrupted them,
+'The Chapter cannot think anything; the Chapter has not common sense,'
+and he turned his back, leaving them petrified. Afterwards, he began
+shouting, and thumping the furniture with his fists, saying he would
+fill all the vacancies in the Cathedral with the dregs of the clergy,
+that he would fill the Chapter with drunkards, with impostors, etc. 'I
+will harass the Chapter,' he shouted, 'I will dirty it; I will teach
+them to talk less of me; I will cover them, yes, sir, I will cover
+them with....' And you may guess, uncle, with what His Eminence wished
+to cover the canons. And the poor man was right. Why should those
+in the choir interfere with this way or that way that Don Sebastian
+lives, or if he has those bonds or others? Does not he let them live
+as they choose? Does he ever say a word to them about their scandalous
+visits, although all Toledo knows of them?"
+
+"And what do the canons say about the cardinal?"
+
+"They say Juanito is his grandson, and that his father, who died, and
+who passed as nephew of His Eminence, was really his son by a certain
+lady when he was bishop in Andalusia. But this does not seem to
+irritate Don Sebastian much; but what does irritate him and makes him
+behave like a fiend is when they speak of Doña Visitacion."
+
+"And who is that lady?"
+
+"Come, that is good! You do not know Doña Visitacion? When no one
+inside the Cathedral or out of it can speak of anybody else? She is
+the niece of Don Sebastian, who lives with him in the palace. It is
+she who rules everything, and Don Sebastian, who is so terrible with
+everyone else, becomes like an angel when he sees her. He rages and
+screams and bites the days when he is ill, but if Doña Visita appears,
+he controls himself at once; he suffers in silence, moans like a
+child, and it is sufficient for her to say a soft word, or give him a
+caress for His Eminence to slobber with delight. He loves her dearly."
+
+"But what is she?" asked Gabriel with interest.
+
+"Clearly she is what you think. What else could she be? She was from
+her childhood in the college for noble ladies, and as soon as the
+cardinal came to Toledo he took her out, and brought her to the
+palace. What a blind infatuation is Don Sebastian's! And the thing is,
+the object is hardly worth it--a very thin, pale little girl, with
+large eyes and a soft skin; that is all. They say she sings, and plays
+the piano, and reads and knows a great many things that they teach
+in that wealthy college, and by God's grace can keep His Eminence in
+order. She comes sometimes into the Cathedral by the arch, dressed
+as a beatita with the habit and mantilla, accompanied by a very ugly
+servant."
+
+"She cannot be what you think, youngster."
+
+"Go on; all the Chapter affirm it, and even the most steady canons
+thoroughly believe it. Even those who are friends and favourites of
+His Eminence, and carry him tales about all the grumbling against him,
+do not deny it with any warmth. And Don Sebastian gets angry, and is
+furious each time any murmurs about this reach his ears. If they told
+him the choir intended to give a dance he would be less irritated than
+when he hears them wag their tongues about Doña Visita."
+
+The Perrero was silent for a few moments as though he were doubtful
+about saying something serious.
+
+"The lady is very good and kind. They all love her in the palace
+because she speaks so gently. Besides, she makes use of the great
+power she has over the cardinal to prevent the violence of His
+Eminence, who very often, when he is racked with excessive pain, would
+throw cups and plates at the heads of his servants. Why should they
+interfere with her? Does she do them any harm? Let everyone do as he
+likes in his own house, and he who does evil, let God punish him."
+
+He scratched his head as though he were once more doubtful.
+
+"And as to what Doña Visita is to the Cardinal," he added, "I have
+no doubt whatever. I have facts to go on, uncle, and I know how they
+live. One of the servants has often seen them kissing--that is to
+say, not the two kissing. No, she does the kissing, and Don Sebastian
+receives her kittenish ways with the smile of an angel. The poor man
+is so old!"
+
+And the Tato ended his confidences with various indecent remarks.
+
+All this grumbling against the cardinal, that came from the sacristy
+up to the cloister, annoyed Gabriel's brother greatly. The "Wooden
+Staff," who was a staunch private soldier of the Church, could not
+bear to hear with equanimity those attacks on his superiors; in his
+opinion they were all calumnies. The canons had spoken of all the
+preceding archbishops precisely as they now spoke of Don Sebastian,
+but this did not in the least prevent their all being called saints
+after their deaths. When he discovered the Tato repeating in the
+Claverias all the gossip from down below, he threatened him with all
+his authority as head of the house.
+
+Esteban was also very much concerned at the state of his brother's
+health. He was pleased at the very prudent behaviour of the latter,
+who conformed with silent respect to all the customs of the Cathedral,
+never permitting a word to escape him that could reveal his past;
+he felt beyond measure proud of the atmosphere of admiration that
+surrounded his brother, and the attention with which the simple
+inhabitants of the cloister listened to the account of his travels,
+but the state of his health was a continual anxiety, the certainty
+that death had laid its hand upon him, and that it was solely the care
+with which he was surrounded that retarded the fatal moment.
+
+There were days in which the Silenciario smiled with pleasure, seeing
+Gabriel a better colour, and hearing less frequently his painful
+cough.
+
+"You are going on well, brother," he would say joyfully.
+
+"Yes," replied Gabriel, "but do not have any illusions. _That_ will
+come at its own hour, it has me in its grasp. It is only you who are
+holding it back, but one day it will be stronger than you."
+
+The certainty that death would at last be victorious made Esteban
+redouble his efforts. He thought that frequent nourishment was the
+only remedy, and he scarcely ever approached Gabriel without something
+in his hands.
+
+"Eat this. Drink what I bring you."
+
+He struggled valiantly with that broken constitution, with that
+stomach disordered by poverty, with those lacerated lungs and with
+that heart subject to constant disturbance of its functions, with that
+human machine dislocated by a life of suffering and trials.
+
+The constant watching over the sick man had upset Esteban's economic
+life; his miserable wages and the poor assistance the Chapel-master
+could give were insufficient even for that extra mouth, which consumed
+more than all the others in the household put together. At the end of
+the month Esteban was obliged to invoke the aid of Silver Stick to
+enable him to get along the last few days, entering thus into the
+humble and miserable flock bound by the priest's usury. Sometimes the
+Chapel-master, waking for an instant to reality, would give him a few
+pesetas, sacrificing the joy of obtaining a fresh score.
+
+Gabriel guessed the privations that his brother underwent, and was
+anxious to contribute to the expenses of the little household. But
+what work could he obtain in his concealment in the Cathedral? He
+wished for some post in the service of the church, in order to receive
+at the beginning of every month a few pesetas from the hands of Silver
+Stick; but all the posts were occupied, death alone could cause a
+vacancy, and there were many eager ones watching for the opportunity
+to urge their family claims.
+
+The impossibility of being useful to his brother, of helping to
+make his sacrifices less expensive, weighed heavily on Gabriel, and
+disturbed the otherwise placid monotony of his life. He inquired of
+Esteban as to what he could possibly do, not to remain inactive, but
+his brother always answered with his kindly expression: "Take care of
+yourself, only take care of yourself; you have no other duty but to
+look after your own health, I am here to do all the rest."
+
+When Holy Week came round Gabriel found an opportunity of getting a
+few days' work. They were going to put up in the Cathedral the famous
+"Monument" between the choir and the Puerta del Perdon. It was a heavy
+and complicated erection, of a sumptuous and rococo style, which had
+cost the second Cardinal de Bourbon a fortune at the beginning of last
+century. A real forest of woodwork formed the basis of the monument;
+the riches of the cardinal had created a prodigality of solidity and
+sumptuousness, and several days were required to fit together the Holy
+Catafalque, and not a few workmen.
+
+Gabriel interviewed Don Antolin asking for a place on the works. The
+wages were seven reals a day, which he would be able to give his
+brother for two weeks; and he, who had been used in former days to
+have his work so lavishly paid, accepted this small daily wage as a
+piece of unexpected good fortune.
+
+The "Wooden Staff" was indignant. Gabriel was ill and ought not to
+risk his poor health in the fatigues of this work. What was he going
+to do, coughing and suffocating every moment? How was he going to
+undertake the heavy work of carrying the framework and fixing it
+together? The invalid tranquillised him. He knew what those works were
+in the church; everything was done with parsimony, but without much
+regard to time. The workmen in the service of the church worked with
+that calm laziness, and that slow prudence which characterised every
+act of religion. Besides, Silver Stick, knowing his condition, would
+reserve the least heavy work for him; he could fix screws and bolts,
+place the candelabra in line on the steps, and arrange the tapestry;
+he trusted him as a man of good taste who had seen much in his
+travels.
+
+Gabriel worked for two weeks on the monument. This time of relative
+activity seemed to give him a certain amount of relief. He moved
+about, intent on giving orders to his fellow-workers; he went from the
+church to the top of the Claverias, where the monument was stored, and
+seeing himself covered with dust, and with his limbs fatigued by the
+constant coming and going, he deluded himself into thinking he was
+strong again.
+
+During these two weeks he never went to the shoemaker's house, and so
+lost sight of his various friends. The bell-ringer and his friends
+were lost in astonishment. A man of so much learning, to work like one
+of themselves in order to help his brother!
+
+The Señora Tomasa stopped him one morning by the iron railing of the
+garden.
+
+"I have news, Gabriel. I think I know where our child is. I won't say
+any more; but be ready to help me. The day when you least expect it
+you may see her in the Cathedral."
+
+The erection of the monument was finished. All that part of the church
+between the choir and the door del Perdon was occupied by this showy
+and ponderous fabric. According to their traditional custom all the
+Toledans gathered to admire--the steps covered with rows of burning
+lights, the Roman legionaries in alabaster leaning on their lances,
+and the rich curtain with its innumerable folds that hung from the
+vaulting down to the platform of the monument.
+
+On the evening of Holy Thursday Gabriel stood considering what was
+in some sense his work, surrounded by a group of worshippers. The
+Cathedral shone with its immaculate whiteness, in spite of the black
+veils that covered both statues and altars. The clouds of colour from
+the lovely rose windows relieved the funereal aspect of the religious
+ceremony, while from the choir a tenor voice intoned the lamentations
+of the oriental prophet.
+
+Gabriel felt someone pulling his jacket, and turning, saw the
+gardener's widow.
+
+"Come, nephew, we have got her here; she is waiting for you in the
+cloister."
+
+Coming out, the Señora Tomasa pointed to a woman sitting crouched on
+the stone coping of the garden, wrapped in an old cloak, and with the
+headkerchief drawn down over her eyes.
+
+Gabriel would never have recognised her. He remembered the pretty
+smiling face of former years, and he looked almost with horror at
+the tarnished youth, haggard with prominent cheek-bones, of the face
+before him. The eyes deep sunk in the sockets without eyebrows or
+eyelashes, with the pupils still beautiful, but dulled with a glassy
+opacity. Everything about her revealed poverty and desolation; the
+dress was a summer one, and from under it showed her split boots much
+too large for her feet.
+
+"Salute him, child," said the old woman. "It is your Uncle Gabriel,
+one of God's angels, in spite of his misfortunes, and you owe it to
+him that we searched for you."
+
+The gardener's widow pushed Sagrario towards her Uncle, but the young
+woman lowered her head, moved her shoulders and drew back, as though
+she could not endure the presence of a member of her family; she
+covered her face with her wretched cloak to hide her tears.
+
+"Aunt, let us go home," said Gabriel, "it is not good for the child to
+be here."
+
+At the cloister staircase they made the young woman pass on in front;
+she went up with her head bent and without looking, as though her feet
+trod those broken steps instinctively.
+
+"We arrived from Madrid this morning," said the gardener's widow as
+they went up. "I kept her at an inn till it was time to bring her to
+the Cathedral in the evening. It is the best time, for Esteban is in
+the choir, and you will have time to settle things here. I spent three
+days there. Ay, Gabriel, my son, what things I have seen, what hells
+there are for poor women! and we call ourselves Christians, but I
+think we are fiends! Mercifully I had friends at court--some old
+bell-ringers who had been in the Cathedral and who remembered the
+gardener's widow. I wanted everything, even money, to get this unhappy
+girl out of the devil's clutches."
+
+The upper cloister was quite deserted. On arriving at the door of the
+Lunas the girl seemed to wake up, and drew quickly back with a look
+of terror, as though inside the "habitation" some great danger was
+awaiting her.
+
+"Go in, woman, go in," said the aunt; "it is your home. You had to
+come back some time or other."
+
+And she pushed her till she was through the door. Once inside the
+sitting-room her tears ceased; she looked round with astonishment, no
+doubt surprised at finding herself there. Her eyes examined everything
+with a sort of stupefaction, as though marvelling that everything
+should be in the same place as five years before, and with an
+exactitude that made her doubt if such a long time had really elapsed.
+Nothing seemed changed in that little world under the shadow of the
+Cathedral. She only, who had left it in the bloom of her youth, now
+returned aged and broken.
+
+There was a long silence between the three people.
+
+"Your room, Sagrario," said Gabriel at last gently, "is the same as
+when you left it. Go in and do not come out till I call you. Be calm
+and do not cry; trust me. You do not know me well, but the aunt will
+have told you that I am interested in your fate. Your father will soon
+be coming; hide yourself and be silent. I repeat it again, do not come
+out till I call you."
+
+When the old woman and her nephew were alone they could hear the
+girl's suffocating sobs that burst out on seeing her old room.
+Afterwards they heard a sound as though she were throwing herself on
+the bed, and the violence of her grief seemed to become more and more
+uncontrolled.
+
+"Poor child!" said the old woman, who was very nearly crying also,
+"she is good, and she has repented of her sins; if only her father had
+sought her out when that rascal deserted her, what shame and misery
+it would have spared her. And her health? I really think she is worse
+than you are, Gabriel. Oh, those men! with their honour which is
+nothing more than lies! What is honourable is to be charitable and
+compassionate to others, and to harm no one. I said this the other
+day when I was shocked at the shamelessness of my son-in-law, who
+was furious at my going to Madrid to find the child. He spoke of the
+honour of the family, and that if Sagrario returned no decent people
+could live in the Cathedral, and that he could not allow his daughter
+to stand at the door; and he such a thief that he steals the Virgin's
+wax every day, and deceives the devout who pay him for masses that are
+never said; that is why his skin shines so and he is so fat. With so
+much honour."
+
+After a short silence the old woman looked undecidedly at Gabriel.
+
+"Well, shall we begin the struggle? Shall I call Esteban?"
+
+"Yes, call him, he will be in the Cathedral. And you, shall you dare
+to be present at the interview?"
+
+"No, son, manage it yourself. You know Esteban, and you know me. I
+should either begin to cry, or I should turn and rend him for his
+obstinacy. You will manage better by yourself, for this God has given
+you those talents that you have used so badly."
+
+The old woman went away, and Gabriel remained alone for more than
+half an hour, looking out of a window into the deserted cloister. The
+yearly commemoration of the death of God spread in the priestly tribe
+on the roofs, an atmosphere of sadness even more marked than that
+inside the church. All the women and children of the Claverias were
+down below admiring the monument, the "habitacions" seemed quite
+deserted. As he sat Gabriel saw his brother pass by the window, and in
+another moment he appeared at the door.
+
+"What do you want, Gabriel? What has happened to you? The aunt
+frightened me with her summons. Are you worse?"
+
+"Sit down, Esteban. I am well, calm yourself."
+
+The "Wooden Staff" looked with surprise at Gabriel; his strange
+seriousness alarmed him and the prolonged silence in which he appeared
+to be arranging his thoughts without knowing where to begin.
+
+"Speak, man! Do make a beginning; you alarm me."
+
+"Brother," said Gabriel gravely, "you know very well that I have
+respected the mystery in your life that I found on my return here. You
+said to me, 'My daughter is dead,' and you never showed any wish to
+speak of her, and you can say if I have ever touched your old wound by
+the slightest allusion."
+
+"Well, and what then? When are you going to stop?" said Esteban,
+becoming very gloomy; "why do you speak to me on a day so holy of
+things that cause me so much pain?"
+
+"Esteban, we shall never understand each other if you hold on to your
+prejudices. Do not make that gesture, but listen to me calmly; do
+not act like an automaton, pulled by the same wires that moved our
+grandfathers and our ancestors. Be a man, and act according to your
+own thoughts. You and I have different beliefs. Setting aside religion
+which I know is a consolation to you, you know that I am silent as
+to mine, so as not to render my life here impossible. But apart from
+this, you believe that the family is a work of God, an institution of
+supernatural origin. I believe it to be a human institution based
+on the necessities of the species. You condemn for ever anyone who
+betrays the laws of the family, or who deserts his banner, you
+sentence him to death and oblivion. I pity his weakness and forgive.
+We understand honour from a different point of view. You believe in
+the Castillian honour--that traditional and barbarous honour, more
+cruel and dismal even than dishonour; a theatrical honour, whose
+impulses are never founded on human feeling, but on the fear of what
+others will say, the desire to appear greater and more dignified in
+the eyes of others than to your own conscience. For the adulterous
+wife, death; for the murderer, revenge; for the fugitive daughter,
+contempt and forgetfulness; this is your gospel. I have another
+standard; for the wife who forgets her duties, contempt and oblivion;
+for that fragment of our own flesh who flies from us, love, support,
+gentleness, even endeavouring to compass her return to us. Esteban, we
+are separated by our beliefs, the gulf of centuries lies between us,
+but you are my brother, we love each other, and I only desire your
+good. I bear the same name of which you are so proud, and I loved our
+poor parents as much as you could love them, and in the name of all
+these I tell you that this situation must come to an end; you must not
+live insensible and frozen in what you call your dignity, without the
+remembrance of your daughter wandering about the world, troubling you.
+You, who are so kind, who have sheltered me in the most difficult
+crisis of my life, how can you sleep, how can you eat, without your
+life being embittered by the remembrance of your lost daughter? What
+do you know about her now? May she not be dying of hunger while you
+eat? May she not be lying in a hospital while you are living in the
+home of your fathers?"
+
+Esteban's brow contracted, and he wore his gloomiest look as he
+listened to his brother.
+
+"It is useless for you to strive, Gabriel, nothing can come of it.
+Have I denied you anything? Am I not ready to do anything for my
+brother? But do not speak to me of that; she has caused me much pain,
+she has broken my life, how I did not die, I know not. Have you
+thought well that for centuries the family of the Lunas have been the
+mirror of the Cathedral, respected by even the archbishops, and now,
+suddenly to find oneself among the lowest, exposed to the ridicule of
+all and looked upon with compassion by the veriest little acolyte!
+What I have suffered! The times I have wept with rage alone in this
+home, hearing what they were saying behind my back. And then," he
+added quietly as though grief were paralysing his voice, "there was
+that unhappy martyr who died of shame; my poor wife who left the world
+so as not to see my grief and the contempt of others! And do you wish
+me to forget all this? For the rest, Gabriel, I cannot express what
+I feel as well as you do. But honour--is honour. It is to live in my
+house without fear of being shamed, to sleep at night without fearing
+to see in the darkness our father's eyes, asking why I allow a lost
+woman to live under the same roof that the Lunas won for themselves
+by centuries of service to the house of God; it is to avoid people
+mocking at our family. Let them say, 'Those Lunas! how unfortunate
+they are,' but they shall never say the Lunas are a family wanting in
+shame. By our love, brother, leave me; do not speak to me of this.
+Those evil doctrines have poisoned your mind; not only have you ceased
+to believe in God, but you have ceased to believe in honour."
+
+"And what is all this?" said Gabriel, warming. "You yourself do not
+know. 'Honour is honour.' Well, I say, children are children. You, man
+of prejudices, you do not wait to consider that those beings are the
+continuation of our own existence. Your religion makes you think
+children are a fruit from God, nevertheless you think yourself better
+and more perfect when you reject and curse those gifts of Heaven if
+they cause you any trouble. No, Esteban, the love of children and pity
+for their faults ought to come before all prejudices. This eternal
+life of the soul, that lying promise of religion, is only true through
+our children. The soul dies with the body; it is no more than a
+manifestation of our own thoughts, and thought is a cerebral function,
+but children perpetuate our own being throughout the generations and
+the centuries; it is they who make us immortal, and that preserve
+and transmit something of our personality, even as we have inherited
+something from our ancestors. He who forgets those beings who are his
+own creation is more worthy of execration than he who leaves life by
+suicide. The disappointments of life, the laws and customs invented by
+men, what are they before the instinctive affection we feel for beings
+that have proceeded from ourselves, and who perpetuate the infinite
+variety of our habits and thoughts? I abhor those wretches who, in
+order not to disturb the commonplace peace of matrimony, abandon the
+children they have outside the house. Paternity is the most noble of
+all animal functions, but the animals have more courage and dignity
+than man in fulfilling it. No animal of the higher sort abandons or
+disowns its cub, and yet there are many men who turn their backs on
+their children for fear of what people will say. If I, having a son,
+were enamoured of the most beautiful woman in the world, and she
+required me to forget that son, I would stifle my passion sooner than
+abandon the little one. If my son sinned against every human law,
+and was sent to prison, even there would I follow him, defying the
+execration of the world, sooner than deny that he is my work. We
+are united for ever to the creatures to whom we give life, it is a
+compromise of solidarity that we make with the species when we work
+for its continuance. He who breaks the chain and flies is a coward."
+
+"You will not convince me, Gabriel," screamed Esteban. "I will not!--I
+will not!"
+
+"I repeat it is cowardly on your part. This honour that weighs so
+heavily on you is a cruel and antiquated honour that settles all the
+conflicts of life by shedding blood. Why do you not seek the man who
+stole your daughter? Why do you not kill him like a father in an old
+play? Is it because you are a fearful man and have not learnt the art
+of murder, and that arms are his profession? If you had taken lawless
+vengeance, relying only on what you think your right, his powerful
+family would have retaliated on you; but you have not revenged
+yourself through an instinct of self-preservation, through fear of
+prison and all the punishments invented by society; you have been
+afraid in spite of your anger, and this fear you indulge at the
+expense of cruelty to the weaker creature. Your anger only falls on
+your daughter. Come, Esteban, this is not worthy of a man."
+
+The "Wooden Staff" shook his head obstinately.
+
+"You will not convince me, I do not wish to hear you. That woman shall
+not return here; did she not leave me? Let her follow her own path."
+
+"She left you from impulses of that instinct which all healthy beings
+possess. That instinct for the preservation of the species, which
+poetry beautifies and which it calls 'Love.' If she had left you after
+receiving the blessing of a man before an altar, you would have been
+delighted, and would have received her with open arms whenever she
+came to see you. She left you to be deceived, to fall into misery and
+shame, and, seeing her so unhappy, does she not deserve more pity at
+your hands than if you saw her living happily? Reflect, Esteban, on
+the way in which your poor daughter fell. What had you taught her to
+enable her to defend herself from the evil in the world? How was she
+armed to preserve intact what you call honour? You and your wife had
+set her the example of the respect due to wealth and high birth by
+allowing that young man to come to your house, thinking it an honour
+that a gentleman should have fallen in love with your daughter. When
+the inevitable results of social inequality came about she could not
+give him up; she had one of those noble natures that rise in revolt
+against the prejudices of the world, even at the risk of suffering all
+the bitterness of their rebellion, and she fell vanquished. Whom can
+you blame? Her ignorance, her life of isolation from the world, or
+yourselves who never taught her better, and who, blinded by ambition,
+let her wander to the edge of the precipice? Blame her less than
+anybody. Unhappy girl! She has paid with interest her noble defiance
+of social prejudices. She has been vanquished in the social fight--a
+corpse that has to be buried; and you, her father, ought to be the one
+to fulfil that work of mercy."
+
+Esteban, with his head bent, continued to make gestures of refusal.
+
+"Brother," said Gabriel solemnly; "if you hold tenaciously to your
+refusal I have only one thing more to say. If your daughter does not
+return here, I must go. Everyone has his scruples; you fear the gossip
+of the people; I fear myself and what my thoughts can throw in my face
+in my solitary moments. Since I have been your guest I have thought
+constantly of your daughter, and ever since I have known what happened
+in this house I have proposed to myself that the unhappy victim should
+return here. You will not let her return? Well then, I must go. I
+should be a thief if I ate your bread while a creature who is flesh
+of your flesh suffers hunger, or if I should be nursed in my illness
+while she, who is possibly worse than I am, has no friendly hand to
+comfort her. If she does not return, I am not your brother, but an
+intruder, usurping the share of affection and comfort that ought to
+fall to her. Brother, everyone has his own code of morality; yours is
+taught by the priests, mine I have made for myself, and though it is
+less apparent, it may very likely be more strict. In the name of my
+morality I say to you, Esteban, my brother, either your daughter
+returns here or I go away. I must return to the world to be persecuted
+like a wild beast, to the hospital, to the prison, to die like a dog
+in the ditch by the roadside. I do not know what will become of me,
+but one thing is certain, it is that I shall go to-morrow, or even
+to-day, so as not to enjoy a moment more what is not mine. I, who
+consider the appropriation of the goods of the world by a privileged
+minority as an iniquitous robbery, cannot enjoy knowingly the comforts
+that belong by natural right to another unhappy being. I can only
+enjoy them sharing them with her."
+
+Esteban had risen to his feet with a gesture of despair.
+
+"Are you mad, Gabriel? Do you wish to leave me? And you say it so
+calmly? Your presence here is the only joy of my life after so many
+misfortunes. I am accustomed to see you. I must care for you, you are
+my whole family; before I had no interest, I lived without hope. Now
+I have one, to see you strong and well, and can you say so carelessly
+that you will leave me? No, you shall not go--only this was wanting to
+me--after the daughter, the brother; kill me once for all!--Lord God,
+take me to Thyself!"
+
+And the simple servant of the Church raised his hands in supplication
+while his eyes filled with tears.
+
+"Be calm, Esteban. Let us speak like men, without exclamations and
+tears. Look at me, I am calm, but do not think for that it is less
+certain that I shall go to-day if you do not grant me what I pray."
+
+"But--and she? Where is she that you plead so earnestly for her?" said
+Esteban. "Have you seen her and spoken to her? Is she in Toledo? Have
+you with the insolence of your unbelief even brought her into the
+Cathedral?"
+
+Gabriel, seeing him tearful and broken by his threat of leaving,
+thought the decisive moment had arrived, and opening the door of
+Sagrario's room he called:
+
+"Come out, child, ask your father's pardon."
+
+He looked astounded, then he fixed his eyes on Gabriel as though
+he could not guess who that woman was. What joke had his brother
+prepared?
+
+With a brutal impulse he tore the woman's hands from her face, looking
+at her earnestly; even so he did not recognise her. In the midst of
+a painful silence he stood a long while looking at her. Little by
+little, in that face so altered by illness, he began to trace the
+well-known features. In the tearful eyes devoid of eyelashes something
+reminded him of the blue eyes of the lost daughter. The discoloured
+lips, surrounded by deep lines, quivered painfully, murmuring always
+the same word:
+
+"Pardon! pardon!"
+
+At the sight of such a wreck the father felt his courage fail; his
+eyes expressed an immense, an overwhelming sadness.
+
+He retreated backwards to the door of the "habitacion," followed by
+the young woman, dragging herself on her knees and stretching out her
+hands.
+
+"Brother, it is well," he said despairingly; "you are stronger than I
+am, let your will be accomplished. Let her remain, as you wish it, but
+do not let me see her!--remain, both of you. It is I that will go."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+The sewing machine clicked from early morning till night in the house
+of the Lunas. This and the hammering of the shoemaker were the only
+sounds of work that disturbed the holy silence of the upper cloister.
+
+When Gabriel left his bed at sunrise, after a night of painful
+coughing, he would find Sagrario already in the entrance room
+preparing her machine for the day's work. From the day following that
+of her return to the Cathedral she had devoted herself to work with
+sullen silence as a means of returning unnoticed to the Claverias,
+trusting that the people would forgive her past. The gardener's widow
+procured her work, and so the sound of the stitching was continually
+heard in the old "habitacion," accompanied very often by melodies from
+the Chapel-master's harmonium.
+
+The "Wooden Staff" moved about his house like a shadow. He remained
+continually in the Cathedral or in the lower cloister, only coming up
+to the "habitacion" when it was absolutely necessary. He ate his meals
+with his head bent, in order not to look at his daughter, who was
+seated opposite to him at the other end of the table, ready to burst
+into tears at the sight of her father before her. A painful silence
+oppressed the family. Don Luis being so absent-minded, seemed the only
+one not to perceive the situation, and chatted gaily with Gabriel
+about his hopes and his musical enthusiasms. Everything seemed to him
+quite natural; nothing disturbed him, and the return of Sagrario to
+the family hearth had not caused him the slightest surprise.
+
+When dinner was over Esteban fled, not to return to the house till
+night-time; after supper he locked himself into his own room,
+leaving his brother and his daughter in possession of the entrance
+sitting-room. The machine began to work again, and Don Luis fingered
+his harmonium till nine o'clock, when Silver Stick locked the tower
+staircase, rattling his bunch of keys with a noise that equalled a
+curfew. Gabriel felt indignant at his brother's obstinacy.
+
+"You will kill the child; what you are doing is unworthy of a father."
+
+"I cannot help it, brother; it is impossible for me to look at her. It
+is sufficient for me to tolerate such things in the house. Ay! if you
+could only tell how the people's looks wound me!"
+
+In reality the scandal produced by the return of Sagrario to the
+Claverias had been much less than he had feared. She seemed so ill and
+so weary that none of the women felt any animosity against her, and
+the energetic protection of her Aunt Tomasa imposed respect. Besides,
+those simple women of instinctive passions could not now feel towards
+her that hostile envy that her beauty and the cadet's courtship had
+formerly inspired. Even Mariquita, Silver Stick's niece, found a
+certain salve to her vanity in protecting with disdainful tolerance
+that unhappy girl who in former days had attracted the attention of
+every man who visited the upper cloister.
+
+Curiosity only disturbed the calm of the Claverias for about a week.
+Little by little the women ceased to stand about the Luna's door
+to watch Sagrario bending over her machine, and the girl quietly
+continued her sad and hard-working life. Gabriel seldom left the
+"habitacion." He spent whole days by the young woman's side,
+endeavouring by his presence to atone for the hostile aloofness of her
+father. It pained him that she should find herself so despised and
+solitary in her own house. Every now and then the Aunt Tomasa came to
+see them, enlivening them with the optimism of her happy old age. She
+was pleased with her niece's conduct; to work hard so as not to be a
+drag on her obstinate old father, and to help towards the maintenance
+of the house, was clearly what was required; but all the same there
+was no reason she should kill herself with work--calm and good humour,
+this bad time would lead to a better; she was there to get things
+straight with that fiend-possessed Gabriel, and she made the gloomy
+"habitacion" ring with her healthy laugh and lively words.
+
+At other times Gabriel's friends would invade the house, abandoning
+the assemblies at the shoemaker's. They could not bear Luna's absence,
+they wanted to hear him, to consult him, and even the shoemaker when
+his work was not urgent would leave his bench and, smelling of paste,
+with his apron tucked into his belt and his head rolled up in striped
+handkerchiefs, would come and sit by Sagrario's machine.
+
+The young woman fixed her sad eyes with admiration on her uncle. She
+had always from her childhood heard her parents speak with respect of
+that extraordinary relative who was travelling in foreign countries;
+she vaguely remembered him as a shadow crossing her love dream when he
+had spent a few days in the Cathedral before establishing himself in
+Barcelona, astonishing them all by the accounts of his travels and
+his foreign customs. Now she returned to find him aged, as sickly as
+herself, but influencing all who surrounded him by the mysterious
+power of his words, that were like heavenly music to those poor
+narrow-minded souls.
+
+In the midst of her sadness Sagrario had no other pleasure but to
+listen to her uncle; she felt the same as did those simple men who
+left their work to seek Luna in their anxiety to hear fresh things
+from his lips. Gabriel was the modern world that for so many years had
+rolled on far from the Cathedral, never touching it, but which had at
+last entered in to stir and awaken a handful of men who were still
+living in the sixteenth century.
+
+The appearance of Sagrario had brought about a change in Luna's life;
+he became more communicative, and he lost a great deal of the reserve
+he had imposed upon himself when he took refuge in the stony lap of
+the church. He no longer forced himself to keep silence and to hide
+his thoughts; the presence of a woman seemed to enliven him and
+wake once more his propagandist fervour. His companions saw a new
+Gabriel--more loquacious and more disposed to communicate to them the
+"new things," that were already upheaving the traditional course of
+their thoughts, and that even now had on many nights disturbed their
+sleep.
+
+They talked, discussed and consulted Luna, so that he could clear
+their confused ideas, and above the voices of the men sounded the
+continual click, click of the sewing machine, always busy, like an
+echo of the universal work surging in the world, while the calm of the
+Infinite spread itself through the precincts of the church.
+
+All those men, accustomed to the slow, regular, quiet duties of the
+church, with long periods of rest, admired the nervous activity of
+Sagrario.
+
+"You will kill yourself, child," said the old organ-blower. "I know
+very well what it is like, I have done something of the same sort; I
+blow and blow at those bellows, and when it is a mass with much
+music, such as Don Luis loves, I end by cursing the organ and him who
+invented it, for indeed it nearly breaks my arms."
+
+"Work!" said the bell-ringer with emphasis. "Work is a punishment from
+God! You all know its origin. It was the eternal penalty imposed on
+our first parents by the Lord when He drove them out of Paradise. It
+is a chain that we must drag on for ever."
+
+"No, señor," replied the shoemaker. "As I have read in the newspapers,
+work is the greatest of all the virtues, not a punishment; laziness is
+the mother of vice, and work is a virtue. Is it not so, Don Gabriel?"
+
+The shoemaker looked at the master, watching for his words as a
+thirsty man looks for water.
+
+"Work," said Gabriel, "is neither a punishment nor a virtue; it is a
+hard law to which we have to submit for self-preservation and for the
+welfare of the species. Without work life could not exist."
+
+And with the same fervid enunciation with which he had in former times
+swayed the multitude at those meetings of protest against society, he
+explained to this half-dozen men and the quiet sewer, who stopped her
+machine to listen, the greatness of universal work, which every day
+laboured on the earth, to subdue it and force it to yield sustenance
+for man.
+
+It was a struggle the whole twenty-four hours against the blind forces
+of Nature. The army of work extended over the whole globe, exploring
+the continents, leaping to the islands, sailing the seas, and
+descending to the bowels of the earth. How many were its soldiers? No
+one could count them--millions and millions. At daybreak no one was
+absent from the roll-call; the casualties were replaced, the gaps that
+poverty and misfortune opened in the ranks were filled up immediately.
+As soon as the sun rose the factory chimney began to smoke, the hammer
+broke the stone, the file bit the metal, the plough furrowed the
+earth, the ovens were lighted, the pump worked its piston, the hatchet
+sounded in the wood, the locomotive moved amidst clouds of vapour, the
+cranes groaned on the wharves, the steamers cut the waters, and the
+little barks danced on the waves dragging their nets. None were absent
+from work's review. All hurried on, driven by the fear of hunger,
+defying danger, not knowing if they would live till night, or if the
+sun rising over their heads would be the last in their lives. And that
+daily concentration of human energies began with the first light of
+day in all parts of the world, wherever men had assembled and built
+towns and constituted societies, or even in the deserts to be
+reclaimed by their energies.
+
+The stonemason breaks the stone with his hammer, and at every breath
+is poisoned by inhaling the invisible particles. The miner descends to
+the hell of modern times with no other guide than the glimmer from
+his lamp, to wrest from the strata of the earliest ages relics of the
+earth's infancy, those carbonised trees that gave shade to prehistoric
+animals. Far from the sun and far from life, he defies death, just as
+the mason, poised on a slight scaffolding despises giddiness, watched
+only by the birds, surprised to see a creature without wings perched
+on such a dizzy height.
+
+The workman in the factory, changed by a fatal and mistaken progress
+into a slave of machinery, lives fastened to it like another wheel, a
+spring of human flesh, struggling with his physical weariness against
+the iron muscles that never tire; brutalised daily by the deafening
+cadence of pistons and wheels to give us the innumerable products of
+industry rendered necessary by the life of civilisation.
+
+And these millions and millions of men who support the existence
+of society, who fight for it against the blind and cruel forces of
+Nature, who every morning return to the struggle, seeing in this
+monotonous and continual sacrifice the sole aim of their existence,
+form the immense family of wage-earners, living on the surplus of a
+privileged minority, contenting themselves to subsist on the smallest
+part of what these reject, submitting to a wretched remuneration,
+always the lowest, without hope of saving or of emancipation.
+
+"It is this egotistical minority," said Gabriel, having arrived at
+this point, "who have falsified truth, endeavouring to persuade the
+majority of workers that work is a virtue, and that the only mission
+of man on earth is to work till he perishes. This code, invented, by
+the great capitalists, misquotes science, declaring that people can
+only live healthily who devote themselves to work, and that all
+inaction is fatal, but is silent as to what science adds--that
+excessive work destroys men with far greater rapidity than if they
+were living in idleness. They say that work is a painful necessity for
+the preservation of life, but they do not say it is a virtue, because
+repose and sweet inaction are far more grateful to men and to all
+animals than exertion and fatigue. The fable of Paradise, the story of
+the Biblical God imposing the sweat of labour as a punishment in order
+to earn subsistence, shows that in all times the natural temperament
+of man considered rest as the pleasantest condition, and that work
+must be considered as an evil indispensable to life, but all the same
+an evil. Ruled by the instinct of preservation, man ought only to work
+just as much as is necessary for food. But as the immense majority do
+not work for themselves alone, but for the profits of a minority of
+employers, these require that a man should work as much as he is able,
+even if he dies from his over-exertion, and in this way they become
+rich, hoarding the surplus from production. Their contention is that
+a man should work more than is required for himself, that he should
+produce more than is required for his own necessities. In this surplus
+lies their wealth, and to obtain it they have invented a monstrous and
+inhuman morality, that by means of religion and even of philosophy,
+glorifies work, saying that work is the greatest of all virtues and
+idleness the source of all vices. And this makes me ask, if idleness
+is a vice in the poor, how is it that among the rich it is counted as
+a sign of distinction and even of elevation of mind? And if work is
+the greatest of all virtues, how is it that capitalists endeavour to
+amass wealth in order to free themselves and their descendants from
+the practice of so great a virtue? Why is it that this society which
+exalts work with every sort of poetical conception relegates the
+worker to the lowest rank? Why do they receive with greater enthusiasm
+a soldier who has fought, more or less, than an aged workman who has
+spent seventy years working without any one praising him or being
+grateful to him for so much virtue?"
+
+The servants of the Cathedral nodded their heads, assenting to what
+fell from the master; they looked up to him as simple people always
+look up to those who come down to them as apostles of a new idea.
+
+The continual friction with Gabriel had caused to germinate in their
+minds, stunted by the traditional atmosphere, a growth of ideas, like
+the microscopic mosses the winter rains had formed on the granite
+buttresses of the church. Hitherto they had lived resigned to the
+life that surrounded them, moving like somnambulists on the undecided
+boundary which separates soul from instinct, but the unexpected
+presence of that fugitive from social battles was the impulse that
+launched them into full thought, walking tentatively and with no other
+light than that of their master.
+
+"You," went on Gabriel, "do not suffer from the slavery of work like
+those who live among modern factories. The Church does not require
+great exertions from you, and the service of God does not destroy you
+from over-fatigue, though it kills you with hunger. There exists a
+monstrous inequality between the salaries of those down below who sit
+in the choir and sing and what you earn, who lend to worship all the
+strength of your arms. You will not die of fatigue, it is true; many a
+workman in the towns would laugh at the lightness of your duties; but
+you languish from poverty. I see in this cloister the same anaemic
+children that I saw in workmen's slums, I see what you eat and what
+you are paid. The Church pays its servants as in the days of faith;
+she believes that we still live in the times when whole towns would
+throw themselves into the work with the hope of gaining heaven, and
+would help to raise cathedrals without any more positive recompense
+than the workman's stew and the blessing of the bishop; and all this
+while, you, beings of flesh who require nourishment, deceive your
+stomachs and those of your wives and children with potatoes and bread,
+while down below those wooden images are covered with pearls and gold
+in senseless profusion, and without its ever occurring to you to ask
+yourselves why the idols who have no wants should be so rich, while
+you are unable to satisfy your own and live in misery."
+
+The listeners looked at each other in astonishment, as though these
+words were an illuminating flash. They were doubtful for a moment as
+though frightened, and then the faith of conviction illuminated their
+faces.
+
+"It is true," said the bell-ringer in a gloomy tone.
+
+"It is true," repeated the shoemaker, throwing into his words all
+the bitterness of his grinding life of poverty, with a constantly
+increasing family, and with no other help but his inadequate work.
+
+Sagrario remained silent. She did not understand many of her uncle's
+sayings, but she received them all as gospel coming from him, and they
+sounded in her ears like delicious music.
+
+Gabriel's reputation spread among the humble inhabitants of the
+church, and all the servants of the Primacy gossiped about his wisdom.
+The clergy took notice of him, and more than once on rainy evenings
+the canon librarian, taking his walk in the cloisters, tried to make
+Gabriel talk; but the fugitive, with a remnant of prudence, showed
+himself towards the cassocks, as they themselves said, coldly
+courteous and reserved, fearing that they would expel him if they
+became acquainted with his views.
+
+Only one priest of all those he saw in the upper cloister had inspired
+him with any confidence. This was a young man of wretched appearance,
+with worn-out clothes, a chaplain of one of the innumerable convents
+of nuns in Toledo. He received seven duros a month, which were all
+his means of supporting himself and his old mother, a common peasant
+woman, who had denied herself bread in order to give an education to
+her son.
+
+"You see, Gabriel," said the priest. "You see how it is--such a great
+sacrifice to earn less than a common labourer earns in my village. Why
+did they ordain me with so much ceremony? Was it for this I sang mass
+in the midst of so much pomp, as though in wedding the Church I were
+uniting myself to wealth?"
+
+His poverty made him the slave of Don Antolin, and in the last third
+of the month he came almost every day to the cloister, trying to
+soften Silver Stick with his prayers and induce him to lend a few
+pesetas. He even flattered Mariquita, who could not show herself shy
+with him, in spite of his cassock.
+
+"He has a very good appearance," she said to the women of the
+Claverias with the enthusiasm inspired by every man. "I like to see
+him by the side of Don Gabriel and to hear them talk as they walk in
+the cloister. They look like two great noblemen. His mother called him
+Martin, no doubt because he resembled the Saint Martin by that painter
+they call El Greco, that hangs in some parish church, but I forget
+which."
+
+To cajole Don Antolin was a far more arduous task, and the poor little
+curate suffered much in his endeavours to propitiate the miser, who
+was irritated if his miserable loans were not repaid at the proper
+time. Silver Stick with his love of authority was delighted to hold a
+priest and an equal under his thumb, so that those in the Claverias
+should see that he did not order about the small fry only. Don Martin
+was for him only a servant in a cassock, and he made him come up to
+the cloister nearly every evening on various pretexts. His delight
+Was to keep him whole hours standing in front of his door, obliged to
+listen and to pay attention to all his words.
+
+Gabriel felt pity for the moral dependency in which the poor young man
+lived, and he would often leave his niece, going out into the cloister
+to join them. His other friends were not long in discovering him;
+first of all the bell-ringer, then the organ-blower, and presently the
+verger, the Perrero, and the shoemaker would join the group, of which
+Silver Stick was the nucleus. Don Antolin was delighted to see himself
+surrounded by so many people, never imagining that Gabriel was the
+attraction, thinking always it was his authority that inspired fear
+and respect.
+
+Recognising equality with no one but Luna, to him only he addressed
+his conversation, as though the others had no other duty but to listen
+to him in silence; if anyone spoke to him he pretended not to hear,
+but continued addressing Gabriel. Mariquita, huddled up in a shawl,
+followed them with her eyes from the door, sharing her uncle's pride
+in seeing himself surrounded by such a group, who accompanied him in
+his stroll up and down the cloister; the proximity of so many men
+seemed to turn her head.
+
+"Uncle! Don Gabriel!" she called in a coaxing voice. "Won't you come
+in; you will be more comfortable inside the house, because, even
+though it is sunny, it is very cold."
+
+But the uncle paid no attention to her words, and continued his walk
+on the side of the cloister bathed by the sun, talking pompously on
+his favourite theme, the present poverty of the Cathedral and its
+greatness In former times.
+
+"These cloisters in which we are," he said; "do you believe that they
+were built to serve as a refuge to the humble secular people who now
+live in them? No, señor, although the Church was generous, she would
+not have built these 'habitaciones,' with their inner courtyards and
+their colonnades for Wooden Staffs and vergers, etc. This cloister,
+which was to have been as large and beautiful as the one below, was
+begun by the great Cardinal Cisneros" (Don Antolin raised his hand to
+his cap) "so that the canons should live in them subject to conventual
+regulations; but the canons in those days were very rich, and,
+being great lords, would not consent to live shut up here; they all
+protested, and the cardinal, who was very quick-tempered, wished to
+keep them in leading strings, but one of them started to Rome with
+their complaints, sent by his comrades. Cisneros, being governor of
+the kingdom, placed guards at all the ports, and the emissary was
+arrested as he was going to embark at Valencia. The end of it all
+was that after a long suit the gentlemen of the Chapter came off
+victorious, and lived out of the Primacy, and the Claverias remained
+unfinished with this low roof and this balustrade, both provisional.
+But even as it is kings have lived in this cloister; that great
+monarch, Philip II., spent several days here. What glorious times!
+when the kings, who had palaces at their command, preferred living in
+these rooms, so as to be inside the Cathedral and nearer to God. Such
+kings, such people. For this reason Spain was greater then than ever.
+We were masters of the world. We had power and money, and we lived
+happily on earth in the certainty of reaching heaven after death."
+
+"That is true," said the bell-ringer; "those were the good times, and
+for their return we fought in the mountains. Ay! if only Don Carlos
+had been victorious! if only there had not been traitors amongst us!
+Is it not true, Gabriel? You who fought in the war as I did, you can
+say if I am not right."
+
+"Hold your tongue, Mariano," said Gabriel, smiling sadly. "You do not
+know what you are saying. You fought and shed your blood for a cause
+that even now you do not understand. You went to the war as blindly as
+I did. Do not look so sullen; it is no use contradicting. Well then,
+let us see, what did you wish for when you went out to fight for Don
+Carlos?"
+
+"I? First of all that every man should come by his own. Did not the
+crown belong to his family? Well, let it be given to him."
+
+"And is this all?" asked Luna with displeasure.
+
+"That was the least of it. What I wanted, and do want, is that
+the nation should have a good master, an upright lord, and a good
+Catholic, who without restraints of laws or Cortes, should govern us
+all with bread in one hand and a stick in the other. For the robber,
+garrote him! for the honoured, 'you are my friend!' A king who will
+not allow the rich to crush the poor, and who will not allow any one
+to die of hunger who wishes to work. Come, I think I am explaining
+myself clearly."
+
+"And all this, do you believe that it existed at any time, or that
+your king would be able to restore it? Those centuries that you
+describe as those of greatness and well-being were really the worst
+in our history; they were the cause of Spanish decadence, and the
+beginning of all our ills."
+
+"Stop there, Gabrielillo," said Silver Stick. "You know a great deal,
+and have travelled and read much more than I have, but we cannot
+swallow that. I am very much interested in the question, and I will
+not allow you to take advantage of the ignorance of Mariano and these
+others. How can you say that those times were evil, and that the
+fault is theirs of what is happening to us now? The true culprit is
+liberalism, the unbelief of the age, which has let the devil loose in
+our house. Spain, when it does not trust its kings and has no faith in
+Catholicism, is like a lame man who drops his crutches and falls to
+the ground. We are nothing without the throne and the altar, and the
+proof of this is everything that has happened to us since we had
+revolutions. We have lost our islands, we count for nothing among the
+other countries. The Spaniards who are the bravest men in the world,
+have been defeated, there is not a peseta anywhere, and all those
+gentlemen who harangue in Madrid vote fresh taxes and we are always
+involved in difficulties. When was this ever seen in former times?
+When?"
+
+"Worse and more shameful things were seen," said Luna.
+
+"You are mad, youngster! Those travels have corrupted you, till I
+believe you are hardly a Spaniard! Look you, that he denies what
+everybody knows, what is taught in all the schools! And the Catholic
+kings; were they nothing? You need no books to know that. Go into the
+choir, and you will see on the lower stalls all the battles that those
+religious kings gained over the Moors with the help of God. They
+conquered Granada and drove out the infidels who had held it seven
+centuries in barbarism. Afterwards came the discovery of America. Who
+could accomplish that? No one but ourselves; and that good queen who
+pawned her jewels so that Columbus should accomplish his voyage. You
+cannot deny all this, it seems to me. And the Emperor Charles V.! What
+have you to say about him? Do you know any more extraordinary man! He
+fought all the kings of Europe, and half the world was his, 'the sun
+never set on his dominions,' we Spaniards were masters of the world;
+you cannot either deny this. And still we have said nothing of Don
+Philip II., a king so wise and so astute that he made all the monarchs
+of Europe dance at his pleasure, as though he were pulling them with
+a string. Everything was for the greater glory of Spain and the
+splendour of religion. Of his victories and greatness we have said
+nothing; if his father was victorious at Pavia, he overturned his
+enemies at St. Quintin. And what do you say about Lepanto? Down in the
+sacristy we preserve the banners of the ship that Don Juan of Austria
+commanded. You have seen them; one of them represents Jesus crucified,
+and they are so long, so very long, that when they were fastened to
+the triforium, the ends had to be turned up so that they should not
+trail on the ground. So, was Lepanto nothing? Come, Gabriel, you
+really must be mad to deny certain things. If someone had to conquer
+the Moors lest they should possess themselves of all Europe and
+endanger the Christian faith, who did it? The Spaniards. When the
+Turks threatened to become masters of the seas, who went out to meet
+them? Spain and her Don Juan. And who went to discover a new world
+but the ships of Spain; and who sailed round the world but another
+Spaniard, Magallanes; and for everything great it has always been us,
+always us, in those days of religion and prosperity. And what can
+we say about learning? Those centuries produced Spain's most famous
+men--great poets and most eminent theologians; no one has equalled
+them since. And to show that religion is the source of all greatness,
+the most illustrious writers have worn the religious habit. I guess
+what will be your argument, that after such glorious kings came others
+less distinguished, and so the decadence commenced. I know something
+about that also. I have heard the librarian of the Cathedral and other
+people of great learning say this. But this really means nothing.
+These are the designs of God, by which He puts His people to the
+proof, just as He does with individuals, bringing them down to low
+estate, to raise them again to great honour, so that they may continue
+in the right way. But we will not speak of this; if there has been
+a decadence we do not want to know anything about it. We want the
+glorious past, the brilliant times of the Catholic kings, of Don
+Carlos and the two Philips, and it is on them that we fix our eyes
+when we talk of Spain returning to her good old times."
+
+"But those centuries, Don Antolin," said Gabriel calmly, "were those
+of Spanish decadence; in them was begun our ruin. I am not surprised
+at your anger; you repeat what you have been taught. There are people
+here of the highest education who are not less irritated if you touch
+what they call their golden age. The fault is in the education that
+is given in this country. All history is a lie, and to know it so
+misrepresented it would be far better not to know it at all. In the
+schools the past of the country is taught from the point of view of a
+savage, who appreciates a thing because it shines and not because of
+its worth or utility. Spain was great, and was on the high road to
+become the first nation in the world, by solid and positive merits
+that the hazards of war or policy could not have destroyed; but that
+was before the centuries that you praise, before the times of the
+foreign kings: in the Middle Ages which held great hopes, which have
+vanished since the consolidation of national unity. Our Middle Ages
+produced a cultivated, industrious and civilised people like none
+other in the world; they had in them the materials for the building of
+a great nation; but foreign architects came in who hastily ran up this
+edifice; those first few years of existence that astound you with the
+splendour of novelty, and among whose ruins we are still groping."
+
+Gabriel forgot all his prudence in the ardour of discussion. He felt
+no fear of Silver Stick, with his manner of an inquisitor incapable of
+reasoning. He wished to convince him; he felt all the fervour, all the
+irresistible impulse of his proselytising days, without trying in any
+way to disguise his feelings from consideration of the atmosphere
+surrounding him. Don Antolin listened to him in astonishment, fixing
+on him his cold glance. The others listened, feeling confusedly the
+marvel that such ideas should be enunciated in the cloister of a
+cathedral. Don Martin, the chaplain of the nuns, who stood behind his
+miserly protector, showed in his eyes the eager sympathy with which he
+heard Luna's words.
+
+He described the Hispano-Roman people over whom the Gothic invasion
+swept, without, however, causing a gap, because before long the
+conquerors had succumbed to the lower Latin degeneration, remaining
+without strength, spending themselves in theological struggles and
+dynastic intrigues like those of Byzantium. The regeneration of Spain
+did not come from the north with the hordes of barbarians, but from
+the south with the invading Arabs. At first they were few, but they
+were sufficient to conquer Roderick and his corrupt courtiers. The
+instinct of the Christian nationality revolting against the invaders,
+and the gathering together of the whole soul of Spain on the rocky
+heights of Covadonga to fall once more upon their conquerors, was all
+a lie. The Spain of those days gratefully welcomed the people from
+Africa and submitted without resistance. A squadron of Arab horsemen
+was sufficient to make a town open its gates. It was a civilising
+expedition more than a conquest, and a continual current of
+immigration was established over the Straits. Over them came that
+young and vigorous culture, of such rapid and astonishing growth,
+which seemed to conquer though it was scarcely born: that civilisation
+created by the religious enthusiasm of the Prophet, who had
+assimilated all that was best in Judaism and in Byzantine
+civilisation, carrying along with it also the great Indian traditions,
+fragments from Persia and much from mysterious China. It was the
+Orient entering into Europe, not as the Assyrian monarchs into Greece,
+which repelled them seeing her liberties in danger, but the exact
+opposite, into Spain, the slave of theological kings and warlike
+bishops, which received the invaders with open arms. In two years they
+became masters of what it took seven centuries to dispossess them. It
+was not an invasion contested by arms, but a youthful civilisation
+that threw out roots in every part. The principle of religious liberty
+which cements all great nationalities came in with them, and in the
+conquered towns they accepted the Church of the Christians and the
+synagogues of the Jews. The Mosque did not fear the temples it found
+in the country, it respected them, placing itself among them without
+jealousy or desire of domination. From the eighth to the fifteenth
+century the most elevated and opulent civilisation of the Middle Ages
+in Europe was formed and flourished. While the people of the north
+were decimating each other in religious wars, and living in tribal
+barbarity, the population of Spain rose to thirty millions, gathering
+to herself all races and all beliefs in infinite variety, like the
+modern American people. Christians and Mussulmans, pure Arabs,
+Syrians, Egyptians, Jews of Spanish extraction, and Jews from the East
+all lived peaceably together, hence the various crossings and mixtures
+of Muzarabes, Mudejares, Muladies and Hebrews. In this prolific
+amalgamation of peoples and races all the habits, ideas, and
+discoveries known up to then in the world met; all the arts, sciences,
+industries, inventions and culture of the old civilisations budded
+out into fresh discoveries of creative energy. Silk, cotton, coffee,
+oranges, lemons, pomegranates, sugar, came with them from the East, as
+also carpets, silk tissues, gauzes, damascene work and gunpowder. With
+them also came the decimal numeration algebra, alchemy, chemistry,
+medicine, cosmology and rhymed poetry. The Greek philosophers, who
+were nearly vanishing into oblivion, saved themselves by following the
+footsteps of the Arab conquerors. Aristotle reigned in the university
+of Cordoba. That spirit of chivalry arose among the Spanish Arabs,
+which has since been appropriated by the warriors of the north, as
+though it were a special quality belonging to Christian people. While
+in the barbarous Europe of the Franks, the Anglo-Normans, and the
+Germans, the people lived in hovels, and the kings and barons in rocky
+castles blackened by the smoke of their fires, devoured by vermin,
+dressed in coarse serge, and fed like prehistoric man, the Spanish
+Arabs were raising their fantastic Alcazars, and, with the refinement
+of ancient Rome, they met at their baths to converse on all literary
+and scientific questions. If any monk from the north felt the hunger
+of learning, he came to the Arab universities or the Jewish synagogues
+of Spain, and the kings of Europe thought they would be cured of their
+infirmities if, by dint of golden bribes, they could procure a Spanish
+physician.
+
+When little by little the aboriginal element separated itself from the
+invaders and small Christian nationalities arose, the Arabs and the
+old Spaniards (if indeed after the constant mingling of blood there
+was any difference between the two races) fought chivalrously without
+exterminating each other after the battles, mutually respecting one
+another, with long intervals of peace, as though they wished to
+retard the moment of final separation, and often joining in various
+enterprises.
+
+A system of liberty ruled in most of the Christian States. The Cortes
+arose much earlier than in the other western countries of Europe, and
+the Spanish people governed and regulated their expenses themselves,
+seeing only in their king a military chief. The municipalities were
+little republics with their own elected magistrates. The town militia
+realised the ideal of a democratic army. The Church at one with the
+people lived peacefully with the other religions in the country; an
+intelligent bourgeoisie created large industries in the interior, and
+fitted out the first navy of the times at their own cost, and Spanish
+products were more sought after than any other in all the ports
+of Europe. There were towns then as populous as any of the modern
+capitals; whole populations devoted themselves to weaving different
+kinds of stuffs, and everything was cultivated on the soil of the
+Peninsula.
+
+The Catholic kings marked the apogee of national strength, but it was
+the beginning also of its decadence. Their reign was great because the
+flow of energy begun in the Middle Ages lasted till their times; but
+it was execrable, because their tortuous policy turned Spain from the
+right way, rousing in us religious fanaticism and the ambition of
+universal empire. Two or three centuries ahead of the rest of Europe,
+Spain was for the world of those days what England is for our own
+times. If we had followed the same policy of religious toleration, of
+fusion of races, of industrial and agricultural work in preference to
+military enterprises, where should we not be now?
+
+Gabriel asked this question, interrupting his ardent description of
+the past.
+
+"The Renaissance," continued Luna, "was more Spanish than Italian. In
+Italy the literature of antiquity, and Greco-Roman art revived, but
+the Renaissance was not entirely literary. The Renaissance represents
+the springing into life of a new and cultivated society, with arts
+and manufactures, armies and, scientific knowledge, etc. And who
+accomplished this but Spain, that Arab-Hebrew-Christian Spain of the
+Catholic kings? The Gran Capitan taught the world the art of modern
+warfare; Pedro Navarro was a wonderful engineer; the Spanish troops
+were the first to use firearms, and they created also the infantry,
+making war democratic, as it gave the people the superiority over the
+noble horsemen clad in armour; finally, it was Spain who discovered
+America."
+
+"And does all this seem little to you?" interrupted Don Antolin. "Do
+you not exactly agree with what I said? We have never seen so much
+power and greatness united in Spain as in the times of those kings,
+who with reason some call the Catholics."
+
+"I agree that it was a grand period of our history; the last that was
+really glorious, the last gleam that flashed before that Spain, who
+alone walked in the right way, was extinguished. But before their
+deaths the Catholic kings commenced the decadence by dismembering that
+strong and healthy Spain of the Arabs, the Christians and the Jews.
+You are right, Don Antolin, to say that those kings are not called
+the Catholics for nothing. Doña Isabel with her feminine fanaticism
+established the Inquisition, so science extinguished her lamp in the
+mosques and synagogues, and hid her books in Christian convents.
+Seeing that the hour for praying, instead of reading, had come,
+Spanish thought took refuge in darkness, trembling in cold and
+solitude, and ended by dying. What remained devoted itself to poetry,
+to comedies and theological tracts. Science became a pathway that led
+to the bonfire; and then came a fresh calamity, the expulsion of the
+Spanish Jews, so saturated with the spirit of this country, loving it
+so dearly, that even to-day, after four centuries, scattered on the
+shores of the Danube or the Bosphorus there are Spanish Jews who weep,
+like old Castillians, for their lost country:
+
+  'Perdimos la bella Sion;
+  Perdimos tambien España
+  Nido de consolacion.'[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: 'We lost our lovely Sion; we also lost our Spain, that
+nest of consolation.]
+
+"That people who had given Maimonides to the science of the Middle
+Ages, and who were the mainstay of all the industries and commerce
+of Spain, left our country _en masse_. Spain, deceived by its
+extraordinary vitality was opening its own veins to satisfy the
+growing fanaticism, believing that it could survive this loss without
+danger. Afterwards came what a modern writer has called 'the foreign
+body,' interposing itself in our national life--those Austrians who
+came to reign and caused Spain to lose her distinctive character."
+
+"Gabriel," interrupted the priest, "you are talking absurdities. The
+true Spain began with the emperor, and went on equally gloriously
+under Don Philip II. This is the pure and uncorrupted Spain that we
+ought to take as an example, and which we hope to restore."
+
+"No. The pure and uncorrupted Spain, the Spanish Spain without foreign
+admixture, is that of the Arabs, Moors and Jews, that of religious
+tolerance, that of industrial and agricultural wealth, and of free
+municipalities; that which perished under the Catholic kings. What
+came after was a Teutonic and a Flemish Spain turned into a German
+colony, serving as a mercenary under foreign standards, ruining itself
+in undertakings in which it had no interest, shedding blood and gold
+for the ambition of the so-called Holy Roman Empire. I can understand
+the enchantment that the emperor exercised over the bigoted and
+ignorant people who worshipped the past. A great man that Don Carlos!
+Brave in fight, astute in politics, jolly and hearty as one of the
+burgomasters of his own country; a great eater, a great drinker, and
+loving to catch the girls round the waist. But he had nothing Spanish
+about him. He only appreciated his mother's heritage for what he could
+wring out of it. Spain became a servant to Germany, ready to supply
+as many men as were required, and to furnish loans and taxes. All the
+exuberant life garnered in this country by Hispano-Arab culture
+was absorbed by the north in less than a hundred years. The free
+municipalities disappeared, their defenders went to the scaffold both
+in Castille and Valencia; the Spaniard abandoned his plough or his
+weaving to range the world with an arquebus on his shoulder, and the
+town militias were transformed into bands which fought all over Europe
+without knowing why. The flourishing towns became villages; churches
+were turned into convents; the popular and tolerant clergy were
+changed into friars who imitated with servile complacency the German
+fanaticism. The fields remained barren for want of hands to cultivate
+them, the poor dreamt of becoming rich from the sack of the enemy's
+towns and left their work; the industrious burghers abandoned commerce
+as only fit for heretics, and became nurseries of clerks and petty
+magistrates; and the armies of Spain as unbeaten and glorious as they
+were ragged, with no pay but pillage and in continual mutiny against
+their chiefs, flooded our country with a swarm of wretched vagabonds,
+from whence proceeded the bully, the beggar with his blunderbuss, the
+highwayman, the wandering hermits, the starving nobleman, and all
+those characters of which picturesque novels have availed themselves."
+
+"But, the devil, Gabriel!" cried indignantly Silver Stick; "do you
+deny that Don Carlos, who built the Alcazar of Toledo, and Don Philip
+II., who lived in this very cloister, were two great kings?"
+
+"I do not deny it; they were two extraordinary men, but they killed
+Spain for ever. They were two foreigners, two Germans; Philip II.
+clothed himself with a false Spaniardism to continue the German policy
+of his father. This masquerading caused us great harm, because there
+are many men now who think of him as the noblest representation of a
+Spaniard. The absurd inventions and lapses from truth to which those
+times give rise are enough to drive one mad. Many Catholics dream of
+canonising Philip II. for the cold cruelty with which he exterminated
+heretics, but such a king had really no Catholicism but his own; he
+was heir to the German Cæsarism, that eternal hammer of the Popes.
+Driven by pride, he was always sailing to the windward of schism and
+heresy; that he did not break with the Pontificate was solely that
+this latter feared that the Spanish soldiery, who had twice entered
+Rome, would remain there for ever, and that it would have to submit to
+all their extortions. The father and son robbed us with dissimulation
+of our nationality, and dissipated our life for their purely personal
+plans of reviving the Cæsarism of Charlemagne and forming the Catholic
+religion to their own imagination and taste. They nearly destroyed the
+ancient religious feeling of Spain, so cultivated and tolerant from
+its continual intercourse with Mahomedanism and Judaism; that Spanish
+Church, whose priests lived peacefully in the towns with the alfaqui
+and the rabbi, and who punished with moral penalties those who from
+excess of zeal disturbed the worship of the infidels. That religious
+intolerance which foreign historians consider a purely Spanish product
+was really imported by the German Caesars. It was the German friar who
+came with his devout brutality and his crazy theology, not tempered
+as in Spain by Semitic culture. With their intolerance and
+impracticability they provoked the revolution of the Reformation in
+the northern countries, and, driven out of them, they came here to
+plant afresh their ignorance and fanaticism. The ground was well
+prepared. When the free towns whose municipalities were republics
+fell, the people also languished; the foreign seed produced in a
+short time an immense forest, the forest of the Inquisition and the
+fanaticism which still exists; the modern woodmen cut and lop, but
+they soon fall off wearied; the arms of one man can do little against
+a trunk that has grown for centuries. Fire, nothing but fire, can
+exterminate that cursed vegetation."
+
+Don Antolin opened his eyes in horror. He was not angry now, he seemed
+quite thunderstruck by Luna's words.
+
+"Gabriel, my son!" he exclaimed; "you are 'greener' than I thought.
+Just think where you are; remember what you are saying. We are in the
+Holy Metropolitan Church of all the Spains."
+
+But Luna was fairly launched by the renewal of his historical
+remembrances and he was not to be stopped, driven on as he was by his
+propagandist zeal. He was fired by the old oratorical fervour, and he
+spoke as at those meetings when he could scarcely continue his speech
+for the applause, and the protests and surging of the multitude
+obstructing the police.
+
+The horror of the priest only seemed to excite him more.
+
+"Philip II.," he continued, "was a foreigner, a German to the very
+bones. His grave taciturnity, his slow and penetrating mind, were not
+Spanish, they were Flemish. The impassibility with which he received
+the reverses which ruined the nation was that of a foreigner who was
+bound by no ties of affection to the country. 'It is better to reign
+over corpses than over heretics,' he said, and corpses the Spaniards
+really were, condemned not to think, but to lie in order to conceal
+their thoughts. All the ancient offices had disappeared. Outside
+the Church there was no future for any adventurous soul, except in
+America--which ceased to be of any use to the nation after it became
+converted into the treasure chest of the king--or to be a soldier
+fighting in Europe for the rehabilitation of the Holy German Empire,
+for the subjection of the Pope to the Emperor or the extinction of the
+reformed religion, undertakings that in no way concerned Spain, but
+were all the same very blood-letting affairs, even for those who
+escaped with their lives. All the handicraftsmen disappeared, carried
+away to the armies, and the towns became filled with invalids and
+veterans, carrying their rusty swords, their only proof of personal
+valour. All the middle-class guilds were suppressed; there only
+remained nobles proud of being servants to the king and a populace
+who only asked for bread and entertainments, like the Romans, and
+contented themselves with the broth from the convents and the burning
+of heretics organised by the Inquisition.
+
+"After this, ruin overwhelmed us; after the great Caesars, so fatal to
+Spain, came the little ones--Philip III., who gave the final blow by
+expelling the Moors; Philip IV., a degenerate with literary fancies,
+who wrote verses and courted nuns, and the miserable Charles II.
+
+"Spain had never been so religious, Don Antolin," said Luna. "The
+Church was mistress of everything; the ecclesiastical tribunals judged
+even the king himself, but secular justice could not touch even the
+hem of a garment of the lowest sacristan, even though he committed the
+greatest crimes in the public streets. Only the Church could judge its
+own; as Barrioneuva relates in his memoirs, friars armed to the teeth
+wrested from the king's justice at the foot of the scaffold, in broad
+daylight in the midst of the Plaza Mayor in Madrid, one of their own
+brothers condemned for murder. The Inquisition, not satisfied with
+burning heretics, judged and punished gangs of cattle-lifters. Men of
+letters, terrified, took refuge in ornamental literature as the last
+refuge of thought, confining themselves to the production of witty
+novels or plays, in which a fantastic honour was exalted which only
+existed in poets' imagination, while the greatest corruption of morals
+reigned. The great Spanish genius ignored or feigned to ignore what
+the religious revolution beyond the frontiers was saying. Quevedo
+only, who was the most daring, ventured to say:
+
+  'With the Inquisition....
+  Hush! Silence!'
+
+the sad epitaph of Spanish thought which preferred to perish as it
+could not speak the truth. In order to live quietly and support
+themselves in those days of ignorance, many poets sought the shadow
+of the Church and wore its vestments. Lope de Vega, Calderon, Tirsode
+Molina, Miradamerscua, Tarriga, Argensola, Gongora, Rioja, and others
+were priests, many of them after stormy lives. Montalban was a priest
+and employed in the Inquisition, and even the poor Cervantes, in
+his old age, had to take the habit of St. Francis. Spain had eleven
+thousand convents, more than a hundred thousand friars, and forty
+thousand nuns, and to these must be added seventy-eight thousand
+priests and the innumerable servitors and dependents of the Church,
+such as alguaciles, familiars, jailors, and notaries of the
+Inquisition, sacristans, stewards, buleros,[1] convent door-porters,
+choristers, singers, lay brothers, novices--and I know not how many
+other people. In exchange, the nation from a population of thirty
+millions had shrunk to seven millions in less than two hundred
+years. The expulsion of Jews and Moors by religious intolerance, the
+continual foreign wars, the emigration to America in the hopes of
+growing rich without work, hunger, the lack of sanitation, and the
+abandonment of agriculture, had brought about this rapid depopulation.
+The revenues of Spain had fallen to fourteen million ducats, whereas
+the clerical revenue had risen to eight millions; the Church possessed
+more than half the national fortune! What times! Eh, Don Antolin?"
+
+[Footnote 1: _Buleros_--One charged with distributing crusading bulls
+and collecting alms for them.]
+
+Silver Stick listened coldly, as though he had formed some definite
+idea about Luna, and therefore did not make much account of his words.
+
+"However bad they were," he said slowly, "they could not be worse than
+they are at present. At all events no one robbed the Church. Everyone
+was contented in his poverty, thinking of heaven, which is the only
+truth, and the worship of God which corresponds to it. Is it that you
+possibly do not believe in God?"
+
+Gabriel avoided an answer, and went on talking of those times.
+
+"It was a period of barbarism and stagnation, and while Europe was
+developing and progressing the people who had been foremost in all
+civilisation were now left far behind. The kings, inspired by Spanish
+pride and the hereditary pretensions of the German Caesars, conceived
+the mad idea of mastering all Europe, with no more support than
+a nation of seven million of inhabitants, and a few companies of
+ill-paid and starving soldiers. The gold from America had gone to fill
+the Dutchmen's purses, and in this undertaking, worthy of Don Quixote,
+the nation received blow after blow. Spain became more and more
+Catholic, poorer and more barbarous. She aspired to conquer the whole
+world, yet in the interior she had whole provinces uninhabited; many
+of the old towns had disappeared, the roads were obliterated and no
+one in Spain knew for certain the geography of the country though few
+were ignorant of the situation of heaven and of purgatory. The farms
+of any fertility were not occupied by granges but by convents, and
+along the few highways bivouacked bands of robbers, who took refuge,
+when they found themselves pursued, in the monasteries, where they
+were welcomed for their piety, and for the many masses they ordered
+for their sinful souls.
+
+"The ignorance was atrocious, the kings were advised even in warlike
+matters by priests. Charles II., when the Dutch troops offered to
+garrison the Spanish towns in Flanders, consulted with the clerics as
+on a case of conscience, because this might facilitate the diffusion
+of heresy, and he ended by preferring to let them fall into the hands
+of the French, who, although they were enemies, were at all events
+Catholics. In the university of Salamanca the poet Torres de
+Villarroel could not find a single work on geography, and when he
+spoke of mathematics, the pupils assured him it was a kind of sorcery,
+a devilish science that could only be understood by anointing oneself
+with an ointment used by witches. The theologians rejected the project
+of a canal to unite the Tagus and the Manzanares, saying that this
+would be a work against the will of God; but having laid this
+down--fiat--the two rivers joined themselves even though they had
+been separated from the beginning of the world. The doctors of Madrid
+begged Philip IV. to allow the refuse to remain in the streets
+'because the air of the town being exceedingly keen, it would cause
+great ravages unless it were impregnated with the vapours from the
+filth,' and a century later, a famous theologian in Seville registered
+in a public document with those who were discussing with him, 'that
+we would far rather err with Saint Clement, Saint Basil and Saint
+Augustin, than agree with Descartes and Newton.'
+
+"Philip II. had threatened with death and confiscation anyone who
+published foreign books or who circulated manuscripts, and his
+successors forbade any Spaniard to write on political subjects, so,
+finding no ways of expansion for thought, they devoted themselves to
+fine arts and poetry; painting and the theatre rose to a higher level
+than in any other country; they were the safety valves of the national
+genius; but this spring of art was only ephemeral, for in the midst of
+the seventeenth century a grotesque and debasing decadence overwhelmed
+everything.
+
+"The poverty in those centuries was horrible; that same Philip II.,
+though he was lord of the world, put up titles of nobility for sale
+for the sum of six thousand reals, noting on the margin of the decree
+'that it was not necessary to inquire much into the quality and origin
+of the people.' In Madrid the people sacked the bakeries, fighting
+with their fists for the bread. The president of Castille travelled
+through the province with the executioner to wring the scanty harvest
+from the peasants. The collectors of taxes, finding nothing that they
+could collect in the towns, tore off the roofs of the houses, selling
+the woodwork and the tiles. The families fled to the mountains
+whenever they saw in the distance the king's representative, and so
+the towns remained deserted and fell into ruins. Hunger came in even
+to the royal palaces, and Charles II., Lord of Spain and of the
+Indies, was unable on several occasions to procure food for his
+servants. The ambassadors of England and Denmark were obliged to sally
+forth with their armed servants to seek for bread in the suburbs of
+Madrid.
+
+"And amidst all this the innumerable convents, masters of more than
+half the country and the sole possessors of wealth, showed their
+charity by distributing soup to those who had strength to fetch it,
+and by founding asylums and hospitals, where the people died of misery
+though they were certain of reaching heaven. The ancient manufactures
+had all disappeared. Segovia, so famous for its cloth, that had
+employed over 40,000 persons in its manufacture, only held 15,000
+inhabitants, and these had so completely forgotten the art of weaving
+wool that when Philip V. wished to re-establish the industry, he was
+obliged to import German weavers.
+
+"And it was the same thing in Seville, in Valencia, and in Medina del
+Campo, so famous for their fairs and their manufactures," continued
+Gabriel. "Seville which in the fifteenth century had 16,000 silk
+weavers, at the end of the seventeenth could only produce 65. Though
+it is true in exchange its Cathedral clergy numbered 117 canons, and
+it had 78 convents, with more than 4,000 friars and 14,000 priests
+in the diocese. And Toledo? At the close of the fifteenth century
+it employed 50,000 artisans in its silk and wool weaving and in its
+factory of arms, to say nothing of curriers, silversmiths, glovers,
+and jewellers; at the end of the seventeenth century it had hardly
+15,000 inhabitants. Everything was decayed, everything was ruined;
+twenty-five houses belonging to illustrious families had passed into
+the hands of the convents, and the only rich people in the town were
+the friars, the archbishop and the Cathedral. Spain was so exhausted
+at the end of the Austrian rule that she saw herself nearly divided
+among the different powers of Europe, like Poland, another Catholic
+country like ours. The quarrels among the kings were the only thing
+that saved her."
+
+"If those times were so bad, Gabriel," said Silver Stick, "how was
+it the Spaniards showed such unanimity? How was it there were no
+'pronunciamientos' and risings in these deplorable times?"
+
+"What could they do? The despotism of the Caesars had imposed on the
+Spaniards a blind obedience to the kings as the representatives
+of God, and the clergy had educated them in this belief from the
+community of interests between the Church and the throne. Even the
+most illustrious poets corrupted the people, exalting servility to the
+monarchy in their plays. Calderon affirmed that the property and life
+of a citizen did not belong to himself but to the king. Besides,
+religion filled everything; it was the sole end of existence, and the
+Spaniards meditating always on heaven, ended by accustoming themselves
+to the miseries of earth. Do not doubt but the excess of religion was
+our ruin, and came very near exterminating us as a nation. Even now we
+are dragging along the consequences of this plague which lasted for
+centuries. To save this country from death what had to be done? The
+foreigners had to be called in, and the Bourbons came. See how low we
+had fallen that we had not even soldiers. In this land, even if we
+were wanting in other advantages, we could from the earliest days
+reckon on good warlike leaders; but look, in the war of succession we
+had to have English and French generals, and even officers, for there
+was not a Spaniard who could train a cannon or command a company; we
+had no one to serve us as a minister, and under Philip V. and Fernando
+VI. all the Government were foreigners, strangers called in to revive
+the lost manufactures, to reclaim the derelict lands, to repair the
+ancient irrigation channels, and to found colonies in the deserts
+inhabited by wild beasts and bandits. Spain, who had colonised half
+the world after her own fashion, was now re-discovered and colonised
+by Europeans.[1] The Spaniards seemed like poor Indians, guided by
+their Cacique the friar, with their rags covered with scapularies and
+miracle-working relics. Anti-clericalism was the only remedy against
+all this superstition and ruin, and this spirit came in with the
+foreign colonists. Philip V. wished to suppress the Inquisition and to
+end the naval war with the Mussulman nations which had lasted for a
+thousand years, depopulating the shores of the Mediterranean with the
+fear of the Barbary and Turkish pirates. But the natives resisted any
+reform coming from the colonists, and the first Bourbon had to desist,
+finding his crown in danger. Later on his immediate successors, having
+deeper roots in the country dared to continue his work. Carlos III.
+in his endeavour to civilise Spain laid a heavy hand on the Church,
+limiting its privileges and curtailing its revenues, being careful of
+earthly things and forgetful of the heavenly. The bishops protested,
+speaking in letters and pastorals 'of the persecutions of the poor
+Church, robbed of its goods, outraged in its ministers, and attacked
+in its immunities,' but the awakened country rejoiced in the
+only prosperous days it had known in modern times before the
+disestablishment. Europe was ruled by philosophic kings and Charles
+III. was one of them. The echo of the English revolution still
+vibrated through the world; the monarchs now wished to be loved and
+not feared, and in every country they struggled against the ignorance
+and brutality of the masses, bringing about progressive reforms
+by royal enactment and even by force. But the great evil of the
+monarchical system was its heredity, the power settled in one family,
+for the son of a clever man with good intentions might be an imbecile.
+After Charles III. came Charles IV., and as if this were not
+sufficient, in the year of his death the French revolution broke out,
+which made all the kings in Europe tremble, and the Bourbons of Spain
+quite lost their heads, which they were never able to recover. They
+went astray, wandering from the right way, throwing themselves once
+more into the arms of the Church as the only means of avoiding the
+revolutionary danger, and they have not yet returned, nor will they,
+to the right track. Jesuits, friars and bishops became once more the
+counsellors at the palace, as they still are, as in the times when
+Carlos II. concocted his military and political plans with a council
+of theologians. We have had false revolutions which have dethroned
+people, but not ideas. It is true we have advanced a little, but
+timidly, with halting footsteps and disorderly retreats, like one who
+advances fearfully, and suddenly, at the slightest noise, rushes back
+to the point of departure. The transformation has been more exterior
+than interior. The minds of the people are still in the seventeenth
+century; they still feel the fear and cowardice engendered by the
+inquisitorial bonfires. The Spaniards are slaves to their very marrow;
+their pride and their energies are all on the surface; they have not
+lived through three centuries of ecclesiastical servitude for nothing.
+They have made revolutions, they are capable of rebelling, but they
+will always stop short at the threshold of the Church, who was their
+mistress by force and remains so still, even though its power has
+vanished. There is no fear of them entering here. You may remain quite
+easy, Don Antolin, though in justice many accounts might be required
+of her from the past. Is it because they are as religious as formerly?
+You know that this is not the case, though they complain with reason
+of the way in which the ancient grandeur of the Church has been
+extinguished without popular aid."
+
+[Footnote 1: In 1897 an Act was passed "to colonise derelict land in
+Spain."]
+
+"That is true," said Silver Stick; "there is no faith. No one is
+capable of making any sacrifice for the house of God. Only in the hour
+of death, when fear comes in, do some of them remember to assist us
+with their fortune."
+
+"There is no faith, that is the truth. The Spaniard, after that
+religious fever that nearly killed him, lived in a state of perfect
+indifference, not from scientific reflection but from inability to
+think at all. They know they will go either to heaven or hell; they
+believe it because they have been taught so, but they let themselves
+be carried on by the stream of life, without the strength to choose
+either one place or the other. They accept the established, living
+in a sort of an intellectual somnambulism. If now and then thought
+awakening suggests some criticism it is smothered at once by fear;
+the Inquisition still lives among us though we have no longer the
+bonfires, but we are terribly afraid of 'what will be said.' A
+stationary and narrow-minded society is our modern holy office. He
+who raises his protest, rising above the general and common monotony,
+draws upon himself the stupid anger of scandalised man, and suffers
+punishment; if he is poor he is put to the proof of hunger, his means
+of life being cut away from him, and if he is independent he is burned
+in effigy, creating emptiness around him. Everyone must be correct and
+agree to what is established, and hence it arises, that, bound to
+one another by fear, never an original thought arises, there is no
+independent thought, and even the learned keep to themselves the
+conclusions they draw from their studies. As long as this goes on the
+task of the revolutionary is useless in this country; they may change
+the apparent nature of the soil, but when the pickaxe strikes they
+come at once on the stones of ages, solid and compact. The national
+character though it has lost its religious faith is unchanged. Faith
+is dead, but the corpse still remains with the appearance of life,
+occupying the same place and obstructing the pathway. The Church is
+poor and driven into a corner compared to what it was formerly, Don
+Antolin, but do not fear, its situation will not be aggravated, the
+tide has risen to its full height and will not overflow; as long as
+the people in this country are afraid to say what they think, as long
+as they are scandalised by a new idea, and tremble at what their
+neighbours will say, so long will they laugh at revolutions, for
+however much they break out, none of these will bring the water to
+your mouths."
+
+Don Antolin laughed on hearing this.
+
+"But Gabrielillo, man--you must be mad. All this reading and
+travelling has turned your head. At first I was indignant, thinking
+you were among those who wished for another revolution to take
+away the little that is left to us, proclaiming the republic and
+suppressing all ecclesiastical things, but I see that you go much
+beyond this, that you conform to nothing, and that everything seems to
+you the worst; and this rather pleases me, because I see you are not a
+terrible enemy to be feared as you fire from too far. It seems to me
+that your head is as much affected as your chest. But do all these
+revolutions we have had seem as nothing to you? Do you think the
+country is still as savage as you have described it in past years? But
+I," continued the priest ironically, "hear a great deal said about the
+progress of the country, and I know that we have railways, and that
+the long chimneys are arising in all the town suburbs, and many of the
+impious are delighted at this, comparing them to the church belfries."
+
+"Bah!" exclaimed Gabriel indifferently. "There is a little of this
+progress; the revolutions have placed Spain in touch with other
+countries, the progressive current has caught this country and is
+carrying it along as the Asiatics and others are carried; no one
+can escape it nowadays. But we advance at very low water, inert and
+without strength; if we advance it is with the current, and not by
+our own energy, while other people stronger than we swim and swim,
+advancing at every stroke. How have we contributed to this progress?
+Where are our manifestations of modern life? The railways, few and
+bad, are the work of foreigners, and are their property; the grass
+grows between the rails, which shows that we still follow the holy
+calm of carts and wagons. The most important industries, metallurgy
+and mines, are all in the hands of foreigners or of Spaniards who are
+subject to them, living under their bountiful protection. Commerce
+languishes under an old-fashioned protection which enhances the price
+of all commodities, and so there is no capital forthcoming; money
+remains hidden in earthen jars in the fields as treasure, or in the
+towns is devoted to usury as in past times; the most daring venture
+to invest in public stock; Government continues the mismanagement,
+certain of always finding someone to lend, and pointing to this credit
+as a proof of the country's prosperity. There are in Spain two million
+hectares of uncultivated land, twenty-six millions of unirrigated
+arable land, and only one million irrigated. This cultivation of
+unirrigated land, which has come to be almost our only agriculture
+is a concession that Spanish indolence makes to hunger, a perpetual
+demonstration of the fanaticism that trusts in prayer or in the rain
+from heaven more than in human progress. The rivers rush to the sea
+through scorched-up provinces overflowing in winter, not to fertilise,
+but to carry away everything in the volume of the inundation; there is
+plenty of stone for churches and new convents, but none for dykes and
+reservoirs; they build belfries and cut down the trees that attract
+the rain. And do not tell me again, Don Antolin, that the Church is
+poor and in no ways in fault; the poor are yourselves, you of the old
+and traditional Church, you of the religion 'à la Española,' for in
+this as in everything else there are fashions, and the faithful
+follow the most recent; for here are the Jesuits, the most modern
+manifestation of Catholicism, the 'latest novelty,' with their Sacred
+Heart of Jesus and other French idolatries, building palaces and
+churches in all directions, diverting the money that formerly went to
+the Cathedrals, the only evidence of wealth in the country. But let us
+return to our progress. Worse even for agriculture than the drought
+is the ignorance and routine of the labourers, every new invention or
+scientific appliance repels them, thinking it evil. 'The old times
+were the good ones, our ancestors cultivated in this way and so ought
+we'; and so ignorance is turned into a sort of national glory, and
+we cannot hope for any remedy at present. In other countries the
+universities and high schools send out reformers, men fighting for
+progress; here the centres of learning only send out a proletariat
+of students who must live, besieging all the professions and public
+appointments, with the sole desire to open themselves a way to
+continuous employment. They study (if you can call it study) for a few
+years, not to learn, but to gain a diploma, a scrap of paper which
+authorises them to earn their bread. They learn anything that the
+professor teaches, without the slightest desire to inquire any
+further. The professors are for the greater part doctors or barristers
+practising their profession, who come between whiles and sit for an
+hour in their chairs, repeating like a phonograph what they have said
+for many previous years, and then they return to their sick or their
+lawsuits, without caring in the least what is being said or written in
+the world since they got their appointments. All Spanish culture is at
+second hand, purely on the surface, 'translated from the French,' and
+even this is only for the scanty minority who read, for the rest of
+those so-called intellectuals have no other library but the text-books
+they studied as children, and all they learn of the progress of human
+thought is from the newspapers. The parents who are desirous of
+securing as soon as possible the future of their sons who are seeking
+a career, send them to these centres of learning when they scarcely
+know how to speak; the man-student of other countries, in the
+full plenitude of his thinking powers, does not exist here. The
+universities are full of children, and in the different institutes you
+only see short trousers, and the Spaniard, before he shaves himself
+for the first time, is a licentiate and on the high road to become
+a doctor; the wet nurse will end by sitting by the professor. These
+children who receive the baptism of science at an age when in other
+countries they are playing with their toys, being confirmed in the
+title that proclaims their scientific acquirements, study no more;
+these are the intellectuals who are to direct and save us, and who
+to-morrow may be legislators and ministers. Come, my good man, it is
+enough to make one laugh!"
+
+Gabriel did not laugh, but Silver Stick and the others applauded his
+words. Any criticism against the present times delighted the priest.
+
+"This country is drained, Don Antolin, nothing remains standing. The
+number of towns which have vanished since our decadence commenced is
+incalculable. In other countries ruins are carefully preserved, as
+so many stone pages of their history; they are cleaned, preserved,
+supported and strengthened, and paths opened round them so that all
+can examine them. Here, where Roman, Byzantine and Arab art have
+passed, and also the Mudejar, the Gothic and the Renaissance--in fact,
+all the styles of Europe--the ruins in the country are hidden and
+disfigured by herbage and creepers, and in the towns they are
+mutilated and disfigured by the vandalism of the people. They are
+constantly thinking of the past, and yet they despise its remains;
+what a country of dreams and desolation! Spain is no longer a country,
+it is an ill-arranged and dusty museum, full of old things that
+attract all the curious of Europe, but in which even the ruins are
+ruined."
+
+The eyes of Don Martin, the young curate, fastened themselves on
+Gabriel. They seemed to speak to him and express the pleasure with
+which he heard his words. The other listeners, silent and with bowed
+heads, did not feel less the enchantment of those propositions which
+sounded so audaciously in the restful and rank atmosphere of the
+cloister. Don Antolin was the only one who laughed, finding Gabriel's
+ideas quite charming but absolutely crazy It was getting late and the
+sun had sunk below the roofs of the Cathedral. Silver Stick's niece
+called to them once again from the door of her house.
+
+"We are coming, child," said the priest, "but I have one thing first
+to say to this gentleman."
+
+And addressing himself to Luna, he continued:
+
+"But, Hombre de Dios![1]--but I ought not to call you that as you
+are so turbulent--you think everything is out of joint. The Spanish
+Church, worn out as you say, has become very poor, and still you say
+this revolution is a very small affair. What do you wish for? What
+is it that you desire so that things might be settled? Tell us your
+secret quickly and let us go, for the cold is very sharp."
+
+[Footnote 1: Man of God.]
+
+And he laughed again, looking at Gabriel with paternal pity as though
+he were a child.
+
+"My remedy!" exclaimed Gabriel, taking no notice of the priest's
+gesture. "I have no remedy whatever, it is the progress of humanity
+that alone offers one. All the nations on earth have passed through
+the same evolutions; first of all they were ruled by the sword, then
+by faith, and now by science. We ourselves have been ruled by warriors
+and priests, but now we tarry at the gate of modern life, without the
+strength or wish to take science by the hand, who is the only guide
+we could have, hence our sad situation. Science is nowadays in
+everything--in agriculture, in all manufactures, in arts and crafts,
+in the culture and well-being of the people; it is even in war. Spain
+still lives far from the sun of science, at most she knows a pale
+reflection, cold and feeble, that comes to us from foreign countries.
+The failure of faith has left us without strength, like those
+creatures who, having suffered from a severe illness in their youth,
+remain anaemic for ever, without possible recuperation, condemned to
+premature old age."
+
+"Bah! Science!" said Silver Stick, turning towards his house; "that
+is the eternal cry of all the enemies of religion. There is no better
+science than to love God and His works. Good evening."
+
+"Very good evening, Don Antolin; but remember this, we have not yet
+done with faith and the sword; sometimes one directs us or the other
+drives us; but of science, never a word, unless Spain has changed in
+the last twenty-four hours."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+After this evening Gabriel avoided the meetings in the cloister, so
+as to have no more discussions with Silver Stick. He repented of his
+audacity, and when he was alone reflected on the danger to which
+he had exposed himself in expressing his views so freely. He felt
+terrified at the possibility of being expelled from the Cathedral to
+roam the world afresh; he reproached himself, throwing in his own
+teeth his folly in hurling himself against the prejudices of the past.
+What could he hope to effect by changing the thoughts of these poor
+people? What weight could the conversion of these few men, stuck
+like limpets to the stones of the past, have in the emancipation of
+humanity?
+
+The Cathedral was to Gabriel like a gigantic tumour, which blistered
+the Spanish epidermis, like scars of its ancient infirmities. It was
+not a muscle capable of development, but an abscess which bided its
+time either to be extirpated, or to disappear of itself through the
+working of the germs it contained; he had chosen this ruin as
+his refuge and he ought to be silent, to be prudent so that his
+ingratitude should not be flung in his face.
+
+Moreover, his brother Esteban, breaking the cold reserve into which he
+had retired since the arrival of his daughter, counselled prudence.
+
+"His mind seems possessed by the demon, Esteban," said the priest,
+"and he explains his views with the most perfect calmness in this holy
+house, as though he were in one of those infernal clubs which exist in
+foreign countries. Where on earth has your brother been to learn such
+things? Never have I heard such frightful heresies. Tell him that I
+shall forget it all as I have known him since his childhood, and that
+I remember he was the pride of our seminary, but more especially
+because he is ill, and it would be inhuman to drive him out of the
+Cathedral; but he must not repeat this scandal. Silence! Let him keep
+all those atrocities in his own head, if it so pleases him to lose his
+soul; but in this holy house, and especially before its staff, not a
+word. Do you understand? not a word. The next thing will be that he
+will hold meetings in the Holy Metropolitan Church. Besides, your
+brother must remember that, after all, at this moment, he is eating
+the bread of the Church, as he lives on you, and is supported by you,
+and it is not right to speak in this way of the most excellent work of
+God, and try to point out all its defects."
+
+This last consideration weighed the most with Gabriel, and it wounded
+his dignity. Don Antolin said rightly, he was no more than a parasite
+of the Cathedral, and having taken refuge in her lap, he owed her
+gratitude and silence. He would keep silence. Had he not decided
+when he took refuge there to live as one dead? He would live like an
+animated corpse, which in some religious orders is the supreme of
+human perfection. He would think like everyone else, or rather, he
+would try not to think at all, but would simply vegetate there till
+his last hour came, like the plants in the garden or the fungus on the
+buttresses of the cloister.
+
+The Cathedral servants seated themselves round the sewing machine,
+hoping in vain that their master would come down, but content on the
+whole, though they did not see him, to be near him, to look at his
+empty seat, and to talk to the girl who expressed such ingenuous
+admiration for her uncle's conversation. The Chapel-master was
+delighted that Luna, his sole admirer, had returned to visit him;
+during his temporary eclipse the poor musician had suffered all the
+bitterness of solitude, despairing with almost infantile rage, as
+though an immense audience had turned its back on him. He caressed
+Gabriel as though he was the woman he loved, listening to his
+coughing, and recommending all sorts of fantastic remedies imagined
+by himself, uneasy at the progress of his malady and trembling at the
+idea that death might tear from him his only listener.
+
+He told Gabriel of all the music he had studied during his absence.
+When the sick man coughed much, he would cease playing his harmonium,
+and begin long talks with his friend, always on the subject of his
+constant preoccupation, musical art.
+
+"Gabriel," said the musician one evening; "you who are so keen an
+observer, and who knows so much, has it ever struck you that Spain is
+sad, and has not the sweet sentimentality of true poetry? She is not
+melancholy, she is sad, with a wild and savage silence. She either
+laughs in wild peals, or weeps moaning. She has not the gentle smile,
+the joyful brightness that distinguishes the man from the animal. If
+she laughs it is showing all her teeth; her inner meaning is always
+gloomy, with the obscurity of a cavern in which all passions rage like
+wild beasts seeking for an outlet."
+
+"You say truly, Spain is sad," replied Luna. "She does not now go
+dressed in black, with the rosary hanging to the pommel of her sword
+as in former years. Still in her heart she is always dressed in
+mourning and her soul is gloomy and wild. For three hundred years the
+poor thing has endured the inquisitorial anguish of burning or being
+burnt, and she still feels the spasm of that life of terror. There is
+no joy here."
+
+"There certainly is not, and you find this more in music than in any
+other phase of Spanish life. The Germans dance the gay and voluptuous
+waltz with a 'bock' in their hand, singing the _Gaudeamus igitur_,
+that students' hymn glorifying the material life free from care. The
+French sing amid rippling laughter, and dance with their free and
+elastic limbs, greeting with rapturous applause their fantastic and
+monkey-like movements. The English have turned their dance into
+gymnastics, with the energy of a healthy body delighting in its own
+strength. But all these people, when they feel the sweet sadness of
+poetry, sing Lieds, romances, ballads, something soft and flowing,
+that rests the soul and speaks to the imagination. Here even the
+popular dances have much that is priestly, recalling the priestly
+stiffness of the sacred dances, and the circling frenzy of the
+priestess, who ended by falling in front of the altar with foaming
+mouth and bloodshot eyes. And our songs? They are most beautiful, the
+products of many civilisations, but most sad, despairing, gloomy,
+revealing the soul of a sick and tainted people, who find their
+greatest pleasure in human bloodshed, or urging on dying horses in the
+enclosure of a circus. Spanish joy! Andalusian merriment! I cannot
+help laughing at it. One night in Madrid I assisted at an Andalusian
+fête, all that was most typical, most Spanish. We went to enjoy
+ourselves immensely. Wine and more wine! And accordingly the bottle
+went round, with ever frowning brows, gloomy faces, abrupt gestures.
+'Ole! come along here! This is the joy of the world!' but the joy did
+not appear in any part. The men looked at one another with scowling
+brows, the women stamped their feet and clapped their hands with a
+stupid vacuity in their looks, as though the music had emptied their
+brains. The dancers swayed like erect serpents, with their mouths
+open, their looks hard, grave, proud, unapproachable, like dancers who
+were performing a sacred rite. Now and then above the monotonous and
+sleepy rhythm, a song, harsh and strident like a roar, like the scream
+of one who falls with his body run through. And the poetry? As dreary
+as a dungeon, sometimes very beautiful, but beautiful as might be the
+song of a prisoner behind his bars, dagger thrusts to the faithless
+wife, offences against the mother washed out in blood, complaints
+against the judge who sends to prison the caballeros[1] of the
+broad-brimmed sombreros and sashes. The adieus of the culprit who
+watches in the chapel the light of his last morning dawn. A poetry
+of death and the scaffold that wrings the heart and robs it of all
+happiness; even the songs to the beauty of women contain blood and
+threats. And this is the music that delights the people in their hours
+of relaxation and that will go on 'enlivening' them probably for
+centuries. We are a gloomy people, Gabriel, we have it in our very
+marrow, we do not know how to sing unless we are threatening or
+weeping, and that song is the most beautiful which contains most
+sighs, most painful groans and gasps of agony."
+
+[Footnote 1: Highwaymen.]
+
+"It is true, the Spanish people must necessarily be so. It believes
+with its eyes shut in its kings and priests as the representatives of
+God, and it moulds itself in their image and likeness. Its merriment
+is that of the friars--a coarse merriment of dirty jests, of greasy
+words and hoarse laughs. Our spicy novels are stories of the refectory
+composed in the hours of digestion, with the garments loosened, the
+hands crossed on the paunch, and the triple chin resting on
+the scapulary. Their laughter arises always from the same
+sources--grotesque poverty, the troublesome hangers on, the tricks
+of hunger to rob a companion of his provision of begged scraps. The
+tricks to filch purses from the gaily-dressed ladies who flaunt in the
+churches, who serve as models to our poets of the golden age to depict
+a lying world devoid of honour. The woman enslaved behind iron bars
+and shutters, more dishonest and vicious than the modern woman with
+all her liberty. The Spanish sadness is the work of her kings, of
+those gloomy invalids who dreamt of conquering the whole world while
+their own people were dying of hunger. When they saw that their deeds
+did not correspond to their hopes, they became hypochondriacs and
+despairingly fanatical, believing their ruin to be a punishment from
+God, giving themselves over to a cruel devotion in order to appease
+the divinity. When Philip II. heard of the wreck of the _Invincible_,
+the death of so many thousand men, and the sorrow of half Spain, he
+never even winked an eyelid. 'I sent it to fight with men, not with
+the elements,' and he went on with his prayers in the Escorial. The
+imperturbable gloom and ferocity of the kings re-acted on the nation,
+and this is why for many centuries black was the favourite colour at
+the court of Spain. The sombre groves in the royal palaces, with their
+gloomy winter foliage, were and still are their favourite resorts; the
+roofs of their country palaces are black, with towers surmounted by
+weather-cocks, and dark cloisters like monasteries."
+
+Shut into that small room with no other listener than the
+Chapel-master, Gabriel forgot the discretion he had imposed on
+himself with a view to the continuance of his quiet existence in
+the Cathedral. He could speak without fear in the presence of the
+musician, and he spoke warmly about the Spanish kings and of the gloom
+that from them had filtered through the country.
+
+Melancholy was the punishment imposed by Nature on the despots of the
+Western decadence. When a king had any artistic predispositions, like
+Fernando VI., instead of tasting the joy of life he nearly died of
+weariness listening to the airs on the guitar feebly tinkled by
+Farinelli. As they were born with their minds closed to every
+inspiration of beauty or poetry, they spent their lives gun in hand in
+the woods near Madrid, shooting the deer and yawning with disgust at
+the fatigues of the chase, while the queens amused themselves at a
+distance hanging on to the arm of one of the bodyguard. They could
+not live with impunity for three centuries in close contact with the
+Inquisition, exercising power simply as papal delegates, under the
+direction of bishops, Jesuits, confessors, and monastic orders, who
+only left to the Spanish monarchy the appearance of power, turning
+it, in fact, into an oppressed theocratic republic. The gloom of
+Catholicism penetrated into their very bones, and while the fountains
+of Versailles were playing among their marble nymphs, and the
+courtiers of Louis XIV. were decked like butterflies in their
+multi-coloured garments, as shameless as pagans among the beautiful
+goddesses, the court of Spain, dressed in black, with a rosary hanging
+at its girdle, assisted at the burnings and, girt with the green scarf
+of the holy office, honoured itself by undertaking the duties of
+alguacil at the bonfires of heretics. While humanity, warmed by the
+soft breath of the Renaissance, was admiring the Apollos and adoring
+the Venus' discovered by the plough amid the ruins of mediaeval
+catastrophes, the type of supreme beauty for the Spanish monarchy
+was the criminal of Judea. The black and dusty Christs in the old
+cathedrals, with the livid mouth, the skeleton and distorted body, the
+feet bony, and dripping with blood, much blood,--that liquid so loved
+by the religious when doubt begins and faith weakens, and to impose
+dogma they place their hand on the sword.
+
+"For this reason the Spanish monarchy has been steeped in gloom,
+transmitting its melancholy from one generation to another. If by any
+chance there appeared among them anyone happy and pleased with life,
+it was because in the blue blood of the maternal veins there was a
+plebeian drop, which pierced like the rays of the sun into a sick
+room."
+
+Don Luis listened to Gabriel, receiving his words with affirmative
+gestures.
+
+"Yes, we are a people governed by gloom," said the musician. "The
+sombre humour of those dark centuries lives in us still. I have often
+thought how difficult life must have been to an awakened spirit. The
+Inquisition listening to every word, and endeavouring to guess every
+thought. The conquest of heaven the sole ideal of life! And that
+conquest becoming daily more difficult! Money must be paid to the
+Church to save one's self, and poverty was the most perfect state; and
+again, besides the sacrifice of all comfort, prayers at all hours,
+the daily visits to the church, the life of confraternities, the
+disciplines in the vaults of the parish church, the voice of the
+brother of Mortal Sin interrupting sleep to remind one of the approach
+of Death; and added to this fanatical and weary life the uncertainty
+of salvation, the threat of falling into hell for the slightest fault,
+and the impossibility of ever thoroughly appeasing a sullen and
+revengeful God. And then again, the more tangible menace, the terror
+of the bonfire, engendering cowardice and debasing suspected men."
+
+"In this way we can understand," said Gabriel, "the cynical confession
+of the Canon Llorente explaining why he became secretary to the Holy
+Office: 'They began to roast, and in order not to be roasted I took on
+me the part of roaster.' For intelligent men there was nothing else
+to be done. How could they resist and rebel? The king, master of all
+lives and property, was only the servant of bishops, friars, and
+familiars. The kings of Spain, except the first Bourbons, were nothing
+but servants of the Church; in no country has been seen as palpably
+as in this one the solidarity between Church and State. Religion
+succeeded in living without the kings, but the kings could not exist
+without religion. The fortunate warrior, the conqueror who founded
+a throne, had no need of a priest. The fame of his exploits and his
+sword were enough for him, but as death drew near he thought of his
+heirs, who would be unable to dispose of glory and fear to make
+themselves respected as he had done, and he drew near to the priest,
+taking God as a mysterious ally who would watch over the preservation
+of the throne. The founder of a dynasty reigned 'by the grace of
+strength' but his descendants reigned 'by the grace of God.' The king
+and the Church were everything for the Spanish people. Faith had made
+them slaves by a moral chain that no revolutions could break; its
+logic was indisputable--the belief in a personal God, who busied
+Himself with the most minute concerns of the world, and granted His
+grace to the king that he might reign, obliged them to obey under pain
+of going to hell. Those who were rich and well placed in the world
+grew fat, praising the Lord who created kings to save men the trouble
+of governing themselves; those who suffered consoled themselves by
+thinking that this life was but a passing trial, after which they
+would be sure to gain a little niche in heaven. Religion is the best
+of all auxiliaries to the kings; if it had not existed before the
+monarchs these last would have invented it. The proof is that in these
+times of doubt they are firmly anchored to Catholicism, which is the
+strongest prop of the throne. Logically the kings ought to say, 'I am
+king because I have the power, because I am supported by the army.'
+But no, señor, they prefer to continue the old farce and say, 'I, the
+king, by the grace of God.' The little tyrant cannot leave the lap of
+the greater despot; it is impossible to them to maintain themselves by
+themselves."
+
+Gabriel was silent for some time; he was suffocating, his chest was
+heaving with the spasms of his hollow cough. The Chapel-master drew
+near alarmed.
+
+"Do not be uneasy," said Luna, recovering himself; "it is so every
+day. I am ill and I ought not to talk so much, but these things excite
+me, and I feel irritated by the absurdities of the monarchy and
+religion, not only in this country, but all over the world. But,
+notwithstanding, I have felt real pity, profound commiseration for a
+being with royal blood. Can you believe it? I saw him quite close in
+one of my journeys through Europe. I do not know how the police
+who guarded his carriage did not drive me away, fearing a possible
+attempt, but what I felt was compassion for the kings who have come
+so late into a world that no longer believes in the divine right; and
+these last twigs, sprouting from the worm-eaten and rotten trunk of a
+dynasty, carry in their poor sap the decay of the rotten branches. It
+was a youth, as sick as I am, not by the chances of life, but weakly
+from his cradle, condemned before his birth to suffer from the malady
+that came to him with his life. Just imagine, Don Luis, if at this
+time for the preservation of my own interests I begot a son, would it
+not be a coldly premeditated attempt against the future?"
+
+And the revolutionist described the young invalid: his thin body,
+artificially strengthened by hygiene and gymnastics, his eyes heavy
+and sunk deep in their sockets, the lower jaw hanging loose like that
+of a corpse, wanting the strength that keeps it fixed to the skull.
+
+"Poor youth! Why was he born? What would be accomplished in his
+journey through the world? Why had Nature, who so often refuses
+fecundity to the strong, shown herself prodigal to the loveless union
+of a dying consumptive? What was the use to him of having carriages
+and horses, liveried servants to salute him, and ninnies to give him
+food; it would have been far better had he never appeared in the world
+but had remained in the limbo of those who are never born. Like the
+squire of Don Quixote, who finding himself at last in the plenty of
+Barataria, had by his side a doctor Recio to restrain his appetite,
+this poor creature could never enjoy with freedom the pleasures of the
+remains of life left to him."
+
+"They pay him thousands of duros," added Gabriel, "for every minute of
+his life, but no amount of gold can procure him a drop of fresh blood
+to cure the hereditary poison in his veins. He is surrounded by
+beautiful women, but if he feels arising the happy tremors of youth,
+the sap of the spring of life, the predisposition of a family who have
+only been notable for the victories won in love's battles, he must
+remain cold and austere, under his mother's vigilant eye, who knows
+that carnal passion would rapidly end a life so weak and uncertain.
+And the end of all these sad-and painful privations--inevitable death.
+Why was this poor creature born? Often the greatness of the earth is
+worse than a malediction, and reasons of State are the most cruel of
+all torments for an invalid, obliging him to feign a health he does
+not feel. To speak of the illness of the king is a crime, and the
+courtiers living under the shadow of the throne consider the slightest
+allusion to the king's health as a sacrilege, a crime worthy of
+punishment, as though he were not a human being subject like others to
+death."
+
+"I do not care much for politics," said the Chapel-master; "kings and
+republics are all the same to me, I am a votary of art. I do not know
+what monarchy may be in the other countries that you have seen, but in
+Spain it seems quite played out. It is tolerated like so many relics
+of the past, but it inspires no enthusiasm and no one is inclined to
+sacrifice themselves for it, and I believe that even the people who
+live in its shadow, and whose interests are most bound up with those
+of the crown, have more devotion on their tongues than in their
+hearts."
+
+"It is so, Don Luis," said Gabriel; "for nearly a century the monarchy
+has been dead in Spain; the last loved and popular king was Fernando
+VII. Since then the nation has asserted itself, becoming emancipated
+from the old traditions, but the kings have not progressed; on the
+contrary, they have gone back, withdrawing themselves daily more and
+more from the anticlerical and reforming tendencies of the first
+Bourbons. If in educating a prince nowadays his masters were to say,
+'We will try and make a Carlos III. of him,' even the stones of the
+palace would be scandalised. The Austrians have revived like those
+parasitic plants which, having been torn up, reappear after a little
+while. If in the life of the kings they seek for examples in the past,
+they remember the Austrian Caesars, but it is complete oblivion of
+those first Bourbons who morally killed the Inquisition, expelled
+the Jesuits, and fostered the material progress of the country; they
+renounce the memory of those foreign ministers who came to civilise
+Spain. Jesuits, friars and clerics order and direct as in the best
+times of Charles II. To have had as minister a Count of Aranda, the
+friend of Voltaire, is a shame of the past and to be passed over in
+silence. Yes, Don Luis, you say well, the monarchy is dead. Between it
+and the country there is the same relation as between a corpse and a
+living man. The secular laziness, the resistance to all change, and
+the fear of the unknown that all stationary people feel, are the
+causes of the continuance of this institution, that has not like other
+countries the military outlet or the aggrandisement of its territory
+as a justification of its existence."
+
+With this the conversation ended that evening in the Chapel-master's
+little room.
+
+Gabriel found himself drawn afresh by the affection of his admirers
+in the Claverias. They coaxed him and followed him, lamenting his
+absence. They could not live without him, so declared the shoemaker.
+They had become accustomed to listen to him, they felt the desire of
+being enlightened, and they begged the master not to desert them.
+
+"We meet in the tower now," said the bell-ringer; "Silver Stick
+looks on our meetings with an evil eye, and he has gone so far as
+to threaten the shoemaker to turn him out of the Claverias if the
+meetings continue to be held in his house. He will not interfere with
+me; he knows my character. Besides, if he rules in the upper cloister,
+I rule in my tower. I am quite capable, if he comes to disturb us with
+his spying, of throwing him down the stairs, the miserly devil!"
+
+And he added with an affectionate expression, a great contrast to his
+usual rough and taciturn character:
+
+"Come, Gabriel, we expect you in my house. When you are tired of
+keeping your niece and that crazy Don Luis company, come up for a
+little while. We cannot get on without your words. Don Martin has been
+quite enthusiastic since he heard you the other evening; he wants to
+see you; he says he would go from one end of Toledo to the other to
+hear you. He wishes me to let him know if you decide on rejoining your
+friends, because Don Antolin in speaking to him sets you down as a
+madman and a heretic who does not know what to be after. But he is an
+ignoramus who, after studying for his profession, can do no better
+than sell tickets and squeeze the poor."
+
+Luna returned to the meetings in the bell-ringer's house. The greater
+part of the morning he sat by his niece, soothed by the tic-tac of the
+machine, which caused a gentle drowsiness, watching the cloth pass
+under the presser with little jumps, spreading the peculiar chemical
+scent of new stuffs.
+
+He watched Sagrario always sad, devoting herself to her work with
+taciturn tenacity; when now and then she raised her head to regulate
+her cotton and met Gabriel's glance, a faint smile would pass over her
+face.
+
+In the isolation in which the anger of her father had left them they
+felt obliged to draw together as though a common danger threatened
+them, and their bodily infirmities were a further bond of union.
+Gabriel pitied the fate of the poor young woman, seeing how hardly the
+world had treated her after her flight from the family hearth. Her
+long illness had changed her greatly and still caused her pain, her
+once beautiful teeth were no longer white and regular, and the lips
+were pallid and drawn; her hair had grown thin in places, but she
+contrived to conceal this with locks of the auburn hair, remains of
+her former beauty, which she dressed with great skill; but in spite
+of this her youth was beginning to assert itself, giving light to her
+eyes and charm to her smile.
+
+Many nights Gabriel, tossing on his bed unable to sleep, coughing, and
+with his head and chest bathed in cold sweat, would hear in the room
+adjoining the suppressed moans of his niece, timid and smothered so
+that the rest of the household should not be disturbed.
+
+"What was the matter with you last night?" asked Gabriel the following
+morning. "What were you moaning for?"
+
+And Sagrario, after many denials, finally admitted her discomfort:
+
+"My bones ache; directly I get to bed the pain begins and I feel as
+though my limbs were being torn asunder. And you, how are you? All
+night I heard you cough, and I thought you were suffocating."
+
+And the two invalids stricken by life forgot their own aches and pains
+to sympathise with those of the other, establishing between their
+hearts a current of loving pity, attracted to each other not by the
+difference of sex, but by the fraternal sympathy aroused by each
+other's misfortunes.
+
+Very often Sagrario would try to send her uncle away; it pained her
+to see him sitting close by her, doing nothing, coughing painfully,
+fixing his eyes upon her as though she were an object of adoration.
+
+"Get up from here," the girl would say gaily--"it makes me nervous
+seeing you so very quiet keeping me company when what you want is
+life and movement. Go to your friends; they are expecting you in the
+bell-ringer's tower. They have been talking about me, thinking it is
+I who keep you in the house. Go out to walk, uncle! Go and speak of
+those things that stir you so much, and that those poor people listen
+to open-mouthed. Be careful as you go up the stairs; go slowly and
+stop often, so that the demon of the cough, may not get hold of you."
+
+Gabriel spent the later hours of the morning in the bell-ringer's
+"habitacion." The walls of ancient whitewash were adorned by faded
+and yellow engravings, representing episodes in the Carlist war,
+remembrances of the mountain campaign which for long years had been
+the pride of Mariano, but of which now he never spoke.
+
+Here Gabriel met all his admirers. Even the shoemaker worked at night
+in order not to deprive himself of this meeting. Don Martin, the
+curate, also came up, concealing himself carefully so that Silver
+Stick should not see him. It was a small community grouping itself
+round the sick apostle, with all the zeal inspired by the unknown.
+
+Gabriel answered all these men's questions, that so often betrayed the
+simplicity of their minds. When a fit of coughing seized him, they all
+surrounded him with concern written on their faces. They would have
+wished even at the cost of their own lives to restore him to health.
+Luna, carried away by his enthusiasm, ended by narrating to them the
+story of his life and sufferings, and so the prestige of martyrdom
+came to increase the ardour of these people. The narrowed minds of
+these sedentary men, living tranquil and safe in the Cathedral, made
+them admire the adventures and torments of this fighter; for them he
+was a martyr to this new religion of the humble and oppressed, and
+besides, their innocence converted him into a victim of that social
+injustice which they daily hated more.
+
+For them there was no other truth but Gabriel's words; the
+bell-ringer, although the roughest and most silent among them, was
+the most advanced in his conversion. His admiration for Gabriel which
+dated from their childhood, his dog-like fidelity, carried him on with
+leaps and bounds, making him accept at once even the most distant
+ideals.
+
+"I am whatever you are, Gabriel," he said firmly. "Are you not an
+anarchist? I will be one also--indeed, I think I have always been one.
+Do you not preach that the poor should live and the rich should work;
+that everyone should possess what he earns, and that we should all
+help one another? Well, this is just what I thought when we wandered
+over the country with our guns and our scarf. And as far as religion
+is concerned, which formerly nearly drove us mad, I feel perfectly
+indifferent. I am convinced on hearing you that it is a sort of fable
+invented by clever people in order that we, the poor and unfortunate,
+should submit to the miseries of this world hoping for heaven; it
+is not badly imagined, for in the end those who die and do not find
+heaven will not return to complain."
+
+One day Gabriel wished to go up where the bells were hung. It was now
+well on in spring; it was warm, and the intense blue of the sky seemed
+to attract him.
+
+"I have not seen the 'big bell' since I was a child," he said. "Let us
+go up; I should like to see Toledo for the last time."
+
+And accompanied by his admirers, indeed, almost carried by them, he
+went slowly up the narrow spiral staircase. Arrived at the top, the
+soft wind was murmuring through the great iron railings, the cages of
+the bells. From the centre of the vault hung the famous "Gorda," an
+immense bronze bell, with all one side split by a large crack; the
+clapper, which was the author of the mischief, lay below it, engraved
+and as thick as a column, and a smaller one now occupied the cavity.
+The roofs of the Cathedral, dark and ugly, lay at their feet, and in
+front on a hill rose the Alcazar, higher and larger than the church,
+as though keeping up the spirit of the emperor who built it, Caesar
+of Catholicism, champion of the faith, but who nevertheless strove to
+keep the Church at his feet.
+
+The city spread out around the Cathedral, the houses disappearing in
+the crowd of towers, cupolas and absides. It was impossible to look on
+any side without meeting with chapels, churches, convents and ancient
+hospitals. Religion had absorbed the industrious Toledo of old, and
+still guarded the dead city beneath its hood of stone. From some of
+the belfries a red flag was floating, bearing a white chalice; this
+meant that some newly-ordained priest was singing his first mass.
+
+"I have never been up here," said Don Martin, sitting by Gabriel's
+side on one of the rafters, "without seeing some of these flags;
+ecclesiastical recruiting never ceases, there are always visionaries
+to fill its ranks. Those who really have faith are the minority, the
+greater part enter because they see the Church still triumphant and
+seemingly commanding, and they think that in her ranks some tremendous
+career is waiting for them. Unlucky wights! I also was led to the
+altar with music and oratorical shouts, as though I were walking to a
+triumph. Incense spread its clouds before my eyes, all my family wept
+with emotion at seeing me nothing less than a minister of God. And
+the day following all this theatrical pomp, when the lights and the
+censers were extinguished and the church had recovered its ordinary
+aspect, began this miserable life of poverty and intrigue to earn
+one's bread--seven duros a month! To endure at all hours the
+complaints of those poor women, with their tempers embittered by
+seclusion, common as the lowest servants, who spend their lives
+gossiping in the parlour of what is passing in the towns, inventing
+scandals to please the canons, or the families who protect the house.
+And there are priests who envy me! hungering against me for this
+coveted chaplaincy of nuns! looking upon me as a flattering hanger-on
+of the archiepiscopal palace, not understanding how otherwise, being
+so young, I could have hooked out this preferment that allows me to
+live in Toledo on seven duros a month!"
+
+Gabriel nodded his head, sympathising with the young priest's
+complaints.
+
+"Yes, it is you who are deceived. The day for making great fortunes in
+the Church is past, and the poor youths who now wear the cassock and
+dream of a mitre make me think of those emigrants who go to distant
+countries famous through long centuries of plunder, and find them even
+more poverty-stricken than their own land."
+
+"You are right, Gabriel. The day of the all-powerful Church is past;
+she has still in her udders milk enough for all, but there are few who
+can fasten on to them and fill themselves to repletion, while others
+groan with hunger. One could die of laughing when one hears of the
+equality and the democratic spirit of the Church. It is all a lie; in
+no other institution does so cruel a despotism reign. In early days
+Popes and bishops were elected by the faithful, and were deposed from
+power if they used it badly. The aristocracy of the Church exists
+still; it may be a canon upwards, or one who succeeds in crowning
+himself with a mitre; from them no account is required. Among the
+laity appointments are changed, ministers are turned out, soldiers are
+degraded--even kings are dethroned; but who exacts responsibility from
+Pope or bishops once they are anointed and in more or less frequent
+intercourse with the Holy Spirit? If you want Justice you are sent
+before tribunals equally formed by the aristocrats of the Church;
+there is no power more absolute on earth, not even the Grand Turk, who
+in a measure is responsible through fear of revolts in his seraglio.
+Here, in the seraglio of the Church, we are all less than women. If it
+happens that a priest, weary of persecution, feeling the man once more
+rising beneath his cassock, deals a heavy blow at his tyrant, he is
+declared mad; the climax of hypocrisy! They try to demonstrate that in
+the Church one lives in the best of worlds, and it is only the lack of
+reason that causes any rebellion against its authority."
+
+Don Martin was silent for a long while as though he were searching in
+his memory; at length he continued:
+
+"You also laugh at the idea of the actual poverty of the Church in
+Spain. She is like the great ruined noblemen, who still have enough
+to live upon in idleness, but who think themselves miserably poor
+compared to their former wealth; the Church has the nostalgia of those
+former centuries when she possessed half the wealth of Spain. Poor
+she is if she thinks of those times, but if you compare her with the
+Catholicism of other modern nations you find that, as in former years,
+she is by far the most favoured and best paid establishment in the
+State. She absorbs forty-one millions of the revenue, which is
+enormous in a country which only devotes nine millions to schools and
+teaching, and one million to the relief of the poor. To maintain an
+intercourse with God costs a Spaniard five times as much as to learn
+to read. But this forty-one millions is a blind. My own poverty made
+me inquisitive, and I wished to know what the clergy in Spain really
+receive, and what comes to our hands, the rank and file. The demands
+and pensions of the Church are an intricate tangle, apart from the
+forty-one millions. There is not a single ministry in which the Church
+has not struck her roots; she is paid by the Ministers of State for
+foreign missions, which are no use to anyone, by the Ministers of
+War and Marine for military clergy, and by the Ministers of Public
+Instruction and Justice. She is paid to support the pomp of the Roman
+Pontiff, as we maintain his ambassador in Spain, which is as though
+I allowed myself the luxury of keeping servants, and laid on my
+neighbour the obligation of paying them. She is paid for the repairs
+to churches, for episcopal libraries, for the colonisation of
+Fernando Po, for unforeseen occurrences, and I do not know how many
+supplemental items besides! And you must take into account what the
+Spanish people pay the Church voluntarily apart from what the State
+gives. The Bull of the Holy Crusade produces two and a half million
+pesetas annually; besides this you must consider what the parochial
+clergy draw from their congregations, the annual gifts to the
+religious orders for their ministry and offices (and this is
+the fattest portion), and the ecclesiastical revenue from the
+Ayuntamientos and deputations. In short, this Church, which is
+continually speaking of its poverty, draws from the State and the
+country more than three hundred million pesetas annually--nearly
+double what the army costs; although they are always complaining
+in the sacristies of these modern times, saying that everything is
+devoured by the military, and that the fault of everything that has
+happened is theirs, as they threw themselves on to the side of that
+cursed liberty. Three hundred millions, Gabriel! I have calculated it
+carefully! And I, who form part of this great establishment, receive
+seven duros a month; the greater part of the vicars in Spain are paid
+less than an excise officer, and thousands of clergy live from hand to
+mouth, wandering from sacristy to sacristy trying to obtain a mass to
+put the stew on the fire; and if bands of clergy do not go into the
+highways to rob, it is only from fear of the civil guard, and because
+after a couple of days of hunger a third may come in which they may
+beg some scraps to eat; there is always a crumb to allay hunger, and
+no cassock ever falls in the street dying of want, but there are a
+great many clerics who spend their existence deceiving their stomachs,
+trying to imagine they nourish themselves, till some sudden illness
+comes which hurries them out of the world. Where, then, does all this
+money go? To the aristocracy of the Church, to the true sacerdotal
+caste; but we who are in religion are people of the backstairs. What a
+terrible mistake, Gabriel! To renounce love and family affection, to
+fly all worldly pleasures, the theatre, concerts, the cafe; to be
+looked upon by people, even by those who think themselves religious,
+as a strange being, a sort of intermediate, neither a man nor a woman;
+to wear petticoats and to be dressed like a lugubrious doll; and in
+exchange for all these sacrifices to earn less than a man who breaks
+stones on the road. We live idly, certain that we shall never fall
+from over-work, but our poverty is greater than that of many workmen;
+we cannot acknowledge it, nor put ourselves in the way of begging
+alms, for the honour of our cloth. And besides, why should they keep
+us if we are of no practical use and cost the country so dear? When
+the religious domination came to an end in Spain it was only we, the
+lower ones, who suffered in consequence. The priest is poor, the
+temple is poor also; but the prince of the Church retains his
+thousands of duros yearly, and his great ecclesiastical state, and
+he sings his psalms tranquilly, certain that his pittance is in no
+danger. The revolution up to now has only prejudiced the lower clergy;
+the power of the Church is ended, it is gone; what we see is only its
+corpse, but an enormous corpse that will cost a great deal to remove,
+and whose preservation will swallow up a great deal of money."
+
+"It is true the Church is defunct; what we fight are only its remains.
+The vulgar believe it still lives because they can see and touch it,
+forgetting that a religion counts centuries in its life as minutes,
+and that generation after generation pass between its death and
+burial. Centuries before the birth of Jesus Paganism had fallen.
+The Athenian poets mocked the gods of Olympus on the stage, and the
+philosophers despised it. All the same Christianity required many
+years of propaganda and the political support of the Caesars to bring
+it to an end, and even then it was not done with, for dogmas are like
+men who leave behind something of themselves in the family who succeed
+them. Religions do not disappear suddenly through a trapdoor; they
+are extinguished slowly, leaving some of their beliefs and their
+ceremonies to the religions that follow them. We have been born in one
+of those times of transition, we are present at the death of a whole
+world of beliefs. How long will the agony last? Who knows? Two
+centuries? Possibly less may be wanted to crystallise in humanity a
+fresh proof of its uncertainty and of its fear of the great mystery of
+nature, but death is certain, inevitable. But what religion has been
+eternal? The symptoms of dissolution are visible everywhere. Where is
+that faith that drove those warlike multitudes to the crusades? Where
+is that fervour which continued building cathedrals for a couple of
+hundred years with angelic patience to shelter a host under a mountain
+of stone? Who scourges themselves to-day, or tortures their flesh,
+or lives in the desert musing continually on death and hell? Three
+centuries of intolerance and of excessive clerical severity have
+made our nation the most indifferent to all religious matters. The
+ceremonies of worship are followed by routine, because they appeal
+to the imagination, but no one takes the trouble to understand the
+foundations of the beliefs they profess; they live as they please,
+certain that in their last hours it is sufficient to save their souls,
+to die surrounded by priests with a crucifix in their hands. In former
+days the pressure from clergy, friars, and inquisitors was so great
+that the machine of faith burst into a thousand pieces, and there
+is no one now who can fit the pieces together, which require the
+co-operation of all. And that was a piece of good luck, friend Don
+Martin; a century more of religious intolerance and we should have
+been like those Mussulmen in Africa, who live in barbarism on account
+of their excessive bigotry, after having been the civilising Arabs of
+Cordoba and Granada."
+
+"Do you know," said the young curate, "why Catholicism has held up its
+appearances of power? It is because from ancient times, in all Latin
+countries, it has possessed itself of every avenue through which human
+life must pass."
+
+"It is true, no religion has been so cautious as ours, or has ambushed
+itself better to entrap men. None has chosen with such certainty in
+the time of power the positions it can hold strongly in its decadence.
+It is impossible to move without stumbling against her. She knows of
+old that man as long as he is healthy, in the plenitude of his vital
+strength, is by instinct irreligious. When he lives comfortable the
+so-called eternal life concerns him very little. He only believes in
+God and fears Him in the hour of supreme cowardice, when death opens
+before him the bottomless pit of nothingness, and his pride as a
+rational animal revolts against the complete extinction of his being.
+He wishes his soul to be immortal, and so he accepts the religious
+phantasies of heaven and hell. The Church, fearing the irreligiousness
+of health, has occupied, as you say, all the avenues of life, so that
+no man shall accustom himself to live without her, appealing solely to
+her in the hour of death. The dead provide much money, they are her
+best asset; but she wishes equally to reign over the living. Nothing
+escapes her despotism and her spying. She insinuates herself into
+all human concerns from the greatest to the most insignificant, she
+interferes in both public and private life; she baptizes the child
+when it comes into the world, accompanies the child to school,
+monopolises love, declaring it shameful and abominable if it does
+not submit to her benediction, and divides the earth into two
+categories--the consecrated, for those who die in her bosom, and the
+dunghill in the open air for the heretic. The Church interferes in
+dress, laying down what is honest and Christian wear and what is
+scandalous frivolity. She interferes in the most intimate relations
+of domestic life, and even penetrates into the kitchen, turning
+Catholicism into a culinary art, ruling what ought to be eaten, what
+ought or ought not to be mixed, and anathematizing certain foods,
+which, being good enough the rest of the year, become the most
+horrible sacrilege if partaken on certain days. She accompanies a man
+from his birth, and does not leave him even after he is laid in the
+tomb; she keeps him chained by his soul, making it wander through
+space, passing from one place to another, ascending the pathway to
+heaven, according to the sacrifices imposed on themselves by his
+successors for the benefit of the Church. A greater or more complete
+despotism no tyrant could possibly imagine."
+
+It was mid-day. The bell-ringer had disappeared; suddenly the rattle
+of chains and pulleys was heard and a dull thunder made the tower
+tremble; all the stones and metal and even the surrounding ether
+vibrated. The big "Gorda" had just rung, deafening the bystanders. A
+few moments afterwards, from the front of the Alcazar, came the sound
+of martial music, trumpets, and drums.
+
+"Let us go," said Gabriel. "Really, Mariano might have warned us and
+spared us this surprise."
+
+And he added, smiling ironically:
+
+"It is always the same; it is the parasites who shine the most and
+make the most noise; they make up in noise what they lack in utility."
+
+The festival of Corpus drew near without anything occurring to ruffle
+the quiet life of the Cathedral. Sometimes in the upper cloister they
+spoke of His Eminence's health. His serious quarrels with the Chapter
+had obliged him to keep his bed, and he had just had an attack which
+made them fear for his life.
+
+"It is his heart," said the Tato--who was usually very well informed
+about things in the palace--"Doña Visita is weeping like a Magdalen
+and cursing the canons, seeing Don Sebastian so ill."
+
+As Wooden Staff sat down to table with his family he began to speak
+of the decadence of the feast of Corpus, which had been so famous in
+Toledo in former times. In his desire to complain he forgot the bitter
+silence he had imposed on himself in his daughter's presence.
+
+"You will hardly recognise our Corpus," he said to Gabriel. "Of all
+that we remember nothing remains but the famous tapestries that are
+hung outside the Cathedral. The giants are not drawn up before the
+Puerta del Perdon, and the procession is shorn of its glory."
+
+The Chapel-master also complained bitterly.
+
+"And the mass, Señor Esteban? Just think what a mass for such a solemn
+festivity! Four instruments from outside the house, and a Rossini mass
+of the lightest description so as not to cost much. It would have been
+far better for this to have played the organ alone."
+
+According to an ancient custom, on the vesper before the feast, the
+band of the Academy of Infantry played in the evening before the
+Cathedral. All Toledo came to hear the serenade, which was an event in
+the monotonous life of the town, and from the province of Madrid many
+strangers came for the bull-fight on the following day.
+
+Mariano, the bell-ringer, invited his friends to listen to the
+serenade from the Greco-Roman gallery on the principal front. At the
+hour when the lights were usually extinguished in the Claverias and
+Don Antolin locked the street door, Gabriel and his friends glided
+cautiously to the bell-ringer's "habitacion." Sagrario was also
+persuaded to come by her uncle, who in this way managed to tear her
+from her machine. She really must enjoy some little amusement; she
+ought to appear in the world now and then; she was killing herself
+with all that tiresome work.
+
+They all sat in the gallery. The shoemaker had brought his wife,
+always with a small baby at her flabby breast. The Tato was talking
+delightedly to the organ-blower and the verger about the bull-fight on
+the following day, and Mariano stood by his adored comrade, while his
+wife, a woman as rough as himself, spoke with Sagrario.
+
+The men were deploring the absence of Don Martin. Probably he had gone
+down below among the people who filled the square, doubtless dreading
+that he must be up before daybreak to say mass to the nuns.
+
+The palace of the Ayuntamiento was decorated with strings of light,
+which were reflected on to the façade of the Cathedral, giving the
+stones a rosy flush as of fire.
+
+Among the trees walked groups of girls with flowers and white blouses,
+like the first appearances of spring. The cadets followed them,
+their hands on the pommels of their swords, walking along with
+their pinched-in waists and their full pantaloons _à la Turc_. The
+archiepiscopal palace remained entirely closed. Above the rosy light
+in the piazza, spread the beautiful summer sky, clear and deep,
+spangled with innumerable brilliant stars.
+
+When the music ceased, and the lights began to fade, the inhabitants
+of the Cathedral felt unwilling to leave their seats. They were very
+comfortable there, the night was warm, and they, accustomed to the
+confinement and the silence of the Claverias, felt the joy of freedom,
+sitting on that balcony with Toledo at their feet and the immensity of
+space above them.
+
+Sagrario, who had never been out of the upper cloister since her
+return to the paternal roof, looked at the stars with delight.
+
+"How many stars!" she murmured dreamily.
+
+"There are more than usual to-night," said the bell-ringer. "The
+summer sky seems a field of stars in which the harvest increases with
+the fine weather."
+
+Gabriel smiled at the simplicity of his companions. They all wondered
+at God, so foreseeing and so thoughtful, who had made the moon to give
+light to men by night, and the stars so that the darkness should not
+be complete.
+
+"Well, then," inquired Gabriel, "why is there not a moon always if it
+was made to give us light?"
+
+There was a long silence. They were all thinking over Gabriel's
+question. The bell-ringer, being most intimate with the master,
+ventured to put the question about which they were all thinking. "What
+were the heavens, and what was there beyond the blue?"
+
+The square was now deserted and in darkness, there was no light but
+the gentle shimmering of the stars scattered in space like golden
+dust. From the immense vault there seemed to fall a religious calm, an
+overwhelming majesty that stirred the souls of those simple people.
+The infinite seemed to bewilder them with its vast grandeur.
+
+"You," said Gabriel, "have your eyes closed to immensity, you cannot
+understand it. You have been taught a wretched and rudimentary origin
+of the world, imagined by a few ragged and ignorant Jews in a corner
+of Asia, which, having been written in a book, has been accepted down
+to our days. This personal God, like to ourselves in His shape and
+passions, is an artificer of gigantic capacity, who worked six days
+and made everything existing. On the first day He created light, and
+on the fourth the sun and stars; from whence then came that light if
+the sun had not then been created? Is there any distinction between
+one and the other? It seems impossible that such absurdities should
+have been credited for centuries."
+
+The listeners nodded their heads in assent; the absurdity appeared to
+them palpable--as it always did when Gabriel spoke.
+
+"If you wish to penetrate the heavens," continued Luna, "you must get
+rid of the human conception of distance. Man measures everything by
+his own stature, and he conceives dimensions by the distance his eyes
+can reach. This Cathedral seems to us enormous because underneath its
+naves we seem like ants; but, nevertheless, the Cathedral seen from
+far is only an insignificant wart; compared with the piece of land we
+call Spain it is less than a grain of sand, and on the face of the
+earth it is a mere atom--nothing. Our sight makes us consider thirty
+or forty yards a dizzy height. At this moment we think we are very
+high because we are near the roof of the Cathedral, but compared to
+the infinite this height is as small as when an ant balances on the
+top of a pebble not knowing how to come down. Our sight is short, and
+we who can only measure by yards, and apprehend short distances, must
+make an immense effort of imagination to realise infinity. Even then
+it escapes us and we speak of it very often as of a thing that has no
+meaning. How shall I make you understand the immensity of the world?
+You must not believe, as our ancestors did, that the earth is flat
+and stationary and that the heaven is a crystal dome on which God has
+fastened the stars like golden nails, and in which the sun and moon
+move to give us light, you must understand that the earth is round,
+and whirls round in space."
+
+"Yes, we do know a little about that," said the bell-ringer
+doubtfully, "for we were taught so at school. But, really, do you
+think it moves?"
+
+"Because in your littleness as human beings, because to our
+microscopic mole-like sight the immense mechanism of the world is
+lost, do not for a moment doubt it. The earth turns. Without moving
+from where you are, in twenty-four hours you will have made the
+complete circuit with the globe. Without moving our feet we rush along
+at the rate of four hundred leagues an hour, a velocity that the
+fastest trains cannot attain. You are astonished? We rush along
+without knowing it. Our planet does not only turn on itself, but at
+the same time it turns round the sun at the rate of nearly a hundred
+thousand miles an hour. Every second we cover thirty thousand miles.
+Men have never invented a cannon ball that could fly so quickly. You
+move through space fixed to a projectile which whirls with dizzy
+speed, and, deceived by your smallness, you think you are living
+immovable in a dead cathedral. And this velocity is as nothing
+compared with others. The sun round which we turn, flies and flies
+through space, carrying on by its attraction the earth and the other
+planets. It goes through immensity, dragging us along, travelling
+towards the unknown, without ever striking other bodies, finding
+always sufficient space to move in with a rapidity which makes one
+giddy; and this has gone on for thousands and millions of centuries
+without either it or the earth who follows it in its flight ever
+passing twice over the same spot."
+
+They all listened to Gabriel open-mouthed with astonishment, and their
+bright eyes seemed dazed and bewildered.
+
+"It is enough to drive one mad," murmured the bell-ringer. "What then
+is man, Gabriel?"
+
+"Nothing; even as this earth, which seems so large, and that we have
+peopled with religions, kingdoms and revelations from God, is nothing.
+Dreams of ants! even less! This same sun which seems so enormous
+compared to our globe is nothing more than an atom in immensity. What
+you call stars are other suns like ours, surrounded by planets like
+our earth, but which are invisible on account of their small size. How
+many are they? Man brings his optical instruments to perfection and
+is able to pierce further into the fields of heaven, discovering ever
+more and more. Those which are scarcely visible in the infinite appear
+much nearer when a new telescope is invented, and beyond them in
+the depths of space others and again others appear, and so on
+everlastingly. They are unaccountable. Some are worlds inhabited like
+ours; others were so, and revolve solitary in space, waiting for a
+fresh evolution of life; many are still forming; and yet all these
+worlds are no more than corpuscles of the luminous mist of the
+infinite. Space is peopled by fires that have burnt for millions,
+trillions and quadrillions of centuries, throwing out heat and light.
+The milky way is nothing but a cloud of stars that seem to us as one
+mass, but which in reality are so far apart that thousands of suns
+like ours with all their planets could revolve among them without ever
+coming into collision."
+
+Gabriel remembered the travelling of sound and light. "Their velocity
+is insignificant compared with the distances in space. The sun, which
+is the nearest to us, is still so far that for a sound to go from us
+to it would take three millions of years. Poor human beings will never
+be able to travel with the rapidity of sound.
+
+"These suns travel like ours towards the unknown with giddy flight,
+but they are so distant that three or four thousand years may pass
+without man being aware that they have moved more than a finger's
+breadth. The distances of infinity are maddening. The sun is a nebula
+of inflammatory gas, and the earth an imperceptible molecule of sand.
+
+"The luminous ray of the Polar star requires half a century to reach
+our eyes; it might have disappeared forty-nine years ago, and still we
+should see it in space.
+
+"And all these worlds are created, grow and die like human beings.
+In space there is no more rest than on earth. Some stars are
+extinguished, others vary, and others shine with all the power of
+their young life. The dead planets dissolved by fires furnish
+the material for new worlds; it is a perpetual renewal of forms,
+throughout millions and millions of centuries, that represent in their
+lives what the few dozen years to which we are limited, are in our
+own. And beyond all those incalculable distances there is space, and
+more space on every side, with fresh conglomerations of worlds without
+limit or end."
+
+Gabriel spoke in the midst of solemn silence. The listeners closed
+their eyes as if such immensity stunned them. They followed in
+imagination Gabriel's description, but their narrowed minds wished to
+place a term to the infinite, and in their simplicity they imagined
+beyond these incalculable distances a vault of firm matter millions of
+leagues thick. Surely all that strange and fantastic work must have a
+limit. What was at the back of it? And the barrier created by their
+imagination fell suddenly; and again they flew through space, always
+infinite, with ever new worlds.
+
+Gabriel spoke of them and of their life with absolute certainty.
+Spectral analysis showed the same composition in the stars as on the
+earth, consequently if life had arisen in our atom, most certainly it
+must exist in other celestial bodies, though probably in different
+forms; in many planets it had already ended, in many it was still to
+come; but surely all those millions of worlds had had, or would have,
+life.
+
+Religions, wishing to explain the origin of the world, paled and
+trembled before the infinite. It was like the Cathedral tower, which
+covered with its bulk a great part of the heavens, hiding millions of
+worlds, but which was of insignificant size compared to the immensity
+it hid, less than an infinitesimal part of a molecule--nothing. It
+seemed very great because it was close to men, concealing immensity,
+but when men looked above it, getting a full grasp of the infinite,
+they laughed at its Lilliputian pride.
+
+"Then," inquired timidly the old organ-blower, pointing to the
+Cathedral, "what is it they teach us in there?"
+
+"Nothing," replied Gabriel.
+
+"And what are we--men?" asked the Perrero.
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"And the governments, the laws, and the customs of society?" inquired
+the bell-ringer.
+
+"Nothing. Nothing."
+
+Sagrario fixed her eyes, grown larger by her earnest contemplation of
+the heavens, on her uncle.
+
+"And God," she asked in a soft voice; "where is God?"
+
+Gabriel stood up, leaning on the balustrade of the gallery; his figure
+stood out dark and clear against the starry space.
+
+"We are God ourselves, and everything that surrounds us. It is life
+with its astonishing transformations, always apparently dying, yet
+always being infinitely renewed. It is this immensity that astounds us
+with its greatness, and that cannot be realised in our minds. It is
+matter that lives, animated by the force that dwells in it, with
+absolute unity, without separation or duality. Man is God, and the
+world is God also."
+
+He was silent for a moment and then added with energy:
+
+"But if you ask me for that personal God invented by religions, in the
+likeness of a man, who brought the world out of nothing, who directs
+our actions, who classifies souls according to their merits, and
+commissions Sons to descend into the world to redeem it, I say seek
+for Him in that immensity, see where He hides His littleness. But even
+if you were immortal you might spend millions of years passing from
+one star to another without ever finding the corner where He hides His
+deposed despotic majesty. This vindictive and capricious God arose in
+men's brains, and the brain is a human being's most recent organ, the
+last to develop itself. When man invented God the world had existed
+millions of years."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+On the morning of Corpus the first person Gabriel saw on leaving the
+cloister was Don Antolin, who was looking over his tickets, placing
+them in line in front of him on the stone balustrade.
+
+"This is a great day," said Luna, wishing to smooth down Silver Stick.
+"You are preparing for a great crowd; no doubt many strangers will
+come."
+
+Don Antolin looked intently at Gabriel, evidently doubting his
+sincerity; but seeing that he was not laughing, he answered with a
+certain satisfaction.
+
+"The feast is not beginning badly; there are a great many who wish to
+see our treasures. Ay, son! indeed we want it badly. You who rejoice
+in our troubles may be satisfied. We live in horrible straits. Our
+feast of Corpus is worth very little compared with former times; but
+all the same, what economies we have had to make in the Obreria, to
+provide the four ochavos[1] that the extra festivity will cost!"
+
+[Footnote 1: _Ochavo_--small Spanish brass coin, value two maravedis.]
+
+Don Antolin remained silent for some time, still looking intently at
+Luna, as though some extraordinary idea had just occurred to him. At
+first he frowned as though he were rejecting it, but little by little
+his face lit up with a malicious smile.
+
+"By the way, Gabriel," he said in a honeyed tone which contained
+something very aggressive, "I remember at the time of the monument in
+Holy Week you spoke to me of your wish to earn some money for your
+brother. Now you have an opportunity. It will not be much; still it
+will be something. Would you care to be one of those who carry the
+platform of the Sacrament?"
+
+Guessing the wish of the malicious priest to annoy him, Gabriel was on
+the point of answering haughtily, but suddenly he was tempted by the
+wish to foil Silver Stick by accepting his proposal; he wished to
+astound him by acceding to his absurd idea; besides, he thought that
+this would be a sacrifice worthy of the generosity with which his
+brother treated him. Even though he could not assist with much money,
+he could show his wish to work, and the scruples of his self-love
+vanished before the hope of carrying home a couple of pesetas.
+
+"You do not care about it," said the priest in mocking accents, "you
+are too 'green,' and your dignity would suffer too much by carrying
+the Lord through the streets of Toledo."
+
+"You are mistaken. As for wishing it, I do wish it, but you must
+remember it is very heavy work for an invalid."
+
+"Do not let that trouble you," said Don Antolin resolutely; "you will
+be at least ten inside the car, and I have chosen all strong men; you
+would go to complete the number, and I should recommend you to accept
+in order to earn a little."
+
+"Then we will clench the business, Don Antolin; you may reckon on me,
+I am always ready to earn a day's wage whenever it turns up."
+
+His great wish to get out of the Cathedral had finally decided him,
+his wish once more to walk through the streets of Toledo, that he had
+not seen during his seclusion in the cloister, and without anyone
+being able to take notice of him. Besides, the ironical situation
+tickled him extremely, that he of all men with his round religious
+denials should be the one to pilot the God of Catholicism through the
+devout crowd.
+
+This spectacle made him smile, possibly it was a symbol; certainly
+Wooden Staff would greatly rejoice, he would look upon it as a small
+triumph for religion, that obliged His enemies to carry Him on their
+shoulders. But he himself would look upon it in a different way;
+inside the eucharistic car he would represent the doubt and denials
+hidden in the heart of worship, splendid in its exterior pomp, but
+void of faith and ideals.
+
+"Then we are agreed, Don Antolin. I will come down shortly into the
+Cathedral."
+
+They parted, and Gabriel, after quietly digesting the milk his niece
+brought him, went down into the Cathedral without saying a word to
+anyone about the work he intended carrying out; he was afraid of his
+brother's objections.
+
+In the lower cloister he again met Silver Stick, who was talking to
+the gardener's widow, showing her contemptuously a bunch of wheat ears
+tied with a red ribbon. He had found it in the holy water stoup by the
+Puerta del Alegria. Every year on the day of Corpus he had found the
+same offering in the same place; an unknown had thus dedicated to the
+Church the first wheat of the year.
+
+"It must be a madman," said the priest. "What is the good of this?
+What does this bunch mean? If at least it had been a cart of sheaves
+as in the good old times of the tenths!"
+
+And while he threw the ears with contempt into a flower border in the
+garden, Gabriel thought with delight of the atavic force which had
+resuscitated in a Catholic church, the pagan offering: the homage to
+the divinity of the firstfruits of the earth fertilised by the spring.
+
+The choir was ended and the mass beginning when Gabriel entered the
+Cathedral, the lower servants were discussing at the door of the
+sacristy the great event of the day. His Eminence had not come down to
+the choir and would not assist at the procession. He said he was ill,
+but those of the household laughed at this excuse, remembering that
+the evening before he had walked as far as the Hermitage of the Virgin
+de la Vega. The truth was he would not meet his Chapter; he was
+furious with them, and showed his anger by refusing to preside over
+them in the choir.
+
+Gabriel strolled through the naves. The congregation of the faithful
+was greater than on other days, but even so the Cathedral seemed
+deserted. In the crossways, kneeling between the choir and the high
+altar, were several nuns in starched linen bibs and pointed hoods, in
+charge of sundry groups of children dressed in black, with red or
+blue stripes according to the colleges to which they belonged; a
+few officials from the academy, fat and bald, listened to the mass
+standing, bending their heads over their cuirass. In this scattered
+assemblage, listening to the music, stood out the pupils from the
+school of noble ladies, some of them quite girls, others proud-looking
+young women in all the pride of their budding beauty, looking on with
+glowing eyes, all dressed in black silk, with mantillas of blonde
+mounted over high combs with bunches of roses--aristocratic ladies
+with "_manolesca_" grace, escaped from a picture by Goya.
+
+Gabriel saw his nephew the Tato dressed in his scarlet robes like the
+noble Florentine, striking the pavement with his staff to scare the
+dogs. He was talking with a group of shepherds from the mountains,
+swarthy men twisted and gnarled as vine shoots, in brown jackets,
+leather sandals, and thonged leggings; women with red kerchiefs
+and greasy and mended garments that had descended through several
+generations. They had come down from their mountains to see the Corpus
+of Toledo, and they walked through the naves with wonder in their
+eyes, starting at the sound of their own footsteps, trembling each
+time the organ rolled, as though fearing to be turned out of that
+magic palace, which seemed to them like one in a fairy tale. The women
+pointed out with their fingers the coloured glass windows, the great
+rosettes on the porches, the gilded warriors on the clock of the
+Puerta de la Feria, the tubes of the organs, and finally remained
+open-mouthed in stupid wonder. The Perrero in his scarlet garments
+seemed like a prince to them, and overwhelmed with the respect they
+felt for him, they could not succeed in understanding what he said,
+but when the Tato threatened with his staff a mastiff following
+closely at his master's heels, those simple people decided to leave
+the church sooner than abandon the faithful companion of their wild
+mountain life.
+
+Gabriel looked through the choir railings; both the upper and lower
+stalls were full. It was a great festival, and not only were all the
+canons and beneficiaries in their places, but all the priests of the
+chapel of the kings,[1] and the prebends of the Muzarabé chapel--those
+two small churches who live quite apart with traditional autonomy
+inside the Cathedral of Toledo.
+
+[Footnote 1: The kings of Spain are canons of Toledo Cathedral, and
+are fined in case of absence on festival days.]
+
+In the middle of the choir Luna saw his friend the Chapel-master in
+his crimped and pleated surplice, waving a small bâton. Around him
+were grouped about a dozen musicians and singers, whose voices and
+instruments were completely smothered each time the organ sounded from
+above, while the priest directed with a resigned look the music, which
+lost itself feeble and swamped in the solitude of the immense naves.
+
+At the High Altar, on its square car, stood the famous Custodia,
+executed by the celebrated master Villalpando. A Gothic shrine,
+exquisitely worked and chiselled, bright with the shimmering of its
+gold in the light of the wax tapers, and of such delicate and airy
+work that the slightest motion made it shiver, shaking its finials
+like ears of corn.
+
+Those invited to the procession were arriving in the Cathedral. The
+town dignitaries in black robes, professors from the academy in full
+dress with all their decorations, officers of the Civil Guard, whose
+quaint uniform reminded one of that of the soldiers of the early part
+of the century. Through the naves with affectedly skipping steps
+came the children, dressed as angels--angels _à la Pompadour_, with
+brocaded coat, red-heeled shoes, blonde lace frills, tin wings
+fastened to their shoulders, and mitres with plumes on their white
+wigs. The Primacy got out for this festivity all its traditional
+vestments. The gala uniform of all the church attendants belonged to
+the eighteenth century, the time of its greatest prosperity. The two
+men who were to guide the car had powdered hair, black coats, and knee
+breeches, like the priests of the last century. The vergers and Wooden
+Staffs wore starched ruffs and perukes, and though they had scarcely
+enough to eat, brocade and velvet covered all the people from the
+Claverias; even the acolytes wore gold embroidered dalmatics.
+
+The High Altar was decorated by the "Tanta Monta" tapestries--those
+famous hangings of the Catholic kings, with emblems and shields, given
+by Cisneros to the Cathedral. The auxiliary bishop said mass, and his
+attendant deacons were perspiring under the traditional mantles
+and chasubles covered with beautiful raised embroidery in high and
+splendid relief, as stiff and uncomfortable as ancient armour.
+
+The surroundings of the Cathedral were disturbed by the gathering for
+the procession; the doors of the sacristies slammed, opened and shut
+hurriedly by the various officials and people employed. In that quiet
+and monotonous life the annual occurrence of a procession which had to
+pass through many streets caused as much confusion and disturbance as
+an adventurous expedition to a distant country.
+
+When the mass ended the organ began to play a noisy and disorderly
+march, rather like a savage dance, while the procession was being
+marshalled in order. Outside the Cathedral the bells were ringing,
+the band of the academy had ceased playing its quick march, and the
+officers' words of command and the rattle of the muskets could be
+heard as the cadets drew up in companies by the Puerta Llana.
+
+Don Antolin, with his great silver staff and a pluvial of white
+brocade, went from one place to another collecting the employees of
+the Church; Gabriel saw him approaching, red-faced and perspiring.
+
+"To your post; it is time."
+
+And he led him to the High Altar by the Custodia. Gabriel and eight
+other men crept inside the scaffolding, raising the cloth with which
+its sides were covered. They were obliged to bend themselves inside
+the erection, and their duty was to push it, so that it should move
+along on its hidden wheels. Their only duty was to push it; outside,
+the two servants in black clothes and white wigs were in charge of
+the front and back shaft or tiller, which guided the eucharistic car
+through the tortuous streets. Gabriel was placed by his companions in
+the centre; he was to warn them when to stop and when to recommence
+their march. The monumental Custodia was mounted on a platform with a
+great counterpoise, and between it and the framework of the car was
+about a hand's breadth of space, through which Gabriel looked, thus
+transmitting the orders of the front pilot.
+
+"Attention! March!" shouted Gabriel, obeying an outside signal.
+
+And the sacred car began to move slowly down the inclined wooden plane
+that covered the steps of the High Altar. It was obliged to stop on
+passing the railings. All the people knelt, and Don Antolin and the
+Wooden Staffs having opened a way between them, the canons advanced in
+their ample red robes, the auxiliary bishop with his gilded mitre,
+and the other dignitaries in white linen mitres without ornament
+whatsoever. They all knelt around the Custodia. The organ was silent,
+and, accompanied by the hoarse blare of a trombone, they intoned a
+hymn in adoration of the Sacrament; the incense rose in blue clouds
+around the Custodia, veiling the brilliancy of its gold. When the hymn
+ceased the organ began to play again, and the car once more resumed
+its march. The Custodia trembled from base to summit, and the motion
+made a quantity of little bells hanging on to its Gothic adornments
+tinkle like a cascade of silver. Gabriel walked along holding on to
+one of the crossbeams, with his eyes fixed on the pilots, feeling
+on his legs the movements of those who pushed this scaffolding, so
+similar to the cars of Indian idols.
+
+On coming out of the Cathedral by the Puerta Llana, the only door in
+the church on a level with the street, Gabriel could take in the whole
+procession at a glance. He could see the horses of the Civil Guards
+breaking the regularity of the march, the players of the city
+kettledrums dressed in red, and the crosses of the different parishes
+grouped without order round the enormous and extremely heavy banner
+of the Cathedral, like a huge sail covered with embroidered figures.
+Beyond, all the centre of the street was clear, flanked on either side
+by rows of clergy and soldiers carrying tapers, the deacons with their
+censers, assisted by the roccoco angels carrying the vessels for the
+Asiatic perfume, and the canons in their extremely valuable historical
+capes. Behind the sacrament were grouped the authorities, and the
+battalion of cadets brought up the rear, their muskets on their arms,
+their shaven heads bare, keeping step to the time of the march.
+
+Gabriel breathed with delight the air of the public streets. He who
+had seen all the great capitals of Europe admired the streets of the
+ancient city after his long seclusion in the Cathedral. They seemed
+to him very populous, and he felt the surprise that great modern
+improvements must cause to those used to a retired and sedentary life.
+
+The balconies were hung with ancient tapestries and shawls from
+Manilla; the streets were covered with awnings, and the pavement
+spread thickly with sand, so that the eucharistic car should glide
+easily over the pointed cobble stones.
+
+Up the hills the Custodia advanced laboriously, the men inside the
+car sweating and gasping. Gabriel coughed, his spine aching with the
+enclosure in the movable prison, and the dignity of the march was
+disturbed by the words of command from the Canon Obrero, who, in
+scarlet robes with a staff in his hand, directed the procession,
+reproving the pilots and those who pushed the car inside for their
+jerky and irregular movements.
+
+Apart from these discomforts, Gabriel was delighted with his
+extraordinary escapade through the town; he laughed, thinking what the
+crowd, kneeling in veneration, would have said had they known whose
+eyes were looking out at them from underneath the car. No doubt many
+of those officials escorting God, in their white trousers, red coats,
+with swords by their sides and cocked hats would have news of his
+existence; they would surely have heard some one speak of him, and
+they probably kept his name in their memory as that of a social enemy.
+And this reprobate, rejected by all, concealed in a hole in the
+Cathedral like those adventurous birds who rested in its vaultings,
+was the man who was guiding the footsteps of God through this most
+religious city!
+
+A little after mid-day the Custodia returned to the Cathedral, passing
+in front of the Puerta del Mollete. Gabriel saw the exterior walls
+hung with the famous tapestries. As soon as the farewell hymns were
+ended the canons despoiled themselves quickly of their vestments,
+rushing to the door on their dismissal without saluting. They were
+going to their dinners much later than usual, as this extraordinary
+day upset the even course of their lives. The church, so noisy and
+illuminated in the morning, emptied itself rapidly, and silence and
+twilight once more reigned in it.
+
+Esteban was furious when he saw Gabriel emerging from the eucharistic
+car.
+
+"You will kill yourself, such work is not for you. What caprice could
+have seized you?"
+
+Gabriel laughed. Yes, it was a caprice, but he did not repent of it.
+He had taken a turn through the town without being seen, and he could
+give his brother sufficient for two days' maintenance; he wished to
+work, not to be a heavy charge on him.
+
+Wooden Staff was softened.
+
+"You idiot, have I asked anything of you? Do I want anything else but
+that you should live quietly and get better?"
+
+But, as though he wished to acknowledge this exertion on his brother's
+part by something which would please him, when he returned to the
+Claverias he dropped his usual sullen face, and spoke to his daughter
+during the meal.
+
+Towards evening the Claverias were quite deserted. Don Antolin hurried
+down with his tickets, rejoicing in the knowledge that many strangers
+were waiting for him. The Tato and the bell-ringer had slipped
+furtively down the tower stairs, dressed in their best clothes; they
+were going to the bull-fight. Sagrario obliged to be idle in order to
+keep the feast day holy, had gone to the shoemaker's house, and while
+he was showing the giants to the servants and soldiers of the academy,
+and the peasants from the country, Luna's niece helped to mend the
+clothes for the poor woman crushed by poverty and the superabundance
+of children.
+
+When the Chapel-master and the Wooden Staff went down to the choir,
+Gabriel went out into the cloister. He could only see there a cadet
+who was walking up and down, with his hand on the pommel of his sword,
+holding it horizontally like the fiery tizonas[1] of former days. Luna
+recognised him by the full pantaloons and the wasplike waist, which
+made the Tato declare that this particular cadet wore stays--it was
+Juanito the cardinal's nephew. He often walked in the cloister, hoping
+for an opportunity to talk with Leocadia, the beautiful daughter of
+the Virgin's sacristan. From the parents he had nothing to fear, but
+the future warrior had a certain dread of Tomasa, as the old lady
+looked on these visits with an evil eye, and threatened to make them
+known to his uncle the Cardinal.
+
+[Footnote 1: _Tizona_--name of the Cid's sword.]
+
+Gabriel had often spoken to the cadet, for when the youth met him
+in the cloister he always stopped to speak, endeavouring by the
+platitudes of his conversation to justify his presence in the
+Claverias; but Luna was surprised to meet him there on a festival
+afternoon.
+
+"Are you not going to the bull-fight?" he inquired. "I thought
+everyone from the academy would be in the Plaza."
+
+Juanito smiled, caressing his moustache; it was his favourite gesture,
+as it raised his arm, giving him the satisfaction of displaying the
+sleeve adorned with sergeant's stripes. He was not a common cadet, he
+had his stripes, and though this did not seem much to one who dreamed
+of being a general, still it was a step in the right direction. No;
+he did not go to bull-fights. In truth he was an _habitué_ but he had
+sacrificed himself in order to talk for a whole afternoon with his
+sweetheart at the door of her house in the silence of the Claverias.
+The grandmother had gone down into the garden, and "Virgin's Blue"
+would not be long in going out and leaving the coast clear, as if
+the matter in no way concerned him. "The beautiful evening, friend
+Gabriel!" He had far more serious and important affairs than the new
+comers at the academy, who spent all their Sundays at the cafés, or
+walking up and down like fools--everyone at the academy, even the
+professors, envied him his sweetheart.
+
+"And when is the wedding to be?" said Gabriel gaily.
+
+Master Stripes looked most important as he replied: "There were many
+things to be done before--first of all to bring his uncle to consent,
+which might not be easy, and to follow the guiding of his good star to
+attain a certain rank; but he was intended for great things, so it was
+only a matter of a few years.
+
+"I, friend Luna, am of the stuff of young generals; it is the good
+luck of the family. My uncle, when he was only an acolyte, was certain
+he would become a cardinal, and he succeeded. I shall rise much
+faster. Besides, you know that to be an archbishop of Toledo is not a
+small thing. My uncle has many friends in the palace, and commands in
+the ministry of war just as though he were a general. In point of fact
+he is far more a soldier than a cleric! And to prove it to you, there
+is the only thing he has ever written, a prayer to the Virgin for the
+soldiers to recite before they go into action."
+
+"And you, Juanito, do you really feel any vocation for a military
+life?"
+
+"A great deal--ever since I knew how to open books and read them I
+have wished to rival those great captains that I saw in the prints,
+erect on their horses, with swords in their hands, proud and handsome.
+Believe me, no one enters on this career without a vocation; many are
+entered in the seminaries against their will, but no one can make a
+soldier by force; anyone who comes to the academy has the longing in
+himself."
+
+"And are all of them as sure of the result as you are?"
+
+"Oh, yes; all," said the cardinal's nephew smiling, "except that the
+immense majority have not such probabilities of making a name.
+But, such as we are, there is not one amongst us who dreams of the
+possibility of vegetating as a captain in a reserve regiment, or of
+dying of old age as a commandant. We all of us see first of all youth
+glorified by the uniform, full of adventures (for you know all
+the women fight for us), by the joy of life, loved and respected
+everywhere, head and shoulders above our countrymen; and when old age
+approaches, and we begin to get fat and bald, the gold braid of a
+general, politics, and, who knows, possibly the portfolio of war! This
+is in everyone's thoughts. No one believes but that the future holds a
+bâton for him, and that he has only to unhook it and fasten it to his
+belt. I know for certain what is awaiting me, the rest dream and hope
+for it, and so we go on living."
+
+Gabriel smiled as he listened to the cadet.
+
+"You are all deceiving yourselves, like those poor youths who enter
+the seminaries, believing that a mitre awaits them or a fat benefice
+on the other side of the door. It is the influence and attraction
+still exercised by the great things that have been. Let us see--apart
+from the material result of the profession--why do you become
+soldiers?"
+
+"For the sake of glory!" said the cadet pompously, remembering the
+harangues of the colonel director of the academy. "For our country,
+whose defence is entrusted to us! and for the honour of our flag!"
+
+"Glory!" said Gabriel, ironically. "I know all about that. Very often,
+seeing you all so young and inexperienced, so full of vain hopes, I
+have reconstructed in my own mind what might be called the psychology
+of the cadet. I can guess all that you thought before entering the
+academy, and I foresee the bitter and crushing disillusion that awaits
+you on leaving it. The history of wars and the artistic trappings of
+the uniform have seduced your youth. Afterwards, warlike tales of an
+irresistible fascination--Bonaparte with his little band crossing the
+bridge at Arcola amid showers of bullets. And then our own generals,
+not to go further--Espartero at Luchana, O'Donnel in Africa, and,
+above all, Prim, that almost legendary leader, directing the battalion
+at Castillejos with his sword. 'I wish to be the same,' say these
+youths; 'where one man has arrived another may also succeed';
+enthusiasm is taken for predestination, and each one thinks himself
+created by God on purpose to be a famous leader. In the meanwhile you
+live in Toledo, dreaming of glory, of hairbreadth enterprises, of
+gigantic battles and noisy triumphs. But when, with the two stars on
+your arm you go to a regiment, the first thing that comes to meet you
+at the barrack gate, even before you receive the salute of the sentry,
+is the ugly and disagreeable reality. He who dreams of covering
+himself with glory and becoming a great leader before he is thirty,
+thinking of nothing but strategic combinations and original
+fortifications, must occupy himself with the washing and decency of a
+lot of wild lads, who come in from the fields reeking with excessive
+health; try the rations, discuss drawers and shirts, calculate the
+lasting of ankle boots and hempen shoes, and he who never went near
+the kitchen at home, was most carefully looked after by his mother,
+and thought that everything was women's work except giving words
+of command and drawing soldiers up in line, now finds the first
+requirement in a regiment is to be cook, tailor, shoemaker, etc., very
+often receiving reprimands from his superiors if he prove lazy in
+those duties."
+
+"That is true," said Juanito laughing; "but without these things there
+cannot be an army, and an army is necessary."
+
+"We are not discussing if it is necessary or no. I only wish to point
+out that you (or perhaps not you, as you enter on a good footing,
+but certainly your companions) are self-deceivers, and are preparing
+without knowing it the shipwreck of your lives, precisely like those
+other youths who, poorer, or perhaps less energetic, crowd to enter
+the Church. The Church has come to an end as there is no longer faith;
+military glory has ended in Spain as there are no longer wars of
+conquest, and our character as strong fighting men has been lost for
+centuries. If we have a war, it is either civil or colonial--wars that
+might be called disasters--without glory and without profit, but in
+which men die as at Thermopyle or Austerlitz, as a man can only die
+once; but without the consolation of fame, or of public applause,
+without in fact that aureole that you call glory. You have all been
+born too late; you are the warriors of a people who must perforce live
+in peace; just as those seminarists will be the future priests in a
+country where there are no longer miracles nor faith, only routine and
+utter stagnation of thought."
+
+"But if we have no foreign wars, if conquests have come to an end, we
+serve at least to defend the integrity of Spanish soil, to guard our
+own homes. Is it that you think," said the cadet nettled, "we are
+incapable of dying for our country?"
+
+"I do not doubt it; that is the only thing Spaniards are capable of
+doing, to die most heroically, but in the end to die. Our history
+for the last two centuries has been nothing but a tale of heroic
+deaths--'Glorious defeat in such a place,' 'Heroic disaster in some
+other.' By sea and by land we have astonished the world, throwing
+ourselves blindly into danger, showing a good front, without
+flinching, with the stoicism of a Chinaman. But nations do not grow
+great from their contempt of death, but through their ability to
+preserve life. The Poles were the terror of the Turks, and some of the
+best soldiers in Europe, yet Poland has ceased to exist. If any great
+European power _could_ invade us--you will remark I say _could_, for
+in these things the wish is not the same as the power, I know exactly
+what would happen; the Spaniards would know how to die, but you may be
+perfectly certain the invaders would not require more than two battles
+to sweep away entirely all our military preparations. And all this,
+which could be scattered in a couple of days, what sacrifices it costs
+the country!"
+
+"Then," said the cadet ironically, "I presume we must suppress the
+army, and leave the nation undefended."
+
+"As things are to-day there is no hope of that happening. As long as
+all Europe is armed and the smallest country has an army, Spain will
+have one also. It is not for her to set an example; and besides, the
+example would be of no use, it is as though one having a few thousand
+pesetas should endeavour to initiate the remedy to social injustice by
+sacrificing himself and giving them up."
+
+After a long silence Gabriel spoke again very quietly, noticing the
+ironical and even aggressive manner of the cadet.
+
+"No doubt you are pained by what I say; believe me I feel it, as I
+have no wish to wound the beliefs of anyone, least of all of those who
+have formed to themselves an ideal of life. But truth is truth. The
+social question does not trouble you. Is it not so? You know nothing
+about it, you have never thought about it for an instant and it is the
+same with all your, companions, but nevertheless, what you suffer in
+your prestige, in your love of country and of your standard, has no
+other cause but the social disorder at present rampant in the world.
+Wealth is everything, capital is lord of the world. Science directs
+humanity as the successor of faith, but the rich have possessed
+themselves of its discoveries, and have monopolised them to continue
+their tyranny. In the economic world they have made themselves masters
+of machinery and of all progress, using them as chains to enslave the
+workman, forcing an excess of production, but limiting his daily wage
+to what is strictly necessary. In the life of nations the same thing
+repeats itself--war to-day is nothing but an appliance of science, and
+the richest countries have acquired the greatest improvements in the
+art of extermination. They have crowds of recruits, thousands of
+enormous cannon, they can keep millions of men under arms, with every
+sort of modern improvement, without becoming bankrupt. But to poor
+countries, their only remaining course is to hold their tongues, or to
+rage uselessly, as the disinherited do against those in possession of
+their property. The most cowardly and sedentary people on the face of
+the globe may become invincible warriors if they have the money. The
+bravery of chivalry came to an end with the invention of powder, and
+the pride of race has faded for ever before the advent of trade. If
+the Cid came to life again he would be in jail, he would have become a
+highwayman, unable to adjust himself to the inequalities and injustice
+of modern life. If the Gran Capitan were now minister of war, he would
+probably be unable even with this military tax which oppresses the
+country to put his regiments in condition to undertake a fresh war in
+Italy. It is money, that cursed money! which has killed the finest
+part of soldiering--personal bravery, initiative, originality--just as
+it has crushed the workman, making his life a hell."
+
+The cadet listened attentively to Gabriel, understanding for the first
+time that in great nations there is something more than the warlike
+sympathies of the monarch and the bravery of the army. He saw suddenly
+that wealth was the basis and mainspring of all military enterprise.
+
+"Then," he said thoughtfully, "if foreign nations do not attack us it
+is not because they fear us."
+
+"No; that we are permitted to live in peace is because these
+omnipotent powers with all their ambitions and jealousies preserve a
+certain equilibrium. They are like the great capitalists who, occupied
+with vast projects of speculation, neglect either from carelessness or
+contempt the small undertakings that lie at their door. Do you believe
+that Switzerland or Belgium or other small countries live in peace
+surrounded by great powers because they have an army? They would exist
+just the same if they had not a single soldier, and the military power
+of Spain is not greater than that of one of these small countries;
+the poverty of the country and the scanty population oblige us to be
+humble. In these days there are two kinds of armies those organised
+for conquest and those whose only use is to keep order at home, that
+are no more than police on a large scale, with guns and generals. That
+of Spain, however much it costs, and however much they increase it,
+comes under the latter classification."
+
+"And if it is only this," said the cadet, "is it not something?
+We keep peace at home, and we watch over the tranquillity of our
+country."
+
+"Yes, but that could be done by fewer people and for less money.
+Besides, how about glory? Will you youths, full of illusions,
+overflowing with aggressiveness and energy for new undertakings,
+resign yourselves to this profession of watchmen and caretakers to a
+country? Your future will be as monotonous as that of a priest in his
+cathedral. Every day the same--to drill men to move this or that way,
+to play at dominoes or billiards in a cafe, to walk about in uniform
+or take a nap in the guard-room. There can be nothing for you beyond
+a small disturbance at the tax on provisions, a strike, a closing of
+shops to protest against the taxes, and then to fire on a mob armed
+with sticks and stones. If at any time in your life you are ordered to
+fire, you may be sure it will be on Spaniards. The Government do not
+wish for an army as they know it is useless for the exterior defence
+of the nation; besides, the national finances do not admit of its
+maintenance, and they are consequently satisfied with an embryonic
+organisation which is always insubordinate, distracted by incessant
+and contradictory reforms, copying foreign improvements as a poor
+girl copies the robes of a great lady. Believe me, there is nothing
+pleasant in living such a narrowed and monotonous life, with no other
+chance of glory but that of shooting a workman who protests or a
+people who complain."
+
+"But, how about liberty? How about political progress?" inquired the
+cadet. "I have heard it said by a captain at the academy that if the
+Liberal party exists in Spain it is through the army."
+
+"There is a great deal in that," said Gabriel. "It is indubitably the
+most important service the army has rendered to the State; without it,
+who knows where the civil wars would have ended in this country, so
+stationary and so timid about all reforms! I repeat it, I do not
+ignore this service, but, believe me, that civil wars between liberty
+and political absolutism will never be repeated, neither could the
+guerilla warfare of the Independence with any definite issue. The
+means of communication and military progress have put an end to
+mountain warfare. The Mauser, which is the arm of the day, requires
+well-provided parks of ammunition to follow it, cartridge magazines at
+its back, and all this is incompatible with party fighting."
+
+"But you will admit that we are of some use, and that we render the
+nation good service."
+
+"I admit it in the actual state of things, but I should admit it more
+fully if you were fewer. The greater part of the grant is spent, but
+all the same you live in poverty, decent and hidden, but poverty all
+the same. A lieutenant earns less than many operatives, but he must
+buy himself showy uniforms, be smart, and frequent when he wants
+amusement the same places as the rich. He can only see before him long
+years of waiting and of hidden poverty, borne with dignity, until some
+promotion provides him with a few duros more monthly. You all suffer
+dragging on this existence of slaves to the sword, the nation who
+pays grumbles at seeing you inactive, and forgets other superfluous
+expenses to fix its complaints solely on the military. Believe me, for
+a modern army, you are too few and badly organised; to keep the peace
+at home you are too many and too dear. The fault is not yours, your
+vocation has come too late, when fate has rendered Spain powerless for
+adventurous undertakings. If she revives she will have to follow a
+direction which will certainly not be that of the sword. For this
+reason I say that these youths stray from the right path when they
+seek for glory where their ancestors thought to find it."
+
+The appearance of Silver Stick cut short the dialogue. He ran in, pale
+with excitement, gasping, rattling his bunch of keys.
+
+"His Eminence is coming," he said, hurriedly. "He is already under the
+arch; he wishes to spend the evening in the garden; it is a whim! They
+say he is quite unmanageable to-day."
+
+And he ran on to open the staircase del Tenorio, which put the
+Claverias in communication with the lower cloister.
+
+The cadet was alarmed at the unexpected proximity of his uncle. He did
+not wish to meet him there, he feared the cardinal's temper, and fled
+towards the tower staircase on his way to the bull-fight, sacrificing
+his sweetheart sooner than meet with Don Sebastian.
+
+Gabriel, who now found himself alone in the cloister, leant against a
+column and watched the progress of this terrible prince of the Church.
+He saw him come out of the doorway leading to the abode of the giants,
+followed by two servants. Luna was able to examine him well for the
+first time. He was enormous; but in spite of his age carried himself
+erectly; over his black cassock with the red borders hung his gold
+cross. He was leaning with a martial air on a staff of command, and
+the gold tassels of his hat fell on the pink skin of his fat neck,
+which was fringed with white hair. His small and penetrating eyes
+looked on all sides in the hopes of discovering some delinquency,
+something contravening the established rules, which would enable him
+to break out into shouts and menaces and so give vent to his ill
+humour and to the anger which furrowed his brows.
+
+He disappeared by the staircase del Tenorio, preceded by Don Antolin,
+who, after opening the iron gates, had placed himself at his orders,
+shaking with fear. The silence and solitude of the Claverias were
+undisturbed, it seemed as though the people hidden in their houses
+remained absolutely still, guessing the danger that was passing.
+
+Gabriel, leaning on the balustrade, watched the cardinal enter the
+lower cloister, walking round two sides till he came to the garden
+gate. A slight gesture from the prelate was sufficient to stop the two
+servants, and he walked on alone through the central avenue towards
+the summer-house where Tomasa was fast asleep between its leafy walls,
+her knitting in her hands.
+
+The old woman awoke at the sound of footsteps, and seeing the prelate,
+gave a cry of surprise.
+
+"Don Sebastian! You here!"
+
+"I wished to visit you," said the cardinal with a benevolent smile,
+seating himself on a bench. "It must not be always you who come to
+seek me. I owe you many visits, and here I am."
+
+Plunging one hand into the depths of his cassock, he drew forth a
+small gold case and lighted a cigarette. He stretched out his legs
+with the complacency of one who being always accustomed to wear
+the frowning brow of authority, finds himself for a few moments at
+liberty.
+
+"But have you not been ill?" inquired the gardener's widow. "I had
+thought of coming round to the palace this afternoon to inquire after
+your health from Doña Visita."
+
+"Hold your tongue, you fool; I have never felt better, especially
+since this morning. The slap I have given to _those_ by not going into
+the choir to pray with them has put me in a splendid humour, and in
+order that they may thoroughly understand my meaning I have come to
+see you. I wish them all to know that I am quite well, and that what
+is said about my illness is untrue. I wish all in Toledo to understand
+that the archbishop will not see his canons, and that he does so from
+a sense of dignity, not from pride, as at the same time he can come
+down to see his old friend the gardener's widow."
+
+And the terrible old man laughed like a child to think of the
+annoyance this visit would cause his Chapter.
+
+"Do not believe, however, Tomasa," he continued, "that I have come to
+see you solely for this reason. I felt sad and worried in the palace
+this afternoon. Visitacion was busy with some friends from Madrid, and
+I had that heartache I sometimes feel when I think of the past. I felt
+that I must come and see you, more especially as it is always cool in
+the Cathedral garden, whereas outside it is as hot as an oven. Ah!
+Tomasa! how strong I see you! So slim and so active. You wear better
+than I do; you are not wrapped in fat like this sinner, and you have
+not the pains that disturb my nights. Your hair is still dark, your
+teeth are well preserved, and you do not need like this old cardinal
+to have a mechanism inside your mouth; but all the same, Tomasa, you
+are just as old as I am. We have very few years of life left to us,
+however much the Lord may wish to preserve us. What would I not give
+to return to those days when I ran up to your house in my red gown in
+search of your father, the sacristan, and stole your breakfast. Eh,
+Tomasa?"
+
+The two old people, forgetting social differences, recalled the past
+with the friendly resignation of those advancing towards death.
+Everything was the same as in their childhood--the garden, the
+cloister; nothing about the Cathedral had changed.
+
+His Eminence, closing his eyes, fancied himself once more the restless
+acolyte of fifty years before; the blue spirals from his cigarette
+seemed to carry his thoughts back through the interminable labyrinths
+of the past.
+
+"Do you remember how your poor father used to laugh at me? 'This boy,'
+he would say in the sacristy, 'is a Sixtus V. What do you wish to be?'
+he would ask me, and I always gave the same answer, 'Archbishop of
+Toledo.' And the good sacristan would laugh again at the certainty
+with which I spoke of my hopes. Believe me, Tomasa, I thought much of
+him when I was consecrated bishop, regretting his death. I should have
+been delighted with his tears of joy seeing me with the mitre on my
+head. I have always loved you, you are an excellent family, and have
+often satisfied my hunger."
+
+"Silence, señor, silence, and do not recall those things. I am the one
+who ought to be grateful for your kindness, so simple and genuine in
+spite of your rank, which comes next after the Pope. And the truth
+is," added the old woman with the pride of her frankness, "that no one
+is the loser. Friends like I am you can never have; like all the great
+ones of the earth, you are surrounded by flatterers and rascals. If
+you had remained a simple mass priest no one would have sought you
+out, but Tomasa would have always been your friend, always ready to do
+you a service. If I love you so much it is because you are kind and
+affable, but if you had put on pride like other archbishops, I should
+have kissed your ring and--'Good-bye.' The cardinal to his palace, the
+gardener's widow to her garden."
+
+The prelate received the old woman's frankness smilingly.
+
+"You will always be Don Sebastian to me," she continued. "When you
+told me not to call you Eminence or to use the same ceremonies as
+other people, I was as pleased as if I had been given the mantle of
+the Virgin del Sagrario. Such ceremonies would have stuck in my throat
+and made me ready to cry out, 'Let him have his fill of Eminence and
+Illustrious, but we have scratched each other thousands of times when
+we were little, and this big thief could never see a scrap of bread or
+an apricot in my hand without trying to snatch and devour it!' You may
+be thankful I spoke of you as 'usted'[1] when you became a beneficiary
+of the Cathedral, for, after all, it would not do to 'thou' a priest
+as if he were an acolyte."
+
+[Footnote 1: Contraction of _vuestra merced_--your worship.]
+
+Silence fell on the two old people, their eyes wandered tenderly over
+the garden, as if each tree or arcade covered with foliage contained
+some memory.
+
+"Do you know what I have just remembered," said Tomasa. "I remember
+that we saw each other just here many many years ago, at least
+forty-eight or fifty. I was with my poor elder sister who had just
+married Luna the gardener, and in the cloister wandering round me was
+he who afterwards became my husband. We saw a handsome sergeant come
+into the summer-house with a great jingle of spurs, a sword on his
+arm, and a helmet with a tail just like the Jews on the Monument. It
+was you, Don Sebastian, who had come to Toledo to visit your uncle
+the beneficiary, and who would not leave without visiting your friend
+Tomasita. How handsome and smart you were. I do not say it to flatter
+you, it is truth. You looked like being a rogue with the girls! And I
+still remember you said something to me about how pretty and fresh you
+thought me after so many years absence. You don't mind my reminding
+you of this? Really? It was only a soldier's gallant jests. How many
+would say that now? When you left, I said to my brother-in-law, 'He
+has put on the uniform for good and all; it is useless his uncle, the
+beneficiary, thinking of making a priest of him.'"
+
+"It was a youthful sally," said the cardinal smiling, remembering with
+pride the dashing sergeant of dragoons. "In Spain, there are only
+three professions worthy of a man--the sword, the Church and the toga.
+My blood was hot and I wanted to be a soldier, but unluckily I fell on
+times of peace, my promotion would have been very slow, and in order
+not to embitter my uncle's last years, I renewed my studies and turned
+to the Church. One can serve God or one's country as well in one place
+as another, but, believe me, very often in spite of the pomp of my
+cardinalate I think with envy of that soldier you saw. What happy
+times they were! Even now the sword draws me. When I see the cadets I
+would gladly exchange with some of them, giving them my crozier and
+cross. And possibly I might have done better than any of them! Ah! if
+only the great times of the reconquest could return when the prelates
+went out to fight the Moors! What a great Archbishop of Toledo I
+should have been!"
+
+And Don Sebastian drew up his fat old body, and proudly stretched out
+his arms with all the remains of his former strength.
+
+"You have always been a strong man," said the gardener's widow. "I say
+very often to some of the priests who speak of you and criticise you:
+'You must not trifle with His Eminence, he is quite capable of going
+one day into the choir--some he likes and some he does not--and
+driving you all out at one fell swoop.'"
+
+"I have more than once been tempted to do so," said the prelate
+firmly, his eyes flashing with energy, "but I have been prevented by
+the thought of my charge and my character as a peaceful priest. I am
+the shepherd of a Catholic flock, not a wolf who tears the sheep in
+his fierceness. But sometimes I can bear no more, and God forgive me!
+I have often been tempted to raise the shepherd's crook and chastise
+with blows that rebel flock who harbour in the Cathedral."
+
+The prelate became excited, speaking of his quarrels with the Chapter;
+the placidity of mind produced by the quiet of the garden disappeared
+as he thought of his hostile subordinates. He felt obliged as at
+other times to confide his troubles to the gardener's widow with that
+instinctive kindly feeling which often causes highly-placed people to
+confide in humble friends.
+
+"You cannot imagine, Tomasa, what those men make me suffer. I will
+subdue them because I am the master, because they owe me obedience by
+the rule of discipline without which there can be neither Church nor
+religion; but they oppose and disobey me. My orders are carried out
+with grumbling, and when I assert myself even the last ordained priest
+stands on what he calls his rights, lays complaints against me and
+appeals either to the Rota[1] or to Rome. Let us see, am I the master
+or am I not? Ought the shepherd to argue with his sheep and consult
+how to guide them in the right way? They sicken and weary me with
+their complaints and questions. There is not half a man amongst them,
+they are all cowardly tale-bearers. In my presence they lower their
+eyes, smile and praise His Eminence, and as soon as I turn my back
+they are vipers trying to bite me, scorpion tongues which respect
+nothing. Ay, Tomasa, my daughter! pity me! when I think of all this it
+makes me quite ill."
+
+[Footnote 1: Ecclesiastical court.]
+
+The prelate turned pale, rising from his seat as though he felt a
+sudden spasm of pain.
+
+"Do not worry yourself so much," said the old woman, "you are above
+them all, and you will overcome them."
+
+"Clearly, I shall defeat them; if not, it would fill my cup, for it
+would be the first time I had been vanquished. These squabbles among
+comrades do not trouble me much after all, for I know in the end I
+shall see my detested enemies at my feet. But it is their tongues,
+Tomasa!--what they say about the beings I love most in the world, that
+is what wounds me, and is killing me."
+
+He sat down again, coming quite close to the gardener's widow, so as
+to speak in a very low voice.
+
+"You know my past better than anyone; I have such great confidence in
+you that I have told you everything. Besides, you are very quick,
+and if I had not told you, you would have guessed. You know what
+Visitacion is to me, and most certainly you are aware of what those
+wretches say about her. Do not play the fool; everyone inside and
+outside the Cathedral listens to these calumnies and believes them.
+You are the only one who does not credit them because you know the
+truth. But ay! the truth cannot be told, I cannot proclaim it, these
+robes forbid me."
+
+And he seized a handful of his cassock with his clenched fingers as if
+he would rend it.
+
+A long silence followed. Don Sebastian looked fixedly at the ground,
+clutching with his hands as though he were trying to grasp invisible
+enemies; every now and then he felt a stab of pain and sighed
+uneasily.
+
+"Why do you think about these things?" said the gardener's widow;
+"they only make you ill, and you ought not to have disturbed yourself
+to come and see me, you would have done better to remain in the
+palace."
+
+"No, you distract my mind from them, it is a great comfort to tell you
+of my troubles. Up there I feel in despair, and have to exert all
+my self-command to suppress my anger. I do not wish my servants to
+understand, for they are quite capable of laughing at me, neither do I
+wish poor Visitacion to know anything. I cannot dissimulate. I cannot
+feign happiness when I am so irritated! What a hell I suffer! I cannot
+say that I have been a man, and that I have been weak as the flesh of
+which I am made, that I have with me the fruit of my faults, and that
+I will not separate myself from them, though persecuted by calumny.
+Every man acts as he is able, and I wish to be good in spite of my
+faults. I might have separated from my children, I might have deserted
+them, as others have done to preserve their reputation as saints, but
+I am a man, and I am proud of them; I am a man with all his defects
+and all his virtues, neither greater nor less than the general run of
+humanity. The feeling of paternity is so deeply rooted in me that I
+would sooner lose my mitre than abandon my children. You remember when
+Juanito's father, who passed as my nephew, died, how deeply I felt it,
+I thought I should have died also. Such a fine, handsome man, and
+with such a brilliant future before him! I would have made him a
+magistrate, president of the supreme court, minister, anything I
+wished! And in twenty-four hours he was dead as though Heaven wished
+to punish me. It is true I have my grandson remaining, but this
+Juanito in no way resembles his father, and I confess it to you, I
+do not care much for him. I can only see in him the most distant
+reflection of my poor son. Of my past, of that time which was the
+happiest of my life, all I have left me is Visitacion. She is the
+living image of the poor dead one. I worship her! and this feeble ray
+of happiness these wretched people disturb with their calumnies. It is
+enough to make one kill them!"
+
+Overcome by the happy recollection of the spring-time which had
+flowered during the first years of his episcopate, far away in an
+Andalusian diocese, he repeated once again to Tomasa the tale of his
+relations with a certain devout lady, who from her childhood had felt
+a horror of the world. Devotion had drawn them together, but life
+was not long in asserting her rights, opening herself a way by their
+almost mystical relations, and finally uniting them in a carnal
+embrace. They had lived faithful to each other in the secrecy of
+ecclesiastical life, loving each other with scrupulous prudence, so
+that no rumour of their relations had ever publicly transpired,
+until she died, leaving two children. Don Sebastian, a man of strong
+passions, was almost vehement in his paternal feelings--those two
+beings were the image of the poor dead woman, the remembrance of the
+only idyll which had softened a life wholly given over to ambition,
+and the calumnies circulated by his enemies, founded on the presence
+of his daughter in the archiepiscopal palace nearly drove him mad.
+
+"They believe her to be my mistress!" he said angrily. "My poor
+Visitacion, so good, so affectionate, so gentle to all, changed to a
+courtesan by these wretches! A sweetheart that I have taken for my
+amusement from the college of Noble Ladies! As if I, old and infirm,
+were able to think of such things! Brutes! wretches! Crimes have been
+committed for less!"
+
+"Let them say on. God is in heaven and sees us all."
+
+"I know it, but this is not enough to quiet me. You have children,
+Tomasa, and you know what it is to love them. It is not only what
+is done against them that wounds us, but what is said. What days of
+suffering I endure! You know since my boyhood all my dreams have been
+to rise to where I am. I used to look at the throne in the choir and
+think how comfortable I should be in it--of the immense happiness of
+being a prince of the Church. Well, now I am on the throne. I have
+spent half a century removing the stones from my path, leaving my skin
+and even my flesh on the brambles of the hillside. I only know how
+I was able to rise from the black mass and obtain a bishopric!
+Afterwards--now I am an archbishop! now I am a cardinal! At last I can
+rise no higher! And what is it all? Happiness always floats before us
+like the cloud of light which guided the Israelites. We see it, we
+almost touch it, but it never lets itself be caught. I am more unhappy
+now than in the days when I struggled to rise, and thought myself the
+most unfortunate of men. I am no longer young; the height on which
+I stand draws all eyes to me and prevents me defending myself. Ay,
+Tomasa! pity me, for I am worthy of compassion! To be a father and
+to be obliged to hide it as a crime! To love my daughter with an
+affection which increases more and more as I draw nearer to death, and
+have to endure that people should imagine this pure affection to be
+something so repugnant!"
+
+And the terrible glance of Don Sebastian, which terrified all the
+diocese, was clouded with tears.
+
+"Moreover, I have other troubles," he went on, "but they are those of
+a far-seeing man who fears the future. When I die, all that I have
+will be my daughter's. Juanito inherits what belonged to his mother,
+who was rich; besides, he has his profession and the support of my
+friends. Visitacion will be very rich. You know my adversaries throw
+in my face what they call my avarice. Avaricious I am not, but
+foreseeing, and anxious for the well-being of those belonging to me. I
+have saved a great deal. I am not one of those who distribute bread at
+the gate of his palace, nor who seek popularity through almsgiving.
+I have pasture lands in Estremadura, many vineyards in La Mancha,
+houses, and above all State stock--much stock. As a good Spaniard I
+have wished to help the Government with my money, more especially
+as it bears interest. I do not quite know how much I possess, but
+certainly twenty millions of reals, and probably more, all saved by
+myself and increased by fortunate speculations. I cannot complain
+of fate, and the Lord has helped me. Everything is for my poor
+Visitacion. I should delight in seeing her married to a good man; but
+she will not leave me. She is drawn to the Church, and that is my
+fear. Do not be surprised, Tomasa; I, a prince of the Church, fear to
+see how she is attracted by devotion, and I do all I can to turn her
+from it. I respect a religious woman, but not one who is only happy in
+the Church. A woman ought to live; she ought to be happy as a mother.
+I have always looked badly on nuns."
+
+"Let her be, señor," said the gardener's widow; "there is nothing
+strange in her love for the Church. Living as she does she could
+scarcely do otherwise."
+
+"For the present time, I have no fear. I am by her side, and her being
+fond of the society of the nuns signifies very little to me. But I
+may die to-morrow, and just imagine what a splendid mouthful
+poor Visitacion and her millions would be, left alone, with this
+predilection to religious life, of which those cunning people would
+be sure to take advantage! I have seen a great deal. I belong to the
+class, and I am in the secret. There is no lack of religious orders
+who devote themselves to hunting heiresses for the greater glory of
+God, as they say. Besides, there are many foreign nuns with great
+flapping caps travelling about here, who are lynxes for that sort of
+work, and I am terrified lest they should pounce on my daughter. I
+belong to the ancient Catholicism, to that pure Spanish religion, free
+from all modern extravagances. It would be sad to have spent my life
+in saving, only to fatten the Jesuits or those sisters who cannot
+speak Castilian. I do not wish my money to share the fate of that of
+the sacristans in the proverb. For this reason, to the annoyance
+I feel at my struggles with this inimical Chapter, I must add the
+distress I feel at my daughter's feeble character. Probably she will
+be hunted; some rake will laugh at me and possess himself of my
+money."
+
+Excited by his gloomy thoughts, he gave vent to an interjection both
+caustic and obscene, a memory of his soldiering days; in the presence
+of the gardener's widow there was no need to control himself, and the
+old woman was accustomed to this relief of his temper.
+
+"Let us see," he said imperiously after a long silence. "You, who know
+me better than anyone, am I as bad as my enemies suppose? Do I deserve
+that the Lord should punish me for my faults? You are one of God's
+souls, simple and good, and you know more of all this by your instinct
+than all the doctors of theology."
+
+"You bad, Don Sebastian? Holy Jesus! You are a man like all others,
+neither more nor less; but you are sincere, all of one piece, without
+deceit or hypocrisy."
+
+"A man--you have said it. I am a man like the rest. We who attain a
+certain height are like the saints on the fronts of the churches: from
+below we cause admiration for our beauty, but viewed closely we cause
+horror from the ugliness of the stones corroded by time. However much
+we wish to sanctify ourselves, keeping ourselves apart, we are still
+nothing but men--creatures of flesh and blood like those who surround
+us.
+
+"In the Church those who free themselves from human passion are most
+rare. And who knows if, even among those few privileged ones, some are
+not driven by the demon of vanity to increase the asceticism of their
+lives, thinking of the glory of being on an altar! The priest who
+succeeds in subduing his flesh falls into avarice, which is the
+ecclesiastical vice _par excellence_. I have never hoarded from vice;
+I have saved for my own, but never for myself."
+
+The prelate was silent for a long while; but in his irresistible
+desire to confide in the simple old woman he went on.
+
+"I am sure that God will not despise me when my hour comes. His
+infinite mercy is above all the littleness of life. What has been my
+fault? To have loved a woman, as my father loved my mother; to
+have had children as the apostles and saints had. And why not?
+Ecclesiastical celibacy is an invention of men, a detail of discipline
+agreed upon at the councils; but the flesh and its exigencies are
+anterior by many centuries; they date from Paradise. Whoever crosses
+this barrier, not from vice, but from irresistible passion, because he
+cannot conquer the impulse to create a family and to have a companion,
+fails indubitably towards the laws of the Church, but he does not
+disobey God. I fear the approach of death; many nights I doubt and
+tremble like a child. But I have served God in my own way. In former
+times I would have served Him with my sword, fighting against the
+heretics. Now I am His priest and do battle for Him whenever I see the
+impiety of the age curtailing anything of His glory. The Lord will
+forgive me, receiving me into His bosom. You, who are so good, Tomasa,
+and have the soul of an angel beneath your rough exterior, do you not
+think so?"
+
+The gardener's widow smiled, and her words fell slowly on the silence
+of the dying evening.
+
+"Tranquillise yourself, Don Sebastian. I have seen many saints in this
+house, and they have been worth much less than you. To ensure their
+salvation they would have abandoned their children. To maintain what
+they call purity of soul they would have renounced their family.
+Believe me, no saints enter here; they are men, nothing but men. You
+have nothing to repent of in following the impulse of your heart. God
+created us in His image and likeness, and also planted in us family
+love. All the rest, chastity, celibacy and other trifles, you invented
+for yourselves, to distinguish yourselves from the common herd of
+people. Be a man, Don Sebastian, and the more you show yourself such
+the better it will be for you, and the better the Lord will receive
+you in His glory."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+A few days after Corpus Don Antolin went one morning in search of
+Gabriel. Silver Stick smiled at Luna, speaking to him in a patronising
+way.
+
+He had thought of him all night; it pained him to see him idle,
+walking about the cloister; it was the want of occupation that
+inspired him with such perverse ideas.
+
+"Let us see," he continued, "would it suit you to come down with me
+every afternoon into the Cathedral, to show the Treasury and the
+other curiosities? A great many foreigners come who can scarcely make
+themselves understood when they question me; you will understand them,
+as you know French and English, and, your brother says, many other
+languages. The Cathedral would be a gainer, as it would show these
+strangers that we have an interpreter at our disposal; you would
+be doing us a favour and would lose nothing by it. It is always an
+amusement to see new faces; and about the recompense ..."
+
+Don Antolin stopped here, scratching his head beneath his skull cap.
+He would see what he could screw out of the funds of the Obreria; if
+just at first nothing could be managed, as the revenues of the Primacy
+were meagre and at their lowest ebb, no doubt something could be given
+later on.
+
+He looked anxiously for Gabriel's answer, who, however, was quite
+agreeable; when all was said and done he was a guest of the Cathedral
+and owed it something. And from that afternoon he went down at the
+hour of choir to show the foreigners all the treasures of the church.
+
+There was no lack of travellers who showed Don Antolin's coloured
+tickets waiting for the time to see the jewels. Silver Stick could
+never see a stranger without imagining that he was a lord or a
+duke, and often felt very much surprised at the shabbiness of their
+clothing; according to his ideas only the great ones of the earth
+could give themselves the pleasure of travelling, and he opened wide
+his incredulous and scandalised eyes when Gabriel told him that many
+were shoemakers from London or shopkeepers from Paris, who during
+their holidays treated themselves to a trip through the ancient
+country of the Moors.
+
+Five canons in their choir surplices advanced up the nave, each one
+holding a key in his hand; these were the guardians of the treasure.
+Each one opened the lock confided to his custody, the door swung
+heavily, and the chapel, with its antique treasures, was opened. In
+large glass cases, like a museum, was displayed the ancient opulence
+of the Cathedral: statues of chiselled silver, large globes crowned
+by graceful little figures all of precious metal, ivory caskets of
+complicated work, custodias and viriles[1] of gold, enormous gilt
+dishes, embossed with mythological subjects reviving the joy of
+paganism in that sordid and dusty corner of the Christian Church, and
+precious stones spread their varied colours over pectorals, mitres and
+mantles for the Virgin. There were diamonds so immense as to make one
+doubt their being genuine, emeralds the size of pebbles, amethysts,
+topaz, and pearls--very many pearls, strewn by the hundreds and
+thousands on the Virgin's garments. The foreigners were amazed at all
+this wealth and dazzled by the quantity, while Gabriel, who had become
+accustomed to see it daily, looked at it carelessly. The Treasury
+presented a deplorable spectacle of neglect: the riches had aged with
+the Cathedral, the diamonds did not flash, the gold seemed tarnished
+and dusty, the silver was blackened, the pearls were opaque and sick,
+the smoke from the wax tapers and the damp atmosphere of the church
+had sadly dulled everything.
+
+[Footnote 1: _Virile_--small box with double glass in which the Host
+is exhibited.]
+
+"The Church," said Gabriel to himself, "ages everything she touches.
+The treasures lose their brilliancy in her hands, like jewels that
+fall into the power of usurers. The diamond becomes dulled in the
+bosom of the great miser, and the most beautiful picture becomes
+blackened on her altars."
+
+After the visit to the Treasury came the exhibition of the Ochavo, the
+octagonal chapel of dark marbles, that pantheon of relics where
+the most repulsive human remains--skulls with their ghastly grin,
+mummified arms and worn-eaten vertebras--were shown in gold or silver
+shrines. The gross and credulous piety of former days displayed
+itself in the full tide of unbelief, so that even Don Antolin, so
+uncompromising when he spoke of the glories of his Cathedral, lowered
+his voice and hurried over his explanations as he showed a piece
+of the mantle worn by Santa Leocadia when she "appeared" to the
+Archbishop of Toledo, quite understanding the difficulty of explaining
+how an apparition could wear garments of stuff.
+
+Gabriel translated faithfully Don Antolin's explanation, repeating
+it again and again with imperturbable gravity, while the canons who
+escorted the batch of strangers drew a few paces away with an absent
+look, to avoid questions.
+
+One day a phlegmatic Englishman interrupted the interpreter.
+
+"And have you not amongst all these things a feather from the wings of
+St. Michael?"
+
+"No, señor, and it is a great pity," said Luna, equally seriously,
+"but you will probably find it in some other Cathedral; we cannot have
+everything here."
+
+In the Chapter-house, a mixture of Arab and Gothic architecture, the
+foreigners were much interested by the double row of portraits of the
+Toledan archbishops hanging on the wall, with their mitres and golden
+croziers. Gabriel called their attention to the picture of Don
+Cerebruno, a mediaeval prelate, so called from his enormous head; but
+it was the wardrobe which more especially surprised the foreigners.
+
+It was a room surrounded by large cupboards and shelves of old wood;
+above these the walls were covered with dusty and torn pictures,
+copies of Flemish paintings that the canons had relegated to this
+corner; round the room were placed in line the ancient armchairs of
+the church, some of Spanish workmanship, austere, with straight lines
+and ravelled coverings, others of Greek design with curved feet
+inlaid with ivory. The capes and chasubles were piled on the shelves,
+according to colours, with the collars outside the heap, so that
+people could examine the wonderful embroidery. A whole world of
+patterns appeared with every possible brilliancy of colour on a few
+inches of stuff. The astonishing art of the ancient embroiderers made
+the silk a series of vivid pictures; the collar and the narrow stripes
+on the front of a cape were large enough to reproduce all the scenes
+of the biblical creation and the passion of Jesus. Brocade and silk
+unrolled the magnificence of their textures. One cape was a garden
+of flame-coloured carnations, another was a bed of roses and other
+fantastic flowers with twisted stamens and metallic petals. The
+sacristans produced from the deep shelves, as though they were books,
+the splendid and famous frontals of the high altar. There were special
+ones for each festival; that for St. John's Day was brightly coloured
+with verbenas, purple bunches of grapes, and golden lambs that fat
+little angels were caressing with their chubby hands. The most
+ancient, of soft and rather faded colours, showed Persian gardens with
+blue waters in which fabulous reddish beasts were drinking.
+
+The visitors were bewildered seeing all this vast collection of
+stuffs and embroideries unrolled piece after piece--all the past of
+a Cathedral which, having millions of revenue, employed for its
+embellishment armies of embroiderers, acquiring the richest textures
+of Valencia and Seville, reproducing in gold and colours all the
+episodes from the Holy books, and the torments of the martyrs, all the
+glorious legends of the Church, immortalised by the needle, before
+printing had been able to do so.
+
+Gabriel returned every evening to the upper cloister, wearied out with
+walking the length and breadth of the Cathedral. During the first few
+days he was delighted with the novelty of seeing fresh faces, to hear
+the rustle of the visitors who, branching off from the great stream of
+travellers who inundated Europe, came as far as Toledo. But after a
+little while the people he saw every afternoon seemed to him just the
+same. There were the same questions, the same stiff and hard-featured
+Englishwomen, and the same o-o-o-h's of cold and conventional
+admiration, and the same identical way of turning their backs with
+rude pride when there was nothing else to be shown. Returning to
+the quiet of the upper cloister after the daily exhibition of the
+Treasury, Gabriel thought the poverty of the Claverias even more
+revolting and intolerable. The shoemaker seemed sadder and yellower in
+the rank atmosphere of his den, bending over his bench hammering the
+soles, his wife more feeble and ill, the miserable slave of maternity,
+weakened by hunger, and offering to her little son as his only hope of
+food those flaccid breasts in which there was nothing left but a drop
+of blood. The little child was dying! Sagrario, who had left her
+machine to spend the greater part of the day in the shoemaker's room
+said so in a low voice to her uncle. She did all the work of the
+house, while the poor mother, motionless in a chair, with the little
+one in her lap, looked at it with weeping eyes. When the baby woke
+from its stupor it would wearily raise its head from its little neck,
+which had become a mere thread; the mother to stifle its feeble moans
+would press it to her breast, but the child would turn away its mouth
+guessing the inutility of expending its strength on that rag of flesh
+from which it could only succeed in extracting the last drop.
+
+Gabriel examined the child, noting its extreme emaciation and the
+spots that scrofula had spread over its straw-coloured skin. He shook
+his head incredulously when the neighbours who had gathered round the
+invalid each diagnosed some particular ailment, and recommended every
+imaginable sort of household remedy, from decoctions of rare herbs and
+stinking ointments to applications on the chest of miracle working
+prints, and tracing seven crosses on the navel with as many
+paternosters.
+
+"It is hunger," said Luna to his niece, "nothing but hunger." And
+depriving himself of part of his own food, he sent to the shoemaker's
+house the milk that had been brought up for himself. But the child's
+stomach could not retain the liquid too substantial for its weakness,
+and threw it up as soon as swallowed. The Aunt Tomasa, with her
+energetic and enterprising character, brought a woman from outside the
+Cathedral to nourish the child, but after two days, and before the
+effects became visible, she came no more, as if she had felt disgusted
+at the miserable and corpse-like little body touching her. In vain the
+gardener's widow searched; it was not easy to find generous breasts
+who would give their milk for very little pay.
+
+In the meanwhile the child was dying. All the women came in and out of
+the shoemaker's house, and even Don Antolin would stand at the door in
+the mornings.
+
+"How is the little one? Just the same? It is all in God's hands."
+
+And he would retire, doing the shoemaker the great charity of not
+speaking to him about the pesetas he owed him, on account of the sick
+child.
+
+"Virgin's Blue" was annoyed by this incident, which upset the calm of
+the cloister, and disturbed the bliss of his digestion as a happy and
+well-fed servant of the Church. It was a shame that that shoemaker
+should be allowed to live in the Claverias with all that flock of
+wretched and scurvy children; one would die every month; all sorts
+of illness would lay hold on them. By what right were they in the
+Cathedral when they drew no wage from the Obreria? Such stinking
+excrescences ought to remain outside the Lord's house.
+
+His mother-in-law was furious.
+
+"Silence, you thief of the saints!" she cried. "Silence, or I will
+throw a dish at you! We are all sons of God, and if things were as
+they should be, all the poor ought to live in the Cathedral. Instead
+of saying such things it would be much better if you gave those
+unhappy people part of what you have stolen from the Virgin."
+
+The sacristan shrugged his shoulders with contempt. If they had not
+enough to eat they should not have children. There he was himself with
+only one daughter--he did not think he had any right to more--and so
+thanks to Our Lady he was able to save a scrap for his old age.
+
+Tomasa spoke of the shoemaker's child to the good gentlemen of the
+Chapter when they came into the garden for a few minutes after choir.
+They listened absently, putting their hands in their cassocks.
+
+"It is all God's will! What poverty!"
+
+And some gave her ten centimes, others a real, one or two even a
+peseta. The old woman went one day to the Archbishop's palace. Don
+Sebastian was engaged and unable to see her, but he sent her two
+pesetas by one of the servants.
+
+"They don't mean badly," said the gardener's widow, giving her
+collection to the poor mother, "but each one lives for himself, and
+his neighbour may manage as he can. No one divides his cloak with
+another--take this, and see how you can get out of your trouble."
+
+They fed a little better in the shoemaker's house; the miserable
+scrofulous children collected in the cloister profited most by the
+baby's illness; it was growing daily weaker, lying motionless for
+hours, with almost imperceptible breathing, on its mother's lap.
+
+When the unhappy child died, all the people of the Claverias rushed
+to the home. Inside could be heard the mother's wailings, strident,
+interminable, like the bellowing of a wounded beast; outside the
+father wept silently, surrounded by his friends.
+
+"It died just like a bird," he said with long pauses, his words broken
+by sobs. "His mother held him on her knees--I was working--'Antonio,
+Antonio!' she called, 'see, what is the matter with the child, it is
+moving its mouth and making grimaces?' I ran up quickly, its face
+was quite dusky--as if it had a veil over it. It opened its mouth, a
+couple of twitches with its eyes staring, and its neck fell over--just
+the same as a bird, just the same."
+
+He wept, repeating constantly the resemblance between his son and
+those birds who die in winter from the cold.
+
+The bell-ringer looked gloomily at Gabriel.
+
+"You who know everything, is it true that it died of hunger?"
+
+And the Tato with his scandalous impetuosity shouted loudly--
+
+"There is no justice in the world! All this must be altered! Fancy a
+child dying of hunger in this house, where money runs like water, and
+where all those creatures are dressed in gold!"
+
+When the little corpse was carried to the cemetery, the cloister
+seemed quite deserted; all its life was concentrated in the
+shoemaker's house, all the women surrounded the mother. Despair had
+rendered that sick and feeble woman furious. She no longer wept: her
+child's death had made her ferocious--she wished to bite or to dash
+her skull against the wall.
+
+"Ay! my s-o-o-o-n! my Antonio!"
+
+At night Sagrario and the other women remained in the house to look
+after her. In her desperation she wished to make some one responsible
+for her misfortune, and she fixed on those highest in the cloister.
+Don Antolin had not helped her with the smallest alms; his affected
+niece had scarcely been in to see the little one, nothing interested
+her but men.
+
+"It is all Silver Stick's fault," wailed the poor mother--"he is
+a thief. He grinds our poverty with his usurer's snares. Never a
+farthing did he give for my son. And that Mariquita is just the same.
+Yes, señor, I do say so. She only thinks of decking herself out so
+that the cadets may see her."
+
+"For mercy's sake, woman, they will hear you," begged some of the
+terrified women.
+
+But others scouted this fear. "Let Don Antolin and his niece hear
+them! What did it matter? The Claverias were tired of the rapacity
+of the uncle, and the magnificent airs that ugly woman gave herself!
+Because they were poor they were not going to spend their lives
+trembling before that couple. God only knew what the uncle and niece
+did when they were alone in the house together!"
+
+A breath of rebellion had passed over that sleepy world. It was the
+unconscious influence of Gabriel. What he had said to his friends had
+been passed on to all the men in the Claverias, getting even to the
+women. They were confused and garbled ideas, that very few could
+understand, but they cherished them like fresh pure air reviving
+their minds. They sounded in their ears like a pleasant echo from the
+outside world. It was sufficient for them to know that this quiet life
+of submission they had led up to now was not immutable--they had
+a right to something better--and that human beings ought to rebel
+against injustice and oppression.
+
+Don Antolin, who knew well enough the crew confided to his care,
+was not long in perceiving this moral upturn. He felt hostility and
+rebellion on every side. The debtors answered him haughtily, alleging
+their poverty as a reason for no longer enduring his avarice; his
+imperious orders were tardily executed, and he had a clear perception
+that they were laughing behind his back as he walked through the
+cloister, and making threatening gestures. One day his legs trembled
+beneath him and his eyes were dimmed, hearing how the Perrero replied
+to one of his reprimands, having returned late to the Cathedral, and
+obliging him to descend and open the door after he had gone to bed.
+The Tato made him understand, with an insolent expression, that he had
+bought a knife, and that he intended its first fleshing to be in the
+bowels of some priest or other who ground down the poor.
+
+His niece complained to Don Antolin, they paid no attention to her and
+flouted her, no woman now ever came to help her gratuitously in her
+household duties. They replied insolently that those who wanted
+servants must pay for them. What was her uncle thinking about? It was
+certainly time to assert his authority and to lay a heavy hand on
+these people.
+
+She herself, so lively and energetic in her own house, was now obliged
+to retire snorting with rage or weeping, whenever she stationed
+herself at her door. All the women of the Claverias wished to revenge
+themselves for their former thraldom, standing already on the
+declivity of disrespect.
+
+"Look at her!" screamed the shoemaker's wife to her neighbours,
+"always so dressed up, the ugly jade. She decks herself with the blood
+that vampire of an uncle sucks from the poor."
+
+And from the iron gratings of the upper Claverias, giving on the
+roofs, there was generally a voice singing the ancient couplet, no
+doubt inspired by the Cathedral garden--
+
+  "Las amas de los curas y los laureles
+  Como nunca dan fruto siempre estan verdes." [1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Priest's housekeepers--like laurels--never have any
+fruit, because they are evergreens.]
+
+It was this that ended the patience of Don Antolin; this insulting
+conjecture about himself and his niece that disturbed his miserly
+chastity. He visited the cardinal to complain of the inhabitants of
+the cloister, but His Eminence, who lived in a perpetual rage, grew
+furious listening to him and very nearly thrashed him. Why did he
+come to him with such tales? For what reason had he been given any
+authority? Was there nothing left of a man beneath his cassock? He who
+was wanting in the good discipline of the house--turn him out into the
+street at once! More energy, and be careful never to trouble him again
+with such insignificant tales, otherwise the person who would be
+turned into the street would be Silver Stick himself.
+
+Don Antolin felt a little braver after this interview, although he
+swore mentally never again to visit that terrible prelate. He was
+determined to reassert his authority, by punishing the weakest, whom
+he considered as the origin of all these scandals. The shoemaker
+should be expelled from the Claverias, as he was there through
+no other right but that his wife had been born there. Mariquita,
+bewildered by her uncle's energy, must needs speak to some one about
+these intentions, and so the news circulated through the cloister.
+
+Don Antolin did not dare to move a step further, terrified by the
+silent unanimity with which the whole population rose against him.
+
+The Tato looked at him with mocking and threatening eyes, in which
+Silver Stick could plainly read "Remember the knife"; but what
+terrified Don Antolin more than anything was the silence of the
+bell-ringer, and the savage and hostile glance with which he responded
+to his words.
+
+Even the good Wooden Staff, Esteban, protested in his own way, saying
+quietly to Don Antolin:
+
+"Is it really true that you intend turning out the shoemaker? You will
+do wrong, very wrong, for after all he is very poor, and his wife was
+born in the cloister. These innovations always bring misfortune, Don
+Antolin."
+
+So the priest, finding he had no support, and seeing hostility on
+every side, put off his energetic resolutions till the following day,
+even reproving his niece when she threw his weakness in his face.
+
+The Canon Obrero, from whom he had implored help, did not care to
+disturb the blessed peace of his existence by mixing himself up in the
+quarrels of the smaller people. It was Silver Stick's own affair; he
+could punish or expel any one he thought fit without fear of anybody.
+But Don Antolin, dreading the responsibility that might accrue from
+energetic action, ended by delivering himself over to Gabriel and
+begging for his assistance. That man was the one who wielded the real
+authority in the upper cloister; all those who had listened to him
+followed his advice blindly.
+
+"Help me, Gabrielillo," said the priest with an agonised expression.
+"If you cannot restore order, this will end badly; they even insult my
+poor niece, and some day I shall turn half the people of the Claverias
+out into the street, as I hold authority from His Eminence for
+everything. Ay, señor! I do not know what has happened here; surely
+the devil must have got loose in our upper cloister! How these people
+have changed to me!"
+
+Luna guessed Don Antolin's thoughts and his allusions to the devil who
+had got loose in the cloister. That devil was himself. No doubt Silver
+Stick was right. Without intending it he had introduced discord into
+the Cathedral. He had sought calm and forgetfulness in that refuge,
+and the spirit of rebellion had followed him even into this
+concealment. He recalled his thoughts on the first day, when he was
+alone in the silent cloister; he wished to be another stone in the
+Cathedral, without thought, without feeling, to spend the rest of his
+life fixed to that ruin, with the embryonic life of the fungus on the
+buttress, but the spirit of the outside world had entered in with him.
+
+Luna remembered how travellers in time of plague had crossed the
+sanitary cordon--they were well and happy, nothing betrayed the
+infection in their bodies; but the poisonous germs travelled in the
+folds of their clothes and in their hair, carrying death without
+knowing it, helping it to leap all barriers and obstacles, without
+being in the least aware of it. He was the same, but instead of
+spreading death, he spread tumultuous and rebellious life. The protest
+of the lower orders that had been surging throughout the world, for
+more than a century, had entered with him into this still remaining
+fragment of the sixteenth century. He had awakened those men, who had
+been like the sleepers in the legend, motionless in their cave for
+ages, while the centuries rolled on and the world was transformed.
+
+The awakening of these people was sudden and violent, like that of a
+people in revolution. They were ashamed of the old errors that they
+had worshipped, and this made them receive as gospel everything that
+was new, without quailing before the consequences.
+
+It was the faith of a people which, once it takes form, rushes
+onwards, accepting everything, justifying everything, the only
+requirement being its novelty, and casting aside contemptuously those
+traditional principles which it had just abandoned.
+
+The cowardly submission of Silver Stick was the first victory of those
+more daring souls who formed Luna's surrounding. The avaricious and
+despotic priest lowered his eyes before them, smilingly anxious to
+make himself agreeable. This they owed to the master, for he was now
+the true ruler of the upper cloister. Don Antolin consulted him before
+making any arrangements, and his ugly niece smiled on Gabriel as the
+daughters of the conquered might smile on a triumphant hero.
+
+They now no longer hid themselves in the bell-ringer's house for their
+meetings; they formed a circle in the cloister during the evenings,
+discussing the audacious doctrines taught by Luna, without now being
+intimidated by the religious atmosphere. They sat with the look of
+lords, surrounding their master, while in the opposite gallery walked
+Silver Stick like a black phantom, reading his book of hours, and
+casting now and then an uneasy glance on the group. Even his ancient
+vassal, the chaplain of the nuns, had dared to leave him to go and
+listen to Gabriel.
+
+Don Antolin with the keenness of his ecclesiastical training, guessed
+the intensity of the evil produced by Luna. But for the moment his
+egoism was stronger than his reflection. Let them talk--what did it
+matter? It was only a little ebullition of pride in those people,
+nothing more. All words and wind in the head. Meanwhile they had
+better not ask for any more money! In exchange he had a very good
+auxiliary in Luna, who, sharing his authority, spared him many
+annoyances, and the Cathedral disposed of his services gratuitously as
+interpreter to the foreigners.
+
+These already began to talk of the great intelligence and education
+of the Toledan sacristans, a praise Don Antolin received as though it
+were entirely deserved by himself.
+
+Gabriel was far more alarmed than Don Antolin at the effect of his
+words; he bitterly repented having been led to speak of his past and
+of his ideals. He had sought for peace and silence, but he was
+still surrounded, though in a smaller degree, by the atmosphere of
+proselytism and blind enthusiasm, as in the days of his martyrdom.
+He had wished to efface himself and to disappear on entering the
+Cathedral, but fate mocked him, reviving the agitation in the midst
+of his concealment, to disturb the peace of that ruin. Society had
+forgotten him, but he unconsciously was agitating, and drawing to
+himself the attention of the outside world.
+
+The enthusiasm of these neophytes was a danger, and his brother, the
+Wooden Staff, without understanding the full extent of the evil,
+warned him with his usual good sense.
+
+"You are turning the heads of these poor men, with the things you
+tell them. Be careful; they are very well meaning, but they are very
+ignorant. And having been ignorant all their lives, it is dangerous to
+turn such men into sages at one blow. It is as if I, being accustomed
+to the homely stew, were taken to-day to His Eminence's table. I
+should gorge myself and drink too much; at night I should have a
+colic, and should probably hop the twig."
+
+Gabriel acknowledged the truth of this prudent advice, but he could
+not draw back--he was driven on by the affection of his disciples and
+his own ardour as propagandist. It was a great delight to him to see
+the wonder in those virgin minds, entering tumultuously into the
+luminous palaces constructed by human thought during the last century.
+
+The description of the future of humanity inflamed all Luna's ardour.
+He spoke of the happiness of men, after a revolutionary crisis which
+would change all the organisation of humanity with mystic rapture,
+like a Christian preacher describing heaven.
+
+"Man ought to seek happiness solely in this world, for after death
+there only existed the infinite life of matter with its endless
+combinations, but the human being was effaced as entirely as a plant
+or an animal--he fell into oblivion when he sank into the tomb.
+Immortality of the soul was one of the illusions of human pride worked
+up by religions, who laid their foundations on this lie. It was
+only in this life that man could find heaven. Everyone embarked on
+immensity in the same ship, the earth. We were all comrades in our
+dangers and our struggles, and we ought to look upon one another
+as brothers seeking the common welfare. And what about the unequal
+distribution of goods, the division of classes, the ability to work,
+and, above all, the struggle for existence, that the philosophers and
+poets of the oppressing classes paint as an indispensable condition of
+progress? Communism is the holiest aspiration of humanity, the
+divine dream of man since he began to think in the first dawn of
+civilisation. Religions had endeavoured to establish it, but religion
+had been shipwrecked and was moribund, and only science could enforce
+it in the future. They must stop on the way they were going, as
+humanity was marching on the road to perdition, therefore it was
+necessary to return to the point of departure. The first man who had
+cultivated a portion of the earth and garnered the fruits of his
+toil, thought it was his for ever, and left it to his sons as their
+property; they engaged other men to cultivate it for them--so these
+men became robbers, appropriators of the universal heritage. It was
+the same with those who possessed themselves of the invention of
+human genius, machines, etc., for the benefit of a small majority,
+subjecting the rest of mankind to the law of hunger. No, everything
+was for everyone. The earth belonged to all human beings without
+exception, like the sun and the air; its products ought to be divided
+between everyone with due regard to their necessities. It was shameful
+that man, who only appeared for an instant on this planet--a minute,
+a second, for his life was no more than this in the life of
+immensity--should spend this mere breath of existence fighting with
+his kin, robbing them, excited by the fever of plunder, not even
+enjoying the majestic calm of a wild beast, which when it has eaten,
+rests, without ever thinking of doing harm from vanity or avarice.
+There ought to be neither rich nor poor--nothing but men. The only
+inevitable division must be that between brains more or less highly
+organised. But the wise, from the fact of being so, ought to show
+their greatness, sacrificing themselves for the more simple, without
+seeking to assist the greatness of their minds by material advantages;
+for in stomachs there were no categories or ranks. Everything that
+exists, even the smallest production that man considers his exclusive
+work, is the work of the past and present generations. By what right
+can anyone say 'This is mine, mine only'? Man is not consulted before
+he is formed if he wishes to burst forth into life. He is born--and
+from the fact of being born he has a right to well-being." Gabriel
+proclaimed his supreme formula, "Everything for everyone, and
+well-being for all."
+
+His friends listened in profound silence. The right to well-being
+sank profoundly into their minds; it was the saying that most cruelly
+touched their poverty, taunted by the contrast of the wealth of the
+Church.
+
+Don Martin, the young chaplain, was the only one who timidly raised
+any objections to the master's sayings. He wished to know if, when
+everything was for everyone, when man should have recognised his
+right to happiness, without laws or compulsion to force him to
+production--would he work? seeing that work was a necessity, and not a
+virtue, as those who employ labour say, to glorify it.
+
+Gabriel loudly affirmed the necessity of work in the future. The
+man of the future would work without being forced to do so by his
+necessities; he would not be ruled by the body and its imperious
+requirements; his conscience would be inspired with the clear
+understanding of solidarity with his fellows and the certainty that
+if one abandoned social duties others would follow the example, thus
+rendering life in common impossible and so returning to the actual
+times of poverty and robbery.
+
+"Why do not the few men of culture and sound conscience living at
+present kill and rob?" exclaimed Gabriel. "It is not through fear of
+the law and its representatives, for a clear intelligence, if it takes
+the trouble, can easily find ways of evading both; neither can it be
+through fear of eternal penalties and divine punishment, as such
+men do not believe in these inventions of the past. It is from that
+respect to his fellows which is felt by every elevated mind, from the
+consideration that all violence should be avoided, for if everyone
+gave themselves over to it, all social life must disappear. When this
+understanding, which now only belongs to a few, embraces all humanity,
+men will live ruled by their own consciences without laws or police,
+working from social duty, without requiring man to be the only spring
+of activity, and sweating without compassion to be the only way to
+ease."
+
+Throughout all his revolutionary raptures Luna had no illusions as to
+the present. Humanity was at present an infected land, in which the
+best seeds rotted, or which at best produced only poisonous fruits; we
+must wait till the equalising revolution begun in the human conscience
+a century ago should be completed, after that it would be possible
+and easy to change the basis of society; he had a blind faith in
+the future. Man must progress in the same way as communities; these
+reckoned their evolutions by centuries, but man by millions of
+years. How could a man of to-day be compared to the biped animal of
+prehistoric times, though bearing visibly the traces of the animalism
+from which he had lately emerged? Living in fellowship with his
+ancestors the monkeys, the principal difference being the first
+babblings of speech, and the first trembling spark that began to burn
+in his brain.
+
+From the ravenous beast of former days, suffering from all the cruel
+forces of nature and living in fraternal misery with the lower
+animals, the man of to-day was evolved, asserting his superiority to
+his ancestors, dominating all nature. From the men of to-day, in whom
+the passions of their former animalism are finding their equilibrium
+with the gradual unfolding of the mind, will arise that superior and
+perfect being indicated by philosophers, pure from all animal egoism,
+and endeavouring to change the actual cruel, restless, and uncertain
+life, into a period of happy and prosperous equality.
+
+The animalism at present dominant in man exasperated Gabriel; it was
+the great stumbling-block to all his generous views of the future,
+and he explained to his astonished listeners the transformations of
+natural creatures and of the origin of man, and the wondrous poem of
+the evolution of nature from the original protoplasm to the infinite
+varieties of life. We still carry in us the marks of our origin. One
+could not help laughing at the God of the Jews, who had modelled a man
+from clay, like a sculptor. Unlucky artist! Science pointed out much
+carelessness and bungling in His work, without being able to justify
+such mistakes. The skin of our bodies did not serve us as a covering
+like the fur of an animal. How could we then believe it? Why were
+nipples given to human males, if they were of no use for milk giving?
+Why was the vertebral column at the back of the body as in quadrupeds,
+when it would have been more logical, in creating a man who stands on
+his feet, to place it in the centre of the body as a strong support,
+thus avoiding the curvatures and weakness of the spine that are now
+suffered by this disequilibrium in the support of its weight?
+
+Gabriel enumerated the various inexplicable inconsistencies and
+incongruities found in the human body, presuming it to be of divine
+origin.
+
+"I feel prouder," said he, "of my animal origin; to be a lineal
+descendant of inferior beings than to have emerged imperfect from the
+hand of a stupid God. I feel the same satisfaction that a nobleman
+feels in speaking of his ancestors when I think of our remote
+forefathers, those men-beasts, exposed like the animals to all the
+cruel severity of nature, who, little by little, through hundreds of
+centuries, have transformed themselves, triumphing in the unfolding of
+their minds, their brains, and their social instincts. Making clothes,
+edible foods, arms, tools and houses, neutralising the exterior
+influences of nature. What hero or discoverer in the four thousand
+years comprising our history can compare with those elementary men who
+have slowly evolved and maintained on the earth the existence of our
+species, exposed thousands of times to annihilation. The day on which
+our ancestors cared for the sick and wounded, instead of abandoning
+them as all animals had previously done; on which the first seed was
+planted, the first arrow shot, brought nature face to face with the
+greatest of her revolutions. Only one in the future will be able to
+equal it; if man in remote times was able to free his body, now he
+requires the great revolution to free his mind. The races who go
+furthest in their intellectual development will be the ultimate
+survivors; they will be masters of the earth, destroying all others.
+The least wise in those days will probably be far superior to the most
+cultivated intellects of the present times. Each individual will find
+his happiness in the happiness of his fellows, and no one will try to
+exercise compulsion on his neighbour. No laws or penalties will exist,
+and voluntary associations will supply through the influence of reason
+the present power of authority. This will be in the future--far, very
+far off. But what do centuries matter in the life of humanity! They
+are like seconds in our existence. On the day when man shall be
+transformed into this superior being, with the full development of
+all his intellectual faculties, now so embryonic, this earth will no
+longer be the vale of tears spoken of by religion, but the paradise
+dreamed of by the poets."
+
+In spite of the enthusiasm with which Gabriel spoke, his hearers did
+not appear to share these illusions. They were silent, and their
+attitude was one of coldness before the immense distance of that
+future to which their master confided all his hopes of universal
+prosperity. They wished for it at once, with the eagerness of a child
+who is shown a dainty which is afterwards put out of its reach. The
+sacrifices, the slow work for the future, struck no chord in their
+minds. From Gabriel's explanations they only drew the fact that they
+were unhappy, but that they had the same right to happiness and
+comfort as those privileged few whom they had formerly respected in
+their ignorance. As a certain portion of human felicity belonged to
+them they wished to possess it at once, without delay or resistance,
+with all the fervour of one claiming what belongs to him. Luna
+remarked in this silence a certain rebellion, like those ironical
+gestures with which his companions in Barcelona had received his
+illusions about the future and his anathemas against violence of
+action.
+
+These ardent neophytes outdistanced their teacher; they listened to
+him with respect, but they were obliged to isolate themselves from him
+in order to digest his teachings in their own fashion. Don Martin was
+the only one who followed him in his visionary excursions into the
+future. The bell-ringer, the organ-blower, the shoemaker and the Tato
+now went up nightly to the bell-ringer's house, without summoning
+the master, and there they gave vent to their hatred of everything
+existing, under the forgotten old prints, yellow and wrinkled, which
+pictured the inglorious episodes of the Carlist war.
+
+This nocturnal reunion was a continual complaint against social
+injustice. They thought themselves even more unfortunate when they
+took an exact review of their situation. The shoemaker recalled with
+tearful eyes the little child who had died of hunger, and spoke of the
+misery of his offspring, so numerous as to render his work useless.
+The organ-blower spoke of his miserable old age, the six reals daily
+during his life, without any hope of earning more. The Tato, in the
+fits of rage of a bullying coxcomb, proposed to behead all the canons
+in the choir some evening and then to set fire to the Cathedral. And
+the bell-ringer, gloomy and scowling, said aloud, following up the
+course of his thoughts:
+
+"And below so much wealth that is of no use to anybody--amassed from
+pure pride--thieves! robbers!"
+
+Gabriel returned to pass his days by Sagrario's side. His disciples
+hid themselves daily more carefully in their isolation in the tower.
+Don Martin had his mother ill, and could not leave the convent.
+
+Silver Stick felt quite satisfied with Luna seeing him alone,
+believing that it was he who had alienated his disciples, cutting
+short in this way his dangerous conversations so as to restore order
+in the cloister. One day he addressed him smilingly with a patronising
+manner.
+
+"You will be rewarded for your good conduct, Gabrielillo, much sooner
+than you expect. Did I not say I would look out for something for you
+in exchange for the help you gave me in showing the treasury? Well,
+now you have it. From next week two pesetas daily will fall into
+your purse like two suns. Are you equal to staying all night in the
+Cathedral? The older watchman, the one who was a civil guard, is tired
+of it, and is going home to his own village. It appears that since his
+dog died he has taken a dislike to the duties. The other watchman is
+very poorly and wants a companion. Will you undertake it? If it were
+winter I should not say anything about it, as you cough too much to
+spend the night down there; but in summer the Cathedral is the coolest
+place in Toledo. What lovely nights! And by the time bad weather comes
+on we will have found you some better place. You are trustworthy,
+though your head is rather light; but you come of an honoured and
+well-known family, which is what is wanted. Do you accept?"
+
+Luna accepted, declaring his intention to Esteban, when the latter
+objected on account of his weak health. He would only undertake the
+watchman's duties during the summer; besides, two pesetas a day were
+even more than Wooden Staff earned; the income of the family would be
+doubled, and it would be a pity to lose such a good opportunity.
+
+That evening Sagrario spoke to her uncle praising the energy which
+prompted him to undertake any sort of work so as not to be a charge on
+the family.
+
+They were in the cloister leaning on the balustrade; below was the
+dark garden with its waving branches, above a summer sky veiled by the
+heat haze which dulled the brightness of the stars. They were alone
+in the four-sided gallery. The lighted windows of the Chapel-master's
+little room threw a square of red on the opposite roofs. They could
+hear the harmonium playing slowly and sadly, and when it stopped the
+shadow of the musician passed and repassed over the square of light
+with his nervous gestures, which, enlarged by the reflection, appeared
+the most grotesque contortions.
+
+The nocturnal calm and darkness surrounded Gabriel and Sagrario with a
+gentle caress; that mysterious freshness was falling from above which
+seems to revive drooping spirits and magnify old remembrances. The
+Church seemed to them as an immense sleeping beast, in whose lap they
+had found peace and protection.
+
+Gabriel spoke of his past, in order to convince the young woman that
+his work in the Cathedral would not be very arduous. He had suffered
+much; there was no bitterness that he had not tasted; he had endured
+hunger, terrible hunger, in his peregrinations through the world.
+He did not know which were the most painful, his martyrdom in the
+dungeons of the gloomy castle, or his days of despair in the streets
+of crowded cities, seeing food and gold through the glass windows of
+the shops while his head was swimming with the dizziness of hunger.
+He could endure his misery while he wandered alone through the cruel
+selfishness of civilisation; but the most horrible days were those
+in which he shared his vagabond poverty with Lucy, his gentle and
+melancholy companion.
+
+Gabriel spoke of the Englishwoman as of a dead sister.
+
+"Had you known her, Sagrario, you would have loved her. She was a
+strong woman, a brave companion, united to me more by the community of
+thought than by carnal attraction. I loved her when I first saw her.
+I hardly know if it was love that we felt; poets have written so many
+lies about love, and have falsified it in such an exaggerated way,
+that I do not for certain know what it is."
+
+He spoke to the young woman of love, explaining it according to his
+beliefs. Goethe had defined it as an "elective affinity," speaking
+as a man of science and not as a poet, using the term that chemistry
+gives to the tendency of two substances to unite and form a distinct
+product. Two beings between whom no affinity existed could meet
+through false laws of life in perpetual contact, but they could not
+mix or merge into one another. This happened more often than not
+between the individuals of different sexes who peopled the earth; a
+passing sentimentality could exist, or carnal caprice, but seldom
+love. The poor invalid Lucy was his affinity; they met and they loved.
+In their pity for human miseries, their hatred of inequalities and
+injustice, their self-abnegation in the cause of the humble and
+unfortunate they were equal; they were not only united by their hearts
+but by their brains.
+
+She was plain, with a soft and sad plainness that seemed to Luna the
+supreme ideal of beauty in the midst of that struggling world of
+unfortunates and victims. She was the image of a woman of the people
+reared in the workmen's slums of great cities, anaemic from the
+mephitic air of the den in which she was born and from bad and
+insufficient food, with a wretched body, all feminine graces paralysed
+in their development by the rough work done in her childhood. Her
+lips, that great ladies paint red, were violet; the only beauty of her
+face lay in her eyes, those windows of sorrow, made larger by the cold
+nights passed in the street from horror of the scenes she saw in her
+childhood; her father, drunken, with the brutal wish of a workman to
+forget, who, after imagining that his tavern was a paradise, would
+become infuriated with the poverty of his home and beat the whole
+family.
+
+"She was like all you women of the lower orders, Sagrario. Your beauty
+only lasts an instant; in fact, it can only exist in the first flush
+of youth. A woman of the poor cannot be beautiful unless she gets
+out of her class. Daily labour makes her lose all her freshness and
+strength, and maternity in the midst of poverty absorbs even the
+marrow in her bones. When her daily work is ended and she returns
+home, she has to sweep and wash, and shrivel herself to a mummy before
+the smoky kitchen stove. I loved Lucy for that reason, because she was
+consumed and drained by sweating, because she was the girl worker
+in all her melancholy decadence, born beautiful and made hideous by
+social injustice."
+
+He recalled the unbending and deadly hatred with which that little
+woman spoke so quietly of the supreme vengeance of the fallen, of the
+revenge for long years of oppression. She showed herself more firmly
+rooted and fiercer in her illusions than Gabriel, and he would praise
+her daring as a propagandist, her perilous expeditions into the great
+towns, running the gauntlet of watchful police, carrying on her arm
+that old bonnet-box full of pamphlets that might have sent her to
+prison. She was the "miss" animated by evangelical propaganda, who
+travels over the globe distributing Bibles with a cold smile, fearless
+alike of the mockery of civilisation, or the brutality of savages; but
+what Lucy distributed were incitements to revolution; she did not seek
+out the happy but the despairing, in the factories and infected
+slums. The two endured hunger, finding themselves often separated by
+persecution and prison, but they met again, continuing their romantic
+career, till poverty and consumption ended her life.
+
+Gabriel wept, remembering their last interview in an Italian hospital,
+clean and sweet, but with the frozen atmosphere of charity. As he was
+not her husband he could only visit her twice a week. He presented,
+himself ragged and downcast, seeing her in an armchair daily paler
+and weaker, her skin of a waxen transparency and her eyes immensely
+enlarged. He knew a little about everything, and he could not conceal
+from himself the gravity of her illness. She waited quietly for death.
+"Bring me some roses," she said, smiling to Gabriel, as if in the last
+moment of her life she wished to acknowledge the natural beauty of the
+world made hideous and darkened by man. The "companion" lived on dry
+bread, refusing the help of his comrades only a little less poor than
+himself, sleeping on the ground, in order to take her on his next
+visit a bunch of flowers.
+
+"She died, Sagrario," groaned Luna, "and I know not where they buried
+her; possibly she may have served for a lecture at the school of
+anatomy; she fell into the common grave like those soldiers whose
+heroism remains in obscurity. But I still see her; she has followed me
+in all my misfortunes, and I think she lives again in you."
+
+"But uncle," said Sagrario, gently, touched by his recital, "I cannot
+do what she did. I am an unhappy woman, without strength or will."
+
+"Call me Gabriel," said Luna, vehemently. "You are my Lucy, who again
+crosses my path; I knew it from the first, and for a long while I have
+been searching my feelings, analysing my will, and I have arrived at
+one certainty--that I love you, Sagrario."
+
+The young woman made a gesture of surprise, drawing further from him.
+
+"Do not draw away, do not fear me. I am a feeble man, you are a weak
+woman; you have suffered much, and have bid good-bye to the joys of
+the earth, but you are strong through misfortune and can look the
+truth in the face. We are both wrecks of life, and the only hope
+left us is to wait and die quietly in the desert island which is our
+refuge. We are undone, rent and swept away; Death has laid his hand
+upon us; we are fallen and shapeless rags after having passed through
+the mills of an absurd society. For this reason I love you, because
+you are my equal in misfortune; elective affinity unites us. Poor Lucy
+was the work-girl enfeebled by sweating, weakened from her birth by
+poverty. You were the girl of the people drawn from her home by the
+attraction of the well-being of the privileged; seduced, not by love,
+but by the caprices of the happy; the girl offered as a sacrifice to
+the Minotaur whose remains were afterwards thrown on to the dunghill.
+I love you, Sagrario; we are two fugitives from society, whose paths
+must join; I am hated as dangerous, you are despised as an outcast;
+misfortune has laid hold on us. Our bodies are weakened and we bear
+the wounds of the conquered, but before death claims us, let us make
+our lives sweet by love. Let us seek for roses as did poor Lucy."
+
+He pressed the young woman's hands, who, bewildered by Gabriel's
+words, knew not what to say, and wept softly. Upstairs, in the upper
+storey of the Claverias, the Chapel-master played his harmonium.
+Gabriel knew the music: it was Beethoven's last lament, the "Must it
+be," that the great genius sang before his death with a melancholy
+that made one shiver.
+
+"I love you, Sagrario," continued Gabriel, "ever since I saw you
+return to this house, bravely facing the odious curiosity of the
+people around. I have spent weeks and months by the side of your
+machine, seeing how industriously you worked. I have studied you and
+read you. You are a sincere and simple creature; your mind has none
+of the doublings and hidden corners of those complicated and tortuous
+souls used to the artifices of civilisation. I guessed day by day, by
+your gentle glance and the attention with which you listened to me,
+your gratitude for the little I was able to do for you. I remembered
+the dark period of your life, your slavery to the flesh; and finding
+me always gentle with you, protecting you from your father's anger,
+your gratitude has grown and grown, till to-day you love me, Sagrario.
+You yourself have not realised it, you know not how to explain it, but
+your being responds to mine like those chemical substances I spoke of.
+That single and eternal love is a lying invention of the poets, of
+which facts often make a mockery. One can love several people with
+equal warmth: the indispensable thing is the affinity. You who
+formerly loved a man to madness, what do you feel for me? Have I
+deceived myself? You really love me?"
+
+Sagrario continued weeping, with her head bent, as though she did
+not dare to look at Luna. He reassured her gently: she must call
+him Gabriel, speak to him as "thou." Were they not companions in
+misfortune?
+
+"I am ashamed," murmured the young woman. "So much happiness disturbs
+me. Yes, I like you. No, I love you, Gabriel. I would never have
+confessed it; I would have died sooner than reveal my secret. What am
+I that anyone should love me? For many days I have not looked in the
+glass, for I should weep at the remembrance of my lost youth. And
+then my story--my terrible story. How could I imagine that you--or, I
+should say, that thou, wouldst read my thoughts so clearly? See how
+I tremble; the shock has not yet ceased, the surprise of finding my
+secret discovered. A man like you to descend to me, ugly and sick for
+ever. No, do not speak of the other man; I forgot him long ago. And am
+I going to remember him now that you give me the charity of your love?
+No, Gabriel, you are the greatest and best of men; you are like a god
+to me."
+
+They remained silent a long while with their hands clasped, looking
+into the darkness of the murmuring garden. From above still sounded
+the lament of the genius at his fading life.
+
+Sagrario leant on Gabriel as though her strength were failing, and as
+if terrified at so much happiness, she wished to take refuge in his
+arms.
+
+"Why have I known you so late!" she said in a low voice. "I should
+have wished to love you in my youth, to be beautiful and healthy only
+for you, to have the beauty and charm of a great lady to soften the
+rest of your life. But my gratitude can offer you little, nothing but
+ill-health; the seeds of death are in me, and slowly I shall fade
+away. Gabriel, why did you set your heart on me?"
+
+"Because you are an invalid, and unfortunate as I am. Our misery is
+the loving affinity. Besides, I have never loved like most men. In my
+travels I have seen the most beautiful women in the world without the
+slightest glow of desire. I am not of an amorous temperament. From my
+adventures in Paris when I was young I always returned with a feeling
+of disgust. My love for the unfortunate has mastered me to the point
+of blunting my feelings. I am like a drunkard or a gambler, who,
+obsessed by their passion, feel nothing before a woman. A studious
+man, buried in his books, feels very little the calls of sex. My
+passion is pity for the disinherited, and hatred of injustice
+and inequality. It has so entirely absorbed me, enslaving all my
+faculties, that I have never had time to think of love. The female
+does not attract me, but I worship a woman when I see her sad and
+unfortunate. Ugliness makes more impression on me than beauty, because
+it speaks to me of social infamies, it shows me the bitterness of
+injustice, it is the only wine which revives my strength. I loved Lucy
+because she was unfortunate and dying. I love you, Sagrario, because
+in your early youth you were a wanderer in life, one whom no one would
+love. My love is for you, to brighten what remains to you of life."
+
+Sagrario leant on Gabriel's breast.
+
+"How good you are!" she sighed; "what a beautiful soul!"
+
+"Yours is the same, poor Sagrario. Your life has been a snare. You
+sold yourself through hunger and despair as do thousands of others;
+you thought to find bread in the false pretences of love. Everything
+is for the privileged of this world: the arms of the father, the sex
+of the daughter, and when those arms are weakened, or the youthful
+body loses its charms, they are thrown on one side and replaced. The
+market is abundant; I love you for your misfortunes. Had I seen you
+young and beautiful as in former times, I should not have felt the
+slightest attraction. Beauty is a bar to sentiment. The Sagrario of
+former times, with her dreams of being a great lady flattered by the
+words of youthful lovers, brightly dressed like brilliant birds, would
+never have thought of a vagabond aged by misery, ugly and sick. We
+understand each other because we are unfortunate; misery allows us to
+see into each other's souls; in full happiness we should never have
+met."
+
+"It is true," she murmured, leaning her head on Gabriel's shoulder. "I
+love that misery which has allowed us to know, each other."
+
+"You will be my companion," continued Luna, in a soft tone. "We will
+pass our lives together till death breaks the chain. I will protect
+you, although the protection of a sick and persecuted man is not worth
+much."
+
+He passed his arm round the woman, raising her head with his other
+hand, fixing his eyes on those of Sagrario, which were shining in the
+starlight bright with tears.
+
+"We shall be two souls, two minds who cherish one another without
+giving rein to passion, and with a purity such as no poets have
+imagined. This night in which we have mutually confessed one to
+another, in which our souls have been laid open to one another is our
+wedding night; kiss me, companion of my life!"
+
+And in the silence of the cloister they kissed each other noiselessly,
+slowly, as though with their lips joined they were weeping over the
+misery of their past, and the brevity of a love around which death was
+circling. Above, the lament of Beethoven went on unfolding its sad
+modulations, which floated through the cloister and round the sleeping
+Cathedral.
+
+Gabriel stood erect sustaining Sagrario, who seemed almost fainting
+from the strength of her feelings; he looked up at the luminous space
+with almost priestly gravity, and said, whispering close to the young
+woman's ear:
+
+"Our life will be like a deserted garden, where amid fallen trunks and
+dead branches fresh foliage springs up. Companion, let us love one
+another. Above our misery as pariahs let spring arise. It will be a
+sad spring, without fruit, but it will have flowers. The sun shines
+for those who are in the open, but for us, dear companion, it is very
+far. But from the black depths of our well we will clasp each other,
+raising our heads, and though his heat will not revive us, we will
+adore him like a distant star."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+In the beginning of July Gabriel began his nocturnal watch in the
+Cathedral.
+
+At nightfall he went down into the cloister, and at the Puerta del
+Mollete, joined the other watchman, a sickly-looking man who coughed
+as badly as Luna, and who never left off his cloak even in the height
+of summer.
+
+"Come along, we are going to lock up!" said the bell-ringer, rattling
+his bunch of keys.
+
+After the two men had entered the church, he locked the doors from
+outside and walked away.
+
+As the days were long, there still remained two hours of daylight
+after the watchmen entered the Cathedral.
+
+"All the church is ours, companion," said the other watchman.
+
+And like a man used to the imposing appearance of the deserted church,
+he settled himself comfortably in the sacristy as in his own house,
+opening his supper basket on the chests, and spreading out his
+eatables between candelabras and crucifixes.
+
+Gabriel wandered about the fane. After many nights of watching, the
+impression produced when he first saw the immense church deserted and
+locked up had not yet faded. His footsteps resounded on the pavement,
+his strides shortened by the tombs of prelates and great men of former
+days. The silence of the church was disturbed by the strange echoes
+and mysterious rustlings; the first day Gabriel had often turned his
+head in alarm, thinking he heard footsteps following him.
+
+Outside the church the sun was still shining, the coloured wheel
+of the rose window above the great doorway glowed like a luminous
+flower-bed; below, among the pillars, the light seemed overcome by the
+darkness; the bats began to descend, and with their wings made the
+dust fall from the shafts in the vaulting. They fluttered round about
+the pillars, circling as in a forest of stone; in their blind flight
+they often struck the cords of the hanging lamps, or shook the old red
+hats with dusty and ragged tassels that hung high above the cardinals'
+tombs.
+
+Gabriel made his rounds throughout the church. He shook the iron
+railings in front of the altars to make sure they were securely
+locked, pushed the doors of the Muzarabe Chapel, and that of the
+Kings, threw a glance into the Chapter-house, and finally stopped
+before the Virgin del Sagrario; through the grating he could see the
+lamps burning, and above, the image covered with jewels. After this
+examination he went in search of his comrade, and they both sat down
+in the crossways, either on the steps of the choir or of the high
+altar; from there you could take in the whole of the church at one
+glance.
+
+The two watchmen began by carefully putting on their caps.
+
+"They will probably have ordered you," said Gabriel's companion, "to
+respect the Church, and that if you want to smoke a cigar you must go
+up to the gallery of the Locum; and that if you wish to sup you must
+go into the sacristy. They said the same to me when I first entered
+into the service of the Church. But these are only the words of people
+who sleep comfortably and quietly in their own houses. Here the
+principal thing is to keep good watch, and beyond that, each one may
+do as seems best to him to pass the night. God and the saints sleep
+during these hours; they really must want some rest after spending the
+whole day listening to prayers and hymns, receiving incense, and being
+scorched by wax tapers close to their faces. We watch their sleep,
+and, the devil! we are surely not wanting in respect if we allow
+ourselves a little liberty. Come along, companion, it is getting dark;
+let us club our suppers."
+
+So the two watchmen supped in the crossways, spreading the contents of
+their baskets on the marble steps.
+
+Gabriel's comrade carried at his belt, as his only arm, an ancient
+pistol, a present to the Obreria which had never been fired; to Luna,
+Silver Stick pointed out a carbine, a legacy to the sacristy from the
+ex-civil guard, in memory of his years of service. Gabriel made a
+gesture of repulsion. It was all right standing there, he would get it
+if it were wanted; so he left it in the corner with some packets of
+cartridges, mouldy from the damp and covered with cobwebs.
+
+As the night fell the colours from the windows above became obscured,
+and in the darkness of the naves all the lights from the various lamps
+began to shine like wavering stars; all the outlines of the church
+were lost, and Gabriel fancied himself once more sleeping at night on
+the open ground. It was only when he went the rounds with his lantern
+in his hand that the outlines of the Cathedral rose out of the shadow
+ever vaster and more mysterious. The pillars seemed to start out to
+meet him, rising suddenly up to the roof with the flashes of light
+from the lantern, the squares in the tiled floor seemed to dance with
+every swing of the light, and every now and then Gabriel could feel on
+his head the flutter of passing wings. To the screams of the bats
+were added the hooting of other frightened birds, who in their flight
+knocked against the pilasters; they were the owls who came down
+attracted by the oil in the lamps, and who nearly extinguished them
+with the sweep of their wings.
+
+Every half-hour the silence was disturbed by the sound of rusty wheels
+and springs, and then a bell with a silvery tone struck; these were
+the gilded giants of the Puerta del Reloj, marking the passing of time
+with their hammers.
+
+Gabriel's companion complained greatly of the innovations introduced
+by the cardinal for the annoyance of poor folks. In former times he
+and his old comrade, once they were locked up, could sleep as they
+pleased without fear of being reproved by the Chapter. But His
+Eminence, who was always endeavouring to find some means of annoying
+his neighbour, had placed in different parts of the Cathedral certain
+little clocks brought from abroad, and now they had to go every
+half-hour, open them and record their visit. The following day they
+were examined by Silver Stick, and if any carelessness was discovered
+he imposed a fine.
+
+"An invention of the demon not to allow us to sleep, comrade. But
+all the same we might manage a nap if we help one another. While one
+sleeps a bit the other must undertake to check these cursed machines.
+No carelessness, eh, fresh man? The pay is short and hunger great, and
+we cannot afford fines."
+
+Gabriel, always good-natured, was the one who made most rounds,
+looking scrupulously after the markers, while his companion, the Señor
+Fidel, rested quietly, praising his generosity. They had given him a
+good companion; he liked him much better than the old one, with his
+imperious manners of an old guard, always squabbling as to whose turn
+it was to get up and make the round.
+
+The poor man coughed as much as Gabriel; his catarrhs disturbed
+the silence, echoing through the naves till it seemed like several
+monstrous dogs barking.
+
+"I do not know how many years I have had this hoarseness," said the
+old man; "it is a present from the Cathedral. The doctors say I ought
+to give up this employment; but what I say is--who is to support me?
+You, companion, have begun at the best time. There is a coolness here
+that all those would envy who are generally perspiring about this time
+in the cafes of the Zocodover. We are still in summer, but you can
+imagine the damp which penetrates everything; and you should see what
+it is in winter! we must really dress up as maskers, covered with
+caps, shawls and cloaks. They have the charity to leave us a little
+fire in the sacristy, but many mornings they find us almost frozen.
+Those of the Chapter call the choir 'kill canon,' and if those
+gentlemen complain of one hour's stay in this ice-house, having eaten
+well and drunk better, you may just fancy what it is for us. You have
+had the good luck to begin in summer, but when the winter comes on you
+will just have a good time of it!"
+
+But even though it was the best part of the year, Gabriel coughed
+much, his illness increasing from the dampness of the Cathedral.
+
+On moonlight nights the church was strangely transfigured, and Gabriel
+remembered sundry operatic effects he had seen during his travels.
+The white tracery of the windows stood out against the blackness with
+milky whiteness, splashes of light glided down the pilasters, some
+even from the vaulting. These mocking spectres moved slowly along the
+pavement, mounting the opposite pillars and losing themselves in the
+darkness; those rays of cold and diffused light made the shadows seem
+even darker as they brought out of the darkness here a chapel, beyond,
+a sepulchral stone or the outline of some pilaster; and the great
+Christ, who crowned the railings of the high altar, glowed against its
+background of shadow with the brilliancy of its old gilding, like some
+miraculous apparition floating in space in a halo of light.
+
+When the cough would not allow the old watchman to sleep, he told
+Gabriel of the many years he had carried on this nocturnal life in the
+Primacy. The office had some resemblance to that of a sexton, for he
+spent most of it among the dead in the silence of desertion, never
+seeing anyone till his watch was finished. He had ended by becoming
+used to it, and it had cured him of many fears he had in his youth.
+Before, he had believed in the resurrection of the dead, in souls, and
+the apparitions of saints. But now he laughed at all that. Whole years
+he had carried on this night work in the Cathedral, and if he heard
+anything it was only the scampering of rats, who respected neither
+saints nor altars, for after all they were only wood!
+
+He only feared men of flesh and blood, those robbers who in former
+times had more than once entered the Cathedral, obliging the Chapter
+to establish this night vigilance.
+
+He entertained Gabriel with the account of all the attempts at robbery
+which had happened during the century. In the Cathedral was enough
+wealth to tempt a saint, Madrid was near, and he much feared the
+"swell" thieves. But thieves would have to be clever and fortunate
+to get the better of them. Silver Stick, the bell-ringer, and the
+sacristan made their nightly inspection before locking up, Mariano
+then taking the keys away with him to the belfry. No one could
+think of breaking the locks and bolts, for they were of antique and
+extremely strong work; besides, they two were there inside to give the
+alarm on hearing the slightest noise. Formerly, by the help of the
+dog, the watching had been more complete, for the animal was so alert
+that no passer-by could approach the doors for an instant without his
+barking. After its death the Señor Obrero spoke month after month of
+getting another, but he had never fulfilled his promise. But all the
+same, without the dog, they two were there and that meant something,
+eh! He with his old pistol which had never been fired, and Gabriel
+with his carbine, which was still standing in the corner where his
+predecessor had left it. He plumed himself upon the fear he and his
+companion would excite, but, called back to reality by Luna's smile,
+he added:
+
+"At any rate, in case of emergency we can reckon on the bell that
+summons the canons; the rope hangs down in the choir, and we have
+only to ring it. And just imagine what would happen if it rang in
+the silence of the night! All Toledo would be on foot, knowing that
+something serious was taking place in the Cathedral. With this and
+those cursed markers that will not let one sleep, one might say that
+even the king was not so well guarded at night as this church."
+
+In the morning when the watch was ended, Gabriel would return to his
+house, perished with cold, longing to stretch himself in bed. He would
+find Sagrario in the kitchen, warming the milk he was to drink before
+turning in. His gentle companion still called him "uncle" in the
+presence of the household, and only used the loving "thou" when they
+were alone. When he was in bed she would bring the steaming milk,
+making him drink it with maternal caresses, smoothing the pillows;
+after which she would carefully close the windows and doors so that no
+ray of light should disturb him.
+
+"Those nights in the Cathedral!" said she complainingly. "You are
+killing yourself, Gabriel. It is not fit for you. My father says the
+same. As it is certain there is nothing beyond death, and that we
+shall not see one another, do try and prolong your life by being
+careful. Now that we know each other, and are so happy, it would be so
+sad to lose you!"
+
+Gabriel reassured her. This would not go on beyond the summer; after
+that they would give him something better. She must not be so sad;
+such a little thing did not kill one. He would cough just as much
+living in the Claverias as passing the night in the Cathedral.
+
+After dinner he would go into the cloister, completely rested by his
+morning's sleep. It was the only time of the day in which he could see
+his friends; they either came to find him, or he went in search of
+them, going to the shoemaker's house or up into the tower.
+
+They greeted him respectfully, listening to his words with the same
+attention as before; but he noted in them a certain air of proud
+independence, and at the same time of pity, as if, although grateful
+to him for having transmitted his ideas to them, they pitied him for
+his gentle character, so inimical to all violence.
+
+"Those birds," said Gabriel to his brother, "are flying on their own
+account. They do not want me, and wish to be alone."
+
+Wooden Staff shook his head sadly.
+
+"God grant, Gabriel, that some day you may not repent of having spoken
+to them of things they cannot understand! They have greatly changed,
+and no one can endure our nephew, the Perrero. He says that if he is
+not allowed to kill bulls in order to get rich, he will kill men to
+get out of his poverty; that he has as much right to enjoyment as any
+gentleman, and that all the rich are robbers. Really, brother, by the
+Holy Virgin! have you taught them such horrible things?"
+
+"Let them alone," said Gabriel, laughing; "they have not yet digested
+their new ideas, and are vomiting follies. All this will pass, for
+they are good souls."
+
+The only thing that vexed him was that Mariano withdrew from him. He
+fled his company as if he were afraid. He seemed to fear that Gabriel
+would read his thoughts, with that irresistible power that from
+boyhood he had held over him.
+
+"Mariano, what is the matter with you?" said he, seeing him pass
+through the cloisters.
+
+"Much that is out of gear," answered his surly friend.
+
+"I know it, man--I know it; but you seem to avoid me. Why is this?"
+
+"Avoid you--I?--never. You know I always love you. When you come to
+my house you see how we all welcome you. We owe you a great deal; you
+have opened our eyes and we are no longer brute beasts. But I am tired
+of knowing so much and being so poor, and my companions are thinking
+the same. We do not care to have our heads full and our bellies
+empty."
+
+"Well, then, what remedy have we? We have all been born too-soon.
+Others will come after us, finding things better arranged. What can
+you do to right the present, when there are millions of workers in
+the world more wretched than yourselves, who have not succeeded in
+finding a better way out even at the cost of their blood, fighting
+against authority?"
+
+"What shall we do?" grumbled his companion. "That is what we shall
+see, and you will see also. We are not such fools as you think. You
+are very clever, Gabriel, and we respect you as our master, for
+everything you say is true. But it seems to us that when you have to
+do with things--practical things: you understand me? when one must
+call bread, bread, and wine, wine: am I explaining myself?--you are,
+begging your pardon, rather soft, like all those who live much in
+books. We are ignorant, but we see more clearly."
+
+He walked away from Gabriel, who-was quite unable to understand the
+true bearing of this aberration among his disciples. Several times
+when he went up to the tower to spend a few moments with his friends,
+they would suddenly cease their conversation, looking anxiously at him
+as though they feared he might have overheard their words.
+
+It was several days since Don Martin had been in the cloister. Gabriel
+knew through Silver Stick that the chaplain's mother had died, and a
+week afterwards he saw him one evening in the Claverias. His eyes were
+bloodshot, his cheeks thin, and his skin drawn as though he had wept
+much.
+
+"I come to take farewell, Gabriel. I have spent a month of sorrow and
+sleeplessness nursing my mother. The poor thing is dead; she was
+far from young, and I expected this ending, but however strong and
+resigned one may be, these blows must be felt. Now the poor old woman
+is gone I am free; she was the only tie that bound me to this Church,
+in which I no longer believe. Its dogma is absurd and puerile, its
+history a tissue of crimes and violence. Why should I lie like others,
+feigning a faith I do not feel? To-day I have been to the palace to
+tell them they may dispose of my seven duros monthly and my chaplaincy
+of nuns. I am going away. I wish not only to fly the Church, I wish
+to get out of her atmosphere; and a renegade priest could not live in
+Toledo. You see this masquerade? I wear it to-day for the last time;
+to-morrow I shall taste the first joy of my life, tearing this shroud
+into shreds, such small shreds that no one will be able to use them.
+I shall be a man. I will go far away, as far as I can. I wish to know
+what the world is like as I have to live in it. I know no one, I shall
+have no assistance. You are the most extraordinary man I have ever
+known, and here you are hidden in this dungeon by your own free will,
+concealed in a Church which to your views must be empty. I am not
+afraid of poverty. When one has been God's representative on six reals
+a day one can look hunger in the face. I will be a workman; I will dig
+the earth, if necessary. I will get employment on something--but I
+shall be a free man."
+
+As the two friends walked up and down the cloister Gabriel counselled
+Don Martin in determining the place to which he should direct his
+steps, as his thoughts wavered between Paris and the American
+republics, where emigration was most needed.
+
+As the evening fell, Gabriel took leave of his disciple; his
+fellow-watchman was waiting for him in the cloister ready for
+locking-up time.
+
+"Probably we shall never meet again," said the chaplain sadly. "You
+will end your days here, in the house of a God in whom you do not
+believe."
+
+"Yes, I shall die here," said Gabriel, smiling. "He and I hate one
+another, but all the same it seems as if He could not do without me.
+If He goes out into the streets it is I who guide His steps, and again
+at night, it is I who guard His wealth. Good-bye, and good-luck,
+Martin. Be a man without weakness. Truth is well worth poverty."
+
+The disappearance of the chaplain of nuns was effected without
+scandal. Don Antolin and the other priests thought the young man
+had moved to Madrid through ambition, to help swell the number of
+place-hunting clerics. Gabriel was the only one who knew Don Martin's
+real intentions. Besides, an astonishing piece of news, that fell on
+the Cathedral like a thunderbolt, soon caused the young priest to be
+forgotten, throwing all the gentlemen of the choir, all the smaller
+folk in the sacristies, and the whole population of the upper cloister
+into the greatest commotion.
+
+The quarrels between the Archbishop and his Chapter had ended,
+everything that had been done by the cardinal was approved of in Rome,
+and His Eminence fairly roared with joy in his palace, with the fiery
+impetuosity of his usual feelings.
+
+As the canons entered the choir they walked with bent heads, looking
+ashamed and frightened.
+
+"Well, have you heard?" they said to one another as they disrobed in
+the sacristy.
+
+In a great hurry, with flying cloaks they all left the church, every
+man his own way, without forming groups or circles, each one anxious
+to free himself from all responsibility, and to appear free from all
+complicity with the prelate's enemies.
+
+The Tato laughed with joy seeing the sudden dispersion, and the
+agitation of the gentlemen of the choir.
+
+"Run! run I The old gossip will give you something to think about!"
+
+The same preparations were made every year in the middle of August for
+the festival of the Virgin del Sagrario. In the Cathedral they spoke
+of this year's festival with mystery and anxiety, as though they were
+expecting great events. His Eminence, who had not been into the church
+for many months, in order not to meet his Chapter, would preside in
+the choir on the feast day. He wished to see his enemies face to
+face, crushed by his triumph, and to enjoy their looks of confused
+submission. And accordingly, as the festival drew near many of the
+canons trembled, thinking of the harsh and proud look the angry
+prelate would fix on them.
+
+Gabriel paid very little attention to these anxieties of the clerical
+world; he led a strange life, sleeping the greater part of the
+day, preparing himself for the fatiguing night watch, which he now
+undertook alone. The Señor Fidel had fallen ill, and the Obreria to
+avoid expense, and not to deprive the old man of his wretched pay, had
+not engaged a new companion for him. He spent the nights alone in the
+Cathedral as calmly as if he had been in the upper cloister, quite
+accustomed to the grave-like silence. In order not to sleep, he read
+by the light of his lantern any books he could get in the Claverias,
+uninteresting treatises on history in which Providence played the
+principal _rôle_; lives of the saints, amusing from their simple
+credulity, bordering on the grotesque; and that family Quixote of the
+Lunas', that he had so often spelt out when little, and in which he
+still found some of the freshness of his childhood.
+
+The Virgin's feast day arrived; the festival was the same as in
+other years. The famous image had been brought out of its chapel and
+occupied on its foot-board a place on the high altar. They brought out
+her mantle kept in the Treasury and all her jewels, that scintillated
+kissed by the innumerable lights, glittering and flashing with endless
+brilliancy.
+
+Before the commencement of the festival, the inquisitive of the
+Cathedral, pretending absent-mindedness, strolled between the choir
+and the Puerta del Perdon. The canons in their red robes assembled
+near the staircase lighted by the famous "stone of light." His
+Eminence would come down this way, and the canons grouped themselves,
+timidly whispering, asking each other what was going to happen.
+
+The cross-bearer appeared on the first step of the staircase, holding
+his emblem horizontally with both hands so that it should pass under
+the arch of the doorway. After, between servitors, and followed by the
+mulberry-coloured robe of the auxiliary bishop, advanced the cardinal,
+dressed in his purple, which quenched the reddish-violet of the
+canons.
+
+The Chapter were drawn up in two rows with bowed heads, offering
+homage to their prince. What a glance was Don Sebastian's! The canons,
+bending, thought they felt it on the nape of their necks with the
+coldness of steel. He held his enormous body erect in its flowing
+purple with a gallant pride, as if at the moment he felt himself
+entirely cured of the malady which was tearing his entrails, and of
+the weak heart which oppressed his lungs. His fat face quivered with
+delight, and the folds of his double chin spread out over his lace
+rochet. His cardinal's biretta seemed to swell with pride on his
+little, white and shining head. Never was a crown worn with such pride
+as that red cap.
+
+He stretched out his hand, gloved in purple, on which shone the
+episcopal emerald ring, with such an imperious gesture that one after
+another of the canons found themselves forced to kiss it. It was the
+submission of churchmen, accustomed from their seminary to an apparent
+humility which covered rancours and hatreds of an intensity unknown in
+ordinary life. The Cardinal guessed their disinclination, and gloated
+over his triumph.
+
+"You have no idea what our hatreds are," he had often said, to his
+friend, the gardener's widow. "In ordinary life few men die of
+ill-humour; he who is annoyed gives vent to it, and recovers his
+equanimity. But in the Church you may count by the hundred men who
+die in a fit of rage, because they are unable to revenge themselves;
+because discipline closes their mouths and bows their heads. Having no
+families, and no anxieties about earning their bread, most of us only
+live for self-love and pride."
+
+The Chapter formed their procession accompanied by His Eminence. The
+scarlet Perrero headed the march, then came the black vergers and
+Silver Stick, making the tiles of the pavement ring with the blows of
+their staffs. Behind came the archiepiscopal cross and the canons in
+pairs, and finally the prelate with his scarlet train spread out at
+full length, held up by two pages. Don Sebastian blessed to the right
+and to the left, looking with his penetrating eyes at the faithful who
+bowed their heads.
+
+His imperious character and the joy of his triumph made his glance
+flash. What a splendid victory! The Church was his home, and he
+returned to it after a long absence with all the majesty of an
+absolute master, who could crush the evil-speaking slaves who dared to
+attack him.
+
+The greatness of the Church seemed to him at that moment more glorious
+than ever. What an admirable institution! The strong man who arrived
+at the top was an omnipotent god to be feared. Nothing of pernicious
+and revolutionary equality. Dogma exalted the humility of all before
+God; but when you came to examples, flocks were always spoken of, and
+shepherds to direct them. He was that shepherd because the Omnipotent
+has so ordered it. Woe to whoever attempted to dethrone him!
+
+In the choir his delighted pride tasted an even greater satisfaction.
+He was seated on the throne of the archbishops of Toledo, that seat
+which had been the star of his youth, the remembrance of which had
+disturbed him in his Episcopacy, when the mitre had travelled through
+the provinces, waiting for the hour to rise to the Primacy. He stood
+erect under the artistic canopy of the Mount Tabor, at the top of four
+steps, so that all in the choir could see him and recognise that he
+was their prince. The heads of the dignitaries seated at his side were
+thus on a level with his feet. He could trample on them like vipers
+should they dare to rise again, striking at his most intimate
+affections.
+
+Fired by the appreciation of his own grandeur and triumph, he was the
+first to rise, or to sit down; as is directed in the rubric of the
+services, he joined his voice to those in the choir, astonishing them
+all by the harsh energy of his singing; the Latin words rolled from
+his mouth like blows upon those hated people, and his eyes passed with
+a threatening expression over the double row of bent heads.
+
+He was a fortunate man, who had risen from place to place, but he
+never felt a satisfaction so deep, so complete as at that moment. He
+himself was startled at his own delight, at that orgy of pride that
+had extinguished his chronic ailments; it seemed to him as though he
+were spending in a few hours the stores of enjoyment of his whole
+life.
+
+As the mass was ending, the singers and lower people in the choir, who
+were the only ones who dared to look at him, were alarmed, seeing him
+suddenly grow pale, rise with his face discomposed, pressing his hands
+to his breast. The canons noticing it, rushed towards him, forming a
+crowded mass of red vestments in front of his throne. His Eminence was
+suffocating, fighting against that circle of hands who instinctively
+clutched at him.
+
+"Air!" he moaned, "air! Get out from before me with a thousand curses!
+Take me home!"
+
+Even in the midst of his agony, he recovered his majestic gesture
+and his old soldiering oaths to drive away his enemies. He was
+suffocating, but he would not allow the canons to see it: he guessed
+the delight many of them must feel beneath their compassionate manner.
+Let no one touch him! He could manage for himself! So leaning on two
+faithful servants, he began his march, gasping, towards the episcopal
+staircase, followed by great part of the Chapter.
+
+The religious function ended hurriedly. The Virgin Would forgive it,
+she should have a better solemnity next year; and all the authorities
+and invited guests left their seats to run in search of news to the
+archiepiscopal palace.
+
+When Gabriel woke, past mid-day, every one in the upper cloister was
+talking of His Eminence's health. His brother inquired of the Aunt
+Tomasa who had just come from the palace.
+
+"He is dying, my sons," said the gardener's widow; "he cannot escape
+from it. Doña Visitacion signalled it to me from afar, weeping, poor
+thing! He cannot be put to bed, for his chest is heaving like a
+broken bellows. The doctors say he will not last till night. What a
+misfortune! And on a day like this!"
+
+The agony of the ecclesiastical prince was received in funereal
+silence. The women of the Claverias went backwards and forwards with
+news from the palace to the upper cloister; the children were shut up
+in the houses, frightened by their mothers' threats if they attempted
+to play in the galleries.
+
+The Chapel-master, who was generally indifferent to events in the
+Cathedral, went nevertheless to inquire of His Eminence's condition.
+He had a plan which he quickly explained to the family during dinner.
+The funeral of a cardinal deserved the execution of a celebrated mass,
+with a full orchestra recruited in Madrid. He had already cast his
+eyes on the famous Requiem of Mozart; that was the only reason for
+which he was interested in the prelate's fate.
+
+Gabriel, looking at his companion, felt the gentle selfishness that a
+living man feels when a great man dies.
+
+"So the great fall, Sagrario, and we, the sickly and wretched, have
+still some life before us."
+
+At the hour of locking up the church he went down to begin his watch.
+The bell-ringer was waiting for him with the keys.
+
+"How about the Cardinal?" inquired Gabriel.
+
+"He will certainly die to-day, if he is not already dead."
+
+And afterwards he added:
+
+"You will have a great illumination to-night, Gabriel. The Virgin is
+on the high altar till to-morrow morning, surrounded by wax tapers."
+
+He was silent for a moment, as if undecided about Something.
+
+"Possibly," he added, "I may come down and keep you company a little.
+You must be dull alone; expect me."
+
+When Gabriel was locked into the church, he caught sight of the high
+altar, resplendent with lights. He made his usual trial of doors and
+railings; visited the Locum and the large lavoratories, where once
+some thieves had concealed themselves, and after he was quite certain
+that there was no human being in the church except himself, he seated
+himself in the crossways with his cloak round him, and his basket of
+supper.
+
+He sat there a long while, looking through the railings at the Virgin
+del Sagrario. Born in the Cathedral and brought up as a child by his
+mother, who knelt with him before the image, he had always admired it
+as the most perfect type of beauty. Now he criticised it coldly with
+his artistic eye. She was ugly and grotesque like all the very rich
+images; sumptuous and wealthy piety had decked her out with their
+treasures. There was nothing about her of the idealism of the Virgin
+painted by Christian artists; she was much more like an Indian idol
+covered with jewels. The embroidered dress and mantle stood out with
+the stiffness of stone folds, and over the head-dress sparkled a crown
+as large as a helmet, diminishing the face. Gold, pearls and diamonds
+shone on every part of her vestments, and she wore pendants and
+bracelets of immense value.
+
+Gabriel smiled at the religious simplicity which dressed heavenly
+heroes according to the fashions of the earth.
+
+The faint twilight glimmering through the windows and the wavering
+flame of the tapers animated the face of the image as if she were
+speaking.
+
+"Even as I am!" said Gabriel to himself. "If a holy person were in my
+place he would think the Virgin was laughing one moment and crying the
+next; with a little imagination and faith, behold here is a miracle!
+These flickerings of light have been an inexhaustible mine for the
+priests, even the Venus' of former times changed the expression of
+their faces at the pleasure of the faithful, just like a Christian
+image."
+
+He thought a long time about miracles, the invention of all religions,
+and as old as human ignorance and credulity.
+
+It was now quite dark. After supping frugally, Gabriel opened a book
+that he carried in his basket and began to read by the light of his
+lantern. Now and then he raised his head, disturbed by the fluttering
+and screams of the night birds, attracted by the extraordinary
+brilliancy of the countless wax tapers. The time passed slowly in the
+darkness; the silvery sound of the warriors' hammers re-echoed through
+the vaulting. Luna got up and visited the markers to record his visit.
+
+Ten o'clock had struck when Gabriel heard the wicket of the Puerta de
+Santa Catalina open quickly but without violence, as though a key had
+been used. Luna remembered the bell-ringer's offer, but soon he heard
+the sound of many steps magnified by the echo as if a whole host were
+advancing.
+
+"Who goes there?" shouted Gabriel, rather alarmed.
+
+"It is us, man," answered from the darkness the husky voice of
+Mariano. "Did I not tell you we should come down?"
+
+As they came into the crossways, the light from the high altar fell
+full upon them, and Gabriel saw the Tato and the shoemaker with the
+bell-ringer. They wished to keep Luna company part of the night, so
+that his watch should not be so wearisome, and they produced a bottle
+of brandy, of which they offered him some.
+
+"You know I do not drink," said Gabriel. "I have never cared for
+alcohol; wine sometimes, and very little of that. But where are you
+all going to, dressed out as for a feast day?"
+
+The Tato answered hurriedly. Silver Stick locked up the Claverias at
+nine, and they wished to spend the night out of bounds. They had been
+some time at a cafe in the Zocodover, feasting like lords. They
+had had all sorts of adventures, that was a night quite out of the
+ordinary way, more especially as all the town was in commotion about
+the Archbishop.
+
+"How is he going on?" inquired Gabriel.
+
+"I believe he died half-an-hour ago," said the bell-ringer. "When
+I went up to my house for the keys, a doctor was coming out of the
+palace and he told one of the canons. But let us sit down."
+
+They all sat down, in their embroidered caps, on the steps of the high
+altar railing. Mariano put his bunch of keys on the ground, a mass of
+iron as big as a club. There were keys of every age, some of iron,
+very large, rough and rusty, showing the old hammer marks and with
+coats of arms near the bows; others, more modern were clean and bright
+as silver, but they were all very large and heavy, with powerful
+indented teeth, proportionate to the size of the edifice.
+
+The three friends seemed extraordinarily happy, with a nervous gaiety
+which made them catch hold of each other and laugh. They cast sidelong
+looks at the Virgin and then looked at each other, with a mysterious
+gesture that Gabriel was quite unable to understand.
+
+"You have all drunk a good deal, is it not so?" said Luna. "You do
+wrong, for you know that drink is the degradation of the poor."
+
+"A day is a day, uncle," said the Perrero; "it delights us that the
+great ones are dying. You see, I esteem His Eminence highly, but let
+him go to the devil! The only satisfaction a poor man has is to see
+that the end comes also to the rich."
+
+"Drink," said the bell-ringer, offering him the bottle. "It is a
+pleasure to find ourselves here, well and happy, while to-morrow His
+Eminence will find himself between four boards; we shall have to ring
+the little bell all day!"
+
+The Tato drank, passing the bottle to the shoemaker, who held it a
+long time glued to his gullet. Of the three he seemed the most tipsy;
+his eyes were bloodshot, he stared stonily on every side and remained
+silent, he only gave a forced laugh when anyone spoke to him, as if
+his thoughts were very, very far off.
+
+On the other hand, the bell-ringer was far more loquacious than usual.
+He spoke of the cardinal's fortune, at the wealth that would fall to
+Doña Visitacion, of the joy many of the Chapter must feel that night.
+He interrupted himself to take a pull at the brandy bottle, passing it
+afterwards to his companions. The smell of the alcohol spread through
+that atmosphere impregnated with incense and the smoke of wax tapers.
+
+More than an hour passed in this way. Mariano had stopped the
+conversation several times as if he had something serious to say and
+was vacillating, wanting courage.
+
+"Gabriel, time is passing and we have much to do and to talk about.
+It is a little past eleven, but we have still several hours to do the
+thing well."
+
+"What do you mean to say?" asked Luna, surprised.
+
+"Few words--in a nut-shell. It concerns your becoming rich and us
+also; we intend to get out of this poverty. You have noticed for
+some time that we have avoided you, that we preferred talking among
+ourselves to the pleasure of listening to you. We all know that you
+are very learned, but as far as things of this life go you are not
+worth a farthing. We have learnt a great deal from you, but that does
+not get us out of our poverty. We have spent months thinking how to
+make a lucky stroke. These revolutions of which you speak seem to us
+very far off; our grandchildren may see them, but we never shall. It
+is all right for clever people to look to the future, but ignorant
+people like us look to the present. We have employed our time
+discussing all sorts of schemes, to kidnap Don Sebastian and require
+a million of ransom, to break into the palace one night, and I don't
+know what besides! All wild ideas started by your nephew. But this
+morning in my house, while we were lamenting our poverty, we suddenly
+saw our salvation close at hand. You as the sole guardian of the
+Cathedral. The Virgin on the high altar, with the jewels that are
+locked up in the Treasury all the rest of the year, and I with the
+keys in my power. The easiest thing in the world. Let us clean out the
+Virgin and take the road to Madrid, where we shall arrive at dawn; the
+Tato knows a lot of people there among cloak stealers. We will hide
+ourselves there for a little while, and then you, who know the world,
+will guide us. We will go to America, sell the stones, and we shall be
+rich. Get up, Gabriel! We are going to strip the idol, as you say."
+
+"But this is a robbery that you are proposing!" exclaimed Luna,
+alarmed.
+
+"A robbery?" said the bell-ringer. "Call it so, if you like--and, what
+then? Are you afraid of it? More has been robbed from us, who were
+born with the right to a share of the world, but however much we look
+round we cannot find a vacant place. Besides, what harm do we do to
+anybody? These jewels are of no use to the bit of wood they cover, it
+does not eat, it does not feel the cold in winter, and we are poor
+miserable creatures. You yourself have said it, Gabriel, seeing our
+poverty. Our children die of hunger on their mother's knees, while
+these idols are covered with wealth, come along, Gabriel, do not let
+us lose any more time."
+
+"Come along, uncle," said the Tato, "have a little courage. You must
+admit we ignorant people know how to manage things when it comes to
+the point."
+
+Gabriel was not listening to them; surprise had made him fall into a
+reverie of self-examination. He thought--terrified of the great error
+he had committed--he saw an immense gulf opening between himself and
+those he had believed to be his disciples. He remembered his brother's
+words. Ah, the good sense of the simpleminded! He, with all his
+reading, had never foreseen the danger of teaching these ignorant
+people in a few months what required a whole life of thought and
+study. What happened to people stirred up by revolution was happening
+here on a small scale. The most noble thoughts become corrupted
+passing through the sieve of vulgarity; the most generous aspirations
+are poisoned by the dregs of poverty.
+
+He had sown the revolutionary seed in these outcasts of the Church,
+drowsing in the atmosphere of two centuries ago. He had thought to
+help on the revolution of the future by forming men, but on awaking
+from his dreams he found only common criminals. What a terrible
+mistake! His ideas had only tended to destruction. In removing from
+the dulled brains the prejudices of ignorance, and the superstitions
+of the slave, he had only succeeded in making them daring for evil.
+Selfishness was the only passion vibrating in them. They had only
+learnt that they were wretched and ought not to be so. The fate of
+their companions in misfortune, of the greater part of humanity,
+wretched and sad, had no interest for them. If they could get out of
+their present state, bettering themselves in whatever way they could,
+they cared very little if the world went on just as it did before;
+that tears, and pain and hunger should reign below, in order to ensure
+the comfort of those above. He had sown his thoughts in them hoping
+to accelerate the harvest, but like all those forced and artificial
+cultivations, that grow with astonishing rapidity only to give rotten
+fruit, the result of his propaganda was moral corruption. Men in the
+end, like all of them! The human wild beast, seeking his own welfare
+at the cost of his fellow, perpetuating the disorders of pain for the
+majority, as long as he can enjoy plenty during the few years of his
+life. Ah! Where could he meet with that superior being, ennobled by
+the worship of reason, doing good without hope of reward, sacrificing
+everything for human solidarity, that man-God who would glorify the
+future!
+
+"Come along, Gabriel," continued the bell-ringer. "Do not let us lose
+time it is only a few minutes' work; and then--flight!"
+
+"No," said Luna firmly, coming out of his reverie, "you shall not do
+this; you ought not to do it. It is a robbery you suggest to me, and
+my pain is great, seeing that you reckoned on me; others rob from
+fatal instinct or from corruption of soul, you have come to it because
+I tried to enlighten you, because I tried to open your minds to the
+truth. Oh! it is horrible, most horrible!"
+
+"What is the use of all these objections, Gabriel? Is it not a bit of
+wood? Whom do we harm by taking its jewels? Do not the rich rob, and
+everyone who possesses anything? Why should we not imitate them?"
+
+"For this very reason, because what you propose doing is a suggestion
+of evil, because it perpetuates once more that system of violence and
+disorder which is the root of all misery. Why do you hate the rich,
+if what they do in sweating the poor is just the same as what you are
+doing in taking possession of a thing for yourselves--understand me
+well--for yourselves--and not for all. The robbery does not scare me,
+for I do not believe in ownership nor in the sanctity of things, but
+for this very reason I detest this appropriation to yourselves and
+I oppose it. Why do you wish to possess all this? You say it is to
+remedy your poverty. That is not true. It is to be rich, to enter into
+the privileged group, to be three individual men of that detested
+minority which desires to enjoy prosperity by enslaving humanity. If
+all the poor of Toledo were now shouting outside the doors of the
+Cathedral, rebellious and emboldened, I would open the way for them, I
+would point out those jewels that you covet, and I would say, 'Possess
+yourselves of those, they are so many drops of sweat and blood wrung
+from your ancestors; they represent the servile work on the land of
+the lords, the brutal plundering of the king's cavaliers, so that
+magnates and kings may cover with jewels those idols which can open to
+them the gates of heaven. These things do not belong to you because
+you happen to be the most daring; they belong to all, as do all the
+riches of the earth. For men to lay their hands on everything existing
+in the world would be a holy work, the redeeming revolution of the
+future. To possess yourselves of some portion of what by moral right
+is not yours, would only be for you a crime against the laws of the
+land, for me it would be a crime against the disinherited, the only
+masters of the existing----"
+
+"Silence, Gabriel," said the bell-ringer harshly; "if I let you, you
+would go on talking till dawn. I do not understand you, nor do I wish
+to. We came to do you a good turn, and you treat us to a sermon. We
+wish to see you as rich as ourselves, and you answer us by talking of
+others, of a lot of people that you don't know, of that humanity who
+never gave you a scrap of bread when you wandered like a dog. I must
+treat you as I did in our youth when we were campaigning. I have
+always loved you and I admire your talents, but we must really treat
+you like a child. Come along, Gabriel! Hold your tongue, and follow
+us! We will lead you to happiness! Forward, companions!" The Tato
+and the shoemaker stood up, walking towards the railings of the high
+altar, the Tato seized one of its gates, and half opened it.
+
+"No!" shouted Gabriel with energy. "Stop! Mariano, you do not know
+what you are doing. You believe your happiness will be accomplished
+when you have possessed yourselves of those jewels. But afterwards?
+Your families remain here. Tato, think of your mother. Mariano, you
+and the shoemaker have wives--you have children."
+
+"Bah!" said the bell-ringer. "They will come and join us when we are
+in safety far away. Money can do everything--the thing is to get it."
+
+"And your children? Shall they be told their fathers were thieves!"
+
+"Bah! they will be rich in other countries. Their history will not be
+worse than that of other rich men's sons."
+
+Gabriel understood the fierce determination that animated those men.
+His endeavours to restrain them were useless. Mariano seized him,
+seeing he was trying to push between them and the altar.
+
+"Stand aside, little one," he said. "You are no use for anything. Let
+us alone. Are you afraid of the Virgin? Undeceive yourself, even if we
+carry off all she has, she will work no miracle."
+
+Gabriel attempted one final effort.
+
+"You shall do nothing. If you pass the railings, if you approach the
+high altar, I will ring the call bell, and before ten minutes all
+Toledo will be at the gates."
+
+And opening the iron gate of the choir, he entered with a decision
+that surprised the bell-ringer.
+
+The shoemaker in tipsy silence was the only one who followed him.
+
+"My children's bread!" he murmured in thickened speech. "They wish to
+rob them! They wish to keep them poor!"
+
+Mariano heard a metallic clatter, and saw the shoemaker raise his hand
+armed with the bunch of keys which had fallen on the marble steps of
+the railing, then he heard a strangely sonorous sound, as if something
+hollow was being struck.
+
+Gabriel gave one scream, and fell forwards on the ground; the
+shoemaker continued striking his head.
+
+"Do not give him any more--stop!"
+
+These were the last words Gabriel heard confusedly, as he lay
+stretched at the entrance of the choir; a warm and sticky liquid ran
+over his eyes; afterwards--silence, darkness and--nothing!
+
+His last thought was to tell himself he was dying--that probably he
+was already dead, and that only the last vital struggle remained to
+him, the last struggle of a life vanishing for ever.
+
+Still he came back to life. He opened his eyes with difficulty and saw
+the sun coming through a barred window, white walls, and a dirty and
+darned cotton counterpane. After great wandering and stumbling, he
+could collect his thoughts sufficiently to' form one idea: they had
+placed the Cathedral on his temples--the huge church was hanging over
+his head crushing him. What terrible pain! He could not move; he
+seemed fastened by his head. His ears were buzzing, his tongue seemed
+paralysed. His eyes could see feebly, as though the light were muddy
+and a reddish haze enveloped all things.
+
+He thought that a face with whiskers, surmounted by the hat of a civil
+guard, bent over him, looking into his eyes. He moved his lips, but
+no one heard a sound. No doubt it was the nightmare of his old
+persecutions returning again.
+
+They looked at him, seeing that he opened his eyes. A gentleman
+dressed in black advanced towards his bed, followed by others who
+carried papers under their arms. He guessed they were speaking to him
+by the movement of their lips, but he could hear nothing. Was he in
+another world? Were all his beliefs false, and after death did another
+life exist the same as the one he had left?
+
+He fell again into darkness and unconsciousness. A long time passed--a
+very long time. Again he opened his eyes, but now the haze was denser,
+it was not red but black.
+
+Through this veil he thought he saw his brother's face, horrified
+and drawn with fear; and the cocked hats of the civil guards, those
+nightmares, surrounding poor Wooden Staff. Afterwards, more misty,
+more uncertain, the face of his gentle companion, Sagrario, looking
+at him with weeping eyes in terrible grief, caressing him with her
+glance, fearless of the black, armed men who surrounded her.
+
+This was his last look, uncertain and clouded, as though seen by
+the light of a flying spark. Afterwards, eternal darkness and
+annihilation.
+
+As his eyes were closing for ever, a voice close to him said:
+
+"We have followed your scent, rascal; you were well hidden, but we
+have discovered you through one of your own. Now we shall see what
+account you can give of the Virgin's jewels, thief!"
+
+But the terrible enemy of God and social order could give no account
+to man.
+
+The following day he was carried out of the prison infirmary on men's
+shoulders to disappear in the common grave.
+
+The earth kept the secret of his death, that frowning Mother who
+watches men's struggles impassively, knowing that all grandeur and
+ambitions, all miseries and follies must rot in her breast, with no
+other object than the fertilisation and renovation of life.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+N.B.--The jewels were stolen from the sacristy of Toledo Cathedral in
+1868.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Shadow of the Cathedral
+by Vicente Blasco Ibañez
+
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+Project Gutenberg's The Shadow of the Cathedral, by Vicente Blasco Ibanez
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Shadow of the Cathedral
+
+Author: Vicente Blasco Ibanez
+
+Release Date: April 15, 2004 [EBook #12041]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SHADOW OF THE CATHEDRAL ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Tim Koeller and PG Distributed
+Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+THE SHADOW OF THE CATHEDRAL
+
+BY
+
+VICENTE BLASCO IBANEZ
+
+
+1919
+
+
+Translated From The Spanish By
+Mrs. W.A. Gillespie
+
+With A Critical Introduction By
+W.D. Howells
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+There are three cathedrals which I think will remain chief of the
+Spanish cathedrals in the remembrance of the traveller, namely the
+Cathedral at Burgos, the Cathedral at Toledo, and the Cathedral at
+Seville; and first of these for reasons hitherto of history and art,
+and now of fiction, will be the Cathedral at Toledo, which the most
+commanding talent among the contemporary Spanish novelists has made
+the protagonist of the romance following. I do not mean that Vincent
+Blasco Ibanez is greater than Perez Galdos, or Armando Palacio Valdes
+or even the Countess Pardo-Bazan; but he belongs to their realistic
+order of imagination, and he is easily the first of living European
+novelists outside of Spain, with the advantage of superior youth,
+freshness of invention and force of characterization. The Russians
+have ceased to be actively the masters, and there is no Frenchman,
+Englishman, or Scandinavian who counts with Ibanez, and of course no
+Italian, American, and, unspeakably, no German.
+
+I scarcely know whether to speak first of this book or the writer of
+it, but as I know less of him than of it I may more quickly dispatch
+that part of my introduction. He was born at Valencia in 1866, of
+Arragonese origin, and of a strictly middle class family. His father
+kept a shop, a dry-goods store in fact, but Ibanez, after fit
+preparation, studied law in the University of Valencia and was
+duly graduated in that science. Apparently he never practiced his
+profession, but became a journalist almost immediately. He was
+instinctively a revolutionist, and was imprisoned in Barcelona, the
+home of revolution, for some political offence, when he was eighteen.
+It does not appear whether he committed his popular offence in the
+Republican newspaper which he established in Valencia; but it is
+certain that he was elected a Republican deputy to the Cortes, where
+he became a leader of his party, while yet evidently of no great
+maturity.
+
+He began almost as soon to write fiction of the naturalistic type, and
+of a Zolaistic coloring which his Spanish critics find rather stronger
+than I have myself seen it. Every young writer forms himself upon some
+older writer; nobody begins master; but Ibanez became master while he
+was yet no doubt practicing a prentice hand; yet I do not feel very
+strongly the Zolaistic influence in his first novel, _La Barraca_,
+or The Cabin, which paints peasant life in the region of Valencia,
+studied at first hand and probably from personal knowledge. It is
+not a very spacious scheme, but in its narrow field it is strictly a
+_novela de costumbres_, or novel of manners, as we used to call the
+kind. Ibanez has in fact never written anything but novels of manners,
+and _La Barraca_ pictures a neighborhood where a stranger takes up a
+waste tract of land and tries to make a home for himself and family.
+This makes enemies of all his neighbors who after an interval of pity
+for the newcomer in the loss of one of his children return to their
+cruelty and render the place impossible to him. It is a tragedy such
+as naturalism alone can stage and give the effect of life. I have read
+few things so touching as this tale of commonest experience which
+seems as true to the suffering and defeat of the newcomers, as to the
+stupid inhumanity of the neighbors who join, under the lead of the
+evillest among them, in driving the strangers away; in fact I know
+nothing parallel to it, certainly nothing in English; perhaps _The
+House with the Green Shutters_ breathes as great an anguish.
+
+At just what interval or remove the novel which gave Ibanez worldwide
+reputation followed this little tale, I cannot say, and it is not
+important that I should try to say. But it is worth while to note here
+that he never flatters the vices or even the swoier virtues of his
+countrymen; and it is much to their honor that they have accepted him
+in the love of his art for the sincerity of his dealing with their
+conditions. In _Sangre y Arena_ his affair is with the cherished
+atrocity which keeps the Spaniards in the era of the gladiator
+shows of Rome. The hero, as the renowned _torrero_ whose career it
+celebrates, from his first boyish longing to be a bull-fighter, to
+his death, weakened by years and wounds, in the arena of Madrid, is
+something absolute in characterization. The whole book in fact is
+absolute in its fidelity to the general fact it deals with, and the
+persons of its powerful drama. Each in his or her place is realized
+with an art which leaves one in no doubt of their lifelikeness, and
+keeps each as vital as the _torrero_ himself. There is little of the
+humor which relieves the pathos of Valdes in the equal fidelity of his
+_Marta y Maria_ or the unsurpassable tragedy of Galdos in his _Dona
+Perfecta_. The _torrero's_ family who have dreaded his boyish ambition
+with the anxiety of good common people, and his devotedly gentle and
+beautiful wife,--even his bullying and then truckling brother-in-law
+who is ashamed of his profession and then proud of him when it has
+filled Spain with his fame,--are made to live in the spacious scene.
+But above all in her lust for him and her contempt for him the unique
+figure of Dona Sol astounds. She rules him as her brother the marquis
+would rule a mistress; even in the abandon of her passion she does not
+admit him to social equality; she will not let him speak to her in
+thee and thou, he must address her as ladyship; she is monstrous
+without ceasing to be a woman of her world, when he dies before her in
+the arena a broken and vanquished man. The _torrero_ is morally better
+than the aristocrat and he is none the less human though a mere
+incident of her wicked life,--her insulted and rejected worshipper,
+who yet deserves his fate.
+
+_Sangre y Arena_ is a book of unexampled force and in that sort must
+be reckoned the greatest novel of the author, who has neglected no
+phase of his varied scene. The _torrero's_ mortal disaster in the
+arena is no more important than the action behind the scenes where the
+gored horses have their dangling entrails sewed up by the primitive
+surgery of the place and are then ridden back into the amphitheatre to
+suffer a second agony. No color of the dreadful picture is spared; the
+whole thing passes as in the reader's presence before his sight and
+his other senses. The book is a masterpiece far in advance of that
+study of the common life which Ibanez calls _La Horda_; dealing with
+the horde of common poor and those accidents of beauty and talent
+as native to them as to the classes called the better. It has the
+attraction of the author's frank handling, and the power of the
+Spanish scene in which the action passes; but it could not hold me to
+the end.
+
+It is only in his latest book that he transcends the Spanish scene and
+peoples the wider range from South America to Paris, and from Paris to
+the invaded provinces of France with characters proper to the times
+and places. _The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse_ has not the rough
+textures and rank dyes of the wholly Spanish stories, but it is the
+strongest story of the great war known to me, and its loss in the
+Parisian figures is made more than good in the novelty and veracity of
+the Argentinos who supply that element of internationality which the
+North American novelists of a generation ago employed to give a fresh
+interest to their work. With the coming of the hero to study art and
+make love in the conventional Paris, and the repatriation of his
+father, a cattle millionaire of French birth from the pampas, with his
+wife and daughters, Ibanez achieves effects beyond the art of Henry
+James, below whom he nevertheless falls so far in subtlety and beauty.
+
+The book has moments of the pathos so rich in the work of Galdos and
+Valdes, and especially of Emilia Pardo-Bazan in her _Morrina_ or _Home
+Sickness_, the story of a peasant girl in Barcelona, but the grief of
+the Argentine family for the death of the son and brother in battle
+with the Germans, has the appeal of anguish beyond any moment in _La
+Catedral_. I do not know just the order of this last-mentioned novel
+among the stories of Ibanez, but it has a quality of imagination, of
+poetic feeling which surpasses the invention of any other that I have
+read, and makes me think it came before _Sangre y Arena_, and possibly
+before _La Horda_. I cannot recall any other novel of the author which
+is quite so psychological as this. It is in fact a sort of biography,
+a personal study, of the mighty fane at Toledo, as if the edifice were
+of human quality and could have its life expressed in human terms.
+There is nothing forced in the poetic conception, or mechanical in
+the execution. The Cathedral is not only a single life, it is a
+neighborhood, a city, a world in itself; and its complex character
+appears in the nature of the different souls which collectively
+animate it. The first of these is the sick and beaten native of it who
+comes back to the world which he has never loved or trusted, but in
+which he was born and reared. As a son of its faith, Gabriel Luna was
+to have been a priest; but before he became a minister of its faith,
+it meant almost the same that he should become a Carlist soldier, and
+fight on for that cause till it was hopeless. In his French captivity
+he loses the faith which was one with the Carlist cause, and in
+England he reads Darwin and becomes an evolutionist of the ardor which
+the evolutionists have now lost. He wanders over Europe with the
+English girl whom he worships with an intellectual rather than
+passionate ardor, and after her death he ends at Barcelona in time to
+share one of the habitual revolutions of the province and to spend
+several years in one of its prisons. When he comes out it is into a
+world which he is doomed to leave; he is sick to death and in hopeless
+poverty; he has lost the courage of his revolutionary faith if not his
+fealty to it; all that he asks of the world is leave to creep out of
+it and somewhere die in peace. He thinks of an elder brother who like
+himself was born in the precincts of the Cathedral where generations
+of their family have lived and died, and his brother does not deny
+him. In fact the kind, dull gardener welcomes him to a share of his
+poverty, and Gabriel begins dying where he began living. The kindness
+between the brothers is as simple in the broken adventurer whose wide
+world has failed him as in the aging peasant, pent from his birth in
+the Cathedral close, with no knowledge of anything beyond it. All
+their kindred who serve in their several sort the stepmother church,
+down to the gardener's son whose office is to keep dogs out of the
+Cathedral and has the title of _perrero_, are good to the returning
+exile. They do not well understand what and where he has been; the
+tradition of his gifted youth when he was dedicated to the church and
+forsook her service at the altar for her service in the field, remains
+unquestioned, and he is safe in the refuge of his family who can offer
+mainly their insignificance for his protection. The logic of the fact
+is perfect, and Gabriel's emergence from the quiet of his retreat
+inevitably follows from the nature of the agitator as the logic of
+his own past and has the approval at least of the _perrero_ and the
+allegiance of the rest. What is very important in the affair is that
+most of the inhabitants of this Cathedral-world, rich and poor, good,
+bad, and indifferent, mean and generous, are few of them wicked
+people, as wickedness is commonly understood; they all have their
+habitual or their occasional moments of good will.
+
+The refugee is tired of his past but he does not deny his faith in
+humanity; his doctrine only postpones to a time secularly remote the
+redemption of humanity from its secular suffering. He begins at once
+to do good; he rescues his kind elder brother from the repudiation of
+the daughter whom he has cast off because her seduction has condemned
+her to a life of shame; he wins back the poor prostitute to her home,
+and forces her father to tolerate her in it.
+
+Most of the Cathedral folk are of course miserably poor, but willing
+to be better than they are if they can keep from starving; the fierce
+and prepotent Cardinal who is over them all, has moments of the common
+good will, when he forgives all his enemies except the recalcitrant
+canons. He likes to escape from these, and talk with the elderly
+widow of the gardener whom he has known from his boyhood, and to pity
+himself in her presence and smoke himself free from, his rancor and
+trouble. He is such a prelate as we know historically in enough
+instances; but he is pathetic in that simplicity which survives in him
+and almost makes good the loss of innocence in Latin souls. He keeps
+with him the young girl who is the daughter of his youth, and whom
+it cuts him to the soul to have those opprobrious canons imagine his
+mistress. He is one out of the many figures that affirm their veracity
+in the strange world where they have their being; and he is only the
+more vivid as the head of a hierarchy which he rules rather violently
+though never ignobly.
+
+But the populace, the underpaid domestics and laborers of the strange
+ecclesiastical world in their wretched over-worked lives and hopeless
+deaths are what the author presents most vividly. There is the death
+of the cobbler's baby which starves at the starving mother's breast
+which the author makes us witness in its insupportable pathos, but his
+art is not chiefly shown in such extremes: his affair includes the
+whole tragical drama of the place, both its beauty and its squalor of
+fact, but he keeps central the character of the refugee, Gabriel Luna,
+in the allegiance to his past which he cannot throw off. When he
+begins to teach the simple denizens of the Cathedral, some of them
+hear him gladly, and some indifferently, and some unwillingly, but
+none intelligently. He fails with them in that doctrine of patience
+which was his failure, as an agitator, with the proletariat wherever
+he has been; they could not wait through geological epochs for the
+reign of mercy and justice which he could not reasonably promise the
+over-worked and underfed multitude to-morrow or the day after. His
+brother, who could not accept his teachings, warns him that the
+people of the Cathedral will not understand him and cannot accept
+his scientific gospel, and for a while he desists. In fact he takes
+service in the ceremonial of the Cathedral; he even plays a mechanical
+part in the procession of Corpus Christi, and finally he becomes one
+of the night-watchmen who guard the temple from the burglaries always
+threatening its treasures.
+
+The story is quite without the love-interest which is the prime
+attraction of our mostly silly fiction. Gabriel's association with the
+English girl who wanders over Europe with him is scarcely passionate
+if it is not altogether platonic; his affection for the poor girl for
+whom he has won her father's tolerance if not forgiveness becomes
+a tender affection, but not possibly more; and there is as little
+dramatic incident as love interest in the book. The extraordinary
+power of it lies in its fealty to the truth and its insight into
+human nature. The reader of course perceives that it is intensely
+anti-ecclesiastical, but he could make no greater mistake than to
+imagine it in any wise Protestant. The author shares this hate or
+slight of ecclesiasticism with all the Spanish novelists, so far as I
+know them; most notably with Perez Galdos in _Dona Perfecta_ and _Lean
+Rich_, with Pardo-Bazan in several of her stories, with Palacio
+Valdes in the less measure of _Marta y Maria_, and _La Hermana de San
+Sulpicio_ and even with the romanticist Valera in _Pepita Jimenez_.
+But it may be said that while Ibanez does not go any farther than
+Galdos, for instance, he is yet more intensively agnostic. He is the
+standard bearer of the scientific revolt in the terms of fiction which
+spares us no hope of relief in the religious notion of human life here
+or hereafter that the Hebraic or Christian theology has divined.
+
+It is right to say this plainly, but the reader who can suffer it from
+the author will find his book one of the fullest and richest in modern
+fiction, worthy to rank with the greatest Russian work and beyond
+anything yet done in English. It has not the topographical range of
+Tolstoy's _War and Peace_, or _Resurrection_; but in its climax it
+is as logically and ruthlessly tragical as anything that the Spanish
+spirit has yet imagined.
+
+Whoever can hold on to the end of it will find his reward in the full
+enjoyment of that "noble terror" which high tragedy alone can
+give. Nothing that happens in the solemn story--in which something
+significant is almost always happening--is of the supreme effect of
+the socialist agitator's death at the hands of the disciples whom he
+has taught to expect mercy and justice on earth, but forbidden to
+expect it within the reach of the longest life of any man or race of
+men. His rebellious followers come at night into the Cathedral where
+Gabriel is watching, to rob an especially rich Madonna, whom he has
+taught them to regard as a senseless and wasteful idol, and they
+will not hear him when he pleads with them against the theft. The
+inevitable irony of the event is awful, but it is not cruel, rather it
+is the supreme touch of that pathos which seems the crowning motive of
+the book.
+
+W.D. HOWELLS.
+
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+THE SHADOW OF THE CATHEDRAL
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+The dawn was just rising when Gabriel Luna arrived in front of the
+Cathedral, but in the narrow street of Toledo it was still night. The
+silvery morning light that had scarcely begun to touch the eaves and
+roofs, spread out more freely in the little Piazza del Ayuntamiento,
+bringing out of the shadows the ugly front of the Archbishop's Palace,
+and the towers of the municipal buildings capped with black slate, a
+sombre erection of the time of Charles V.
+
+Gabriel walked for some time up and down the deserted square, wrapping
+himself up to his eyes in the muffler of his cloak, while at intervals
+his hollow cough shook him painfully. Without daring to stop walking
+on account of the bitter cold, he looked at the great doorway called
+"del Perdon," the only part of the church able to present a really
+imposing aspect. He recalled other famous cathedrals, isolated,
+occupying commanding situations, showing themselves freely in the full
+pride of their beauty, and he compared them with this Cathedral
+of Toledo, the mother-church of Spain, smothered by the swarm of
+poverty-stricken buildings that surrounded it, clinging closely to its
+walls, permitting it to display none of its exterior beauties, beyond
+what could be seen from the narrow streets that closed it in on every
+side. Gabriel, who was acquainted with its interior magnificence,
+thought of the deceptive oriental houses, outwardly squalid and
+miserable, but inwardly rich in alabasters and traceries. Jews and
+Moors had not lived in Toledo for centuries in vain, their aversion to
+outward show seemed to have influenced the building of the Cathedral,
+now suffocated by the miserable hovels, pushed and piled up against
+it, as though seeking its protection.
+
+The little Piazza del Ayuntamiento was the only open space that
+allowed the Christian monument to display any of its grandeur; under
+this little patch of open sky the early morning light showed the three
+immense Gothic arches of its principal front, the hugely massive bell
+tower, with its salient angles, ornamented by the cap of the Alcuzon,
+a sort of black tiara, with three crowns, almost lost in the grey mist
+of the wintry dawn.
+
+Gabriel looked affectionately at the closed and silent fane, where his
+family lived, and where he himself had spent the happiest days of his
+life. How many years had passed since he had last seen it! And now he
+waited anxiously for the opening of its doorways.
+
+He had arrived in Toledo by train the previous night from Madrid.
+Before shutting himself up in his miserable little room in the Posada
+del Sangre (the ancient Messon del Sevillano, inhabited by Cervantes)
+he had felt a feverish desire to revisit the Cathedral, and had spent
+nearly an hour walking round it, listening to the barking of the
+Cathedral watch-dog, who growled suspiciously, hearing the sound of
+footsteps in the surrounding streets. He had been unable to sleep; the
+fact of returning to his native town after so many years of misery and
+adventures had taken from him all desire to rest, and, while it was
+still night, he again stole out to await near the Cathedral the moment
+that it should be opened.
+
+To while away the time he paced up and down the front, admiring again
+the beauties of the porch, and noting its defects aloud, as though he
+wished to call the stone benches of the Piazza and its wretched little
+trees as witnesses to his criticisms.
+
+An iron grating surmounted by urns of the seventeenth century ran in
+front of the porch, enclosing a wide, flagged space, where in former
+times the sumptuous processions of the Chapter had assembled, and
+where the multitude could admire the grotesque giants on high days and
+festivals.
+
+The first storey of the facade was broken in the centre by the great
+Puerta del Perdon, an enormous and very deeply-recessed Gothic arch,
+which narrowed as it receded by the gradations of its mouldings,
+adorned by statues of apostles, under open-worked canopies, and by
+shields emblazoned with lions and castles. On the pillar dividing the
+doorway stood Jesus in kingly crown and mantle, thin and drawn out,
+with the look of emaciation and misery that the imagination of
+the Middle Ages conceived necessary for the expression of Divine
+sublimity. In the tympanum a relievo represented the Virgin surrounded
+by angels, robed in the habit of St. Ildefonso, a pious legend
+repeated in various parts of the building as though it were one of its
+chief glories.
+
+On one side was the doorway called "de la Torre,"[1] on the other side
+that called "de los Escribanos,"[2] for by it entered in former days
+the guardians of public religion to take the oath to fulfil the duties
+of their office. Both were enriched with stone statues on the jambs,
+and by wreaths of little figures, foliage, and emblems that unrolled
+themselves among the mouldings till they met at the summit of the
+arch.
+
+[Footnote 1: Of the Tower.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Of the Scribes.]
+
+Above these three doorways with their exuberant Gothic rose the second
+storey of Greco-Romano and almost modern construction, causing Gabriel
+the same annoyance as would a discordant trumpet interrupting a
+symphony. Jesus and the twelve apostles, all life size, seated at the
+table, each under his own canopied niche, could be seen above the
+central porch, shut in by the two tower-like buttresses which divided
+the front into three parts. Beyond, two rows of arcades of inferior
+design, belonging to the Italian palace, extended as far as those
+under which Gabriel had so often played as a child when living in the
+house of the bell-ringer.
+
+The riches of the Church, thought Luna, were a misfortune for art; in
+a poorer church the uniformity of the ancient front would have been
+preserved. But, then, the Archbishop of Toledo had eleven millions of
+yearly revenue, and the Chapter as many more; they did not know what
+to do with their money, so started works and made reconstructions,
+and the decadent art produced monstrosities like that one of the Last
+Supper.
+
+Above, again, rose the third storey, two great arches that lighted the
+large rose of the central nave. The whole was crowned by a balustrade
+of open-worked stone following the sinuosities of the frontage, between
+the two salient masses that guarded it, the tower and the Musarabe
+chapel.
+
+Gabriel ceased his contemplation, seeing that he was no longer alone
+in front of the church. It was nearly daylight, and several women with
+bowed heads, their mantillas falling over their eyes, were passing in
+front of the iron grating. The crutches of a lame man rang out on the
+fine tiles of the pavement, and, out beyond the tower, under the
+great arch of communication between the archbishop's palace and the
+Cathedral, the beggars were gathering in order to take up their
+accustomed positions at the cloister door. The faithful and "God's
+creatures" [1] knew one another; every morning they were the first
+occupants of the church, and this daily meeting had established a kind
+of fraternity, and with much coughing and hoarseness they all lamented
+the cold of the morning and the lateness of the bell-ringer in coming
+down to open the doors.
+
+[Footnote 1: _Pordioseres_.]
+
+A door opened beyond the archbishop's arch, that of the tower and
+the staircase leading to the dwellings in the upper cloister. A man
+crossed the street rattling a huge bunch of keys, and, followed by the
+usual morning assemblage, he proceeded to open the door of the lower
+cloister, narrow and pointed as an arrow-head. Gabriel recognised him,
+it was Mariano, the bell-ringer. To avoid being noticed he remained
+motionless in the _Piazza_, allowing those to pass first through
+the Puerta del Mollete,[1] who seemed so anxious to hurry into the
+Metropolitan church, lest their usual places should be stolen from
+them and occupied by others.
+
+[Footnote 1: Door of the rolls, or loaves.]
+
+At last he decided to follow them, and slowly descended the same steps
+leading down into the cloister, for the Cathedral, being built in a
+hollow, is much lower than the adjacent streets.
+
+Everything appeared the same. There on the walls were the great
+frescoes of Bayan y Maella, representing the works and great deeds
+of Saint Eulogio, his preaching in the land of the Moors, and the
+cruelties of the infidels, who, with big turbans and enormous
+whiskers, were beating the saint. In the interior of the Mollete
+doorway was represented the horrible martyrdom of the Child de la
+Guardia; that legend born at the same time in so many Catholic towns
+during the heat of anti-Semitic hatred, the sacrifice of the Christian
+child, stolen from his home by Jews of grim countenance, who crucified
+him in order to tear out his heart and drink his blood.
+
+The damp was rapidly effacing this romantic fresco, that filled the
+sides of the archway like the frontispiece of a book, causing it to
+scale off; but Gabriel could still see the horrible face of the judge
+standing at the foot of the cross, and the ferocious gesture of the
+man, who with his knife in his mouth, was bending forward to tear out
+the heart of the little martyr; theatrical figures, but they had often
+disturbed his childish dreams.
+
+The garden in the midst of the cloister showed even in midwinter its
+southern vegetation of tall laurels and cypresses, stretching their
+branches through the grating of the arches that, five on each side,
+surrounded the square, and rising to the capitals of the pillars.
+Gabriel looked a long time at the garden, which was higher than the
+cloister; his face was on a level with the ground on which his father
+had laboured so many years ago; at last he saw again that charming
+corner of verdure--the Jews' market converted into a garden by the
+canons centuries before. The remembrance of it had followed him
+everywhere--in the Bois de Boulogne, in Hyde Park; for him the garden
+of the Toledan Cathedral was the most beautiful of all gardens, for it
+was the first he had even known in his life.
+
+The beggars seated on the doorsteps watched him curiously, without
+daring to stretch out their hands; they could not tell if this early
+morning visitor with the worn-out cloak, the shabby hat, and the old
+boots, was simply an inquisitive traveller, or whether he was one of
+their own order, choosing a position about the Cathedral from whence
+to beg alms.
+
+Annoyed by this curiosity, Luna walked down the cloister, passing
+by the two doors that opened into the church. The one called del
+Presentacion is a lovely example of Plateresque art, chiselled like a
+jewel, and adorned with fanciful and happy trifles. Going on further,
+he came to the back of the staircase by which the archbishops
+descended from their palace to the church; a wall covered with Gothic
+interlacings, and large escutcheons, and almost on the level of the
+ground was the famous "stone of light," a thin slice of marble as
+clear as glass, which gave light to the staircase, and was the
+admiration of all the countryfolk who came to visit the cloister. Then
+came the door of Santa Catalina, black and gold, with richly-carved
+polychrome foliage, mixed with lions and castles, and on the jambs two
+statues of prophets.
+
+Gabriel went on a few steps further as he saw that the wicket of the
+doorway was being opened from inside. It was the bell-ringer going
+his rounds and opening all the doors; first of all a dog came out,
+stretching his neck as though he was going to bark with hunger, then
+two men with their caps over their eyes, wrapped in brown cloaks; the
+bell-ringer held up the curtain to let them pass out.
+
+"Well, good-day, Mariano," said one of them by way of farewell.
+
+"Good-night to the caretakers of God.... May you sleep well."
+
+Gabriel recognised the nocturnal guardians of the Cathedral; locked
+into the church since the previous night, they were now going to their
+homes to sleep.
+
+The dog trotted off in the direction of the seminary to get his
+breakfast off the scraps left by the students, free till such time as
+the guardians came to look for him, to lock themselves in the church
+once more.
+
+Luna walked down the steps of the doorway into the Cathedral. His feet
+had scarcely touched the pavement before he felt on his face the cold
+touch of the clammy air, like an underground vault. In the church
+it was still dark, but above the stained glass of the hundreds of
+different-sized windows glowed in the early dawn, looking like magic
+flowers opening with the first splendours of day. Below, among the
+enormous pillars that looked like a forest of stone, all was darkness,
+broken here and there by the uncertain red spots of the lamps burning
+in the different chapels, wavering in the shadows. The bats flew in
+and out round the columns, wishing to prolong their possession of the
+fane, till the first rays of the sun shone through the windows; they
+fluttered over the heads of the devotees, who, kneeling before the
+altars, were praying loudly, as pleased to be in the Cathedral at that
+early hour as though it were their own house. Others chattered with
+the acolytes and other servants of the church, who were coming in by
+the different doors, sleepy and stretching themselves like workmen
+coming to their work. In the twilight, figures in black cloaks glided
+by on their way to the sacristy, stopping to make genuflections before
+each image; and in the distance, invisible in the darkness, you
+could still divine the presence of the bell-ringer, like a restless
+hobgoblin, by the rattle of his bunch of keys and the creaking of the
+doors he opened on his round.
+
+The Cathedral was awake. Echo repeated the banging of the doors from
+nave to nave; a large broom, making a saw-like noise, began to sweep
+in front of the sacristy; the church vibrated under the blows of
+certain acolytes engaged in removing the dust from the famous carved
+stalls in the choir; it seemed as though the Cathedral had awoke
+with its nerves irritated, and that the slightest touch produced
+complaints.
+
+The men's footsteps resounded with a tremendous echo, as though the
+tombs of all the kings, archbishops and warriors hidden under the
+tiled floor were being disturbed.
+
+The cold inside the church was even more intense than that outside;
+this, together with the damp of its soil traversed by underground
+water drains, and the leakage of subterranean and hidden tanks
+that stained the pavement, made the poor canons in the choir cough
+horribly, "shortening their lives," as they complainingly said.
+
+The morning light began to spread through the naves, bringing out of
+the darkness the spotless whiteness of the Toledan Cathedral, the
+purity of its stone making it the lightest and most beautiful of
+temples. One could now see all the elegant and daring beauty of the
+eighty-eight pillars soaring audaciously into space, white as frozen
+snow, and the delicate ribs interlacing to carry the vaulting. In the
+upper storey the sun shone through the large stained-glass windows,
+making them look like fairy gardens.
+
+Gabriel seated himself on the base of one of the pilasters between two
+columns; but he was soon obliged to rise and move on, the dampness
+of the stone, and the vault-like cold throughout the whole building
+penetrated to his very bones.
+
+He strolled through the naves, attracting the attention of the
+devotees, who stopped in their prayers to watch him. A stranger at
+that early hour, which belonged specially to the familiars of the
+Cathedral, excited their curiosity.
+
+The bell-ringer passed him several times, following him with uneasy
+glance, as though this unknown man, of poverty-stricken aspect, who
+wandered aimlessly about at an hour when the treasures of the church
+were, as a rule, not so strictly watched, inspired him with little
+confidence.
+
+Another man met him near the high altar. Luna recognised him also: it
+was Eusebio, the sacristan of the chapel of the Sagrario, "Azul de la
+Virgen,"[1] as he was called by the Cathedral staff, on account of the
+celestial colour of the cloak he wore on festival days.
+
+[Footnote 1: Virgin's blue.]
+
+Six years had passed since Gabriel had last seen him, but he had not
+forgotten his greasy carcase, his surly face with its narrow, wrinkled
+forehead fringed with bristly hair, his bull neck that scarcely
+allowed him to breathe, and that made every breath like the blast of a
+bellows. All the servants of the Cathedral envied him his post, which
+was the most lucrative of all, to say nothing of the favour he enjoyed
+with the archbishop and the canons.
+
+"Virgin's blue" considered the Cathedral as his own peculiar property,
+and he often came very near turning out those who inspired him with
+any antipathy.
+
+He fixed his bold eyes on the vagabond he saw walking about the
+church, making an effort to raise his overhanging brows. Where had he
+seen this strange fellow before? Gabriel noted the effort he made
+to recall his memory, and turned his back to examine with pretended
+interest a coloured panel hanging on a pillar.
+
+Flying from the curiosity excited by his presence in the fane, he went
+out into the cloister; there he felt more at his ease, quite alone.
+The beggars were chattering, seated on the doorsteps of the Mollete;
+many of the clergy passed through them, entering the church hurriedly
+by the door of the Presentacion; the beggars saluted them all by name,
+but without stretching out their hands. They knew them, they all
+belonged to the "household," and among friends one does not beg. They
+were there to fall on the strangers, and they waited patiently for the
+coming of the English; for, surely, all the strangers who came from
+Madrid by the early morning train could only be from England.
+
+Gabriel waited near the door, knowing that those coming from the
+cloister must enter by it. He crossed the archbishop's arch, and,
+following the open staircase of the palace, descended into the street,
+re-entering the church by the Mollete door. Luna, who knew all the
+history of the Cathedral, remembered the origin of its name. At first
+it was called "of justice," because under it the Vicar-General of
+the Archbishopric gave audience. Later it was called "del Mollete,"
+because every day after high mass the acolytes and vergers assembled
+there for the blessing of the half-pound loaves, or rolls of bread
+distributed to the poor. Six hundred bushels of wheat--as Luna
+remembered--were distributed yearly in this alms, but this was in the
+days when the yearly revenues of the Cathedral were more than eleven
+millions.
+
+Gabriel felt annoyed by the curious glances of the clergy, and of the
+devout entering the church. They were people accustomed to seeing each
+other daily at the same hour, and they felt their curiosity excited by
+seeing a stranger breaking in on the monotony of their lives.
+
+He drew back to the further end of the cloister, then some words from
+the beggars made him retrace his steps.
+
+"Ah! here comes old 'Vara de palo.'"[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Wooden staff.]
+
+"Good-day, Senor Esteban!"
+
+A small man dressed in black, and shaved like a cleric, came down the
+steps.
+
+"Esteban! Esteban!" cried Luna, placing himself between him and the
+door of the Presentacion.
+
+"Wooden Staff" looked at him with his clear eyes like amber, the quiet
+eyes of a man used to spending long hours in the Cathedral, with never
+a rebellious thought arising to disturb his immovable beatitude. He
+stood doubting for some time, as though he could scarcely credit the
+remote resemblance in this thin, pale face, to another that lived in
+his memory, but at last, with a pained surprise, he became convinced
+of its identity.
+
+"Gabriel! my brother! is it really you?"
+
+And the rigidly set face of the Cathedral servant, which seemed to
+have acquired the immobility of its pillars and statues, relaxed with
+an affectionate smile.
+
+"When did you come? Where have you been? What is your life? Why have
+you come?"
+
+"Wooden Staff" expressed his surprise by incessant questions, never
+giving his brother time to answer.
+
+Gabriel at length explained, that he had arrived the previous night,
+and that he had waited outside the church since early dawn in the
+hopes of seeing his brother.
+
+"I have now come from Madrid, but before that I was in many places:
+in England, in France, in Belgium, who knows where besides. I have
+wandered from one town to another, always struggling against hunger
+and the cruelty of men. My footsteps have been dogged by poverty and
+the police. When I rest a little, worn out by this Wandering Jew's
+existence, Justice, inspired by fear, orders me to move on, and so
+once again I begin my march. I am a man to be feared, Esteban, even as
+you now see me, with my body ruined before old age, and the certainty
+before me of a speedy death. Again, yesterday in Madrid, they told me
+I should be sent once more to prison if I stayed there any longer, and
+so in the evening I took the train. Where shall I go? The world is
+wide; but for me and other rebels it is very small, and narrows till
+it does not leave a hand's breadth of ground for our feet. In all the
+world nothing was left me but you, and this peaceful silent corner
+where you live so happily, and so, I came to seek you. If you turn me
+out, nothing will be left me but to die in prison, or in a hospital,
+if indeed they would take me in when they know my name."
+
+And Gabriel, spent with his words, coughed painfully, a hollow
+cavernous cough that seemed to tear his chest. He expressed himself
+vehemently, moving his arms freely, with the gestures of a man used to
+speaking in public, burning with the zeal of his cause.
+
+"Ah! brother, brother!" said Esteban, with an accent of mild reproof,
+"what has it profited you reading so many books and newspapers? What
+is the use of trying to disturb and upset things that are all right;
+and if they are all wrong, is there no other means of righting them
+possible? If you had followed your own path quietly, you would have
+been a beneficiary of the Cathedral, and, who knows, you might have
+had a seat in the choir among the canons, for the honour and profit of
+the family! But you were always wrong-headed, although you were the
+cleverest of us all. Cursed talent that leads to such misery! What
+I have suffered, brother, trying to hear about your affairs! What
+bitterness have I not gone through since you last came here! I thought
+you were contented and happy in the printing office in Barcelona,
+receiving a salary that was a fortune compared to what we earn here.
+I was disturbed at reading your name so often in the papers, at those
+meetings, where the division of everything is advocated, the death of
+religion and of the family, and I do not know what follies besides.
+The 'companion' Luna said this, or the 'companion' Luna has done the
+other, and I tried to hide from the people of the 'household' that
+this 'companion' could be you, guessing that such madness must turn
+out ill--furiously ill--and after--after came the affairs of the
+bombs."
+
+"I had nothing to do with that," said Gabriel sadly. "I am only a
+theorist; I condemned the action as premature and inefficacious."
+
+"I know it, Gabriel. I always thought you innocent. You so good, so
+gentle, who since you were a little one always astonished us by your
+kindness; you who seemed like a saint, as our poor mother used to say!
+You kill, and so treacherously, by means of such infernal artifices!
+Holy Jesus!"
+
+And the "Wooden Staff" was silent, overcome by the recollection of
+those attempts that had overwhelmed his brother.
+
+"But what is certain is," he continued after a little, "that you fell
+into the trap spread by the Government after those affairs. What I
+suffered for a while! Now and again I heard firing in the castle ditch
+beyond there, and I searched anxiously in the papers for the names
+of those executed, always fearing to find yours. There were rumours
+current of horrible tortures inflicted on those taken to make them
+confess the truth, and I thought of you, so frail, so delicate, and
+I feared that some day you would be found dead in a dungeon. And I
+suffered even more from my anxiety that no one here should know of
+your situation; you a Luna! a son of Senor Esteban, the old gardener
+of the Primate, with whom all the canons and even the archbishop
+talked. You mixed up with those infernal scoundrels who wish to
+destroy the world. For this reason when Eusebio the 'Virgin's Blue,'
+asked me if you could possibly be the Luna of whom he read in the
+papers, I replied that my brother was in America, that I heard from
+him now and again, but that he was occupied with a big business--you
+see what pain! Fearing from one moment to another that they would
+kill you, unable to speak, unable to complain, fearful of telling
+my distress even to my family. How often have I prayed in there!
+Accustomed as we of the 'household' are to associate daily with
+God and the saints, we may be a little hard and narrow-minded, but
+misfortune softens the heart, and I addressed myself to Her who can do
+everything, to our patroness the Virgin of the Sagrario, begging her
+to remember you, who used to kneel at her shrine as a little child
+when you were preparing to enter the seminary."
+
+Gabriel smiled gently as though admiring the simplicity of his
+brother.
+
+"Do not laugh, I pray you--your smile wounds me. The Divine Lady did
+all she could for you. Months afterwards I learnt that you and others
+had been put on board ship with orders never to return to Spain, and,
+up to the present time, never a letter or a scrap of news, good or
+ill. I thought you had died, Gabriel, in those distant lands, and more
+than once I have prayed for your poor soul, that I am sure wanted it."
+
+The "companion" showed in his eyes his gratitude for these words.
+
+"Thanks, Esteban. I admire your faith, but I did not come out of that
+dark adventure as well as you imagine. It would have been far better
+to have died. The aureole of a martyr is worth more than to enter a
+dungeon a man and come out of it a limp rag. I am very ill, Esteban,
+my sentence is irrevocable. I have no stomach left, my lungs are gone,
+and this body that you see is like a dislocated machine that can
+hardly move, creaking in every joint, as though all the bits intended
+to fall apart. The Virgin who saved me at your recommendation might
+really have interceded a little more in my favour, softening my
+jailors. Those wretches think to save the world by giving free rein
+to those wild beast instincts that slumber in us all, relics of a
+far-away past. Since then, at liberty, life has been more painful than
+death. On my return to Spain, pressed by poverty and persecution, my
+life has been a hell. I dare stop in no place where men congregate;
+they hunt me like dogs, forcing me to live out of the towns, driving
+me to the mountains, into the deserts, where no human beings live. It
+appears I am still a man to be feared, more to be feared than those
+desperadoes who throw bombs, because I can speak, because I carry in
+me an irresistible strength which forces me to preach the Truth if
+I find myself in the presence of miserable and trodden-down
+wretches--but all this is coming to an end. You may be easy, brother,
+I am a dead man; my mission is drawing to a close, but others will
+come after me, and again others. The furrow is open and the seed is in
+its bowels--'GERMINAL!'[1] as a friend of my exile shouted as he saw
+the last rays of the setting sun from the scaffold of the gibbet. I am
+dying, and I think I have the right to rest for a few months. I wish
+to enjoy for the first time in my life the sweets of silence, of
+absolute quiet, of incognito; to be no one, for no one to know me; to
+inspire neither sympathy nor fear. I should wish to be as a statue
+on the doorway, as a pillar in the Cathedral, immovable, over whose
+surface centuries have glided without leaving the slightest trace or
+emotion. To wait for death as a body that eats or breathes, but cannot
+think or suffer, nor feel enthusiasm; this to me would be happiness,
+brother. I do not know where to go; men are waiting for me out beyond
+these doors to drive me on again. Will you let me stay with you?"
+
+[Footnote 1: "It will sprout."]
+
+For all answer the "Wooden Staff" laid his hand affectionately on
+Gabriel's arm.
+
+"Let us come upstairs, madman--you shall not die, I will nurse you;
+what you want is care and quiet. We will cure that hot head, which
+seems like that of Don Quixote. Do you remember when you were a child
+reading us his history in the long evenings? Go along, dreamer, what
+does it signify to you if the world is better or worse regulated?
+As we found it, so it has always been. What does signify is that we
+should live like Christians, with the certainty that the other life
+will be a better one, as it will be the work of God and not of man. Go
+up--let us go up."
+
+And taking hold of the vagabond affectionately, they passed out of
+the cloister through the beggars, who had followed the interview with
+curious eyes, without, however, being able to hear a single word. They
+crossed the street and entered the staircase of the tower. The steps
+were of red brick, worn and broken; the whitewashed walls were covered
+on all sides with grotesque drawings and various inscriptions,
+scrawled by those who had ascended the tower, attracted by the fame of
+the big bell.
+
+Gabriel went up slowly, gasping, and stopping at every step.
+
+"I am ill, Esteban, very ill; these bellows let out the wind in every
+part."
+
+Then, as though repenting his forgetfulness, he suddenly asked:
+
+"And Pepa, your wife? I hope she is all right."
+
+The brows of the Cathedral servant contracted, and his eyes became
+bright as though full of tears.
+
+"She died," he said with laconic sadness.
+
+Gabriel stopped suddenly, clinging to the handrail, struck with
+surprise; then, after a short silence, he went on, wishing to console
+his brother.
+
+"But, Sagrario, my niece, she must have grown a beauty. The last time
+I saw her she looked like a queen, with her crown of auburn hair and
+her smiling face, with its golden bloom, like a ripe apricot. Did she
+marry the cadet, or is she still with you?"
+
+The "Wooden Staff" appeared even more sad, and he looked grimly at his
+brother.
+
+"She also died," he said drily.
+
+"Sagrario also dead!" exclaimed Gabriel astounded.
+
+"She is dead to me, which is the same thing. Brother, by all you love
+best in the world, do not speak to me of her."
+
+Gabriel understood that he had opened some deep wound by his
+inquiries, and so said no more, beginning once more his ascent. During
+his absence a terrible event had happened in his brother's life--one
+of those events that break up a family and separate for ever those
+that survive.
+
+They crossed the gallery covered by the archbishop's archway and
+entered the upper cloister called "the Claverias": four arcades
+of equal length to those of the lower cloister, but quite bare of
+decoration, and with a poverty-stricken aspect. The pavement was
+chipped and broken, the four sides had a balustrade running round
+between the flat pillars that supported the old beams of the roof. It
+had been a provisional work three hundred years ago, and had always
+remained in the same state. All along the whitewashed walls, the doors
+and windows belonging to the "habitacions" of the Cathedral servants
+opened without order or symmetry. These were transmitted with the
+office from father to son. The cloister, with its low arcade, looked
+like a street having houses on one side only; opposite was the flat
+colonnade with its balustrade, against which the pointed branches of
+the cypresses in the garden rested. Above the roof of the cloister
+could be seen the windows of another row of "habitacions," for nearly
+all the dwellings in the Claverias had two stories.
+
+It was the population of a whole town that lived above the Cathedral,
+on a level with its roofs; and when night fell, and the staircase of
+the tower was locked, it remained quite isolated from the city. This
+semi-ecclesiastical tribe was born and died in the very heart of
+Toledo without ever going down into the streets, clinging with
+traditional instinct to the carved mountain of stone, whose arches
+served it as a refuge. They lived saturated with the scent of incense,
+breathing the peculiar smell of mould and old iron belonging to
+ancient buildings, and with no more horizon than the arches of the
+bell tower, whose height soared into the small patch of blue sky
+visible from the cloister.
+
+The "companion" Luna thought he was returning with one step to the
+days of his childhood. Little children like the Gabriel of former days
+were playing about the four galleries, and sitting in that part of the
+cloister bathed by the first rays of the sun. Women, who reminded
+of his mother, were shaking the bedclothes out over the garden, or
+sweeping the red bricks opposite their dwellings; everything seemed
+the same. Time had left it quite alone, evidently thinking there was
+nothing there that he could possibly age. The "companion" could now
+see two sketches of lay brothers that he had drawn with charcoal when
+he was eight years old; had it not been for the children one might
+have thought that life had been suspended in that corner of the
+Cathedral, as though this aerial population could neither be born nor
+die.
+
+The "Wooden Staff," frowning and gloomy since the last words were
+spoken, tried to give some explanation to his brother.
+
+"I live in our same old house. They left it to me out of respect to
+the memory of my father. I am grateful to the clergy of the Chapter,
+taking into consideration that I am nothing but a sad old 'Wooden
+Staff.' Since my misfortune happened I have had an old woman to keep
+house, and Don Luis, the Chapel-master, lives with me. You will come
+to know him, a young priest of great talent, but quite hidden here:
+one of God's souls, whom they think crazy in the Cathedral, but who
+lives like an angel."
+
+They entered into the house of the Lunas, which was one of the best in
+the Claverias. By the door two rows of flower vases in the shape of
+a clock-case fastened to the walls were filled with hanging plants;
+inside, in the sitting room, Gabriel found everything the same as
+during his father's lifetime. The white walls that with years had
+become like ivory, were still decorated with the old engravings of
+saints, the chairs of mahogany, bright with constant rubbing, looked
+like new, in spite of their curves, which showed them to belong to
+a previous century, and their seats almost ready to drop through.
+Through a half-open door he could see into the kitchen, where his
+brother had gone to give some orders to a timid-looking old woman. In
+one corner of the room, half hidden, was a sewing machine. Luna had
+seen his niece working at it the last time he came to the Cathedral.
+It was the permanent remembrance the "little one" had left behind her
+after that catastrophe which had filled her father with such gloomy
+sadness. Through a back window of the room Gabriel could see the inner
+court, which made this "habitacion" one of the most charming in the
+Claverias, the open expanse of sky, and the upper rooms on all four
+sides, supported by rows of slender pillars, that made the courtyard
+look like a little cloister.
+
+Esteban came back and rejoined his brother.
+
+"You must say what you would like for breakfast. It would soon be
+ready; ask, man, ask for what you want, for though I am poor I shall
+take little credit to myself unless I can make you pick up a little
+and lose that look of a resuscitated corpse."
+
+Gabriel smiled sadly.
+
+"It is useless your troubling; my stomach is quite gone; a little milk
+is enough for it, and I am thankful if it retains it."
+
+Esteban ordered the old woman to go into the town in search of the
+milk, and he had hardly seated himself by his brother's side when the
+door giving into the cloister opened, and the head of a young man
+appeared.
+
+"Good-day, uncle!" he exclaimed.
+
+His face was unhealthy and currish, the eyes were malicious, and above
+his ears were combed two large tufts of glossy hair.
+
+"Come in, vagabond, come in," said the "Wooden Staff."
+
+And he added, turning to his brother:
+
+"Do you know who this is? No? It is the son of our poor brother, whom
+God has taken to his glory. He lives in the upper dwellings of the
+cloister with his mother, who washes the linen of the choir, and of
+the senores canons; and it is a delight to see how she crimps the
+surplices. Thomas, lad, bow to the gentleman; it is your uncle
+Gabriel, who has just arrived from America, and from Paris, and I
+don't know from where else besides! From very far off countries, very
+far off."
+
+The young man saluted Gabriel, though he seemed rather scared by the
+sad and suffering face of their relative, whom he had heard his mother
+speak of as a mysterious and romantic being.
+
+"Here, as you see him," proceeded Esteban, speaking to his brother,
+and pointing to his nephew, "he is the worst lot in the Cathedral.
+The Senor Obrero[1] would more than once have turned him out into
+the street, were it not for respect to the memory of his father and
+grandfather, and also to the name he bears, for everybody knows the
+Lunas are as ancient in the Cathedral as the stones in its walls. No
+escapade enters his head but he hastens to carry it out, and he swears
+like a pagan even in full sacristy, under the very noses of the
+beneficiaries. Don't dare to deny it! Grumbler!"
+
+[Footnote 1: Canon in charge of the fabric.]
+
+And he shook his first at the lad, half severely, half smiling, as
+though in the bottom of his heart he felt some pride in his nephew's
+scrapes, who received his reprimand with grimaces that made his face
+twitch like that of a monkey, while his eyes retained their fixed and
+insolent stare.
+
+"It is a real shame," continued the uncle, "that you should comb your
+hair in that fashion, like the Merry Andrews that come to Toledo from
+the Court on great festivals. In the good old times of the Cathedral
+they would have shaved your head for you. But in these days of
+alienation, of universal licence and misfortunes, our holy church is
+as poor as a rat, and poverty does not give the senores canons much
+inclination to examine details. It is a grievous pity to see how
+everything is going down. What desolation, Gabriel! If you could only
+see it! The Cathedral is as beautiful as ever, but we do not now see
+the former beauty of the Lord's worship. The Chapel-master says the
+same thing, and he is indignant to see that on great festivals only
+about half-a-dozen musicians take their place in the middle of the
+choir. The young people who live in the Claverias have not our great
+love for the mother-church; they complain of the shortness of their
+salaries without considering that it is the temporalities that support
+religion. If this goes on I should not be surprised to see this
+popinjay and other rascals like him playing at 'Rayuelo'[1] in the
+crossways in front of the choir. May God forgive me!"
+
+[Footnote 1: A game of drawing lines.]
+
+And the simple "Wooden Staff" made a gesture as though scandalised at
+his own words. He went on:
+
+"This young fellow you see here is not satisfied with his position in
+life, and yet, though he is only a youth, he occupies the place his
+poor father could only attain to after thirty years' service. He
+aspires to be a toreador, and often on a Sunday he dares to take part
+in the bull-fight in the bull-ring of Toledo. His mother came down,
+dishevelled like a Magdalen, to tell me all about it, and I, thinking
+that as his father was dead I ought to act in his place, I watched for
+our gentleman as he returned tricked out smartly from the bull-ring,
+and I thrashed him up the tower staircase to his rooms with the same
+wooden staff that I use in the Cathedral, and he can tell you if I
+have not a heavy hand when I am angry. Virgin of the Sagrario! A Luna
+of the Holy Metropolitan Church lowering himself to be a bull-fighter!
+The canons did laugh, and even the Lord Cardinal himself, as I have
+been told, when they heard about the affair! A witty beneficiary has
+since nicknamed him the 'Tato,'[1] and so they all call him now in
+the Cathedral. So you see, brother, how much respect this rascal pays
+to his family."
+
+[Footnote 1: _Tato_--Armadillo.]
+
+The "Silenciario"[1] attempted to annihilate the "Tato" with his
+glance, but this latter only smiled without paying much attention,
+either to his uncle's words or looks.
+
+[Footnote 1: _Silenciario_--Officer appointed to keep silence.]
+
+"You would hardly believe, Gabriel," he continued, "that this creature
+often wants a bit of bread, and it is for this reason he commits all
+these follies. In spite of his wrong-headedness, since the age of
+twenty he has occupied the position of 'Perrero'[3] in the holy
+church, he has obtained what in better times only those could obtain
+who had served well and striven hard for years. He gets his six reals
+a day, and as he can go freely about the church he can show the
+curiosities to strangers; and so with the salary and the tips he
+gets, he is much better off than I am. The foreigners who visit the
+Cathedral, excommunicated people who look upon us as strange monkeys,
+and who think that anything interesting of ours is only worthy of a
+laugh, take a fancy to him. The English ask him if he is a toreador,
+and he--what does he want better than that! When he sees they pay him
+according as he pleases them, he brings out his pack of lies, for,
+unfortunately, no one has any check on the deceit, and he tells them
+about all the great bull-fights in which he has taken part in Toledo,
+and all about the bulls he has killed; and these blockheads from
+England make a note of it in their albums, and even some coarse hand
+may make a sketch of this imposter's head; all he cares for is that
+they should believe all his lies and give him a peseta on leaving. It
+matters very little to him, if when these heretics return to their
+own country they spread the report that in Toledo, in the Holy
+Metropolitan Church of all Spain, the Cathedral servants are
+bull-fighters, and assist in the ceremonies of worship between the
+bull runs. The sum total is, that he earns more than I do, but in
+spite of this he considers his employment beneath him. And such
+beautiful duties, too. To walk in the great processions before
+everyone, close to the Primate's great banner, with a staff covered
+with red velvet to support him should he chance to fall, and wearing a
+robe of scarlet brocade like a cardinal. Our Chapel-master, who knows
+a great deal about such things, says that when he wears that robe
+he looks like a certain Diente, or some name of the sort, who
+lived hundreds of years ago in Italy, and went down into hell, and
+afterwards described his journey in poetry."
+
+[Footnote 3: _Perrero_--Beadle whose special duty it is to chase the
+dogs out of church.]
+
+Sounds of footsteps were heard on the narrow circular staircase in the
+thickness of the wall that led from the sitting-room to the storey
+above.
+
+"It is Don Luis," said the "Wooden Staff," "he is going to say his
+mass in the chapel of the Sagrario, and afterwards to the choir."
+
+Gabriel rose from his sofa to salute the priest. He was feeble and
+small of stature, but the thing about him that struck you at first
+sight was the disproportion between his shrunken body and his immense
+head. The forehead, round and prominent, seemed to crush with its
+weight the dark and irregular features, much pitted by smallpox.
+He was very ugly, but still the expression of his blue eyes, the
+brilliancy of his white and regular teeth, and the ingenuous smile,
+almost childlike, that played on his lips, gave his face that
+sympathetic expression which showed him to be one of those simple
+souls wrapped up in their artistic fancies.
+
+"And so this gentleman is the brother of whom you have spoken to me so
+often," said he, hearing the introduction made by Esteban.
+
+He held out his hand in a friendly way to Gabriel. They both looked
+very sickly, but their bodily infirmities seemed to be a bond of
+attraction.
+
+"As the senor has studied in the seminary," said the Chapel-master,
+"he will know something about music."
+
+"It is the only thing that I remember of all those studies."
+
+"But having travelled so much all over the world, you must have heard
+a great deal of good music."
+
+"That is so. Music is to me the most pleasing of all the arts. I do
+not know much about it, but I feel it."
+
+"Very well, very well, we shall be good friends. You must tell me all
+sorts of things; how I envy you having travelled so much."
+
+He spoke like a restless child, without sitting down. Although the
+"Silenciario" offered him a chair at each of his flirtings round the
+room, he wandered from side to side in his shabby cloak, his hat in
+his hand--a poor worn-out hat with not a trace of pile left, knocked
+in, with a layer of grease on its flaps, miserable and old, like the
+cassock and the shoes. But in spite of this poverty the Chapel-master
+had a certain refinement about him. His hair, rather too long for his
+ecclesiastical dress, curled round his temples, and the dignified way
+in which he folded his cloak round his body reminded one of the cloak
+of a tenor at the opera. He had a sort of easy grace that betrayed the
+artist who, under the priestly robes, was longing to get rid of them,
+leaving them at his feet like a winding sheet.
+
+Some deep notes from the bell, like distant thunder, floated into the
+room through the cloister.
+
+"Uncle, they are calling us to the choir," said the "Tato." "We ought
+to have been in the Cathedral before now; it is nearly eight o'clock."
+
+"It is true, lad. I am glad you were here to remind me; let us be
+going."
+
+Then he added, speaking to the musical priest:
+
+"Don Luis, your mass is at eight o'clock. You can talk with Gabriel
+later on; now we must fulfil our obligations, for those who are late
+will, as you say, be turned out, even though our office hardly gives
+us enough to eat."
+
+The Chapel-master assented sadly with a movement of his head, and
+went out, following the two Cathedral servants. He seemed to go
+unwillingly, as though forced to a task that was to him both irksome
+and painful. He hummed absently while giving his hand to Gabriel, who
+thought he recognised a fragment of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony in
+the low and uneven tones that came from the lips of the young priest.
+
+Now that he was alone Luna stretched himself on the sofa, giving
+himself up to the fatigue he felt from his long wait before the
+Cathedral. His brother's old servant placed a little pitcher of
+milk by his side, and filling a cup, Gabriel drank, endeavouring to
+overcome the repugnance of his weak stomach, which almost refused to
+retain the liquid. His body, fatigued by his restless night and the
+long morning wait, at last assimilated the nourishment, and a soft,
+dreamy languor spread over him that he had not felt for a long time.
+He soon fell asleep, remaining for more than an hour motionless on the
+sofa, and though his breathing was disturbed, and his chest racked by
+his hollow cough, they were unable to wake him from his slumber.
+
+When he did awake, it was suddenly, with a nervous start that shook
+him from head to foot, making him bound from the sofa as though a
+spring had been touched. It was the wariness produced by his ever
+present danger, that had become habitual to him; the habit of
+restlessness formed in dark dungeons, expecting hourly to see the door
+open, to be beaten like a dog, or led off between a double file of
+muskets to the square of execution; the habit of living perpetually
+watched, of feeling in every country the espionage of the police
+around him, the habit of being awoke in the middle of the night in his
+wretched room in some inn by the order to leave at once; the unrest of
+the ancient Asheverus, who, as soon as he could enjoy a moment's rest,
+heard the eternal cry--"Go on. Go on."
+
+He did not try to sleep again, he preferred the present reality, the
+silence of the Cathedral which was to him as a gentle caress, the
+noble calm of the temple, that immense pile of worked stone, which
+seemed to press on him, enveloping him, hiding for ever his weakness
+and his persecutions.
+
+He went out into the cloister, and, resting his elbows on the
+balustrade, looked down into the garden.
+
+The Claverias seemed quite deserted. The children who had enlivened
+them in the early morning had gone to school, the women were inside
+their houses preparing their mid-day meal, there seemed to be no one
+in the cloister except himself; the sunlight bathed all one side,
+and the shadow of the pillars cut obliquely the great golden spaces
+flooding the pavement. The majestic silence, the holy calm of the
+Cathedral overpowered the agitator like a gentle narcotic. The seven
+centuries surrounding those stones seemed to him like so many veils
+hiding him from the rest of the world. In one of the dwellings of the
+Claverias you could hear the incessant tap, tap, of a hammer; it was
+that of a shoemaker whom Gabriel had seen through the window-panes,
+bending over his bench. In the square of sky framed by the roofs some
+pigeons were flying, lazily moving their wings, soaring in the vault
+of intense blue; some flew down into the cloister, and, perching on
+the balustrade, broke the religious silence with their gentle cooing;
+now and again the heavy door-curtains of the church were lifted, and
+a breath of air charged with incense floated over the garden of the
+Claverias, together with the deep notes of the organ, and the sound of
+voices chanting Latin words and solemnly prolonging the cadences.
+
+Gabriel looked at the garden surrounded by its arcades of white stone,
+with its rough buttresses of dark granite, in the chinks of which the
+rain had left an efflorescence of fungus, like little tufts of black
+velvet. The sun struck on one angle of the garden, leaving the rest
+in cool green shade, a conventual twilight. The bell-tower hid one
+portion of the sky, displaying on its reddish sides, ornamented with
+Gothic tracery and salient buttresses, the fillets of black marble
+with heads of mysterious personages, and the shields with the arms of
+the different archbishops who had assisted at its building; above,
+near the pinnacles of white stone, were seen the bells behind enormous
+gratings; from below they looked like three bronze birds in a cage of
+iron.
+
+Three deep strokes from a bell, echoing round the Cathedral, announced
+that the High Mass had arrived at its most solemn moment, the mountain
+of stone seemed to tremble with the vibration, which was transmitted
+through the naves and galleries, to the arcades and down to the lowest
+foundations.
+
+Again there was silence, which seemed even deeper after the bronze
+thunders; the cooing of the pigeons could again be heard, and, down in
+the garden, the twittering of the birds, warmed by the sun's rays that
+began to gild its cool twilight.
+
+Gabriel felt himself deeply moved; the sweet silence, the absolute
+calm, the feeling almost of non-existence overpowered him; and beyond
+those walls was the world, but here it could not be seen, it could not
+be felt; it remained respectful but indifferent before that monument
+of the past, that splendid sepulchre, in whose interior nothing
+excited its curiosity. Who would ever imagine he was there? That
+growth of seven centuries, built by vanished greatness for a dying
+faith, should be his last refuge. In the full tide of unbelief the
+church should be his sanctuary, as it had been in former days to
+those great criminals of the Middle Ages, who, from the height of the
+cloister mocked at justice, detained at the doors like the beggars.
+Here should be consummated in silence and calm the slow decay of his
+body, here he would die with the serene satisfaction of having died to
+the world long before. At last he realised his hope of ending his days
+in a corner of the sleepy Spanish Cathedral, the only hope that had
+sustained him as he wandered on foot along the highways of Europe,
+hiding himself from the civil guards and the police, spending his
+nights in ditches, huddled up, his head on his knees, fearing every
+moment to die of cold.
+
+He clung to the Cathedral as a shipwrecked and drowning man clings
+to the spar of a sinking ship; this had been his hope, and he was
+beginning to realise it. The church would receive him, like an old and
+infirm mother, unable to smile, but who could still stretch out her
+arms.
+
+"At last! At last!" murmured Luna.
+
+And he smiled, thinking of the world of sorrows and persecutions that
+he was leaving behind him, as though he were going to some remote
+place, situated in another planet, from which he would never return;
+the Cathedral would shelter him for ever.
+
+In the profound stillness of the cloister, that the sound of the
+street could not reach, the "companion" Luna thought he heard far off,
+very far off, the shrill sound of a trumpet and the muffled roll
+of drums, then he remembered the Alcazar of Toledo, dominating the
+Cathedral from its height, intimidating it with the enormous mass of
+its towers; they were the drums and trumpets of the Military Academy.
+
+These sounds were painful to Gabriel; the world had faded from his
+sight, and when he thought himself so very far from it, he could still
+feel its presence only a little way beyond the roof of the temple.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+Since the times of the second Cardinal de Bourbon Senior Esteban Luna
+had been gardener of the Cathedral, by the right that seemed firmly
+established in his family. Who was the first Luna that entered the
+service of the Holy Metropolitan Church? As the gardener asked himself
+this question he smiled complacently, raising his eyes to heaven, as
+though he would inquire of the immensity of space. The Lunas were as
+ancient as the foundations of the church; a great many generations
+had been born in the abode in the upper cloister, and even before the
+illustrious Cisneros built the Claverias the Lunas had lived in houses
+adjacent, as though they could not exist out of the shadow of the
+Primacy. To no one did the Cathedral belong with better right than
+to them. Canons, beneficiaries, archbishops passed; they gained the
+appointment, died, and others came in their places. It was a constant
+procession of new faces, of masters who came from every corner of
+Spain to take their seats in the choir, to die a few years afterwards,
+leaving the vacancies to be filled again by other newcomers; but the
+Lunas always remained at their post, as though the ancient family were
+another column of the many that supported the temple. It might happen
+that the archbishop who to-day was called Don Bernardo, might next
+year be called Don Caspar, or again another Don Fernando. But what
+seemed utterly impossible was that the Cathedral could exist without
+Lunas in the garden, in the sacristy, or in the crossways of the
+choir, accustomed as it had been for centuries to their services.
+
+The gardener spoke with pride of his descent, of his noble and
+unfortunate relative the constable Don Alvaro, buried like a king in
+his chapel behind the high altar; of the Pope Benedict XIII., proud
+and obstinate like all the rest of his family; of Don Pedro de Luna,
+fifth of his name to occupy the archiepiscopal throne of Toledo, and
+of other relatives not less distinguished.
+
+"We are all from the same stem," he said with pride. "We all came
+to the conquest of Toledo with the good King Alfonso VI. The only
+difference has been, that some Lunas took a fancy to go and fight
+the Moors, and they became lords, and conquered castles, whereas my
+ancestors remained in the service of the Cathedral, like the good
+Christians they were."
+
+With the satisfaction of a duke who enumerates his ancestors, the
+Senor Esteban carried back the line of the Lunas till it became misty
+and was lost in the fifteenth century. His father had known Don
+Francisco III. Lorenzana, a magnificent and prodigal prince of the
+church, who spent the abundant revenues of the archbishopric in
+building palaces and editing books, like a great lord of the
+Renaissance. He had known also the first Cardinal Bourbon, Don Luis
+II., and used to narrate the romantic life of this Infante. Brother of
+the King Carlos III., the custom that dedicated some of the younger
+branches to the church had made him a cardinal at nine years old. But
+that good lord, whose portrait hung in the Chapter House, with white
+hair, red lips and blue eyes, felt more inclination to the joys of
+this world than to the grandeurs of the church, and he abandoned the
+archbishopric to marry a lady of modest birth, quarrelling for ever
+with the king, who sent him into exile. And the old Luna, leaping
+from ancestor to ancestor through the long centuries, remembered the
+Archduke Alberto, who resigned the Toledan mitre to become Governor of
+the Low Countries, and the magnificent Cardinal Tavera, protector
+of the arts, all excellent princes, who had treated his family
+affectionately, recognising their secular adhesion to the Holy
+Metropolitan Church.
+
+The days of his youth were bad ones for the Senor Esteban; it was the
+time of the war of Independence. The French occupied Toledo, entering
+into the Cathedral like pagans, rattling their swords and prying into
+every corner at full High Mass. The jewels were concealed, the canons
+and beneficiaries, who were now called _prebendaries_, were living
+dispersed over the Peninsula. Some had taken refuge in places that
+were still Spanish, others were hidden in the towns, making vows for
+the speedy return of "the desired." It was pitiful to hear the choir
+with its few voices; only the very timid, who were bound to their
+seats and could not live away from them, had remained, and had
+recognised the usurping king. The second Cardinal de Bourbon, the
+gentle and insignificant Don Luis Maria, was in Cadiz, the only one of
+the family remaining in Spain, and the Cortes had laid their hands
+on him to give a certain dynastic appearance to their revolutionary
+authority.
+
+When the war was over and the poor cardinal returned to his seat, the
+Senor Esteban was moved to pity to see his sad and childlike face,
+with the small round head, and insignificant appearance; he returned
+discouraged and disheartened, after receiving his nephew Ferdinand
+VII. in Madrid. All his colleagues in the regency were either in
+prison or in exile, and that he did not suffer a like fate was solely
+due to his mitre and to his name. The unfortunate prelate thought
+he had done good service in maintaining the interests of his family
+during the war, and now he found himself accused of being Liberal, an
+enemy to religion and the throne, without being able to imagine how he
+had conspired against them. The poor Cardinal de Bourbon languished
+sadly in his palace, devoting his revenues to works in the Cathedral,
+till he died in 1823 at the beginning of the reaction, leaving his
+place to Inguanzo, the tribune of absolutism, a prelate with iron-grey
+whiskers, who had made his career as deputy in the Cortes at Cadiz,
+attacking as deputy every sort of reform, and advocating a return to
+the times of the Austrians as the surest means of saving his country.
+
+The good gardener saluted with equal cordiality the Bourbon Cardinal,
+hated by the kings, as the prelate with the whiskers, who made all
+the diocese tremble with his bitter and harassing temper, and his
+arrogance as a revolutionary Absolutist. For him, whoever occupied the
+throne of Toledo was a perfect man, whose acts no one should dare to
+discuss, and he turned a deaf ear to the murmurs of the canons and
+beneficiaries, who, smoking their cigarettes in the arbour of his
+garden, spoke of the genialities of this Senor de Inguanzo, and were
+indignant at the Government of Ferdinand VII. not being sufficiently
+firm, through fear of the foreigners, to re-establish the wholesome
+tribunal of the Inquisition.
+
+The only thing that troubled the gardener was to watch the decadence
+of his beloved Cathedral. The revenues of the archbishop and of the
+Chapter had been greatly wasted during the war. What had occurred was
+what happens after a great flood, when the waters begin to subside
+and carry everything away with them, leaving the land bare and
+uninhabited. The Primacy lost many of its rights, the tenants made
+themselves masters, taking advantage of the disorders of the State;
+the towns refused to pay their feudal services, as though the
+necessity of defending themselves and helping in the war had freed
+them for ever from vassalage; further, the turbulent Cortes had
+decreed the abolition of all lordships, and had very much curtailed
+the enormous revenues of the Cathedral, acquired in the centuries when
+the archbishops of Toledo put on their casques, and went out to fight
+the Moors with double-handed swords.
+
+Even so, a considerable fortune remained to the church of the Primacy,
+and it maintained its splendour as if nothing had happened, but the
+Senor Esteban scented danger from the depths of his garden, hearing
+from the canons of the Liberal conspiracies, the executions by
+shooting and hanging, and the exiling, to which the king Senor Don
+Fernando appealed, in order to repress the audacity of the "Negros,"
+the enemies of the Monarchy and of religion.
+
+"They have tasted the sweets," said he, "and they will return--see if
+they do not return, and take what is left! During the war they took
+the first bite, taking from the Cathedral more than half that was
+hers, and now they will come and take the rest; they will try and
+catch hold of the handle of the fryingpan."
+
+The gardener was angry at the possibility of such a thing happening.
+Ay! and was it for this that so many lord archbishops of Toledo fought
+against the Moors? Conquering towns, assaulting castles and annexing
+pasture lands, which all came to be the property of the Cathedral,
+contributing to the great splendour of God's worship! And was
+everything to fall into the dirty hands of the enemies of anything
+that was holy? Everything that so many faithful souls had willed to
+them on their deathbeds, queens and magnates, and simple country
+gentlemen, who left the best part of their fortunes to the Holy
+Metropolitan Church, in the hope of saving their souls! What would
+happen to the six hundred souls, big and little, clerics and seculars,
+dignitaries and simple servants who lived from the revenues of the
+Cathedral?.... And was this called liberty? To rob what did not
+belong to them, leaving in poverty innumerable families who were now
+supported by the "great pot" of the Chapter?
+
+When the sad forebodings of the gardener began to be realised, and
+Mendizabal decreed the dismemberment, the Senor Esteban thought he
+would have died of rage. But the Cardinal Inguanzo did better. Placed
+in his seat by the Liberals as his predecessor had been by the
+Absolutists, he thought it best to die in order to take no part in
+these attempts against the sacred revenues of the Church.
+
+The Senor Luna, who was only a humble gardener, and who therefore
+could not imitate the illustrious Cardinal, went on living. But every
+day he felt more and more sorrowful, knowing that for shamefully low
+prices, many of the Moderates, who still came to High Mass, were
+stealthily acquiring to-day a house, to-morrow a farm, another day
+pasture lands, properties all belonging to the Primacy, but which had
+lately been put on the list of what was called national property.
+
+Robbers! this slow subversion and sale, that rent in pieces the
+revenues of the Cathedral, caused the Senor Esteban as much
+indignation as though the bailiffs had entered his house in the
+Claverias to remove the family furniture, each piece of which embalmed
+the memory of some ancestor.
+
+There were times in which he thought of abandoning his garden, and
+going to Maestrazgo, or to the northern provinces, in search of some
+of the loyal defenders of the rights of Charles V. and of the return
+to the old times. He was then forty years of age, strong and active,
+and though his temperament was pacific and he had never touched a
+musket, he felt himself fired by the example of certain timid and
+pious students, who had fled from the seminary, and were now, so it
+was said, fighting in Catalonia behind the red cloak of Don Ramon
+Cabrera.
+
+But the gardener, in order not to be alone in his big "habitacion" in
+the Claverias, had married three years previously the daughter of the
+sacristan, and he had now one son; besides, he could not tear himself
+away from the church, he was another square block in the mountain of
+stone, he moved and spoke as a man, but he felt a certainty that he
+should perish at once if he left his garden. Besides, the Cathedral
+would lose one of the most important props if a Luna were wanting in
+its service, and he felt terrified at the bare thought of living out
+of it. How could he wander over the mountains fighting, and firing
+shots, when years had passed without his treading any other profane
+soil beyond the little bit of street between the staircase of the
+Claverias and the Puerta del Mollete?
+
+And so he went on cultivating his garden, feeling the melancholy
+satisfaction that he was at least sheltered from all the wicked
+revolutionaries under the shadow of that colossus of stone, which
+inspired awe and respect from its majestic age. They might curtail
+the revenues of the temple, but they would be powerless against the
+Christian faith of those who lived under its protection.
+
+The garden, deaf and insensible to the revolutionary tempests that
+broke over the church, continued to unfold its sombre beauty between
+the arcades, the laurels grew till they reached the balustrade of the
+upper cloister, and the cypresses seemed as though they aspired
+to touch the roofs; the creepers twined themselves among the iron
+railings, making thick lattices of verdure, and the ivy mantled the
+wall of the central arbour, which was surmounted by a cap of black
+slate with a rusty iron cross. After the evening choir the clergy
+would come and sit in here and read, by the soft green light that
+filtered through the foliage, the news from the Carlist Camp, and
+discuss enthusiastically the great exploits of Cabrera, while above,
+the swallows quite indifferent to human presence, circled and screamed
+in the clear blue sky. The Senor Esteban would watch, standing
+silently, this bat-like evening club, which was kept quietly hidden
+from those belonging to the National Militia of Toledo.
+
+When the war terminated, the last illusions of the gardener vanished,
+he fell into the silence of despair and wished to know of nothing
+outside the Cathedral. God had abandoned the good and faithful, and
+the traitors and evil-doers were triumphant; his only consolation
+was the stronghold of the temple, which had lived through so many
+centuries of turmoil, and could still defy its enemies for so many
+more.
+
+He only wished to be the gardener, to die in the upper cloister like
+his forefathers, and to leave fresh Lunas to perpetuate the family
+services in the Cathedral. His eldest son, Tomas, was now twelve years
+old, and able to help him in the care of the garden. After an interval
+of many years a second son had been born, Esteban, who, almost before
+he could walk, would kneel before the images in the "habitacion,"
+crying for his mother to carry him down into the church to see the
+saints.
+
+Poverty entered into the Cathedral, reducing the number of canons and
+prebendaries; at the death of any of the old servants, their places
+were suppressed, and a great many carpenters, masons, and glaziers
+who previously had lived there as workmen specially attached to the
+Primacy, and were continually working at its repairs, were dismissed.
+If from time to time certain repairs were indispensable, workmen were
+called in from outside, by the day; many of the "habitacions" in the
+Claverias were unoccupied, and the silence of the grave reigned where
+previously the population of a small town had gathered and crowded.
+The Government of Madrid (and you should have seen the expression of
+contempt with which the old gardener emphasised those words) was in
+treaty with the Holy Father to arrange something called the Concordat.
+The number of canons was limited as though the Holy Metropolitan was
+a college, they were to be paid by the Government the same as the
+servants, and for the maintenance of worship in this most famous
+Cathedral of all Spain--which, when it formerly collected its tithe,
+scarcely knew where to lock up such riches--a monthly pension of
+twelve hundred pesetas was now granted.
+
+"One thousand two hundred pesetas, Tomas!" said he to his son, a
+silent boy, who took very little interest in anything but his garden.
+"One thousand two hundred pesetas, when I can remember the Cathedral
+having more than six millions of revenue! Bad times are in store for
+us, and were I anyone else I would bring you up to an office, or
+something outside the church; but the Lunas cannot desert the cause of
+God, like so many traitors who have betrayed it. Here we were born,
+here we must die, to the very last one of the family." And furious
+with the clergy, who seemed to put a good face on the Concordat and
+their salaries, thankful to have come out of the revolutionary tumults
+even as well as they had done, he isolated himself in his garden,
+locking the door in the iron railing, and shrinking from the
+assemblies of former times!
+
+His little floral world did not change, its sombre verdure was like
+the twilight that had enveloped the gardener's soul. It had not the
+brilliant gaiety, overflowing with colours and scents of a garden in
+the open, bathed in full sunlight, but it had the shady and melancholy
+beauty of a conventual garden between four walls, with no more light
+than what came through the eaves and the arcades, and no other birds
+but those flying above, who looked with wonder at this little paradise
+at the bottom of a well. The vegetation was the same as that of the
+Greek landscapes, and of the idylls of the Greek poets--laurels,
+cypress and roses, but the arches that surrounded it, with their
+alleys paved with great slabs of granite in whose interstices wreaths
+of grass grew, the cross of its central arbour, the mouldy smell of
+the old iron railings, and the damp of the stone buttresses coloured a
+soft green by the rain, gave the garden an atmosphere of reverend age
+and a character of its own.
+
+The trees waved in the wind like censers, the flowers, pale and
+languid with an anaemic beauty, smelt of incense, as though the air
+wafted through the doors of the Cathedral had changed their natural
+perfumes.
+
+The rain, trickling from the gargoyles and gutters of the roofs, was
+collected in two large and deep stone tanks; sometimes the gardener's
+pail would disturb their green covering, letting one perceive for an
+instant the blue-blackness of their depths, but as soon as the circles
+disappeared, the vegetation once more drew together and covered them
+over afresh, without a movement, without a ripple, quiet and dead as
+the temple itself in the stillness of the evening.
+
+At the feast of Corpus, and that of the Virgin of the Sagrario in the
+middle of August, the townspeople brought their pitchers into the
+garden, and the Senor Esteban allowed them to be filled from these two
+cisterns. It was an ancient custom and one much appreciated by the
+old Toledans, who thought much of the fresh water of the Cathedral,
+condemned as they were during the rest of the year to drink the red
+and muddy liquid of the Tagus. At other times people came into the
+garden to give little presents to Senor Esteban, the devout entrusted
+him with palms for their images, or bought little bunches of flowers,
+believing them to be better than those they could buy at the farms,
+because they came from the Metropolitan Church, and the old women
+begged branches of laurel for flavouring and for household medicines.
+These incomings, and the two pesetas that the Chapter had assigned to
+the gardener after the final dismemberment, helped the Senor Esteban
+and his family to get on. When he was getting well on in years his
+third son Gabriel was born, a child who from his fourth year attracted
+the attention of all the women in the Claverias; his mother affirmed
+with a blind faith that he was a living image of the Child Jesus that
+the Virgin of the Sagrario held in her arms. Her sister Tomasa, who
+was married to the "Virgin's Blue," and was the mother of a numerous
+family which occupied nearly the half of the upper cloister, talked a
+great deal about the intelligence of her little nephew, when he could
+hardly speak, and about the infantile unction with which he gazed at
+the images.
+
+"He looks like a saint," she said to her friends. "You should see how
+seriously he says his prayers.... Gabrielillo will become somebody;
+who knows if we may not see him a bishop! Acolytes that I knew when
+my father had charge of the sacristy now wear the mitre, and possibly
+some day we may have one of them in Toledo."
+
+The chorus of caresses and praises surrounded the first years of the
+child like a cloud of incense; the family only lived for him, the
+Senor Esteban, a father in the good old Latin style who loved his
+sons, but was severe and stern with them in order that they might grow
+up honourable, felt in the presence of the child a return of his own
+youth; he played with him, and lent himself smilingly to all his
+little caprices; his mother abandoned her household duties to please
+him, and his brother hung on his babbling words. The eldest, Tomas,
+the silent youth who had taken the place of his father in the care of
+the garden, and who even in the depths of winter went barefooted over
+the flower-beds and rough stones of the alleys, came up often bringing
+handfuls of sweet-scented herbs, so that his little brother might play
+with them. Esteban, the second, who was now thirteen and who enjoyed
+a certain notoriety among the other acolytes on account of his
+scrupulous care in assisting at the mass, delighted Gabriel with his
+red cassock and his pleated tunic, and brought him taper ends and
+little coloured prints, abstracted from the breviary of some canon.
+
+Now and then he carried him in his arms to the store-room of the
+giants, an immense room between the buttresses and the arches of the
+nave, vaulted with stone. Here were the heroes of the ancient
+feasts and holidays. The Cid with a huge sword, and four set pieces
+representing as many parts of the world: huge figures with dusty and
+tattered clothes and broken faces, which had once rejoiced the streets
+of Toledo, and were now rotting under the roofs of its Cathedral. In
+one corner reposed the Tarasca, a frightful monster of cardboard,
+which terrified Gabriel when it opened its jaws, while on its wrinkled
+back sat smiling, idiotically, a dishevelled and indecent doll, whom
+the religious feeling of former ages had baptised with the name of
+Anne Boleyn.
+
+When Gabriel went to school all were astonished at his progress. The
+youngsters of the upper cloister who were such a trial to "Silver
+Stick," the priest charged with maintaining good order among the tribe
+established in the roofs of the Cathedral, looked upon the little
+Gabriel as a prodigy. When he could scarcely walk he could read
+easily, and at seven he began to recite his Latin, mastering it
+quickly, as though he had never spoken anything else in his life, and
+at ten he could argue with the clergy who frequented the gardens, and
+who delighted in putting before him questions and difficulties.
+
+The Senor Esteban, growing daily more bent and feeble, smiled
+delightedly before his last work; he was going to be the glory of his
+house! His name was Luna, and therefore he could aspire to anything
+without fear, because even Popes had come from that family.
+
+The canons would take the boy into the sacristy after choir, and
+question him as to his studies. One of the clergy belonging to the
+archbishop's household presented him to the cardinal, who, after
+hearing him, gave him a handful of sugared almonds and the promise of
+a scholarship, so that he could continue his studies at the seminary
+gratuitously.
+
+The Lunas and all their relations more or less distant, who were
+really nearly the whole population of the upper cloister, were
+rejoiced at this promise; what else could Gabriel be but a priest? For
+these people, attached to the church from the day of their birth, like
+excrescences of its stones, who considered the archbishops of Toledo
+as the most powerful beings in the world after the Pope, the only
+profession worthy of a man of talent was the Church.
+
+Gabriel went to the Seminary, and to all the family the Claverias
+seemed quite deserted. The long, pleasant evenings in the house of
+the Lunas came to an end, at which the bell-ringer, the vergers, the
+sacristans and other church servants had been used to assemble, and
+listen to the clear and well modulated voice of Gabriel, who read like
+an angel--sometimes the lives of the saints, at other times Catholic
+newspapers that came from Madrid, or chapters from a Don Quixote with
+pages of vellum and antiquated writing--a venerable copy which had
+been handed down in the family for generations.
+
+Gabriel's life in the Seminary was the ordinary and monotonous life of
+a hard-working student: triumphs in theological controversies, prizes
+in heaps, and the satisfaction of being held up to his companions as a
+model.
+
+Sometimes one of the canons who lectured in the seminary would come
+into the garden:--
+
+"The lad is getting on very well, Esteban; he is first in everything,
+and besides, is as steady and pious as a saint. He will be the comfort
+of your old age."
+
+The gardener, always growing older and thinner, shook his head. He
+should only be able to see the end of his son's career from the
+heavens, should it please God to call him there. He would die before
+his son's triumph; but this did not sadden him, for the family
+would remain to enjoy the victory and to give thanks to God for His
+goodness.
+
+Humanities, theology, canons, everything, the young man mastered with
+an ease which surprised his masters, and they compared him to the
+Fathers of the Church, who had attracted attention by their precocity.
+He would very soon finish his studies, and they all predicted that his
+Eminence would give him a professorship in the seminary, even before
+he sang his first mass. His thirst for learning was insatiable, and it
+seemed as though the library really belonged to him. Some evenings he
+would go into the Cathedral to pursue his musical studies, and talk
+with the Chapel-master and the organist, and at other times in the
+hall of sacred oratory he would astound the professors and the Alumni
+by the fervour and conviction with which he delivered his sermons.
+
+"He is called to the pulpit," they said in the Cathedral garden. "He
+has all the fire of the apostles; he will become a Saint Bernard or
+a Bossuet. Who can tell how far this youth will go, or where he will
+end?"
+
+One of the studies which most delighted Gabriel was that of the
+history of the Cathedral, and of the ecclesiastical princes who had
+ruled it. All the inherent love of the Lunas for the giantess who was
+their eternal mother surged up in him, but he did not love it blindly
+as all his belongings did. He wished to know the why and the wherefore
+of things, comparing in his books the vague old stories that he had
+heard from his father, that seemed more akin to legends than to
+historical facts.
+
+The first thing that claimed his attention was the chronology of the
+archbishops of Toledo--a long line of famous men, saints, warriors,
+writers, princes, each with his number after his name, like the kings
+of the different dynasties. At certain times they had been the real
+kings of Spain. The Gothic kings in their courts were little more than
+decorative figureheads that were raised or deposed according to the
+exigencies of the moment. The nation was a theocratic republic, and
+its true head was the Archbishop of Toledo.
+
+Gabriel grouped the long line of famous prelates by characters. First
+of all the saints, the apostles in the heroic age of Christianity,
+bishops as poor as their own people, barefooted, fugitives from the
+Roman persecution, and bowing their heads at last to the executioner,
+firm in the hope of gaining fresh strength to the doctrine for which
+they sacrificed their lives--Saint Eugenio, Melancio, Pelagio, Patruno
+and other names that shone in the past scarcely breaking through the
+mists of legend. Then came the archbishops of the Gothic era; those
+kingly prelates who exercised that superiority over the conquering
+kings by which the spiritual power succeeded in dominating the
+barbarian conquerors. Miracles accompanied them to confound the
+Arians, and celestial prodigies were at their orders to terrify and
+crush those rude men of war. The Archbishop Montano, who lived with
+his wife, and was indignant at the consequent murmurs, placed red-hot
+coals in his sacred vestments the while he said mass, and did not
+burn, demonstrating by this miracle the purity of his life. Saint
+Ildefonso, not content with only writing books against heretics,
+induced Santa Leocadia to appear to him, leaving in his hands a piece
+of her mantle, and he enjoyed the further honour of this same Virgin
+descending from heaven to present him with a chasuble embroidered by
+her own hands. Sigiberto, many years after, had the audacity to
+vest himself in this chasuble, and was in consequence deposed,
+excommunicated and exiled for his temerity.
+
+The only books that were produced in those times were written by the
+prelates of Toledo. They compiled the laws, they anointed the heads
+of the monarchs with the holy oil, they set up Wamba as king, they
+conspired against the life of Egica, and the councils assembled in
+the basilica of Santa Leocadia were political assemblies in which the
+mitre was on the throne and the crown of the king at the feet of the
+prelate.
+
+At the coming of the Saracen invasion the series of persecuted
+prelates begins again. They did not now fear for their lives as during
+the time of Roman intolerance; for Mussulmen as a rule do not martyr,
+and furthermore, they respect the beliefs of the conquered.
+
+All the churches in Toledo remained in the hands of the Christian
+Muzarabes[1] with the exception of the Cathedral, which was converted
+into the principal mosque.
+
+[Footnote 1: Muzarabes--Christians living among the Moors and mixing
+with them; also an ancient form of service still continued in one
+chapel in Toledo and in one at Salamanca.]
+
+The Catholic bishops were respected by the Moors, as were also the
+Hebrew rabbis; but the Church was poor, and the continual wars between
+the Saracens and the Christians, together with the reprisals which set
+a seal on the barbarities of the reconquest, made the continuance and
+life of worship extremely difficult.
+
+Having arrived at this point Gabriel read the obscure names of Cixila,
+Elipando and Wistremiro. Saint Eulogio termed this last "the torch of
+the Holy Spirit, and the light of Spain"; but history is silent as to
+his deeds, and Saint Eulogio was martyred and killed by the Moors
+in Cordova on account of his excessive religious zeal. Benito,
+a Frenchman who succeeded to the chair, not to be behind his
+predecessors, made the Virgin send him down another chasuble to a
+church in his own country before he came to Toledo.
+
+After these, came the interesting chronology of the warrior
+archbishops, warriors of coat-of-mail and two-edged sword, the
+conquerors who, leaving the choir to the meek and humble, mounted
+their war-horses and thought they were not serving God unless during
+the year they added sundry towns and pasture lands to the goods of the
+Church. They arrived in the eleventh century, with Alfonso VI., to the
+conquest of Toledo. The first were French monks from the famous Abbey
+of Cluny, sent by the Abbot Hugo to the convent of Sahagun, and they
+were the first to use the "don" as a sign of lordship. To the pious
+tolerance of the preceding bishops, accustomed to friendly intercourse
+with Arabs and Jews in the full liberty of the Muzarabe worship,
+succeeded the ferocious intolerance of the Christian conqueror. The
+Archbishop Don Bernardo was scarcely seated in the chair before he
+took advantage of the absence of Alfonso VI. to violate all his
+promises. The principal mosque had remained in the hands of the Moors
+by a solemn compact with the king, who, like all the monarchs of the
+reconquest, was tolerant in matters of religion. The archbishop,
+using his powerful influence over the mind of the queen, made her
+the accomplice of his plans, and one night, followed by clergy and
+workmen, he knocked down the doors of the mosque, cleansed it and
+purified it, and next morning when the Saracens came to pray towards
+the rising sun, they found it changed into a Catholic cathedral. The
+conquered, trusting in the word given by the conqueror, protested,
+scandalised, and that they did not rise was solely due to the
+influence of the Alfaqui Abu-Walid, who trusted that the king would
+fulfil his promises. In three days Alfonso VI. arrived in Toledo from
+the further end of Castille, ready to murder the archbishop and even
+his own wife for their share in this villainy that had compromised his
+word as a cavalier, but his fury was so great that even the Moors were
+moved, and the Alfaqui went out to meet him, begging him to condone
+the deed as it was accomplished, as the injured parties would agree to
+it, and in the name of the conquered he relieved him from keeping his
+word, because the possession of a building was not a sufficient reason
+for breaking the peace.
+
+Gabriel admired as he read the prudence and moderation of the good
+Moor Abu-Walid; but with his enthusiasm as a seminarist he admired
+still more those proud, intolerant and warlike prelates, who trampled
+laws and people under foot for the greater glory of God.
+
+The Archbishop Martin was Captain-General against the Moors in
+Andalusia, conquering towns, and he accompanied Alfonso VIII. to the
+battle of Alarcos. The famous prelate Don Rodrigo wrote the chronicle
+of Spain, filling it with miracles for the greater prosperity of the
+Church, and he practically made history, passing more time on his
+war-horse than on his throne in the choir. At the battle de las Navas
+he set so fine an example, throwing himself into the thick of the
+fight, that the king gave him twenty lordships as well as that of
+Talavera de la Reina. Afterwards, in the king's absence, he drove
+the Moors out of Quesada and Cazorla, taking possession of vast
+territories, which passed under his sway, with the name of the
+Adelantamiento.[1] Don Sancho, son of Don Jaime of Aragon, and brother
+to the Queen of Castille, thought more of his title of "Chief Leader"
+than of his mitre of Toledo, and on the advance of the Moors went out
+to meet them in the martial field. He fought wherever the fighting was
+fiercest, and was finally killed by the Moslems, who cut off his hands
+and placed his head on a spear.
+
+[Footnote 1: _Adelantamiento_--Advancement.]
+
+Don Gil de Albornoz, the famous cardinal, went to Italy, flying from
+Don Pedro the Cruel, and, like a great captain, reconquered all the
+territory of the Popes, who had taken refuge in Avignon. Don Gutierre
+III. went with Don Juan II. to fight against the Moors. Don Alfonso de
+Acuna fought in the civil war during the reign of Enrique IV.; and as
+a fitting end to this series of political and conquering prelates,
+rich and powerful as true princes, there arose the Cardinal Mendoza,
+who fought at the battle of Toro, and at the conquest of Granada,
+afterwards governing that kingdom; and Jimenez de Cisneros, who,
+finding no Moors left in the Peninsula to fight, crossed the sea and
+went to Oran, waving his cross and turning it into a weapon of war.
+
+The seminarist admired these men, magnified by the mists of ancient
+history and the praises of the Church. For him they were the greatest
+men in the world after the Popes, and, indeed, often far superior to
+them. He was astonished that the Spaniards of the present times were
+so blind that they did not entrust their direction and government to
+the archbishops of Toledo, who in former centuries had performed
+such heroic deeds. The glory and advancement of the country was so
+intimately connected with their history, their dynasty was quite as
+great as that of the kings, and on more than one occasion they had
+saved these latter by their counsels and energy.
+
+After these eagles came the birds of prey; after the prelates with
+their iron morions and their coats-of-mail came the rich and luxurious
+prelates, who cared for no other combats but those of the law courts,
+and were in perpetual litigation with towns, guilds, and private
+individuals in order to retain the possessions and the vast fortune
+accumulated by their predecessors.
+
+Those who were generous like Tavera built palaces, and encouraged
+artists like El Greco, Berruguete and others, creating a Renaissance
+in Toledo, an echo from Italy. Those who were miserly, like Quiroga,
+reduced the expenses of the pompous church, to turn themselves into
+money-lenders to the kings, giving millions of ducats to those
+Austrian monarchs on whose dominions the sun never set, but who,
+nevertheless, found themselves obliged to beg almost as soon as their
+galleons returned from their voyages to America.
+
+The Cathedral was the work of these priestly ecclesiastics; each one
+had done something in it which revealed his character. The rougher
+and more warlike its framework, that mountain of stone and wood which
+formed its skeleton; those who were more cultivated, elevated to the
+See in times of greater refinement, contributed the minutely-worked
+iron railings, the doors of lace-like stonework, the pictures, and
+the jewels which made its sacristy a veritable treasure house. The
+gestation of the giantess had lasted for three centuries; it seemed
+like those enormous prehistoric animals who slept so long in their
+mother's womb before seeing the light.
+
+When its walls and pilasters first rose above the soil Gothic art was
+in its first epoch, and during the two and a half centuries that its
+building lasted architecture made great strides. Gabriel could follow
+this slow transformation with his mind's eye as he studied the
+building, discovering the various signs of its evolution.
+
+The magnificent church was like a giantess whose feet were shod with
+rough shoes, but whose head was covered with the loveliest plumes. The
+bases of the pillars were rough and devoid of ornament, the shafts of
+the columns rose with severe simplicity, crowned by plain capitals
+at the base of the arches, on which the Gothic thistle had not yet
+attained the exuberant branching of a later florid period; but the
+vaulting which was finished perhaps two centuries after the first
+beginning, and the windows with their multi-coloured ogives, displayed
+the magnificence of an art at its culminating point.
+
+At the two extreme ends of the transepts Gabriel found the proof
+of the immense progress made during the two centuries in which the
+Cathedral had been rising from the ground. The Puerta del Reloj[1],
+called also de la Feria[2], with its rude sculptures of archaic
+rigidity, and the tympanum, covered with small scenes from the
+creation, was a great contrast to the doorway at the opposite end
+of the crossway, that of Los Leones[3], or by its other name, de la
+Alegria[4], built nearly two hundred years afterwards, elegant and
+majestic as the entrance to a palace, showing already the fleshly
+audacities of the Renaissance, endeavouring to thrust themselves into
+the severity of Christian architecture, a siren fastened to the door
+by her curling tail serving as an example.
+
+[Footnote 1: _Reloj_--Clock.]
+
+[Footnote 2: _Feria_--Of the fair.]
+
+[Footnote 3: _Los Leones_--Lions.]
+
+[Footnote 4: _Alegria_--Joy.]
+
+The Cathedral, built entirely of a milky white stone from the quarries
+close to Toledo, rose in one single elevation from the base of the
+pillars to the vaulting, with no triforium to cut its arcades and to
+weaken and load the naves with superimposed arches. Gabriel saw in
+this a petrified symbol of prayer, rising direct to Heaven, without
+assistance or support. The smooth, soft stone was used throughout
+the building, harder stone being used for the vaultings, and on
+the exterior the buttresses and pinnacles, as well as the flying
+buttresses like small bridges between them, were of the hardest
+granite, which from age had taken a golden colour, and which protected
+and supported the airy delicacy of the interior. The two sorts of
+stone made a great contrast in the appearance of the Cathedral, dark
+and reddish outside, white and delicate inside.
+
+The seminarist found examples of every sort of architecture that had
+flourished in the Peninsula. The primitive Gothic was found in the
+earliest doorways, the florid in those del Perdon and de los Leones,
+and the Arab architecture showed its graceful horseshoe arches in the
+triforium running round the whole abside of the choir, which was the
+work of Cisneros, who, though he burnt the Moslem books, introduced
+their style of architecture into the heart of the Christian temple.
+The plateresque style showed its fanciful grace in the door of the
+cloister, and even the chirruguesque showed at its best in the famous
+lanthorn of Tome, which broke the vaulting behind the high altar in
+order to give light to the abside.
+
+In the evenings of the vacation Gabriel would leave the seminary,
+and wander about the Cathedral till the hour at which its doors were
+closed. He delighted in walking through the naves and behind the high
+altar, the darkest and most silent spot in the whole church. Here
+slept a great part of the history of Spain. Behind the locked gates of
+the chapel of the kings, guarded by the stone heralds on pedestals,
+lay the kings of Castille in their tombs, their effigies crowned, in
+golden armour, praying, with their swords by their sides. He would
+stop before the chapel of Santiago, admiring through the railings of
+its three pointed arches the legendary saint, dressed as a pilgrim,
+holding his sword on high, and tramping on Mahomedans with his
+war-horse. Great shells and red shields with a silver moon adorned the
+white walls, rising up to the vaulting, and this chapel his father,
+the gardener, regarded as his own peculiar property. It was that of
+the Lunas, and though some people laughed at the relationship, there
+lay his illustrious progenitors, Don Alvaro and his wife, on their
+monumental tombs. That of Dona Juana Pimental had at its four corners
+the figures of four kneeling friars in yellow marble, who watched over
+the noble lady extended on the upper part of the monument. That of
+the unhappy constable of Castille was surrounded by four knights of
+Santiago, wrapped in the mantle of their Order, seeming to keep guard
+over their grand master, who lay buried without his head in the stone
+sarcophagus, bordered with Gothic mouldings. Gabriel remembered what
+he had heard his father relate about the recumbent statue of Don
+Alvaro. In former times the statue had been of bronze, and when mass
+was said in the chapel, at the elevation of the Host, the statue, by
+means of secret springs, would rise and remain kneeling till the
+end of the ceremony. Some said that the Catholic queen caused the
+disappearance of this theatrical statue, believing that it disturbed
+the prayers of the faithful; others said that some soldiers, enemies
+of the constable, on a day of disturbance, had broken in pieces the
+jointed statue. On the exterior of the church the chapel of the Lunas
+raised its battlemented towers, forming an isolated fortress inside
+the Cathedral.
+
+In spite of his family considering this chapel as their own, the
+seminarist felt himself more attracted by that of Saint Ildefonso
+close by, which contained the tomb of the Cardinal Albornoz. Of all
+the great past in the Cathedral, that which excited his greatest
+admiration was the romantic figure of this warlike prelate; lover of
+letters, Spanish by birth, and Italian by his conquests. He slept in a
+splendid marble tomb, shining and polished by age, and of a soft
+fawn colour; the invisible hand of time had treated the face of the
+recumbent effigy rather roughly, flattening the nose, and giving the
+warlike cardinal an expression of almost Mongolian ferocity. Four
+lions guarded the remains of the prelate. Everything in him was
+extraordinary and adventurous even to his death. His body was brought
+back from Italy to Spain with prayers and hymns, carried on the
+shoulders of the entire population, who went out to meet it in order
+to gain the indulgences granted by the Pope. This return journey to
+his own country after his death lasted several months, as the good
+cardinal only went by short journeys from church to church, preceded
+by a picture of Christ, which now adorns his chapel, and spreading
+among the multitude the sweet scent of his embalming.
+
+For Don Gil de Albornoz nothing seemed impossible; he was the sword of
+the Apostle returned to earth in order to enforce faith. Flying from
+Don Pedro the Cruel, he had taken refuge in Avignon, where lived
+exiles even more illustrious than himself. There were the Popes driven
+out of Rome by a people who, in their mediaeval nightmare, tried to
+restore at the bidding of Rienzi the ancient republic of the Consuls.
+Don Gil was not a man to live long in the pleasant little Provencal
+court; like a good archbishop of Toledo, he wore the coat-of-mail
+underneath his tunic, and as there were no Moors to fight he wished to
+strike at heretics instead. He went to Italy as the champion of the
+Church; all the adventurers of Europe and the bandits of the country
+formed his army. He killed and burnt in the country, entered and
+sacked the towns, all in the name of the Sovereign Pontiff, so that
+before long the exile of Avignon was again able to return and occupy
+his throne in Rome. The Spanish cardinal after all these campaigns,
+which gave half Italy to the Papacy, was as rich as any king, and he
+founded the celebrated Spanish college in Bologna. The Pope, well
+aware of his robberies and rapacity, asked him to give some sort of
+accounts. The proud Don Gil presented him with a cart laden with keys
+and bolts.
+
+"These," said he proudly, "belong to the towns and castles I have
+gained for the Papacy. These are my accounts."
+
+The irresistible glamour that a powerful warrior throws over a man
+physically feeble was strongly felt by Gabriel, and it was augmented
+by the thought that so much bravery and haughtiness had been joined
+in a servant of the Church. Why could not men like this arise now, in
+these impious times, to give fresh strength to Catholicism?
+
+In his strolls through the Cathedral Gabriel greatly admired the
+screen before the high altar, a wonderful work of Villalpando, with
+its foliage of old gold, and its black bars with silvery spots like
+tin. These spots made the beggars and guides in the church declare
+that all the screen was made of silver, but that the canons had had
+it painted black so that it might not be plundered by Napoleon's
+soldiers.
+
+Behind it shone the majestic decorations of the high altar, splendid
+with soft old gilding, and a whole host of figures under carved
+canopies representing various scenes from the Passion. Behind the
+altar and the screen the gilding seemed to spring spontaneously from
+the white walls, marking with brilliant lights the divisions between
+the stalls. Beneath highly-decorated pointed arches were the tombs of
+the most ancient kings of Castille, and that of the Cardinal Mendoza.
+
+Under the arches of the triforium an orchestra of Gothic angels with
+stiff dalmatics and folded wings sang lauds, playing lutes and flutes,
+and in the central parts of the pillars the statues of holy bishops
+were interspersed with those of historical and legendary personages.
+
+On one side the good Alfaqui Abu-Walid, immortalised in a Christian
+church for his tolerant spirit, on the opposite side the mysterious
+leader of Las Navas who, after showing the Christians the way to
+victory, suddenly disappeared like a divine envoy--a statue of
+exceeding ugliness with a haggard face covered by a rough hood. At
+either end of the screen stood as evidences of the past opulence of
+the church two beautiful pulpits of rich marbles and chiselled bronze.
+
+Gabriel cast a glance at the choir, admiring the beautiful stalls
+belonging to the canons, and he thought enthusiastically that perhaps
+some day he might succeed in gaining one to the great pride of his
+family. In his wanderings about the church he would often stop before
+the immense fresco of Saint Christopher, a picture as bad as it
+was huge--a figure occupying all one division of the wall from the
+pavement to the cornice, and which by its size seemed to be the
+only fitting inhabitant of the church. The cadets would come in the
+evenings to look at it; that colossus of pink flesh, bearing the child
+on its shoulders, advancing its angular legs carefully through the
+waters, leaning on a palm tree that looked like a broom, was for them
+by far the most noticeable thing in the church. The light-hearted
+young men delighted in measuring its ankles with their swords and
+afterwards calculating how many swords high the blessed giant could
+be. It was the readiest application that they could make of those
+mathematical calculations with which they were so much worried in the
+academy. The apprentice of the church was irritated at the impudence
+with which these dressed up popinjays, the apprentices of war,
+sauntered about the church.
+
+Many mornings he would go to the Muzarabe Chapel, following
+attentively the ancient ritual,[1] intoned by the priests especially
+devoted to it. On the walls were represented in brilliant colours
+scenes from the conquest of Oran by the great Cisneros. As Gabriel
+listened to the monotonous singing of the Muzarabe priests he
+remembered the quarrels during the time of Alfonso VI. between the
+Roman liturgy and that of Toledo--the foreign worship and the national
+one. The believers, to end the eternal disputes, appealed to the
+"Judgment of God." The king named the Roman champion, and the Toledans
+confided the defence of their Gothic rite to the sword of Juan Ruiz,
+a nobleman from the borders of Pisuerga. The champion of the Gothic
+breviary remained triumphant in the fight, demonstrating its
+superiority with magnificent sword thrusts, but, in spite of the will
+of God having been manifested in this warlike way, the Roman rite by
+slow degrees became master of the situation, till at last the Muzarabe
+ritual was relegated to this small chapel as a curious relic of the
+past.
+
+[Footnote 1: The Muzarabe ritual is still sung in Arabic both in
+Toledo and Salamanca.]
+
+Sometimes in the evenings, when the services were ended and the
+Cathedral was locked up, Gabriel would go up to the abode of the
+bell-ringer, stopping on the gallery above the door del Perdon.
+Mariano, the bell-ringer's son, a youth of the same age as the
+seminarist, and attached to him by the respect and admiration his
+talents inspired, would act as guide in their excursions to the upper
+regions of the church; they would possess themselves of the key of the
+vaultings and explore that mysterious locality to which only a few
+workmen ascended from time to time.
+
+The Cathedral was ugly and commonplace seen from above. In the very
+early days the stone vaultings had remained uncovered, with no other
+concealment beyond the light-looking carved balustrade, but the rain
+had begun to damage them, threatening their destruction, and so the
+Chapter had covered the Cathedral with a roof of brown tiles, which
+gave the Church the appearance of a huge warehouse or a great barn.
+The pinnacles of the buttresses seemed ashamed to appear above this
+ugly covering, the flying buttresses became lost and disappeared among
+the bare-looking buildings, built on to the Cathedral, and the little
+staircase turrets became hidden behind this clumsy mass of roofing.
+
+The two youths climbing along the cornices, green and slippery from
+the rain, would mount to quite the upper parts of the building. Their
+feet would become entangled in the plants that a luxuriant nature
+allowed to grow amid the joints of the stones, flocks of birds would
+fly away at their approach; all the sculptures seemed to serve as
+resting-places for their nests, and every hollow in the stone where
+the rain-water collected was a miniature lake where the birds came
+to drink; sometimes a large black bird would settle on one of the
+pinnacles like an unexpected finial; it was a raven who settled there
+to plume his wings, and it would remain there sunning itself for
+hours; to the people who saw it from below it appeared about the size
+of a fly.
+
+These vaultings caused Gabriel a strange impression; no one could
+guess the existence of such a place in the upper regions of the
+building. He would walk through the forest of worm-eaten posts which
+supported the roof, through narrow passages between the cupolas of the
+vaulting that arose from the flooring like white and dusty tumours;
+sometimes there would be a shaft through which he could see down into
+the Cathedral, the depth of which made him giddy. These shafts were
+like narrow well-mouths at the bottom of which could be seen people
+walking like ants on the tile flooring of the church. Through these
+shafts were lowered the ropes of the great chandeliers, and the golden
+chains that supported the figure of Christ above the railing of the
+high altar. Enormous capstans showed through the twilight their cogged
+and rusty wheels, their levers and ropes like forgotten instruments
+of torture. This was the hidden machinery belonging to the great
+religious festivals; by these artifices the magnificent canopy of the
+holy week was raised and fastened.
+
+As the sun's rays shone in between the wooden posts the dust of ages
+that lay like a thick mantel on the roof of the vaulting would rise
+and dance in them for a few seconds, and the huge old spiders' webs
+would wave like fans in the wind, while the footsteps of the intruders
+would occasion wild and precipitous scrambles of rats from all the
+dark corners. In the furthest and darkest corners roosted those black
+birds who by night flew down into the church through the shafts in
+the vaulting, and the eyes of the owls glowed with phosphorescent
+brilliancy, while the bats flew sleepily about sweeping the faces of
+the lads with their wings.
+
+The bell-ringer's son would examine the deposits dropped in the dust,
+and would enumerate all the different birds who took refuge in the
+summit of the mountains of stone: this belonged to the hooting owl,
+and that to the red owl, and this again to the raven, and he spoke
+with respect of a certain nest of eagles that his father had seen as a
+young man, fierce birds who had endeavoured to tear out his eyes,
+and who had so thoroughly frightened him that he had been obliged to
+borrow the gun belonging to the night watchers on each occasion that
+his duties took him to the roof.
+
+Gabriel loved that strange world, harbouring above the Cathedral with
+its silence and its imposing solitude. It was a wilderness of wood,
+inhabited by strange creatures who lived unnoticed and forgotten under
+the roof-tree of the church. Truly the good God had a house for the
+faithful down below, and an immense garret above for the creatures of
+the air.
+
+The savage solitude of the higher regions was a great contrast to the
+wealth of the chapel of the Ochava, full of relics in golden vessels
+and caskets of enamel and precious marbles, to the quantities of
+pearls and emeralds in the magnificent treasury, heaped up as though
+they had been peas, and to the elegant luxury of the wardrobe, full
+of rare and costly stuffs and vestments exquisitely embroidered with
+every colour of the rainbow.
+
+Gabriel was just eighteen when he lost his father. The old gardener
+died quietly, happy in seeing all his family in the service of the
+Cathedral and the good old tradition of the Lunas continued without
+interruption. Thomas, the eldest son, remained in the garden, Esteban,
+after serving many years as acolyte and assistant to the sacristans,
+was Silenciario, and had been given the Wooden Staff and seven reals
+a day, the height of all his ambition; and as far as regarded the
+youngest, the good Senor Esteban had the firm conviction that he
+had begotten a Father of the Church, for whom a place in heaven was
+especially reserved at the right hand of God Omnipotent.
+
+Gabriel had acquired in the seminary that ecclesiastic sternness that
+turns the priest into a warrior more intent on the interest of the
+Church than on the concerns of his family. For this reason he did
+not feel the death of his father very greatly; besides, much greater
+misfortunes soon occurred to preoccupy the young seminarist.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+There was great excitement both in the Cathedral and in the seminary,
+everyone discussing from morning till night the news from Madrid, for
+these were the days of the September revolution. The traditional and
+healthy Spain, the Spain of the great historical tradition had fallen.
+The Cortes Constituyentes were a volcano, a breath from the infernal
+regions, to those gentlemen of the black cassock who crowded round the
+unfolded newspaper, and, if they found comfort and satisfaction in a
+speech of Maesterola's they would suffer the agonies of death at the
+revolutionary harangues, which dealt such terrible blows at the olden
+days. The clergy had turned their eyes towards Don Carlos, who
+was beginning the war in the northern provinces; the king of the
+Vascongados[1] mountains would be able to remedy everything when he
+came down into the plains of Castille. But years passed by, Amadeus
+had come and gone, they had even proclaimed a republic! And yet the
+cause of God did not seem to advance much, and Heaven seemed deaf. A
+republican deputy proclaimed a war against God, challenging Him to
+silence him; and so impiety stalked along immune and triumphant, and
+its eloquence flowed abroad like a poisonous spring.
+
+[Footnote 1: Provinces of Alava, Guipuscoa, and the lordship of
+Biscay.]
+
+Gabriel lived in a state of bellicose excitement--he forgot his books,
+he disregarded his future, he never thought now of singing his mass.
+What would happen to his career now that the Church was in peril, and
+that the sleepy poetry of past ages, that had enveloped him from his
+cradle like a perfumed cloud of old incense and dried roses, was on
+the point of vanishing?
+
+Often some of the pupils disappeared from the seminary, and the
+professors would reply to the inquiries of the curious with a sly
+wink.
+
+"They have gone out--with the good sort. They could not see quietly
+what was happening--'child's play,' 'follies.'"
+
+But nevertheless such follies made them smile with paternal
+satisfaction.
+
+He thought to be himself among those who fled, as the world seemed
+to be coming to an end. In certain towns the revolutionary mob had
+invaded and profaned the churches; as yet they had not murdered any of
+the ministers of God as in other revolutions, but still the priests
+were unable to go about the streets in their cassocks for fear of
+being hooted and insulted. The remembrance of the archbishops of
+Toledo, those brave ecclesiastical princes, implacable warriors
+against the infidels, fired his warlike feelings. As yet he had never
+been away from Toledo, away from the shadow of its Cathedral; Spain
+seemed to him as vast as all the rest of the world put together, and
+he began to feel the ardent desire of seeing something new, of seeing
+closer all the wonderful things he had read about in his books,
+stirring within him.
+
+One day he kissed his mother's hand, without feeling any very great
+emotion towards the trembling and nearly blind old woman, for the
+seminary had for him more tender memories than the house of his
+fathers, smoked his last cigar with his brothers in the garden without
+revealing his intentions to them, and that night he fled from Toledo
+with a scapulary of the Heart of Jesus sewed into his waistcoat, and a
+beautiful silk scarf in his wallet, one of those worked by white hands
+in the convents of the city. The son of the bell-ringer went with
+him. They joined one of the insignificant bands who were devastating
+Murcia, but they soon went on to Valencia and Catalonia, anxious to
+perform greater exploits for the cause of God than merely stealing
+mules and extorting contributions from the rich.
+
+Gabriel felt an intense delight in this wandering life, with its
+continual alarms owing to the proximity of the troops.
+
+He had been made an officer at once, on account of his education, and
+because of the letters of recommendation that certain of the prebends
+of the Metropolitan Church had given him; letters lamenting greatly
+that a youth of so much theological promise should go and risk his
+life like a simple sacristan.
+
+Luna enjoyed the free and lawless life of war with the zest of a
+collegian out of bounds; but he could not hide the feeling of painful
+disillusion that the sight of those armies of the Faith caused him.
+He had expected to find something akin to the ancient crusading
+expeditions: soldiers who fought for an ideal, who bent the knee
+before beginning the fight, so that God might be on their side, and
+who at night, after a hard-fought field, slept the pure sleep of an
+ascetic; instead of which he found an armed mob, mutinous to their
+leaders, incapable of that fanaticism which rushes blindfold to death,
+anxious only that the war might last as long as possible, so that they
+might continue the life of lawless wandering at the expense of the
+country, which they considered the best life possible; people who
+at the sight of wine, women or plunder would disband themselves,
+hungering, turning against their leaders.
+
+It was the ancient life of the horde, surging up through civilisation,
+the atavic custom of stealing the stranger's bread and women by force
+of arms, the ancient Celtiberic love of factions and internal strife,
+that only caught hold of a political pretext in order to revive.
+
+Gabriel, with very rare exceptions, found none in those badly-armed
+and worse-clothed bands who fought with a fixed idea; they were
+adventurers who wished for war for the sake of war; visionaries
+anxious for fortune; country lads from the fields, who in their
+passive ignorance had joined the factions, just as they would have
+stayed at home if they had had better counsels; simple souls who
+firmly believed that in the towns they were burning and destroying
+God's ministers, and who had thrown themselves into the fray so that
+society should not lapse into barbarism.
+
+The common danger, the misery of the interminable marches to deceive
+the enemy, the scarcity suffered in the barren fields and on the rough
+hilltops on which they took refuge, made them all equals, enthusiasts,
+sceptics or rustics. They all felt the same desire to compensate
+themselves for their privations, to appease the ravenous beast they
+felt inside, awakened and irritated by a life of such sudden changes;
+as much by the wild abundance and plundering of a sack as by the
+distress endured in the long marches over interminable plains without
+ever seeing the slightest sign of life. On entering a town they would
+shout, "Long live religion," but on the slightest provocation they
+would do this, that and the other in the name of God and all the
+saints, not omitting in their filthy oaths to swear by everything most
+sacred in that same religion.
+
+Gabriel, who soon became accustomed to this wandering life, ceased
+to feel shocked. The former scruples of the seminarist vanished,
+smothered under the crust of the fighting man, which became hardened
+with war.
+
+The romantic figure of Dona Blanca, the king's sister-in-law passed
+before him, like a person in a novel; in her romantic energy this
+princess wished to emulate the deeds of the heroines of La Vendee, and
+mounted on a small white horse, her pistol in her belt, and the white
+scarf tied over her floating tresses, she put herself at the head of
+these armed bands, who revived in the centre of the Peninsula
+the strife of almost prehistoric times. The flutter of the dark
+riding-habit of this heroine served as a standard to the battalions of
+Zouaves, to the troop of French, German, and Italian adventurers, the
+scum of all the wars on the globe, who found it pleasanter to follow
+a woman anxious for fame than to enlist themselves into the foreign
+legion of Algeria.
+
+The assault of Cuenca, the sole victory of the campaign, made a deep
+impression on Gabriel's memory; the troops of men wearing the scarf,
+after they had knocked down the ramparts as weak as mud walls, rushed
+like overflowing streams through the streets. The firing from the
+windows could not stop them; they rushed in pale, with discoloured
+lips and eyes brilliant with homicidal mania, the danger overcome, and
+the knowledge that they were at length masters of the place drove them
+mad; the doors of the houses fell under their blows, terrified men
+rushed out to be pierced with bayonets in the streets, and in the
+houses you could see women struggling in the arms of the assailants,
+striking them in the face with one hand, while with the other they
+struggled to retain their clothes.
+
+Gabriel saw how the roughest of the mountaineers destroyed in the
+Institute all the apparatus of the Cabinet of Physical Science,
+breaking it in pieces. They were furious with these inventions of the
+evil one, with which they thought the unbelievers communicated with
+the Government of Madrid, and they smashed on the ground with the butt
+ends of their muskets, and trampled with their feet, all the
+gilt wheels of the apparatus, and all the discs and batteries of
+electricity.
+
+The seminarist was delighted at all this destruction; he also hated,
+but it was with a calm, reflective hate bred in the seminary, all
+positive and material sciences, for the sum total of his reasoning was
+that they came perilously near to the negation of God; those sons of
+the mountains in their blessed ignorance, had without knowing it done
+a great deed. Ah! if only the whole nation would imitate them! In
+former times there were none of these ridiculous inventions of
+science, and Spain was far happier. To live a holy life, the learning
+of the priests and the ignorance of the people was sufficient, for
+both together produced a blessed tranquillity; what did they want
+more? For so the country had existed for centuries, all through the
+most glorious period of its existence.
+
+The war came to an end, the closely pursued rebels passed through the
+centre of Catalonia and were finally driven over the frontier, where
+they were compelled to give up their arms to the French custom-house
+officers. Many availed themselves of the amnesty, anxious to return to
+their own homes. Mariano, the bell-ringer, was one of these. He did
+not wish to live in a foreign land; besides, during his absence his
+father had died, and it was extremely probable that he might succeed
+to the charge of the Cathedral tower if he laid due stress on the
+merits of his family, his three years' campaigning for the sake of
+religion, and a wound he had received in his leg; he would really be
+able to compare himself with the martyrs for Christianity.
+
+Gabriel preferred emigration. "He was an officer and therefore
+could not take the oath of allegiance to a usurping dynasty." This
+declaration he made with all the pride learnt in this caricature of an
+army, which emphasised all the ceremonies of ancient warfare, and who,
+ragged and shoeless as they were, with their swords by their sides,
+never failed to transmit orders to each other as "high-born officer."
+But the real reason which prevented Luna from returning to Toledo was
+that he wished to follow the course of events, to see new countries
+and different customs. To return to the Cathedral would mean to remain
+there for ever, to renounce everything in life, and he, who during the
+war had tasted of worldly delights, had no desire to turn his back on
+them quite so soon; also he was not yet of age, so he had plenty of
+time before him in which to finish his studies; the priesthood was a
+sure retreat, but one to which he was in no hurry to return just at
+present; besides, his mother was dead, and his brother's letters told
+him of no alteration in the sleepy life of the upper cloister, beyond
+that the gardener was married and that the "Wooden Staff" was courting
+a girl in the Claverias, it being against all the good traditions of
+these people to ally themselves with anyone outside the Cathedral.
+
+Luna lived for more than a year in the emigrants' cantonments; his
+classical education and the sympathy aroused by his youth smoothed his
+path to a certain extent; he talked Latin with the French abbes, who
+were delighted to hear about the war from the young theologian, and
+at the same time they taught him the language of the country. These
+friends procured for him Spanish lessons among the upper middle
+classes who were friendly to the Church. In these days of penury he
+was saved by his friendship with an old legitimist Countess, who
+invited him to spend several days in her country house, introducing
+the warlike seminarist to all the grave and pious friends at her
+assemblies as though he had been a crusader newly returned from
+Palestine.
+
+Gabriel's great desire was to go to Paris; his life in France had
+radically changed his ideas, he really felt as though he had fallen
+into a new planet. Accustomed to the monotonous life in the seminary,
+and to the nomadic existence during that mountainous and inglorious
+war, he was astonished at the material progress, the refinement of
+civilisation, the culture and the well-being of the people in France.
+He remembered now with shame his Spanish ignorance, all that Castilian
+phantasmagoria, fed by lying literature, that had made him believe
+that Spain was the first country in the world, and its people the
+noblest and bravest, and that all the other nations were a sort of
+wretched mob, created by God to be victims of heresy, and to receive
+overwhelming punishment each time that they ventured to interfere with
+this privileged country, which, though it eats little and drinks less,
+has yet produced the holiest saints and the greatest captains of
+Christendom.
+
+When Gabriel could express himself fluently in French and had
+contrived to save a few francs for his journey, he went to Paris. A
+friendly abbe had procured him employment as corrector of proofs in a
+religious library close to Saint Sulpice. In this priestly quarter of
+Paris, with its hostels for the clergy and for religious families, as
+gloomy as convents, with its shops full of pious images, which flood
+the globe with varnished and smiling saints, was accomplished the
+great transformation of Gabriel.
+
+This quarter of Saint Sulpice with its streets almost Spanish in their
+silence and peacefulness, with the sisters in black veils gliding by
+the walls of the seminary, drawn by the sound of the bells, was for
+the Spanish seminarist what the road to Damascus had been for the
+Apostle. The French Catholicism, cultivated, reasoning and respectful
+to human progress, bewildered Gabriel, whose fierce Spanish bigotry
+had taught him to despise all profane science. There was only one true
+learning in the world, and that was theology. The other sciences were
+only toys, only fit to amuse the eternal infancy of humanity. To know
+God and to meditate on the greatness of His power, this was the only
+serious study to which men could devote themselves; machinery, the
+discoveries of the positive sciences, in fact everything which did not
+treat of divinity and the future life, was only a bagatelle for the
+amusement of fools and people of no faith.
+
+The former seminarist, who from his earliest childhood had despised
+all human progress, was stupefied when he perceived how earnestly all
+French Catholicism spoke of it. In correcting the proofs of so many
+religious works he could not but notice the profound respect which
+this despised science inspired in the good French priests, men of such
+far superior culture to that of the canons down there. And moreover he
+noticed a certain humble shrinking in the representatives of religion
+when they came face to face with science--a desire to please, not
+to be censorious, to help on with their sympathy any conciliatory
+solutions, so that dogma should not fall to the ground, finding no
+place in the rapid march of events that was hurrying humanity into
+the future with the whirl of its new discoveries. Entire books were
+written by eminent priests with the view of adjusting and bringing
+into line the revelations of the holy books and the discoveries of
+modern science, even at the risk of doing some violence to the former.
+The ancient and venerable Church that Gabriel had seen in his own
+country, immovable in its antiquated majesty, unwilling to move a
+single fold of its mantle for fear of losing some of the dust of ages,
+was stirring in France, endeavouring to renew itself, throwing on one
+side the ancient garments of tradition, like old rags that would turn
+it into ridicule, and stretching out its hands with almost despairing
+strength to catch hold of the modern achievements of science; the
+great enemy of yesterday, whose appearance had been ushered in with
+bonfires and shameful abjurations was triumphant to-day.
+
+What had that fatal apple of Paradise contained, that after six
+thousand years of malediction that same Church had begun to venerate
+it, striving to make it forget its ancient persecutions? Why was
+religion, firm as a rock throughout the centuries, which had defied
+persecutions, schisms and wars, beginning to dissolve before the
+discoveries of a few men, and entering into that wild current which
+sought for the cause and explanation of everything? If it had the
+secular support of faith, why should it seek the assistance of reason
+to maintain its traditions and to justify its dogmas?
+
+Gabriel felt the same fever of curiosity which had obliged him as a
+child to bend his back over the old volumes, bound in parchment, in
+the library of the seminary; he wished to be acquainted with the
+mysterious perfume of that hated science which had so disturbed God's
+priests, and had made them indirectly deny the beliefs of nineteen
+centuries. He wished to know why the sacred books were being
+dislocated and tortured in order to explain by geological periods the
+creation which God had accomplished in six days. What danger did they
+hope to avoid by making the divinity appear before science in order to
+explain its acts and fit them into the decisions of the latter?
+Whence came the instinctive fear of the religious authors of roundly
+affirming miracles? attempting instead to justify them by intricate
+and tentative reasonings, without daring to adduce as the decisive
+proof the incomprehensibility of supernatural prodigies.
+
+For the time being Gabriel abandoned the tranquil atmosphere of the
+religious library. His reputation as a humanist had reached the ears
+of an editor living near the Sorbonne, so, without leaving the left
+bank of the Seine, he moved into the Latin quarter to undertake the
+correction of proofs in Latin and Greek. He earned in this way twelve
+francs a day--far more than those canons of Toledo, who formerly had
+appeared to him as great dukes. He lived in a small inn for students
+near to the School of Medicine, and his vehement discussions at night
+with his fellow-lodgers over the smoke of their pipes taught him as
+much as the books of that hated science. Those students who lent him
+books, or who told him of those he should search for in his free
+hours in the library on the hill of Saint Genevieve, laughed like
+pagans at the exalted ideas of the former seminarist.
+
+For two years young Luna did little else but read; now and again he
+accompanied his friends in some escapade, throwing himself into the
+free and joyous life of the Quartier, wearing out the elbows of his
+sleeves on the tables of the beershops. The Mimi of Murger often
+passed before him, but less melancholy than the creation of the poet,
+and the ex-seminarist found his Sunday evening idylls in the woods
+surrounding Paris. But Gabriel was not of an amorous temperament;
+curiosity and the thirst for knowledge mastered him, and after these
+escapades from which he returned fresher, and with his brain keener,
+he threw himself with greater ardour into his studies.
+
+History, true history, whose cold clearness contrasted so strongly
+with that intricate morass of miracles in the chronicles that he had
+read in his childhood, beat down the greater part of his beliefs.
+Catholicism was no longer for him the only religion, neither could
+he any longer divide the history of humanity into two periods, that
+before and that after the appearance in Judea of a handful of obscure
+men, who, spreading themselves over the world, preached a cosmopolitan
+morality drawn from the maxims of Orientals, and from the teachings of
+Greek philosophy.
+
+Religions were for him human inventions, subject to the conditions of
+existence belonging to all organisms, its generous infancy capable of
+blind sacrifices, its self-contained and masterful manhood, in which
+the early sweetness was changed by the authoritative imposition of its
+power, and its inevitable age, with a long agony, in which the sick
+man, guessing his speedy end, clings to life with all the energy of
+desperation.
+
+His faith in Catholicism as the only religion disappeared completely;
+losing his belief in dogmas he lost also, by inevitable logic, that
+belief in the monarchy which had driven him to fight in the mountains,
+and he understood clearly now the history of his country without
+prejudices of race. The foreign historians showed him the sad fate of
+Spain, arrested in the most critical period of her development, when
+she was emerging young and strong during the most fertile period of
+the Middle Ages, by the fanaticism of priests and inquisitors, and the
+folly of some of her kings, who, with utterly inadequate means, wished
+to revive the empire of the Caesars, draining the country for this mad
+enterprise. Those people who had broken with the Papacy, turning their
+backs for ever on Rome, were far happier and more prosperous than that
+Spain, which slept like a beggar at the door of the Church.
+
+At this period of his intellectual development Gabriel had an ideal,
+and often of an evening he would leave his work to go and listen to
+him for an hour at the College of France: this was Ernest Renan;
+Gabriel admired him for a double reason, for his talent and for his
+history. The great man had also passed through a seminary, and even
+now had a priestly look as though he had suffered deeply from the
+pressure of the ecclesiastical yoke; he was a rebel, and Gabriel felt
+as though he belonged to his own family. "Truly the hammers to destroy
+the temple are forged within the temple," and the law fatal to all
+religions was being accomplished, when faith vanishes, and the
+multitude no longer feel the fervour of early days.
+
+Gabriel was astonished to hear how the teacher could penetrate the
+intellectual development of the Hebrew people, which had served as the
+basis of Christianity, as he heard him demolish bit by bit the
+immense altarpiece, before which humanity had knelt for over nineteen
+centuries. The Spanish seminarist revolted against his old faith with
+all the impetuosity of his vehement temperament. How could he have
+believed all that and have considered it the height of human wisdom!
+Certainly Christianity had exercised a beneficial influence at one
+period of the infancy of humanity, it had filled men's lives in the
+Middle Ages when there was little to think of beyond religion, and, in
+a land desolated by strife, there was no other refuge for intellectual
+thought but the cathedral in the towns and the monastery in the
+country. "The fairs--the assemblies for business and pleasure," said
+the master, "were religious feasts; the scenic representations were
+mysteries, the journeys were pilgrimages and the wars crusades." After
+this the ways of life divided--religious life took one way and human
+life the other. Art placed nature above the ideal, and men thought
+more of earth than of heaven. Reason was born, and every advance that
+it made was one step backward for faith, and at last the time arrived
+when the clear-sighted, those who were anxious about the future, began
+to ask themselves what the new belief was likely to be which would
+replace the moribund religion. Luna had no doubts on the point--it was
+science, and science alone, which could fill the vacuum caused by that
+religion now dead for ever.
+
+Influenced by the Hellenism of his master, which he assimilated
+easily, being accustomed to daily intercourse with the Greek authors,
+he dreamed that the humanity of the future would be an immense Athens,
+an artistic and learned democracy governed by great thinkers, with
+no strifes but those of the mind, with no ambition but that of
+cultivating the intellect, of gentle manners, and devoted to the joys
+of the mind and the culture of reason.
+
+Of all his old beliefs, Gabriel only retained that of a creative
+God from a certain superstitious scruple. His ideas were rather
+disconcerted by astronomy, which he had taken up with an almost
+childish eagerness, attracted by the charm of the marvellous.
+That infinite space in which in olden days legions of angels had
+manoeuvred, and which had served the Virgin as a pathway in her
+terrestrial descents, he suddenly found to be peopled with thousands
+of millions of worlds, and the more powerful men's instruments became
+the more numerous they seemed to be, the distances being infinitely
+prolonged to immensities that were inconceivable. Bodies were
+attracted to one another travelling in space at the rate of millions
+of miles a minute, and all this cloud of worlds revolved without ever
+passing twice over the same spot in this immensity of silence, in
+which fresh stars, and again others and others, were continually being
+discovered as the instruments of observation became more perfect.
+
+This God of Gabriel's having lost the corporeal form given to Him by
+religion, and as divulged in the history of the creation, lost at once
+all His attributes, and being magnified to fill the infinite and being
+absorbed into it, became so impalpable and subtle to the intellect as
+to appear a phantasm.
+
+Nothing remained to Gabriel of all his ancient beliefs. His mind was
+like a bare field over which the whirlwind had passed, for his last
+belief, which had remained standing like a monolith in the midst of
+ruins, the belief in the history of creation, had now fallen.
+
+But it was impossible to the former seminarist to remain inactive with
+his cargo of new ideas. He felt obliged to believe in something, to
+devote to the defence of some ideal all the faith in his character, to
+make some use of that fervour of proselytising which had been so
+much admired in the class of eloquence in the seminary, and so
+revolutionary sociology took possession of him. First of all it was
+Proudhon with his audacious writings, and afterwards the work was
+completed by some "militantes" who were working in the same printing
+office as himself--old soldiers of the Commune, who had lately
+returned from their exile in the prisons of Oceania, and were renewing
+their campaign against social organisation with an ardour increased
+tenfold by their painful sufferings and their desire of vengeance.
+With them he went to the anarchist meetings; there he heard Reclus
+and Prince Kropotkine, and the words of the since deceased Miquel
+Bakronhine came to him as the gospel of a Saint Paul of the future.
+
+Gabriel had met with his new religion, and he gave himself over to
+it entirely, dreaming of the regeneration of humanity through its
+stomach. Believing in a future life, misfortunes gave the false
+consolation of happiness after death; but all religion was a lie,
+there was no other life but that of the present, and Luna rose in
+anger against the social injustice that condemned millions of beings
+to poverty and misery for the happiness of a few privileged thousands.
+Authority, which was the fount of all evil, was to him the greatest
+enemy; it must be destroyed, but men must be created who were capable
+of living without masters, priests or soldiers. The natural gentleness
+of his character, and the horror of violence with which his three
+years' campaigning had filled him, caused him rather to draw back from
+his new companions, who, dreaming of hecatombs from dynamite and the
+dagger to reform the world, obliged him to accept these new doctrines
+through fear. No; he believed in the strength of the "idea," and in
+the innocent evolution of humanity; he had only to work like the first
+apostles of Christianity certain of the future, but without hurrying,
+to see his ideas realised; he had only to fix his eyes on the day's
+work, without thinking of the long years and centuries before it would
+bear its fruit.
+
+The ardour of his proselytising made him leave Paris at the end of
+five years. He was anxious to see the world, to study for himself all
+these social miseries, so as to judge what forces these disinherited
+could command for their great transformation. Besides, he began to
+find himself incommoded by the vigilance of the French police, on
+account of his intimacy with the Russian students of the Quartier
+Latin--young men with cold eyes and limp and dishevelled hair who were
+endeavouring to implant in Paris the vengeances of Nihilism. In London
+he came to know a young Englishwoman of weak health, but burning like
+himself with all the ardour of revolutionary propaganda, who would
+walk from morning till night in the lanes and surroundings of
+workshops and laboratories, distributing pamphlets and printed
+leaflets that she kept in a band-box that was always hanging on her
+arm. In a short time Lucy became Gabriel's companion; they loved each
+other without excitement, with a cold and quiet passion, more from
+community of ideas than anything else, for the love of revolutionists,
+dominated with the thought of rebellion against everything existing,
+has not much room for any other feeling.
+
+Luna and his companion went to Holland and thence to Belgium, settling
+afterwards in Germany, always travelling from group to group of
+"companions," taking up different work with that facility of
+adaptation which seems universal among revolutionaries, who wander
+over the world penniless, enduring every sort of privation, but
+finding always in their difficulties some brotherly hand to raise them
+and set them again on the path.
+
+After eight years of this life Gabriel's friend died of consumption.
+They were then in Italy, and Luna, finding himself alone, understood
+for the first time how much support the gentle companion of his life
+had given him. In his sorrow for the loss of Lucy he forgot for a
+while his revolutionary enthusiasm, lamenting only the void left in
+his life. He had not loved her as most men love, but she was his
+companion, his sister, they were alike in their pleasures and their
+sorrows, and their common poverty had welded them into one will.
+Moreover, Gabriel felt himself aged before his time by this life
+of soul-stirring adventures and painful privations. He had been
+imprisoned in many places in Europe, being suspected of complicity
+with the terrorists, he had often been beaten by the police, and he
+began to find a difficulty in travelling about the Continent, as his
+photograph figured with that of several other "companions" in the
+central police offices of the principal nations. He was a vagabond and
+dangerous dog, who would end by being kicked out of every place.
+
+Gabriel could not live alone; he was accustomed to see those kind blue
+eyes near him, and to hear the caressing voice with its bird-like
+inflexions which had so much encouraged him in times of trial and
+difficulty, and he could not endure the solitude in a strange land
+after Lucy's death. A great longing for his native land awoke in him,
+he wished to return to Spain, to that land he had so often ridiculed,
+and which now in spite of its backwardness seemed to him so
+attractive. He thought of his brothers, fixed like plants to the
+stones of the Cathedral, never interesting themselves with what took
+place in the world, never seeking for news of him, as though they had
+entirely forgotten him.
+
+With a sudden impulse, as though he were afraid of dying away from
+his native land, he returned to Spain. In Barcelona some of the
+"companions" had obtained for him the management of a printing press,
+but before taking up his post he wished to spend a few days in Toledo.
+He returned an old man, though he was barely forty, speaking four or
+five languages, and poorer than when he had left it. He found that
+his brother the gardener had died, and that the widow and her son had
+taken refuge in a garret in the Claverias, where she supported herself
+by washing the canon's linen. Esteban, the "Wooden Staff," received
+him with the same admiration he had felt for him while in the
+seminary. He talked a great deal about his travels, gathering together
+all the people in the upper cloister, so that they should listen to
+this man who had travelled all over the world, just as though he were
+going about his own house. In their inquiries they painfully entangled
+geography, as they could only comprehend two divisions in it, the
+countries of heretics, and the countries of Christians.
+
+Gabriel pitied the great poverty of these people, and admired the
+humbleness of these Cathedral servants, content to live and die in the
+same place, without any curiosity as to what was taking place outside
+the walls. The church seemed to him a huge derelict. It was like the
+petrified skeleton of one of those immense and powerful animals of
+former days, that had been dead for ages, its body decayed, its soul
+evaporated, and nothing left but this framework, like to the shells
+found by geologists in prehistoric strata by whose structure they can
+guess at the soft parts of the vanished being. Seeing the ceremonies
+of worship which in former days had so moved him, he felt roused to
+protest, a longing to shout to the priests and acolytes to stop, and
+withdraw, as their times were passed, and faith was dead, and it was
+only from routine and the fear of outside opinion that people now
+frequented these places, which formerly religious fervour had filled
+from morning till night.
+
+On his arrival in Barcelona Gabriel's life was a whirlwind of
+proselytising, of struggles, and of persecutions. The "companions"
+respected him, seeing in him the friend of all the great propagandists
+of "the idea," and one who might himself rank among the most famous
+revolutionists. No meeting could be held without the "companion" Luna;
+that natural eloquence which had caused such wonder on his entry into
+the seminary, bubbled up and spread like an intoxicating gas in these
+revolutionary assemblies, firing that ragged, hungry, and miserable
+crowd, making them tremble with emotion at the description of future
+societies set forth by the apostle, that celestial city of the
+dreamers of all ages, without property, without vices, without
+inequalities, where work would become a pleasure, and where there
+would be no other worship but that of science and art. Some of his
+hearers, the darker spirits, would smile with a compassionate gesture,
+listening to his maledictions against authority, and his hymns to
+the sweetness and triumph to be won by passive resistance. He was an
+idealist, one to whom they must listen because he had served the cause
+well; they who were the strong men, the fighters, knew well enough how
+to crush in silence that cursed society if it should show itself deaf
+to the voice of Truth.
+
+When they exploded bombs in the streets the "companion" Luna was the
+first to be surprised at the catastrophe, he was also the first to be
+taken to prison on account of the popularity of his name. Oh! those
+two years passed in the castle of Montjuich! They had ploughed a deep
+furrow in Gabriel's memory, a deep wound that could not heal, that
+made him tremble at the slightest remembrance, disturbing his calm,
+and making him hot and cold with terror.
+
+The madness of fear had taken possession of society, and all laws and
+regard to humanity, were trampled under foot to defend it. The justice
+of former ages, with its violent procedure was resuscitated in full
+civilisation. The judge was distrusted as being too cultured and
+scrupulous, and a free hand was given to the petty officers of
+justice, ordering them to introduce afresh all the old instruments of
+torture.
+
+In the darkness of the night Gabriel saw his Moorish dungeon lighted
+up; some men in uniform seized him and dragged him down the staircase
+to a room where others were waiting with huge cudgels. A young man
+with a soft voice, in the uniform of a lieutenant, and with the lazy
+manners of a Creole, questioned him as to the various attempts that
+had occurred months before down in the town. Gabriel knew nothing, had
+seen nothing. But all the same these men were your companions; but
+he, having fixed his eyes on high, contemplating his visions of the
+future, had never realised that all around him this violence was
+surging and germinating. His reiterated negative rendered the men
+furious; the soft voice of the Creole became harsh with anger, and
+with menaces and blasphemies they all threw themselves upon him, and
+the cruel hunt of the man round and round the dungeon began, the
+cudgels falling on his body, beat his head or his legs indifferently,
+pursuing him into corners, following him as with a desperate bound he
+reached the opposite wall, opening the way with his bent head, his
+back resounding like an empty box beneath the blows. Now and then the
+desperation of pain inflamed the victim, the lamb turned into a wild
+beast, and before falling to the ground, cowering like a child before
+superior numbers, he would throw himself on the executioners, tearing
+them, and trying to bite them. Gabriel kept a button from the
+lieutenant's uniform which had remained in his fingers after one of
+these revolts of his weakness.
+
+Afterwards, his tormentors, wearied by the inutility of their
+violence, left him forgotten in the dungeon. A loaf of bread and some
+bits of dry salt cod were his only food. Thirst, an infernal thirst,
+racked his bowels, contracted his throat, and burnt his mouth. At
+first he called piteously under the door for water, but afterwards he
+would beg no more, knowing beforehand what the answer would be. It was
+a calculated torture; they promised him as much water as he wished,
+after he should have disclosed the names of the guilty, confessing
+things of which he had no knowledge. Hunger strove in him against
+thirst, but fearing this latter most, he would throw this salted food
+into a corner as though it were poison. He was delirious with the
+delirium of a shipwrecked man tormented with visions of fresh water
+in the midst of the salt waves. In his nightmare he saw clear and
+murmuring brooks, great rivers; and seeking freshness for his mouth
+he would pass his tongue over the filthy walls, finding a certain
+alleviation in the lime of the whitewash.
+
+The privations and the incarceration disturbed his mind with horrible
+ravings; often Gabriel was surprised at finding himself on all fours,
+growling and barking opposite the door without knowing how or why.
+
+His tormentors seemed to forget him; they had other prisoners to look
+after. The jailors gave him water, but whole months passed without
+anyone entering his cell. Some nights he would hear vaguely and
+far off through the greasy walls wailing and sobs in the adjacent
+dungeons. One morning he was awoke by sounds as of thunder, in spite
+of a tiny ray of sunlight filtering through his loophole; hearing the
+jailors in the corridors near, he understood the mystery. They had
+been shooting some of the prisoners.
+
+Luna received as a happiness this hope of death; he would renounce
+with pleasure that shadow of a life in a small stone box, tormented by
+physical pain and the fear of men's ferocity. His stomach, weakened by
+all these privations, refused for many days, with horrible nausea, to
+receive the bitter bread and the coppery mess. His want of exercise,
+the want of air, and the bad and scanty nourishment had made him
+fall into a mortal anaemia; he coughed continually, suffering great
+oppression on his chest. The knowledge he had acquired of the human
+body in his thirst for knowing everything did not admit of his being
+mistaken; he would die as poor Lucy had died.
+
+After a year and a half of imprisonment he appeared before a council
+of war, mixed up with a mob of old men, women, and even quite young
+people, all weakened and broken by imprisonment, with their skin white
+and thick as chewed paper, and that dazed look in their eyes that
+comes from solitary confinement. Gabriel hoped he would be executed.
+When the fiscal came to the name of Luna on the long list he stopped
+an instant, shooting a ferocious glance at him--this man was among the
+theorists. It appeared from the declarations of witnesses that he took
+no direct part in the deeds of violence, and that in his speeches he
+had always deprecated them; still it must be remembered that he was
+one of the principal propagandists of anarchism, and that he had
+delivered speeches in all the workmen's societies frequented by the
+authors of the attempts.
+
+An elderly captain bent towards another member of the council,
+speaking in his ear, but Gabriel caught his words:
+
+"It is on these gentlemen who make speeches that we must lay our hand,
+so that they may be warned not to lecture any more on Tolstoi or
+Ibsen, or any of those foreign worthies who advocate throwing bombs."
+
+Gabriel spent many months of solitary confinement in his prison.
+From words now and then dropped by his jailors he could guess at the
+fluctuations of his fate. Sometimes he would gather that he and all
+his companions in misfortune were to be sent to the jail in Africa, or
+again they would hint at his immediate liberation, or would prophesy
+that they were all to be shot _en masse_. When at the end of two
+years he left this gloomy castle, it was to be embarked with all his
+companions for exile. He was only the shadow of a man; his weakness
+made his walk as uncertain and tremulous as that of a child, but he
+forgot his own misery in trying to assist those of his companions who
+were even weaker than himself, and who bore the cruel scars of the
+torments they had endured.
+
+The return to liberty recalled all his former gentleness and the
+philosophic pity with which he surrounded all men, pitying and
+pardoning their faults. On landing in England the more violent of
+his companions spoke of future vengeance on their persecutors, while
+Gabriel asked pardon for them, as blind instruments employed by
+society in a moment of terror, thinking they had saved it by their
+barbarity.
+
+The climate of London aggravated Gabriel's illness, and in about two
+years he was obliged to move to the Continent, although England with
+its absolute liberty was the only land where he could have lived
+quietly and ignored.
+
+His existence was a cruel one, always a fugitive through the different
+countries of Europe, driven from one place to another by the vigilance
+of the police, thrown into prison, or expelled on the slightest
+suspicion. It was a return to the ancient persecution of the gipsies,
+the constant hunting of independent people, leading vagabond lives, of
+the Middle Ages. His illness and his desire for rest and peace made
+him return to Spain. Time had produced a certain amount of tolerance
+towards the exiles, and in Spain everything is soon forgotten, and
+though the authorities are harder and less scrupulous than in other
+countries, still they interfere less on account of their improvidence
+and the carelessness natural to the race.
+
+Sick and without any work by which he could earn his living, precluded
+from seeking work among the printers, as his name was encircled by
+a halo which terrified the masters, Gabriel fell into such extreme
+poverty that the little help and succour his companions could afford
+were unable to relieve it, and he travelled from end to end of the
+Peninsula begging from his fellows and hiding from the police.
+
+His spirit was broken, he was conquered, and he had no longer strength
+to continue the struggle. Nothing remained for him but to die, but
+merciful death came slowly to his call. He thought of his brother, the
+only affection remaining to him in the world; he remembered the quiet
+family in the Claverias, of which he had caught a glimpse on his last
+visit to the Cathedral, and he turned to seek them as his last hope.
+
+On his return to Toledo, he found the happy family dissolved;
+misfortune had come even to that silent and stagnant corner.
+
+But the Cathedral, insensible to all human vicissitudes was there,
+the same as ever, and to it he clung, hiding himself in its recesses,
+hoping to die there in peace, with no other hope but to be forgotten;
+dying before his proper time, tasting the bitter happiness of
+annihilation, leaving behind him at the door, like an animal who sheds
+its skin, all that rebellion which had drawn upon him the hatred of
+society.
+
+His happiness was not to think, not to speak, to mould himself to that
+dead world; he would be among the living statues peopling the upper
+cloister, one more automaton; he would imitate those beings who seemed
+to have absorbed into themselves something of the austerity of the
+granite buttresses, he would inhale like a healing balsam the scent
+of the rusty iron railings and the incense that spread through the
+church, the ancient perfume of the past centuries.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+On leaving the cloister in the mornings soon after daybreak, the first
+person Gabriel would see was Don Antolin, the "Silver Stick." This
+priest exercised an authority like that of Governor of the Cathedral,
+for all the lay servants were under his orders, and all the repairs of
+little importance were done under his supervision.
+
+Down below, in the church, he watched the sacristans and the acolytes,
+careful that the canons and beneficiaries should have no cause of
+complaint in the services. Upstairs, in the cloister, he watched over
+the good behaviour and cleanliness of the families, being by the grace
+of the cardinal archbishop a sort of magistrate over that little town.
+
+He occupied the best "habitacion" in the Claverias. At the great
+ceremonies he walked in front of the Chapter in his pluvial, carrying
+a silver stick nearly as tall as himself, making the tiles of the
+pavement re-echo with its blows. During High Mass and the choir in the
+evening he walked about the naves to check any irreverence on the part
+of the congregation or any inattention on that of the staff. At eight
+o'clock at night in the winter, and at nine in summer, he locked the
+door of the staircase leading to the upper cloister, putting the key
+in his pocket, and so all the people in the cloister remained quite
+isolated from the town. If now and again anyone was taken ill in the
+night, it was necessary to wake Don Antolin who, plunging his hand
+into the depths of his cassock, would produce his key, and deign to
+restore communication with the outer world.
+
+He was about seventy years of age, small and wizened; age had scarcely
+tinged his shaven crown with grey, his forehead was broad and square,
+and rose straight beneath the silk cap he wore in winter. His features
+were rather drawn out, without a single wrinkle, and devoid of any
+expression that showed emotion, the jaw-bone narrow and sharp, and the
+eyes as inexpressive and motionless as the rest of the face, but with
+a cold, penetrating glance that was extremely disconcerting.
+
+Gabriel had known him from his childhood; he was, to use his own
+expression, like a private soldier of the church, who by reason of his
+years and services had attained the rank of sergeant, but who could
+rise no further. When Luna first entered the seminary Don Antolin had
+just been ordained priest, and since then had passed his life in the
+sacristy of the Primacy where he had begun as acolyte.
+
+On account of his absolute and irrational faith and his unbending
+adhesion to the Church, the professors in the seminary had pushed him
+on in his career, in spite of his ignorance; he was a son of the soil,
+having been born in a village in the mountains round Toledo. The Holy
+Metropolitan Church was to him the second house of God in the world,
+only ranking after Saint Peter's in Rome, and all ecclesiastical
+learning was to him like rays emanating from the Divine wisdom, which
+blinded him, and were to be adored with the profound respect of
+ignorance.
+
+He had that blessed and entire want of education so appreciated by the
+Church in former years. Gabriel felt sure that if Silver Stick had
+been born in the flourishing times of Catholicism he would have become
+a saint on dedicating himself to the spiritual life, or he would have
+played an excellent part in the Inquisition on the arrival of that
+militant society. Having come into the world at the wrong time, when
+faith was weakened and the Church could no longer impose its laws
+by violence, the good Don Antolin had remained hidden in the lower
+administration of the Cathedral, assisting the Canon Obrero in the
+division and assignment of the money that the State allowed to the
+Primacy, giving long thought over the spending of each handful of
+farthings, endeavouring that the holy house, like the ruined families,
+should keep up its good outward appearance without revealing the
+poverty inside.
+
+He had been promised several times a chaplaincy of nuns, but he was
+one of those faithful to the Cathedral, one of those quite in love
+with the great establishment. He was proud of the confidence that the
+Lord Archbishop placed in him, and of the frank friendliness
+with which the canons and beneficiaries spoke to him, and of his
+administrative conferences with the Obrero and the Treasurer. For this
+reason he could not repress a gesture of contemptuous superiority when
+having donned his pluvial, and clutching his silver stick, he advanced
+and spoke to any strange clergy from the neighbouring villages who
+visited the Primacy.
+
+His faults were purely ecclesiastic; he saved in secret, with that
+cold, determined avarice so usual at all times in people attached to
+the Church. His greasy skull cap had been discarded as too old by its
+former owner, one of the canons; his cassock of a greenish black and
+his shoes had also belonged to some one of the beneficiaries; in the
+Claverias they all whispered of the monies hoarded by Don Antolin,
+and of his savings that were devoted to usury--loans that never went
+beyond two or three duros to the poorer servants of the church ground
+down by poverty, and which he recovered with interest at the beginning
+of every month when they were paid by the Canon Obrero. In him avarice
+and usury were joined to the most implicit honesty in regard to the
+interests of the church; he would punish relentlessly the smallest
+pilfering in the sacristy, and he made up his accounts for the Chapter
+with a minuteness that annoyed the Obrero. To every one his own, the
+church was poor and it would be a sin worthy of hell to deprive her of
+a single farthing; he, as a good servant of God was poor also, and he
+thought he was doing no wrong in drawing a certain profit from the
+money he had gathered together by dint of bargaining, and by many
+painful privations in the midst of his poverty.
+
+His niece, Mariquita, lived with him, an ugly woman with masculine
+features and a fresh colour, who had come from the mountains to look
+after her uncle, of whose riches and power in the Primacy all his
+relations and friends in the village talked a great deal. She rode
+roughshod over all the other women in the Claverias, taking undue
+advantage of Don Antolin's supreme authority. The more timid formed
+round her a circle of adulation, endeavouring to evoke her protection
+by cleaning her house and cooking for her, while Mariquita, dressed in
+the habit, and with her hair most carefully combed--the only luxury
+allowed by her uncle--loitered about the cloister hoping to meet there
+some cadet, or that some of the foreigners visiting the tower or the
+hall of the giants would take notice of her. She made sheep's eyes
+at every man; and she, so hard and imperious to all the women, would
+smile sweetly on all the bachelors living in the Claverias. The "Tato"
+was a great friend of hers; he would come and visit her when her uncle
+was absent in order to air his graces as apprentice to a Torrero.
+Gabriel, with his delicate looks, his mysterious self-containment, and
+the confused story of all his great travels about the world interested
+her not less; she would even speak with marked deference to the
+"Wooden Staff," as he was both a man and a widower, and, as the
+"Perrero" wickedly said, the very sight of a pair of trousers nearly
+drove the poor woman mad in that establishment where the greater part
+of the men wore petticoats.
+
+Don Antolin had known Gabriel since his childhood, and spoke to him in
+the second person. The ignorant priest still retained the remembrance
+of Luna's great triumphs obtained in the seminary, and though he saw
+him so poor and ailing, taking refuge in the Cathedral almost on
+charity, his "tuteo" of superiority was not free from admiration.
+Gabriel, on his side, feared Silver Stick, knowing his intolerant
+fanaticism. For this reason he confined himself to listening to him,
+careful in their conversation that not a single word should slip in
+which could betray his past. He would be the first to demand his
+expulsion from the Cathedral, where he wished to live unknown and
+silent.
+
+On meeting each other in the cloister, the two men began with the same
+questions every morning:
+
+"How is your health to-day?"
+
+Gabriel showed himself an optimist. He knew that his illness had
+no remedy; still, that quiet life free from all emotions, and his
+brother's care, feeding him at all hours, like a bird and almost by
+force, had arrested the decay of his health. The course of the illness
+was slower--death was meeting with obstacles.
+
+"I am better, Don Antolin. And yesterday, what sort of a day had you?"
+
+Silver Stick plunged his dirty and horny hands into the recesses of
+his cassock, and produced three greasy little ticket-books, one red,
+one green and the third white. He turned over the leaves, considering
+the counterfoils of those he had torn out; he took the most respectful
+care of these little books, as though they were far more important
+than the big music books in the choir.
+
+"A very slack day, Gabriel! Being in the winter, so few people travel.
+Our best time is in the spring, when they say the English come in by
+Gibraltar. They go first to the fair in Seville, and afterwards they
+come to have a look at our Cathedral. Besides, in milder weather the
+people come from Madrid, and although they grumble, the flies crowd
+to see the giants and the big bell, then I have to hurry with the
+tickets; one day, Gabriel, I took eighty duros. I remember it was at
+the last 'Corpus'; Mariquita had to sew up the pockets of my cassock,
+for they tore with the weight of so many pesetas; it was a blessing
+from the Lord."
+
+He looked sadly at the little books, as though regretting that many
+days passed in winter when he only tore out one or two leaves. This
+plan of selling entrance tickets to see the treasures and curiosities
+of the Cathedral filled all his thoughts. It was the salvation of the
+church, the modern proceeding to help it on, and he felt proud of
+fulfilling this function, which made him one of the most important
+persons in the life of the temple.
+
+"You see these green tickets?" said he to Gabriel. "These are the
+dearest, they cost two pesetas each. With these you can see everything
+that is most important--the treasury, the chapel of the Virgin, and
+the Ochavo with its relics which are unique in the world. The other
+cathedrals are dirt compared with ours, and their relics lies, many of
+them invented on account of the envy that our Holy Metropolitan Church
+inspired. You see these red ones? These only cost six reals, and with
+them you can visit the sacristies, the wardrobe, the chapels of Don
+Alvaro de Luna and of Cardinal Albornoz, and the Chapter-house, with
+its two rows of portraits of the archbishops which are wonders. Who
+would not scrape their purse to see such prodigies?"
+
+Afterwards he added, showing the last ticket book with contempt:
+
+"These white ones are only worth two reals. They are to see the giants
+and the bells. We sell a great many of those to the lower class who
+come to the Cathedral on feast days. Could you believe it, but many
+of the Protestants and Jews call this a robbery? The other day three
+soldiers came from the Academy with some country folks to see the
+giants, and they made quite a scandalous scene because we would not
+let them in for an old song. As if we were asking their charity! Many
+of them commit all sorts of nuisances about the Cathedral, just as
+if they were heretics, to say nothing of their drawing all sorts
+of abominable things and writing obscene words on the walls of the
+staircase. What shocking times, eh, Gabriel? What shocking times!"
+
+Luna smiled silently, and Silver Stick, encouraged by what seemed to
+him acquiescence, went on with pride:
+
+"And about these tickets, I invented them--that is to say, I am not
+really their inventor, but their introduction into this house is owing
+to me. You have travelled so much, and must have seen in those foreign
+countries that everything is shown on payment. The Lord Cardinal
+before this one, who is now in blessed glory (and he raised his hand
+to his skull cap) had also travelled a great deal--he was quite a
+'modern,' and had he lived would have ended by putting electric light
+in the naves of the Cathedral. I heard him on one occasion speak of
+what was done in the museums and other interesting places in Rome
+and other towns; unrestricted entrance at all hours--on payment, an
+immense convenience to the public, who required to get no tickets
+beforehand to visit these things. So one day when the Obrero and I
+were biting our nails, seeing that this miserable thousand and odd
+pesetas (God forgive me!) that this unhappy State allows us, could not
+possibly suffice for our monthly expenses, I propounded my idea. Now,
+could you believe that some of the gentlemen in the Chapter opposed
+it? Some of the young canons spoke of the sellers in the Temple, you
+know who they were--certain Jews who drove the Lord out with scourges
+in their hand, for I know not what misdemeanours. The older ones said
+the Cathedral had always had its treasures open to all for centuries,
+and so it ought to go on. All the gentlemen were quite right, but
+you cannot do anything with a stupid canon, and at last the defunct
+cardinal, who is now in the enjoyment of God (another tug at his cap)
+interfered, and the Chapter were obliged, though with much grumbling,
+to accept the reform, and they ended by praising it. In all bitter
+there is a sweet! Do you know how much money I handed to the Lord
+Cardinal last year? More than three thousand duros, nearly as much as
+this sinful State allows us, and this without prejudice to anybody.
+The public pays, they admire and they go; in any case they are only
+birds of passage who come once, and when they go they do not return.
+And what are four wretched pesetas, when for that money you can see
+one of the most glorious churches in Christendom, the cradle of
+Spanish Catholicism, the Cathedral of Toledo!"
+
+The two men were walking in the cloister on the side warmed by the sun
+at that early hour, the cleric had put away his ticket books, and his
+eyes were fixed on Gabriel, who thought that to smile in his enigmatic
+way, which Don Antolin accepted as assent, quite met the situation,
+and it encouraged him to continue his confidences.
+
+"Ay, Gabriel! You cannot think that my heavy duties can be fulfilled
+without hard work; the Cardinal trusts me, the Chapter distinguish
+me with their regard, and the Obrero has no other hope but in my
+assistance. Thanks to these tickets we can carry the Cathedral along,
+and keep up its ancient appearance of grandeur, so that the public
+will come and admire. But we are poorer than rats, and we must be
+thankful that even some crumbs are left us from the past. If the wind
+or the hail break some of our glass in the naves, we can still lay our
+hands on some of the stores left by the Obreros of former days. Ay,
+senor! And to think there was a time when the Chapter maintained at
+its own expense inside the church, cutters and painters of glass,
+plumbers, and I know not what beside, so that any great works could be
+undertaken without seeking any help outside the house! If one of the
+tombs gets broken, even now we have quantities of borderings carved
+with saints and flowers that are wonderful to see. But what will
+happen when all these are finished? When the last pane of glass in
+the stores has been broken, and the last fragments of carving in the
+Obreria used up? We shall have to put cheap white panes in the windows
+to prevent the rain and wind coming in. The Cathedral will look like
+an inn--may God forgive me the comparison--and the priests of the
+Primacy will praise God dressed like the chaplain of a hermitage."
+
+And Don Antolin laughed sarcastically, as though this future that he
+was anticipating was an absurd contradiction of the eternal laws.
+
+"You will easily believe," he went on, "that they do not waste
+anything, and that they make money out of every possible thing. The
+garden that was for so many years in your family is now leased out by
+the Chapter, since your brother's death; twenty duros a year your Aunt
+Tomasa pays for her son to cultivate it, and this only because, as you
+know, the old woman is such a great friend of His Eminence, as they
+have known each other since they were children. I go about like a
+water carrier, all round the church and the cloisters, watching that
+no one plays tricks, for there are a lot of young light-hearted
+people, whom you cannot trust. One minute I am in the Ochavo, watching
+that your nephew the 'Tato' has sold the tickets to the foreigners
+(for he is quite capable of letting them in gratis if they tip him
+on leaving), and the next I am up in the cloister looking after that
+shoemaker who repairs the giants; they cannot deceive me, no one
+escapes me without paying; but, ay! it is a long while since I have
+sung mass. You can see me at mid-day when the Cathedral is closed
+reading my hours hurriedly in the cloisters, watching the clock in
+order to go down the moment the church is opened, when the strangers
+begin to come to see the treasury. This is not the life of a good
+Catholic, and if God does not lay it to my account that I am doing it
+all for the glory of His house, I fear that I shall lose my soul."
+
+The two men walked up and down some time in silence, but Don Antolin
+could not hold his tongue for long when the subject was the economic
+life of the Primacy.
+
+"And to think, Gabriel," he continued, "that having been what we were
+in former times, we should have come to this! You and most of those
+alive have no idea how rich this house used to be--as rich as a king,
+and often far richer. From a child no one has known as you have the
+history of our glorious archbishops, but of the fortune they amassed
+for God, you know nothing. Of course these temporalities do not
+interest learned people like you. Have you any idea what donations the
+kings and great lords gave in their lifetime to our Cathedral, or the
+legacies they left her on their deathbeds? You have a great deal to
+learn! I know all about it, I have searched in the Obreria, in the
+archives, in the library; everyone does what interests them, and I and
+the Senor Obrero have often raged at the indigence of the house, but I
+console myself by thinking of what we had, long before any of us were
+born. We were very rich, Gabriel--very, very rich. The archbishops of
+Toledo could have placed one or two crowns on their mitre, I dare not
+say three, for I think of the Supreme Pontiff. First of all, there is
+the Deed of Gift to the Cathedral, made by the King Alfonso VI., by
+reason of his having conquered Toledo. It was made a hermitage, after
+the election of the Bishop Don Bernardo, and I have seen it in the
+archives with my own sinful eyes, a parchment with Gothic letters, and
+at the head is written, 'The privileges of this Holy Church.' The good
+king gave to the Cathedral nine towns--if I wished I could tell you
+their names--several mills, and vineyards innumerable, houses and
+shops in the town, and he ends by saying with all the munificence of
+a Christian cavalier, 'This, therefore, in such a way I give, and I
+grant to this church and to you, Bernard, Archbishop, in free and
+perfect gift, that neither by homicide, nor any other calumny, shall
+it ever be forfeited. Amen.' Afterwards, Don Alfonso VII. gave us
+eight towns on the other side of the Guadalquiver, several ovens, two
+castles, the salt works of Belinchon, and a tenth of all the money
+coined in Toledo, for the vestments of the prebendaries. The VIII. of
+the name showered on the Cathedral a perfect rain of gifts, towns,
+villages, and mills. Illescas is ours, and a great part of Esquivias,
+as also the mortgage on Talavera. Afterwards came the fighting
+prelate, Don Rodrigo, who took much land from the Moors, and the
+Cathedral possesses one principality, the Adelantamiento de Cazorla,
+with towns like Baza, Niebla, and Alcaraz. And besides the kings there
+is a great deal to be said about the nobles, great princes who showed
+their generosity to the Holy Metropolitan Church. Don Lope de Haro,
+Lord of Vizcaya, not content with paying the cost of the building from
+the Puerta de los Escribanos as far as the choir, gave us the town of
+Alcubilete, with its mills and fisheries, and he also left a legacy
+so that in the choir when complines are sung, that lamp called the
+Preciosa should be lighted, which is placed by the great bronze eagle
+belonging to the big missal. Don Alfonso Tello de Meneses gave us
+four towns on the banks of the Guadiana, granted us tithes and bridge
+tolls, and I know not what riches besides. We have been very powerful,
+Gabriel; the territory of this diocese is larger than a principality.
+The Cathedral had property on the earth, in the air, and in the sea!
+Our dominions extended throughout the whole nation from end to end;
+there was not a single province in which we did not hold possessions.
+Everything contributed to the glory of the Lord, and to the comfort
+and welfare of His ministers; everything paid to the Cathedral: bread
+when it was baked in the ovens, the casting of the net, wheat as it
+passed through the mill, money as it came from the Mint, the traveller
+as he went on his way; the country people who then paid no taxes or
+contributions served their king and saved their own souls, giving
+the best sheaf in every ten, so that the granaries of the Holy
+Metropolitan Church were quite insufficient to contain such abundance.
+What times were those, Gabriel! There was faith, Gabriel, and faith
+is the chief thing in life--without faith there is no virtue nor
+decency--nor nothing."
+
+He stopped for a moment, quite out of breath with talking. The priest
+was so saturated with the atmosphere of the Cathedral, that in himself
+he seemed to unite all the various scents of the church; his cassock
+had collected the mouldy smell of the old stones and the rusty iron
+railings, and his mouth seemed to breathe of the gutters and the
+gargoyles, and the rank damp of the garrets.
+
+With the rapid enumeration of all the past wealth Don Antolin warmed,
+even to indignation.
+
+"And having been so rich, now we find ourselves in extreme poverty.
+And I, my son, a priest of the Lord, am obliged to go hither and
+thither with those tickets so that we may all live, just as though
+I were a seller of entrance tickets to a bull-fight, and the Lord's
+house were a theatre, having to endure all those foreign heretics,
+who come in without blessing themselves, and who look at everything
+through opera-glasses. And I have to smile at them because they pay us
+and provide us with some dessert for our poor stew! Carape! Jesus have
+mercy on me! I was going to say a sacrilege."
+
+Don Antolin continued his angry complaints till, in passing the front
+of his house, Mariquita of the scowling and ugly countenance appeared
+at the door.
+
+"Uncle, enough of walking. Your chocolate is getting cold."
+
+But before the priest disappeared into his house, she went on, smiling
+amiably at Luna:
+
+"Will you have some, Don Gabriel?"
+
+And with her bold eyes, like a hungry wolf, she invited Luna to enter.
+She liked the masterful ways of the man, she said, and the ease which
+his former intercourse with the world had given him, and, moreover,
+for her woman's imagination Gabriel's mysterious past possessed
+a great attraction; his proud silence, the vague reports of his
+adventures, and the smile, as much compassionate as disdainful, with
+which he listened to the people of the upper cloister.
+
+The insinuating Mariquita withdrew, and Gabriel continued his walk
+through the cloister, after finishing the little jar of milk that his
+brother brought him up every morning.
+
+At eight o'clock, Don Luis, the Chapel-master, came out, his cloak
+wrapped as usual theatrically round him, and his big hat well tilted
+back, like a glory, round his enormous head; he was humming absently,
+restless with perpetual nervous movements; he inquired anxiously if
+the bell had yet rung for the choir, frightened by the threats of a
+fine in case he were late. Gabriel felt himself very much attracted
+by this poor priestly musician, who lived so despised in the furthest
+corner of the church, thinking far more of music than of dogma.
+
+In the evenings Gabriel would often go up to the little room inhabited
+by the Chapel-master, on the tipper floor of the Lunas' house; the
+room contained all the priest's fortune--a little iron bed, which had
+belonged formerly to the seminarist, two plaster busts of Beethoven
+and Mozart, and an enormous pile of bundles of music, bound scores,
+loose sheets of ruled paper, so big and so piled up and disorderly
+that every now and then a pile would slip down, covering the floor of
+the little room with white sheets to its furthest corner.
+
+"That is how all his money goes," said the Wooden Staff with an air of
+good-natured reproof, "he will never have a farthing. As soon as he
+gets his pay he orders more music from Madrid. It would be far better
+for Don Luis if he were to buy himself a new hat, even if it were a
+cheap one, so that the gentlemen of the choir should not laugh at the
+covering he has on his head."
+
+In the winter evenings, after the choir, the musician and Gabriel took
+refuge in this little room. The canons, wishing to avoid the cold
+winds and the rain, took their daily walk in the galleries of the
+upper cloister, not wishing to forego this exercise to which their
+methodical existence had accustomed them. The rain would beat on the
+window of the little room, and in the dull grey twilight the musician
+would turn over his portfolios, or letting his hands wander over the
+harmonium, he would talk the while with Gabriel, who was seated on the
+bed.
+
+The musician would grow excited, speaking of his love of art. In the
+midst of some peroration he would become suddenly silent, and bending
+over the instrument its melodies would fill the room, and floating
+down the staircase would reach the ears of the walkers in the cloister
+like a distant echo. Suddenly he would cease playing and resume his
+chattering, as though afraid that with his absent-mindedness his ideas
+would evaporate.
+
+The silent Luna was the only listener he had met with in the
+Cathedral; the first who would listen to him for long hours without
+ridiculing him or thinking him crazy, and who often showed by his
+short interruptions and questions the pleasure with which he listened.
+
+The end of the evening's conversation was always the same--the
+greatness of Beethoven, the idol of the poor musician.
+
+"I have loved him all my life," said the Chapel-master, "I was
+educated by a Jeronomite friar, an old man driven from his convent
+who, after leaving it, had wandered over the world as a professor
+of the violoncello. The Jeronomites were the great musicians of the
+Church. You did not know this, neither should I have known it if this
+holy man had not taken me under his protection soon after I was born,
+and been to me a real father. It appears that in olden days each order
+devoted itself to some special thing. One, I think the Benedictines,
+copied and annotated old books; others made sweet liqueurs for the
+ladies, others were wonderfully clever in training cage birds, and
+the Jeronomites studied music for seven years, each one playing the
+instrument of his choice, and to these we owe that there has been
+preserved in the Spanish churches a little, but very little, good
+musical taste. And from what my little father told me, what wonderful
+orchestras these Jeronomites must have had in their convents! For the
+ladies it was a great delight to go on Sunday evenings to the parlour,
+where they met the good fathers, each one a master of his own
+particular instrument. These were the only concerts in those days, and
+with their pittance assured, and no anxiety as to housing or clothing
+themselves, and with the love of art as their only duty, you may
+imagine, Gabriel, what musicians they could become. For this reason,
+when the friars were expelled from their convents the Jeronomites were
+not the worst off. There was no need to beg masses in the churches
+or to live on the charity of devout families; they were able to earn
+their bread by an art conscientiously studied, and consequently they
+soon got places as organists and Chapel-masters; the Chapters really
+fought for them. Some were more venturesome, and, anxious to see more
+of that musical world which had seemed to them while in their convents
+a vision of Paradise, entered the orchestras of theatres, many
+travelling even to Italy, transforming themselves so entirely that
+even their own former prior could not have recognised them. One of
+these was my little father. What a man! He was a good Christian, but
+he had thrown himself so thoroughly into music that he retained
+very little of the former friar. When he was told that probably the
+convents would be re-established, he shrugged his shoulders with
+indifference, a new sonata interested him much more. He sometimes said
+things that have always lived in my memory. I remember one day when I
+was a child he took me to a meeting of musical friends in Madrid, who
+played, for their own pleasure only, the famous 'Seventh Symphony.' Do
+you know it? It is the freshest and most graceful of all Beethoven's
+works. I remember my little father leaving the room quite wrapped up
+in himself, with his head bent, dragging me along, for I could hardly
+keep up with his long footsteps, and when we got home he looked at me
+fixedly, as though I had been a grown-up person. 'Listen, Luis,' he
+said, 'and remember this well. There is only one Lord in the world,
+Our Lord Jesus Christ, and there are two lesser lords, Galileo and
+Beethoven.'"
+
+The musician looked lovingly at the plaster bust which faced the room
+from one corner, with its leonine brows and the diffident eyes of a
+deaf person.
+
+"I do not know much about Galileo," continued Don Luis. "I know that
+he was a very wise man, and a scientific genius. I am only a musician
+and I know very little about other things, but I adore Beethoven,
+and I think my little father did the same--he is a god; the most
+extraordinary man the world has ever produced. Don't you think so,
+Gabriel?"
+
+His nerves were quivering with his excitement, and getting up, he
+walked rapidly up and down the room, trampling on all the loose sheets
+of music.
+
+"Ay! how I envy you, Gabriel, having travelled so much, and having
+heard so many good things! The other night I could not sleep for
+thinking of all you had told me about your life in Paris--those
+beautiful Sunday afternoons when you would go to the Lamoureax
+concerts, or sometimes to Colonnas, giving yourself a surfeit of
+sublimity! And here am I, shut up, my only hope being perhaps to
+conduct a Mass of Rossini's at one of the great festivals! My only
+comfort is to read music, instructing myself thoroughly in those great
+works that so many fools in the towns can listen to half asleep and
+bored. Here I have, in this pile, the nine symphonies of the great
+man--his innumerable sonatas, his masses, and together with him,
+Haydn, Mozart, Mendelssohn, in fact all the great writers. I have even
+Wagner. I read them, and I play what is possible on the harmonium.
+But--it is just as if you were to describe the drawing and colours of
+a picture to a blind man, buried in this cloister. I know, blindly,
+that there are most beautiful things in this world--for those who can
+hear them."
+
+The Chapel-master kept from the previous year the remembrance of a
+great happiness, and he spoke of it enthusiastically. He had been
+chosen by the Cardinal Archbishop to go to Madrid, to be one of a
+board of examiners for organists.
+
+"That was the best time I ever had in my life, Gabriel. One evening
+I listened to Wagner, dressed in the clothes of a friend of mine, a
+violinist, who plays here in Toledo at the great festivals. I heard
+the Walkyria in the pit of the Real Theatre, another night I went to
+a concert; but the greatest night of all was the one on which I heard
+the Ninth Symphony of that ugly old fellow, of that deaf, bad-tempered
+genius who is listening to us."
+
+And with one bound the musician rushed to the bust, kissing it
+with childish humility, just as a child would caress a stern and
+domineering father.
+
+"You know the Ninth Symphony; true, Gabriel? And what did you feel as
+you listened to it? When I listen to music strange things happen to
+me. I close my eyes and I see unknown countries and strange faces, and
+whenever I hear the same works the same visions are repeated. If I
+speak about this with any of the people down below they say I am mad,
+but I know that you feel as I do, and I am not afraid that you will
+laugh at me. There are musical passages that make me see the sea, blue
+and boundless, with silvery waves, and this, though I have never seen
+the ocean; other works bring before me woods and castles, or groups
+of shepherds with white flocks; with Schubert I always see two lovers
+sighing at the foot of a linden tree, and certain French composers
+bring before my mind's eye beautiful women walking among beds of
+roses, dressed in violet, always violet. And you, Gabriel, do not you
+see these things?"
+
+The anarchist assented--yes, music awoke in him also a world of
+fantastic visions, far more beautiful than reality.
+
+"I remember," went on the priest, "what the Ninth Symphony made me
+see. I see it still if I only hum some of its passages. Oh! that
+graceful Scherzo with its strange tremolos! I thought, hearing it,
+that God and his court of saints had left the heavens to take a
+walk, leaving the little angels masters of the house, full liberty!
+Universal gambols! The heavenly children, without any restraint,
+sported from cloud to cloud, amusing themselves by scattering on the
+earth the garlands of flowers that the saints had left behind them;
+one let loose the rain and made it fall on the earth; another seized
+the key of the thunder and touched it, fearful peals which frightened
+all the revellers and made them fly. But they returned again to
+continue their graceful play, beginning afresh their noisy games that
+the thunder had disturbed. And the Adagio! What do you say about that?
+Do you know anything softer, more loving or so divinely peaceful?
+Human beings will never speak like this again, however much progress
+they make. Hearing it, I thought of those fresco-painted ceilings with
+mythological figures--gods and goddesses with pink flesh and flowing
+curves, Apollo and Venus reclining on a mountain of pink and gold
+clouds, like a lovely dawn."
+
+"Chaplain, what has come to you?" said Gabriel; "this is not very
+Christian."
+
+"No, but it is artistic," said the musician simply. "I do not trouble
+myself much about religion, I believe what I was taught, and I have
+never taken the trouble to inquire any further. Music alone occupies
+me, of which someone has said 'that it will be the religion of the
+future,' the purest manifestation of the ideal. Everything that is
+beautiful delights me, and I believe in it as a work of God. 'I
+believe in God and in Beethoven,' as his pupil said--and besides, how
+much religion the grandeur of music contains! Do you know the last
+quartet that Beethoven wrote? He felt he was dying, and he wrote on
+the edge of the score this terrible question: 'Must it be?' and lower
+down he added, 'Yes, it must be, it must be.' It was necessary to die,
+even for such a genius to leave life, while he still carried in his
+mind such glorious things, to pay the tribute of human renovation;
+and then he wrote that lament, that farewell to life, whose greatness
+cannot be equalled by any song, or by any words of religion."
+
+The musician sat down to the harmonium, and for a long while played
+that last lament of the genius, his sorrowful complaint on crossing
+the threshold, not despairing and trembling through fear of the
+unknown, but with a brave melancholy, sinking into the eternal shadow,
+confident that nothing could obscure his genius.
+
+These evenings of artistic communion in that corner of the sleepy
+Cathedral drew the two men together with an ever increasing affection.
+The musician talked, turning over his scores, or playing his
+harmonium; the revolutionist listened silently, only interrupting his
+friend by his painful cough. They were evenings of sweet sadness that
+these two men spent together, one dreaming of leaving the stone prison
+of the Cathedral to see the world, the other returning from life
+wounded and breathless, content with the obscure repose of the
+beautiful church, and guarding with prudent silence the secret of his
+past. Art shone for them like the rays of the sun in the grey and
+monotonous atmosphere of the Cathedral.
+
+When they met in the early mornings in the cloister the conversation
+between the two friends generally ran on the same lines.
+
+"This evening, eh?" the Chapel-master would say mysteriously. "I have
+some fresh music, we shall enjoy something new that I have been sent
+to-day, and besides, I wrote a little thing last night."
+
+The anarchist nodded affirmatively, quite ready to serve as
+entertainment for this pariah of art, who saw in him his only
+audience, and who took so much kindly trouble to interest him.
+
+While the services lasted Gabriel would walk alone in the cloisters;
+all the men were in the Cathedral, except the shoemaker, who was
+mending the giants. Tired of the chattering of the women who stood
+at the doors of the Claverias, he would go up to the dwelling of the
+bell-ringer, his old companion in arms, or he would go down into the
+garden by the remarkable staircase del Tenorio when it was open, or by
+the archbishop's archway crossing the street.
+
+He delighted in passing an hour under the trees; he found in the
+garden as many memories of his family as in the "habitacion" upstairs.
+Besides, he was tired of always finding his walks bounded by stone
+walls, which reminded him of his prison, and he wanted the movement of
+the vegetation caressed by the breeze to foster the illusion that he
+was living in complete liberty in the open country.
+
+In the arbour, where he had formerly so often seen his father, infirm
+and crippled with age, directing his eldest son, who received all his
+orders impassively, he would now meet his Aunt Tomasa, knitting her
+stockings, and watching with vigilant eyes the work of a boy whom she
+had taken into her service.
+
+Gabriel's aunt was by far the most important person in the Claverias;
+her word was worth quite as much as Don Antolin's, the Silver Stick
+was afraid of her, bending before the powerful protection that they
+all guessed stood behind the poor old woman. In the days when her
+father, Gabriel's maternal grandfather, was sacristan in the Cathedral
+the functions of acolyte were exercised by a small boy, nephew of one
+of the beneficiaries of the Cathedral, who ended by paying for his
+education in the seminary. This little acolyte of half a century
+before was now a prince of the church, and the Cardinal Archbishop of
+Toledo. Old Tomasa and he had known each other as children, fighting
+over trifles in the upper cloister, or playing tricks on the beggars
+who sat at the Puerta del Mollete. The imposing Don Sebastian, whose
+look alone made the Chapter and all the clergy in the diocese tremble,
+became happy, fraternal and confidential, when now and then in the
+evenings he saw Tomasa. She was the only living reminder of his
+childhood in the Cathedral. The old woman would kiss his ring with
+great reverence, but very soon she would lapse into talking to him as
+one of her own family, often very nearly speaking to him in the second
+person. The cardinal, always surrounded by fear and adulation, often
+felt the necessity of the old woman's careless and frank conversation.
+The people belonging to the Cathedral declared that the Senora Tomasa
+was the only person who dared to tell the cardinal home-truths face to
+face, and the neighbours in the Claverias felt their pride flattered
+when they saw the prince of the church sweeping down the stone steps
+in his brilliant scarlet robes to sit in the arbour and gossip for
+a good hour with the old woman, while his attendants remained
+respectfully standing at the gate of the iron railings.
+
+Tomasa was not puffed up with this honour; to her this ecclesiastical
+prince was only the friend of her childhood, who had had a certain
+amount of good luck; and in the end, he was only Don Sebastian,
+without going any further into ceremonies and formulas of respect. But
+her family knew how to take advantage of this friendship, especially
+her son-in-law, "Virgin's Blue," a hypocrite, as the old woman
+declared, who would make money out of the very cobwebs of the
+Cathedral; an insatiable locust who, profiting by the friendship of
+the cardinal and his mother-in-law, went on continually obtaining
+fresh privileges, without the priests and sacristans daring to make
+the slightest protest, seeing him so well protected.
+
+Gabriel much enjoyed his aunt's talk. She was the only person born
+in the cloister who seemed to have freed herself from the soporific
+influence of the church. She loved the Cathedral, as being her ancient
+roof-tree, but she did not retain much respect for the saints in the
+chapels, nor for the human dignitaries who sat in the choir. She
+laughed with the happiness of a healthy and placid old woman, her
+seventy years being, as she said, quite free from any evil done to her
+neighbour. Her language was free and easy, like that of a woman who
+has seen much, and does not believe in human majesty or irreproachable
+virtues; but the bed-rock of her character was its tolerance, her
+compassion for all faults, but she Was indignant with those who
+attempted to hide them.
+
+"They are all men, Gabriel," she would say to her nephew, speaking of
+the clergy of the Cathedral. "Don Sebastian is only a man; all sinners
+who have much to answer for before God. They cannot be anything else,
+and so I forgive them. But believe me, nephew, I often feel inclined
+to laugh when I see the people kneeling before them. I believe in the
+Virgin of the Sagrario, and a little in God; but in these gentlemen!
+If you only knew them as I do! But, when all is said and done, we must
+all live, and the evil is not in having faults, but in attempting to
+hide them; playing a farce with the shamelessness of my son-in-law
+who, here as you see him, is as proud as a castle, beats his breast,
+kisses the ground like the Beatas,[1] and yet he is anxious for my
+death, thinking I have something laid away in my chest; he filches
+what he can from the Virgin's poor-box, steals the wax tapers, and
+plays tricks with what is paid for masses, and yet he would be in
+the street if it were not for me, who always think of my poor sick
+daughter and my poor little grandchildren."
+
+[Footnote 1: _Beata_--woman engaged in works of charity who wears the
+religious habit.]
+
+When Gabriel went down to see her in the garden, she always received
+him with the same salutation:
+
+"Hola, you ghost! but to-day you are looking better, you are being
+patched up. I believe your brother will pull you through with all his
+care."
+
+And then followed a comparison between her healthy and vigorous old
+age and his ruined youth, which was fighting so tenaciously against
+death.
+
+"Here you see my seventy years, and never an illness in all my life.
+Summer and winter I never hear four o'clock strike in bed, and all my
+teeth are as sound as in the days when Don Sebastian came in his red
+dress as server in the church and wanted to steal half my breakfast.
+You Lunas have always been delicate; your father, long before he was
+my age, could barely walk, and was always complaining of rheum and of
+the damp in this garden. Here am I in it constantly, and I feel just
+the same as when I am upstairs in the Claverias. We, the Villalpandos,
+are made of iron; for, of course, we are descended from that famous
+Villalpando who made the screen of the high altar, the custodia, and
+an innumerable quantity of other things. He really must have been a
+giant, to judge by the ease with which he twisted and moulded every
+sort of metal."
+
+Gabriel's ill-health awoke in her the deepest compassion, but all the
+same not quite free from malicious suggestions.
+
+"How much you must have amused yourself about the world, eh, nephew?
+But that war was your perdition; without it you would now have had
+your stall in the choir, and who knows if you might not have come to
+be another Don Sebastian. The truth is, that from his childhood no one
+spoke half as much about him in the seminary as they did of you, and
+he certainly was no prodigy of learning. But you saw the world, and
+you took a fancy to those countries where they say the ladies are
+very pretty, and wear hats as large as parasols. You are a monster of
+ugliness now, but you were very smart, though I, who am your aunt, say
+so. And now you have come back so lean and suffering! You must have
+lived very fast; who knows what you have done in the world--sly boots!
+And your poor mother, who thought you would be a saint! God have mercy
+on us! Don't deny it; you have done no good and I hate lies. You did
+right to enjoy yourself and to take advantage of every opportunity,
+but the misfortune is that you should have returned as you are, for it
+is pitiful to see you, but I have known a great many like you. I don't
+know what evil spirit possesses people belonging to the church, but
+once they throw themselves into life, they don't know where to stop,
+and they burn the candle at both ends till there is next to nothing
+left; many of them, like you, have passed through the seminary."
+
+One morning Gabriel asked a question of his aunt that he had been long
+thinking about, but that he had never before dared to put into words.
+He wanted to know all about his niece, Sagrario, and what had happened
+in his brother's house.
+
+"You who are so kind, aunt, you will tell me; everyone seems afraid to
+speak about it; even my nephew the Tato, who is such a chatterer
+and skins everyone in the Claverias, is silent when I ask him. What
+happened, aunt?"
+
+The old woman's face grew very sad.
+
+"A great misfortune, my son, such as was never known before in the
+upper cloister. The madness of the world came into the Cathedral, and
+made a nest in the most honoured, most ancient, and most respectable
+house in the Claverias. We are all good people, though we have never
+seen as much of the world as can be seen from a skylight, and live
+here as though wrapped in cotton wool, but you Lunas have always been
+the best among the best, to say nothing of us Villalpandos, who come
+close behind. Ay! if your mother could raise her head! If your father
+were alive! But I lay all the blame on your brother, as being weak and
+a simpleton, having that cursed blindness of all fathers, who ignore
+the danger in the hope of marrying their daughters well."
+
+"Well, but how was it, aunt? What passed between my niece and the
+cadet?"
+
+"What happens frequently in the world, but what has never happened
+here before. A thousand times I said to my brother, 'See, Esteban,
+this young gentleman is not for your daughter'--very sympathetic,
+very lively, and wearing the uniform of the Academy like no one else,
+leader of a group of the wildest cadets in all their escapades about
+the town, besides a son of a great family--wealthy people who did not
+allow him to come to Toledo with his purse empty. And she--the poor
+Sagrario, crazy with love, flattered by her cadet, as proud as
+possible when she walked on Sundays through the Zocodover and the
+Miradero between her mother and that handsome young lover, that all
+the girls in the place envied her. The beauty of your niece was
+the talk of all Toledo; the girls in the college for noble ladies,
+nicknamed her the 'sacristana' of the Cathedral; but the poor girl
+lived only for her cadet, and she seemed to devour him with her
+beautiful blue eyes. That idiot, your brother, let him come to the
+house, proud of the honour that was being done to the family. You
+know, Gabriel, the eternal blindness of those middle-class Toledans,
+who encourage with pride the courtship of one of their girls by a
+cadet, though they are perfectly well aware that it is most rare that
+one of these courtships should end in marriage. There is no woman here
+with the slightest pretence to a pretty face who has escaped without
+her mouthful of love for one of those red pantaloons. Even I remember
+when I was a girl how I would smooth my hair and pull out my dress
+when I heard the rattle of a sword on the flags of the cloister. It is
+a blindness that descends from mothers to daughters, and the worst
+is, that those cursed ones have all their cousins and their lovers in
+their own country, and to them they return as soon as they leave the
+Academy."
+
+"That is true, aunt, but what happened to my niece?"
+
+"When the young man passed out a lieutenant, his family decided he
+ought to return to Madrid. The farewells were like a scene at the
+theatre. I believe that even your brother and that simpleton his wife,
+who is now in glory, wept as though the lover were theirs. The young
+people sat for hours with clasped hands, gazing into each other's
+eyes, as though they would devour each other. He was the calmest; he
+promised to come every Sunday and to write every day, and at first he
+did so, but before long many weeks passed without his coming, and the
+postman came up less often to the Claverias, and at last did not come
+at all--it was ended, the young lieutenant found other amusements in
+Madrid. Your poor niece was like one demented; the colour in her face
+faded, she was no longer like the beautiful ripe apricot, with the
+soft skin that made you long to bite it. She wept like a Magdalen in
+every corner--and one day the foolish girl fled--and up to now--"
+
+"But where was she? Did no one search for her?"
+
+"Your brother seemed quite dazed. Poor Esteban! several nights we
+found him half dressed in the upper cloister, as stiff as a post,
+gazing up at the heavens with eyes that looked like glass. He became
+furious if any of us spoke of searching for the child; the scandal
+was past remedy, and he did not wish to aggravate it by her return,
+bringing back a lost one to the Holy Metropolitan Church, and to the
+honoured house of the Lunas. For more than a year everyone in the
+Claverias seemed crushed by this blow; it seemed as though we were all
+in mourning. You see, that such a thing should occur in the Cathedral
+where the years pass by in blessed peace without any of us saying
+one word louder than the other! And then I remembered you. It seemed
+impossible that from these Lunas, so quiet and steady, should have
+sprung a girl with sufficient pluck to run away to Madrid, where she
+had never been before, to join a man, without fear of God or of her
+own people. To whom could I liken the unhappy child? To her uncle, to
+Gabriel who passed for a saint, but who, nevertheless, after fighting
+like a wolf, wandered all over the world just like a gipsy."
+
+Gabriel made no protest at the conception his aunt had formed of his
+past.
+
+"And after her flight? What did you know about the child?"
+
+"At first a good deal, but latterly not a word. The two were living
+in Madrid together, peacefully and quietly, away from the world, as
+though they were man and wife. This lasted for a good while, and I,
+hearing about it, began to wonder if I had not been mistaken, and that
+the man we had blamed so much had repented and would end by marrying
+Sagrario. But at the end of the year everything was ended; he grew
+tired, and the family intervened, in order that the escapade should
+not cut short the career they had marked out for the young man. They
+even sought the aid of the police, to frighten the child, so that she
+should not molest the young officer in the first angry transports of
+her desertion. Afterwards--nothing certain is known. Now and again
+those who have gone to Madrid told me a little; some of them had seen
+her, but it would have been far better if they had not seen her. It is
+a disgrace, Gabriel; a dishonour for your family which is mine. This
+unhappy girl is the worst of the worst. I heard that she had been very
+ill, and I believe that she is so still. Just imagine, what a life!
+And for five years! What will have happened to the unfortunate girl!
+And to think that she is my sister's daughter!"
+
+The Senora Tomasa spoke with deep feeling.
+
+"Afterwards, Gabriel, you know what happened here; your poor
+sister-in-law died, we hardly knew why, it was only a matter of a few
+days; possibly she may have died of the shame, as she died saying that
+the fault was entirely hers. It broke one's heart to see the state
+your brother was in after all this. Esteban has never been good for
+much, and now after this affair of his daughter he seemed to become
+quite imbecile. Ay, nephew! I also have felt it greatly, even though
+you see me so happy, and so satisfied with life, every now and then
+the remembrance of that unhappy girl strikes me here, in my head, and
+I eat badly and sleep worse, thinking that a girl who, after all, is
+of our own blood, is wandering lost over the world, a plaything for
+men, without anyone sheltering her, as though she were all alone, as
+though she had no family."
+
+The Senora Tomasa wiped her eye with the point of her forefinger, her
+voice shook and the tears fell over her wrinkled old cheeks.
+
+"Aunt, you are very kind," said Gabriel, "but you ought to have
+searched more for this poor girl; you ought to have recovered her, to
+have saved her, to have brought her back here. We must be merciful to
+the weakness of others, especially when that other is one of our own
+flesh."
+
+"Ay, son! Who do you say it to? A thousand times I have thought this,
+but I was afraid of your brother. He is like a bit of dough, but he
+turns into a wild beast if you speak to him of his daughter. Even if
+we found her and brought her here he would not receive her; he would
+be as angry as if you were proposing some sacrilege to him. He could
+not calmly bear her presence in the house which was that of your
+forefathers. Besides, though he does not say so, he fears the scandal
+among the neighbours in the Claverias who know what had happened. This
+is the easiest part to arrange, as they would be very careful not to
+open their mouths when I am among them. But your brother frightens me,
+and I do not dare."
+
+"I will help you," said Gabriel firmly. "Let us seek for the child,
+and once we have found her I will undertake to manage Esteban."
+
+"It will be most difficult to find her. For a long time we have heard
+nothing. Doubtless those who do see her are careful to say nothing
+for fear of paining us. But I will try and find out--we will see,
+Gabriel--we will think about her."
+
+"And the canons? and the cardinal? Will they not oppose the return of
+the poor girl to the Claverias?"
+
+"Bah! The thing happened some time ago, and few of them will remember
+it; besides, we might place the girl in a convent, where she would be
+looked after and quiet, and cause scandal to no one."
+
+"No, not that, aunt. It is a cruel remedy. We have no right to try and
+save this poor girl at the cost of her liberty."
+
+"You are right," said the old woman, after a few moments' reflection.
+"I don't care much for these nuns myself. Where would she be more
+likely to follow a good example than in the heart of her own family?
+We will bring her back to this house if she repents and wishes for
+peace. And I will scratch out the eyes of the first woman in the
+Claverias who dares to say anything against her. My son-in-law will
+probably pretend to be scandalised, but I will settle him. It would be
+much better if he did not wink at the walks that Juanito, that
+cadet nephew of Don Sebastian's, takes in the cloister whenever my
+granddaughter stands at the door. The crackbrained fellow dreams of
+nothing less than becoming related to the cardinal, and seeing his
+daughter a general's wife; he might remember poor Sagrario. And as far
+as regards Don Sebastian, you may be quite easy, Gabriel. He will say
+nothing but that we ought to bring the child back--and what should he
+say? People ought to be charitable one to another, and none more than
+they; for after all, Gabriel, believe me--they are only men, nothing
+but men!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+The people of the Primacy always received with obstinate silence the
+slightest allusion to the reigning prelate. It was a traditional
+custom in the Claverias, and Gabriel remembered to have noticed the
+same in his childhood.
+
+If they spoke of the preceding archbishop, these people, so used to
+grumbling, like all those who live in solitude, would loose their
+tongues and comment on his history and his defects. There was nothing
+to fear from a dead prelate, and besides, it was an indirect praise to
+the living archbishop and his favourites to speak ill of the defunct.
+But if during the conversation the name of His reigning Eminence
+arose, they were all silent, raising their hands to their caps to
+salute, as though the prince of the church were able to see them from
+the neighbouring palace.
+
+Gabriel, listening to his companions of the upper cloister, remembered
+the funeral judgment of the Egyptians. In the Primacy no one dared to
+speak the truth about the prelates, or to discuss their faults till
+death had taken possession of them.
+
+The most that they dared to do was to comment on the disagreements
+among the canons, to compare their lists of those who saluted one
+another in the choir, or who glared at one another between versicle
+and antiphon like mad dogs ready to fly at one another, or to speak
+with wonder about a certain polemic discussed by the Doctoral and the
+Obrero in the Catholic papers in Madrid, which had lasted for three
+years, as to whether the deluge was partial or universal; answering
+each other's articles with an interval of four months.
+
+A group of friends had collected round Gabriel. They sought him,
+feeling the necessity of his presence, experiencing that attraction
+exercised by those who are born to be leaders of men even though they
+remain silent. In the evenings they would meet in the dwelling of the
+bell-ringer, or when it was fine weather they would go out into the
+gallery above the Puerta del Perdon. In the mornings the assembly
+would be in the house of the shoemaker who mended the giants, a yellow
+little man, who suffered from continual pains in his head, which
+obliged him to wear sundry coloured handkerchiefs tied round his head
+in the fashion of a turban.
+
+He was the poorest in all the Claverias; he had no appointment, and
+mended the giants without any remuneration in the hopes of succeeding
+to the first vacant place, feeling very grateful to those gentlemen of
+the Chapter who gave him his house rent free, on account of his wife
+being the daughter of a former old servant of the church. The smell
+of the paste and of the damp floor infected his house with the rank
+atmosphere of poverty. A hopeless fecundity aggravated this poverty;
+his sad, placid wife with her big yellow eyes appeared every year with
+a new baby tugging at her flabby breast, and several children crept
+along the cloister walls, dull and inert with hunger, with enormous
+heads and thin necks, always sickly, though none of them managed to
+die; afflicted by all the pains of anaemia, by boils that arose and
+vanished on their faces, and watery eruptions covering their hands.
+The shoemaker worked for the shops in the town, without, however,
+earning much money. From the rising of the sun one could hear the
+sound of his hammer in the cloister. This sole evidence of profane
+work attracted all the unoccupied to the miserable and evil-smelling
+dwelling. Mariano, the Tato, and a verger who also lived in the
+cloister, were those who most frequently met Gabriel, seated on the
+shoemaker's ragged and broken chairs, so low that one could touch the
+floor of red and dusty bricks with one's hands.
+
+Often the bell-ringer would run to his tower to ring the usual
+bells, but his vacant place would be immediately occupied by an old
+organ-blower, or some of the servants from the sacristy, all attracted
+by what they heard of these meetings of the lower servants of the
+Primacy. The object of the assembly was to listen to Gabriel. The
+revolutionary wished to keep silence, and listened absently to their
+grumblings at the daily round of worship; but his friends longed to
+hear about those countries in which he had travelled, with all the
+curiosity of people who lived confined and isolated; listening to his
+descriptions of the beauties of Paris and the grandeur of London they
+would open their eyes like children listening to a fairy tale.
+
+The shoemaker with his head bent, never ceasing his work, listened
+attentively to the recital of such marvels; when Gabriel was silent
+they all agreed on one point, those cities must be far more beautiful
+than Madrid; and just think how beautiful Madrid was! Even the
+shoemaker's wife, standing in the corner forgetful of her sickly
+children, would listen to Luna with wonder, her face enlivened by a
+feeble smile, which showed the woman through the animal resigned to
+misery, when Luna described the luxury of the women in foreign parts.
+
+All these servants of the church felt their narrowed and dulled minds
+stirred by these descriptions of a distant world that they were never
+likely to see; the splendours of modern civilisation touched them much
+more nearly than the beauties of heaven as described in the sermons,
+and in the pungent and dusty atmosphere of the dirty little house they
+would see unrolled before their mind's eye beautiful and fantastic
+cities, and they would ask questions in all innocence as to the food
+and habits of those distant people, as though they believed them
+beings of a different species.
+
+Towards evening, at the hour of the choir, when the shoemaker was
+working alone, Gabriel, tired of the monotonous silence of the
+cloister, would go down into the church.
+
+His brother, in a woollen cloak with a white neck band, and a staff as
+long as an ancient alguacil's, stood as sentry in the crossways, to
+prevent the inquisitive passing between the choir and the high altar.
+
+Two tablets of old gold with Gothic letters, hung on to one of the
+pilasters, set forth that anyone talking in a loud voice or making
+signs in the church would be excommunicated; but this menace of former
+centuries failed to impress the few people who came to vespers and
+gossiped behind one of the pillars with some of the church servants.
+The evening light, filtering through the stained glass, threw on the
+pavement great patches of colour, and the priests as they walked
+over this carpet of light would appear green or red according to the
+colours flashed from the windows.
+
+In the choir the canons sang for themselves only in the emptiness of
+the church; the shutting of the iron gates of the screen, opened to
+admit some late-coming priest, echoed like explosions throughout the
+building, and above the choir the organ joined in at times between the
+plain song, but it sounded lazily, timidly, as though from necessity,
+and seemed to lament its feebleness in the gathering twilight.
+
+Gabriel had not completed the round of the Cathedral before he was
+joined by his nephew, the Perrero, who left his conversation with
+the servers and acolytes, and with the errand boy belonging to the
+Secretary of the Chapter, whose fixed seat was at the door of the
+Chapter-house. Luna was always very much diverted by the pranks of the
+Tato, and the confidence and carelessness with which he moved about
+the temple, as though having been born in it deprived him of all
+feeling of respect The entry of a dog into the nave caused great
+excitement.
+
+"Uncle," said he to Luna, "you shall see how I can open my cloak."
+
+Seizing the two ends of his garment he advanced towards the dog with
+the contortions and bounds of a wrestler; the animal, knowing this of
+old, endeavoured to escape through the nearest door, but the Tato,
+cutting off his retreat, drove him into the nave, and, pretending to
+pursue him, drove him from chapel to chapel, finally rounding him up
+where he could give him some good sound whacks. The dismal howlings
+disturbed the singing of the canons, and the Tato laughed more than
+ever to see behind the iron railing of the choir, the angry gesture of
+the good Esteban threatening him with his wooden staff.
+
+"Uncle," said the depraved Perrero one evening, "you, who think you
+know the Cathedral so well, have you ever seen the lively things in
+it?"
+
+The wink of his eye, and the gesture accompanying the words showed
+that the things might very well be more than lively.
+
+"I am always very much interested," he went on, "with the jokes the
+ancients allowed themselves. Come along, uncle, it will amuse you for
+a little; you, like all those who think they know the Cathedral, will
+have passed many times by these things without noticing them."
+
+Going along the outside of the choir, the Tato led Gabriel to the
+front opposite the door del Perdon. Under the great medallion, which
+serves as a back to the Mount Tabor, the work of Berruguete, opens the
+little chapel of the Virgin of the Star. "Look well at that image,
+uncle. Is there another like it in all the world? She is a courtezan,
+a siren who would drive men mad if she only fluttered her eyelids."
+
+For Gabriel this was no new discovery; from his childhood he had known
+that beautiful and sensual figure, with its worldly smile, its rounded
+outlines, and its eyes with their expression of wanton gaiety as
+though she were just going to dance.
+
+The child in her arms was also laughing and placing his hand on the
+bosom of the beautiful woman, as though he intended to tear the
+covering from her breast. The image of painted stone, stuffed and
+gilt, wore a blue mantle strewn with stars, from whence its name.
+
+"Even you, who have read so much, uncle, may possibly not know the
+history of this chapel, which is far more ancient than the Cathedral.
+The woolstaplers, carders, and weavers of Toledo had their patroness
+here long before the church was built, and they only gave up their
+right to the ground on the condition that they should be entire
+masters of the chapel, and do in it whatever they pleased and in all
+this piece of the Cathedral as far as those nearest pillars. Oh! the
+trouble this wrought! On the days they held their feasts to the Virgin
+they never paid any heed to the canons in the choir, and they greatly
+disturbed all the offices with 'rabeles,'[1] lutes and disorderly
+songs. If the canons begged them to be silent, they replied that it
+was they in the choir who ought to keep silence, considering that
+they were in their own chapel, which was far more ancient than the
+Cathedral. Did you know this, uncle?"
+
+[Footnote 1: An ancient instrument with three strings, played with a
+bow.]
+
+"Yes, I remember it now. The Archbishop Valero Loza brought a suit
+against them at the beginning of the eighteenth century; you can see
+his tomb at the foot of the altar. He lost his suit, and died from
+disappointment. He desired to be buried in that place, so that the
+insolent wool merchants should trample on him in death, even as
+they had vanquished him in his lifetime. The haughtiness of these
+ecclesiastical princes drove them to the proudest humility. But is
+this all you wished to show me?"
+
+"You shall see better things than this. Let us say good-bye to the
+Virgin. But do look at her! What a face! What alluring eyes! The
+beautiful woman! I spend hours looking at her; she is my sweetheart.
+Oh! the many nights I have dreamt of her."
+
+They walked on a little towards the great doorway of the Cathedral, so
+as to obtain a better view of the exterior face of the choir. Above
+the three hollows or chapels that pierce it runs a frieze of ancient
+relievos, the work of some obscure mediaeval artist. Gabriel
+recognised these coarse sculptures as being contemporaneous with the
+Puerta del Reloj, and by far the most ancient work in the Cathedral.
+
+"Look you, in the first medallion Adam and Eve are as naked as worms;
+but the Lord drives them out of Paradise, and they are obliged to
+dress themselves to appear in the world; and see what they do directly
+they get their clothes. But look at the fifth medallion on our right
+hand; the old gossip who cut that had a lively turn of mind."
+
+Gabriel looked for the first time attentively at these forgotten
+sculptures. They were carved with all the naturalistic simplicity
+of the Middle Ages, with all the directness with which the artists
+represented their profane conceptions, with the desire to perpetuate
+the triumph of the flesh in some ignored corner of the mystical
+buildings, in order to testify that human life was not dead.
+
+The Tato was delighted at the surprise on his uncle's face.
+
+"Eh! what do you think of that? I discovered it wandering about the
+church. The canons sing every day on the other side of this wall
+without ever suspecting what gay doings they have over their heads.
+And the stained glass, uncle, look at it well. At first so many
+colours blind one and the forms are indistinct; besides, the lead cuts
+the figures and it is difficult to make out anything, but I know them
+to my fingers' ends. They are stories, things of their own times, that
+these glass-workers painted; the intrigues have been forgotten, and no
+one has disentangled them."
+
+He pointed to the windows of the second nave, through which the
+evening light was shining with a ruddy glow.
+
+"Look up there," went on the Perrero. "A gallant in a red cape and
+sword mounts by a rope ladder; at the window a nun is waiting for him.
+It seems something like the Don Juan Tenorio that they represent at
+All Saints'. Further on, you see those two in bed, and people knocking
+at the door. They must be the same pair of birds with the family
+surprising them. Then in the next window--look well at it--lovers,
+with scarcely any clothes beyond bare skin. These things belong to the
+days when people had no shame, when they went with their heads covered
+and the rest of their flesh bare."
+
+Gabriel smiled at the whimsical ideas with which ancient art inspired
+the Perrero.
+
+"But in the choir, uncle, there is also something to see. Let us go
+there; the service is over and the canons are coming out."
+
+Luna felt overpowered by admiration as he always did on entering the
+choir. Those magnificent stalls, the work on one side of Philip of
+Burgundy, and on the other side of Berruguete, bewildered him with
+their profusion of marbles, jaspers, gildings, statues and medallions.
+It was the genius of Michael Angelo reviving in the Toledan Cathedral.
+
+The Perrero examined the lower stalls, ferreting out among the Gothic
+relievos the discoveries enjoyed by his unwholesome curiosity. This
+first row of stalls, almost on a level with the ground, were occupied
+by the inferior clergy, and were anterior by half a century to the
+upper stalls; but in those fifty years art had made a great stride,
+from the hard and rigid Gothic to the flowing lines and good taste of
+the Renaissance. They had been carved by Maestre Rodrigo at the time
+when Christian Spain, roused to enthusiasm, was helping the Catholic
+kings with all its strength to complete the reconquest. On the backs
+of the stalls, and on the entablature of the frieze fifty-four carved
+pictures represented the principal incidents of the conquest of
+Granada.
+
+The Tato did not look at these carvings of walnut or oak, with troops
+of horsemen and companies of soldiers scaling the walls of Moorish
+towns. What interested him most were the arms of the stalls, the
+handrails of the steps leading to the upper seats, and the salients
+dividing the stalls which served to rest the head, all covered with
+animals, grotesque beings, dogs, monkeys, big birds, friars, and
+little birds, all in difficult postures, some beautiful, some obscene.
+Hogs and frogs wound themselves up together in inextricable tangles,
+monkeys with ignoble gestures were mixed up with interlaced birds in
+never ending variety--it was a world of caricatures of voluptuousness,
+of monkey-like actions and satirical suggestions, in which appeared
+carnal passion with the most grotesque animal grimaces.
+
+"Look here, uncle. Is not this capital--it is far the best."
+
+And the Tato showed Gabriel the little chubby figure of a preaching
+friar with enormous donkey's ears.
+
+When they came out of the choir Gabriel spied the Chapel-master close
+to the fresco of Saint Christopher. He had just emerged from a little
+door close to the giant, which led by a circular staircase to the
+musical archives. He was carrying under his arm a big book with dusty
+pages which he showed to Gabriel.
+
+"I am taking it upstairs. You shall hear something out of it; it is
+worth the trouble."
+
+And turning his eyes from the book to the little door close by he
+exclaimed:
+
+"Ay! these archives, Gabriel, how it pains one! Each time I visit them
+I come out sadder. The vandals have been at work there; nearly all the
+music books have pages torn out, pieces cut out wherever there was an
+illuminated letter, a vignette or anything pretty. The senor canons
+do not care for music, neither do they understand it, and they are
+incapable of devoting a few pesetas so that it might be heard on
+festival days. It is quite enough for them to walk in procession to
+some piece of Rossini's; and as far as regards the organ, all they
+care about is that it must play slowly, very slowly. The slower it
+plays, the more religious they think it, even though the organist may
+be playing a Habanera."
+
+He continued looking at the little door with melancholy eyes as though
+he were ready to weep over the decay of music.
+
+"In there, Gabriel, are many beautiful works, that ought not to be
+forgotten as long as art lives in the world. In profane music we have
+not been great, but believe me that Spain has been far otherwise with
+religious authors. That is, provided that profane music and religious
+music really exist, which I doubt; for me there is only--music--and I
+think he will be a clever man who draws the line where one ends and
+where the other begins. Behind this wall of Saint Christopher's, the
+works of all the great Spanish musicians sleep, mutilated and covered
+with dust. Perhaps it is better they do sleep, when you hear what is
+sung in this choir! Here you will find Christobal Morales, who three
+hundred years ago was Chapel-master here, and began the reform of
+music twenty years before Palestrina. In Rome he shares the glory
+with the famous master; his portrait is in the Vatican, and his
+lamentations, his motets, and his Magnificat rest here, forgotten for
+centuries. And Victoria? Do you know him? Another of the same period;
+his jealous contemporaries called him 'Palestrina's monkey' taking
+all his works to be imitations, in consequence of his long sojourn in
+Rome; but, believe me, instead of being plagiarisms from the Italian,
+they are far superior. Here also is Rivera, a Toledan master who no
+one remembers, but in the archives there is a whole volume of his
+masses, and Romero de Avila, who more than anyone had studied the
+Muzarabe chants, and Ramos de Pareja, not the least musician of
+the fifteenth century, who wrote in Bologna his book 'De Musica
+Tractatus,' and destroyed the ancient system of Guido de Arezzo,
+discovering the tonality of sound; and the Monk Urena, who added the
+note 'si' to the scale, and Javier Garcia, who in the last century
+reformed music, leading it towards Italy (God forgive him!), a beaten
+track from which we have not yet emerged; and Nebra, the great
+organist of Carlos III., who, a century before Wagner was born, used
+musical discords. When he wrote the Requiem for the funeral of Dona
+Barbara di Braganza, foreseeing the surprise and difficulties that the
+musicians and singers would meet with in the innovations in his score,
+he wrote on the margin, 'This is to give notice that there are no
+mistakes in the score.' His Litany became so celebrated that it was
+forbidden to copy it, under pain of excommunication; but I think
+to-day the persons who remember it would be the excommunicated.
+Believe me, Gabriel, these archives are a pantheon of great men, but a
+pantheon, unluckily, from which no one emerges."
+
+Then he added, lowering his voice:
+
+"The Church has never been a great lover of music. To feel and
+understand it you must be born a musician, and you know well enough
+that these gentlemen who are paid to sing in the choir know nothing
+about music. When I see you, Gabriel, smiling at religious things,
+I guess by your manner how much you conceal, and I am sure you are
+right. I was interested to know the history of music in the Church.
+I have followed step by step the long Calvary of this unhappy art,
+carrying the cross of worship uphill through the long centuries. You
+have heard people often talk of religious music, as if it were a thing
+apart, believed in by the Church; but it is all a lie, for religious
+music does not exist."
+
+The Perrero had moved off when he heard that the Chapel-master, whose
+loquacity was indefatigable when he spoke of his art, had started on
+the theme of music. He had formed his own opinion of Don Luis and told
+it to everyone in the upper cloister. He was a simpleton who only knew
+how to play melancholy ditties on his harmonium, without ever thinking
+of enlivening the poor people in the Claverias by playing something to
+which they could dance, as the niece of Silver Stick had asked him.
+
+The priest and Gabriel walked slowly through the silent naves talking
+the while; the only people to be seen were a group of the household at
+the door of the sacristy, and two women kneeling before the railing
+of the high altar praying aloud. The early twilight of the winter
+evenings was beginning to darken the Cathedral, and the first bats
+were coming down from the vaulting and fluttering through the columns.
+
+"Ecclesiastical music," said the artist, "is a real anarchy; but in
+the Church everything is anarchy. I believe there is a great deal to
+be said for the unity of the Catholic worship throughout the world.
+When Christianity began to form itself into a religion it did not
+invent even a single bad melody; it borrowed its hymns and the manner
+of singing them from the Jews, a primitive and barbarous music that
+would shock our ears if we heard it now. Out of Palestine, and where
+there were no Jews, the earliest Christian poets--Saint Ambrose,
+Prudencio and others--adopted their new hymns and psalms to the
+popular songs that were then in vogue in the Roman world, or possibly
+to Greek music. It seems as though that word 'Greek music' ought to
+mean a great deal; is it not so, Gabriel? The Greeks were so great in
+their poetry and in the plastic arts that anything that bears their
+name would seem to be surrounded by an atmosphere of undying beauty.
+But it is not so: the march of the arts has not been parallel in human
+life; when sculpture had its Phidias, and had reached its climax,
+painting had hardly passed that rudimentary stage that we see in
+Pompeii, and music was only a childish babbling. Writing could not
+perpetuate music, for there seemed as many musical styles as there
+were peoples, and everything was left to the judgment of the
+executant. You could not fix on parchment what mouths and instruments
+played, and so progress was impossible. For this reason, though there
+was a Renaissance for sculpture, for painting, for architecture, at
+the revival of the arts after the Middle Ages, music was found in the
+same elementary stage in which it was at the break-up of the ancient
+world."
+
+Gabriel nodded his head assenting to the words of the Chapel-master.
+
+"This was the first Christian music," continued Don Luis. "Confided
+to tradition and transmitted orally, the religious songs soon became
+disfigured and corrupt. In every church they sang in a different way,
+and religious music became a hotch-potch. The mystics leaned to
+rigid unity, and in the sixth century Saint Gregory published his
+'Antifonario,' a collection of all liturgic melodies, purifying them
+according to his ideas. They were a mixture of two elements: the
+Greek, rather oriental and florid, very much like the present debased
+style; and the grave and rough Roman. The notes were expressed
+by letters, the Phrygian and Lydian styles followed, and so the
+intricacies of Greek music continued though much altered, with
+fioriture, rests, and breathing pauses. The collection became lost,
+and many who think a return to the old style would be best, much
+regret it. To judge by the fragments that remain, if such music was
+now executed it would have very little that was religious about it, as
+we understand religion in art to-day; it would more resemble the songs
+of the Moors, or the Chinese, or those of some schismatic Greeks who
+still use the ancient liturgies. The harp was the principal instrument
+in the churches till the organ appeared in the tenth century, a rough
+and barbarous instrument that had to be played with blows, and was
+supplied with wind from inflated skins. Guido di Arezzo made a musical
+rule on the basis of Gregory's collection, and this was sufficient for
+the invention of the pentagramma[1] to be assigned to the Benedictine.
+They continued to use the letters of Boccio and Saint Gregory as
+notes, but they placed them on lines of three different colours. The
+imbroglio continued; to learn music badly took twelve years, and then
+they could not manage that singers from different towns could read
+from the same score. Saint Bernard, dry and austere as his times,
+ridiculed this music as not being solemn enough; he was a man
+antagonistic to all art; he would have liked to see the churches
+dismantled and without any architectural adornments; and the slower
+the music was, the better it seemed to him. He was the father of plain
+song, and he maintained that the more drawn out the music was, the
+more religious it became. But in the thirteenth century Christians
+found this chant most wearisome. The cathedrals in those days were the
+point of attraction: the theatre, the centre of all life. People went
+to the church to pray to God and to amuse themselves, forgetting for
+the moment all the wars and the violence and confusion outside. Once
+again popular music came into the churches, and you could hear intoned
+in the cathedrals all the songs most in vogue, and which were often
+obscene. The people took part in the religious music, singing in
+different tones, each one as seemed best to him, and these were the
+first beginnings of concerted singing. In those days religion was
+joyful, popular--democratic as you would say, Gabriel; there was
+no Inquisition, nor suspicion of heresy to embitter the soul with
+fanaticism and fear. All the coarse wind and stringed instruments that
+the artisans had in the towns, or the labourers in the fields, came
+into the churches, and the organ was accompanied by violas, violins,
+bagpipes, flutes, guitars and lutes. The plain song was the
+established liturgy almost throughout Europe; but the people disliked
+it, and interspersed it with songs, and at the great festivals,
+religious hymns were sung, adapted to the popular melodies then in
+fashion, such as 'The song of the armed man,' 'Morencia, give me a
+kiss,' 'I know not what confuses me,' 'Weep for me, lady,' 'Bad luck
+to him who married you,' and others in the same style. And Rome, you
+will ask, and the Church? What did it say about such disorders? The
+Church lived without artistic perception: it never had any. What are
+the boundaries between religious and profane music? From the sixteenth
+to the seventeenth century all critics have asked themselves this
+question, but the Church let them talk, accepting everything without
+remark. Now and again Rome made itself heard by a Papal bull, to which
+no one paid any attention, because the Pontiff was incapable of saying
+this is religious art, and the other is profane. Palestrina was
+entrusted with the task of reforming church music; the Pope showed
+himself disposed not to leave anything but plain song, and to suppress
+even that if necessary. The mass of Papa Marcelo and other melodies
+was the result of this, but things did not advance much. It was
+necessary in order that music should be purified inside the Church
+that the great secular musical movement should begin with the Italian
+Monteverde, with the Frenchman Rameau, and with the Germans Sebastian
+Bach and Handel; what splendid times, Gabriel! And just think what
+genius followed: Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Mehuel, Boieldieu, and, above
+all, our good friend Beethoven."
+
+[Footnote 1: The stave.]
+
+The Chapel-master was silent for a little as though the name of his
+idol imposed on him a religious silence. Presently he continued.
+
+"All this avalanche of art passed over the Church, and she, according
+to her habit, appropriated everything that was most to her taste; in
+any country the Catholic religion adopted the music most in accordance
+with its traditions--in Spain we have been saturated with the Italian
+style since the days of Palestrina, and German or French music never
+came to us. We were first of all fuguists and contrapuntists; but
+after the 'Stabat Mater' of Rossini we felt the attraction of
+theatrical melody so strongly that we have never wished to taste a
+fresh dish. Religious music in Spain has run parallel with Italian
+opera, a thing of which the canons are ignorant; they would be furious
+if at the mass you played them anything by Beethoven, which they would
+consider profane, but they listen with mystic unction to fragments
+which have gone the round of all the theatres in Italy. And about the
+plain song, you will ask? The plain song had its nest in this Primacy.
+It was preserved here for centuries and purified; all the best was
+collected in Toledo, and from the books in this Cathedral have gone
+forth the chorales of all the churches in Spain and America. Poor
+plain song! it has long been dead. You see for yourself, Gabriel, who
+comes to the Cathedral at the hour of the choir? No one, absolutely no
+one. The matins are recited, and all the offices are intoned in the
+midst of perfect solitude. The people who still believe know nothing
+of the liturgy; they do not prize it and have forgotten all about it;
+they are only attracted by the novenas, the triduos and retreats, all
+that is termed tolerated and extra-liturgic worship. The Jesuits, with
+their cunning, guessed that they must give their services a theatrical
+attraction, and for this reason their churches--gilt, carpeted, and
+decked with flowers like dressing-rooms--are always full, whereas the
+old cathedrals are as empty as tombs. They have not proclaimed the
+necessity for this reform aloud, but they have put it into practice
+by abolishing the singing in Latin, and substituting all sorts of
+romances and songs. In the churches, with the exception of the
+Tantum-ergo, nothing is sung in Latin, sermons and hymns are in the
+language of the country, just as in a Protestant church. For the mass
+of devout people, who believe without thinking, religions only differ
+in their exterior forms. It would be impossible to consign such a
+multitude to the bonfires, or that half Europe should again be in the
+clutches of the thirty years' war, or that the Popes should launch
+excommunication after excommunication, only to find in the end that
+the only difference between a Catholic or an evangelical church is a
+few images and a few wax tapers, but that the worship in both is the
+same. But we must go, Gabriel; they are going to lock up."
+
+The bell-ringer was hurrying through the naves, shaking his bunch
+of keys and startling the bats which were becoming more and more
+numerous. The two devout women had disappeared; no one remained in the
+Cathedral save Gabriel and the Chapel-master. From the farther end of
+the nave were coming the night watchmen, to take up their charge till
+the following morning, preceded by the dog.
+
+The two friends went out into the cloister, guided through the dusk by
+the rich glow from the stained glass windows; outside, the last rays
+of the sun were touching both the garden and the cloister of the
+Claverias with crimson.
+
+"I repeat," continued the musical priest, looking back at the door
+from which they had come out, "that in there they do not love music
+and they do not understand it. The Church has only rendered one
+service to music, and that without wishing it: they have been obliged
+to have instrumentalists and vocalists for the services, and that
+made them support the chapels and choir-schools that have served for
+musical education in default of schools. We who represent art in the
+cathedrals are as much despised as were the minstrels in the old
+chapels, players of the clarion and bassoon. For the canons, all that
+sleeps in the musical archives is so much Greek, and we, the artistic
+priests, form a race apart, and are only just a step above the
+sacristans. The Chapel-master, the organist, the tenor, contralto, and
+the bass form the chapel. We are clergy like the canons, we become
+beneficiaries by appointment, we have studied religious science as
+they have, and, moreover, we are musicians; but in spite of this
+we receive less than half the salary of a canon, and to remind us
+constantly of our inferior position we have to sit in the lower
+stalls. We, the only ones in the choir who know anything about music,
+have to occupy the lowest places. The precentor is by right the chief
+of the singers, and the precentor is a canon named by Rome without
+competition, probably not knowing a note of the pentagramma. Oh! the
+anarchy, friend Gabriel! Oh! the contempt of the Church for music
+which has always been its slave and never its daughter! In many
+convents of nuns the organist and the singers are despised and called
+sergeants. There seems money for everything in the Church: the
+revenues of the building are ample for everything except for music.
+The canons look upon us as fools masking in ecclesiastical robes. When
+the feast of Corpus or that of the Virgin of the Sagrario comes round,
+and I dream of a fine mass worthy of the Cathedral, the Canon Obrero
+attacks me and begs for something Italian and simple, an affair of
+half-a-dozen musicians that I must pick up in the town, and then I
+have to conduct a few bungling musicians, raging to hear how the
+miserable orchestra sounds under these vaults, which were built for
+something grander. In the end, friend Luna, it is dead, quite dead."
+
+The complaint of the Chapel-master did not surprise Gabriel. Everyone
+in the Cathedral complained of the miserable and sordid way in which
+the services were conducted. Some, like the Silver Stick, declared
+that it was due to the impiety of the age, others, like the musician,
+made that same religion responsible, but they did not dare to say so
+aloud. Respect to the Church and to the higher powers, instilled since
+their childhood, kept the population of the Cathedral silent. The
+greater part of the servitors of the Church were living morally in the
+sixteenth century, in an atmosphere of servility and superstitious
+fear of their superiors, feeling the injustice of their position, but
+without daring to give form, even in their thoughts, to their vague
+notions of protest.
+
+Only at night, in the silence of the upper cloister, in the privacy
+of those families who were born and died among the stones of the
+Cathedral, did they dare to repeat the murmurs of the Church,
+the interminable tangle of tattle which grew over the monotonous
+ecclesiastical existence, the complaints of the canons against His
+Eminence, and what the cardinal said about the Chapter, an underground
+war which was reproduced at every archiepiscopal elevation, intrigues
+and heart-burnings of celibates, embittered by ambition and
+favouritism, primitive hatreds that reminded one of the time when the
+clergy elected their own prelates and ruled over them, instead of
+groaning as now under the iron rule of the archbishop's will.
+
+Everyone in the cloister knew of these quarrels, and the remarks that
+the canons allowed themselves to make in the sacristy reached their
+ears; but these humble servitors kept silence when these murmurs were
+repeated in their presence, fearing to be reported by their neighbour,
+who possibly might covet their post. It was the terror of the
+Inquisition still alive amidst this little stagnant world.
+
+The Perrero was the only one who seemed to have no fear, and who spoke
+openly about the Chapter and the cardinal. What did it matter to him!
+Possibly he may have wished to be turned out of "that den" to give
+himself up to his favourite pursuit, going to the bull-ring without
+any objections from the household. Moreover, he delighted in speaking
+evil of the gentlemen of the Chapter, who had given him more than one
+cuff when he was an acolyte.
+
+He gave nicknames to all the canons, and pointing them out one by one
+to Gabriel, related the most intimate secrets of their lives. He knew
+the houses where each prebendary passed the evening after the choir
+time, and the names of all the ladies and nuns who crimped their
+surplices, and could tell of the fierce and deadly rivalries between
+these admirers of the Chapter, endeavouring to vanquish each other
+by the exquisite way in which they washed and ironed the canonical
+batiste. As the choir were coming out he pointed out the precentor, an
+obese prebendary with his face covered with red spots.
+
+"Look at him, uncle," he said to Gabriel, "that rash on his face is a
+record of the past. He was a great gallant, never fixing himself long
+anywhere. The other evening he said to a chaplain of the chapel of the
+kings, 'Those captain professors at the Academy think that in point
+of women they cull the best in Toledo, but where is the Church! The
+seculars must lower their flag!'"
+
+He laughed as he pointed out a group of young priests, carefully
+shaved, with their cheeks blue and shining, dressed in silk mantles
+that diffused a strong scent of musk as they moved. These were the
+dandies of the Chapter, the young canons, who often made journeys to
+Madrid to confess their patronesses--ancient marchionesses who, by
+dint of influence, had gained for them a seat in the choir. At the
+Puerta del Mollete they stopped a few moments to arrange the folds of
+their cloaks before they went into the street.
+
+"They are going out to court the ladies," said the Tato. "Brrrum! make
+way for Don Juan Tenorio!"
+
+When they had watched all the canons come out, the Perrero spoke to
+his uncle about the cardinal.
+
+"In these days he is given over to the fiends. No one in the palace
+can manage him; his internal complaint nearly drives him mad."
+
+"But is it true he is so very ill?" asked Gabriel.
+
+"Everyone says so; ask your Aunt Tomasa. They say they are such great
+friends because she makes a lotion that calms him like an angel's
+hand. In the morning when he wakes in a bad temper all the palace
+trembles, and very soon all the diocese. He is a good man, but when
+the mad dog bites him everyone must fly. I have seen him on pontifical
+days wearing his mitre, looking at us with such eyes, as though he
+were ready to seize his crozier and belabour us all with it, from what
+the aunt says--if he did not drink!"
+
+"Then the complaints of the Chapter are true."
+
+"He does not get drunk. No, senor, give the devil his due, but a glass
+now, and another presently, and a third if a friend comes to see him,
+must obfuscate him. It is a habit he brought with him from Andalusia,
+where he was bishop before coming here. But nothing common, a fine and
+refreshing drink, only to keep up his strength, nothing more. And the
+wine is first class, uncle; I know it from one of his household. He
+gives as much as fifty duros the arroba![1] They keep him the best in
+all la Mancha, a vintage from the time of the French, a syrup that
+warms the stomach and tempers it as though it were an organ. From what
+the Aunt Tomasa says, the doctors patch him up, and then he does his
+best to get ill again with this glorious wine."
+
+[Footnote 1: _Arroba_--Measure containing thirty-two pints.]
+
+The Tato, in the midst of his cynical mockery, still showed a regard
+for the prelate.
+
+"Do not believe, uncle, that he is a nonentity. Apart from his bad
+temper he is really a strong man, even as you see him here, with his
+small white and shining head like a baby's, that seems even smaller
+above his immense corporation; but it carries something in it! He has
+spoken a great deal in Madrid, and all the newspapers took as much
+notice of him as though he were Guerra. His wisdom finds a remedy for
+everything. If they speak of the poverty and misery in the world, he
+sings the old song: bread for the poor, charity from the rich, and
+much Christian doctrine for everyone; that men ought not to quarrel
+because I have more than you, and there ought to be patience and
+decency in the world, for that is what is wanting. What nonsense, eh,
+uncle? You laugh at it? But His Eminence's recipe rather pleases me,
+especially that about the bread; but the cursed Catechism is in fault
+as we have all learnt from our childhood."
+
+The Perrero grew quite excited speaking about his prince:
+
+"And as a man? A masterful man; no hypocrisy about him, nor hiding his
+head. Everyone knows he was a soldier in his younger days. The Aunt
+Tomasa remembers seeing him in the cloister with his helmet with
+horse-hair crest, his sergeant's epaulets, and his rattling broad
+sword. He is not afraid of anything, is not easily scandalised, and
+does not make a fuss about things. Last year a Portuguese lady arrived
+here, who nearly drove all the cadets out of their senses with her
+silk stockings and her big hats. You know Juanito, and you are aware
+that he is the son of a nephew of His Eminence who died some years
+ago. Well, the youngster paraded up and down the Zocodover in his
+uniform with the Portuguese lady on his arm to arouse the jealousy
+of his companions in the Academy. One day the young woman presented
+herself at the palace, and the servants, seeing her so beautifully
+dressed, made no difficulty about letting her in, thinking she was
+some lady from Madrid. His Eminence received her with a paternal
+smile, and listened to her without winking. A friend of mine, one of
+the pages who was present, told me about it. She came to complain to
+the cardinal that his nephew, the cadet, had entertained her for two
+days without giving her a farthing. His Eminence smiled modestly:
+'Lady, the Church is poor, but I do not wish that for this misfortune
+the good name of the family should suffer. Take this and it will be
+remedied,' and he handed her two duros. The Portuguese, encouraged by
+her good reception, began to bawl and complain, thinking she would
+terrify Don Sebastian by making a scandal. But you should have seen
+the fury of His Eminence as he shouted to the page, 'Boy, call the
+police'; and the look on his face was such that the Portuguese lady
+vanished as quickly as she could, leaving the two pieces of silver on
+the table."
+
+Gabriel laughed, listening to the story.
+
+"He is a strong man, believe me, uncle. I like him because he holds
+the Chapter in his fist. He is not like his predecessor, who was like
+a sop in milk, who only knew how to pray, and trembled before the
+last-made canon. He is quite capable of going down into the choir one
+evening and turning them all out with blows from his crozier. It
+is more than two months since he has been down into the Cathedral,
+neither has he seen the canons. The last time they sent a deputation
+to the palace everybody trembled. They went to propose I know not what
+reform to the Primate, and they began by saying, 'My lord, the Chapter
+thinks--.' Don Sebastian, turned into a basilisk, interrupted them,
+'The Chapter cannot think anything; the Chapter has not common sense,'
+and he turned his back, leaving them petrified. Afterwards, he began
+shouting, and thumping the furniture with his fists, saying he would
+fill all the vacancies in the Cathedral with the dregs of the clergy,
+that he would fill the Chapter with drunkards, with impostors, etc. 'I
+will harass the Chapter,' he shouted, 'I will dirty it; I will teach
+them to talk less of me; I will cover them, yes, sir, I will cover
+them with....' And you may guess, uncle, with what His Eminence wished
+to cover the canons. And the poor man was right. Why should those
+in the choir interfere with this way or that way that Don Sebastian
+lives, or if he has those bonds or others? Does not he let them live
+as they choose? Does he ever say a word to them about their scandalous
+visits, although all Toledo knows of them?"
+
+"And what do the canons say about the cardinal?"
+
+"They say Juanito is his grandson, and that his father, who died, and
+who passed as nephew of His Eminence, was really his son by a certain
+lady when he was bishop in Andalusia. But this does not seem to
+irritate Don Sebastian much; but what does irritate him and makes him
+behave like a fiend is when they speak of Dona Visitacion."
+
+"And who is that lady?"
+
+"Come, that is good! You do not know Dona Visitacion? When no one
+inside the Cathedral or out of it can speak of anybody else? She is
+the niece of Don Sebastian, who lives with him in the palace. It is
+she who rules everything, and Don Sebastian, who is so terrible with
+everyone else, becomes like an angel when he sees her. He rages and
+screams and bites the days when he is ill, but if Dona Visita appears,
+he controls himself at once; he suffers in silence, moans like a
+child, and it is sufficient for her to say a soft word, or give him a
+caress for His Eminence to slobber with delight. He loves her dearly."
+
+"But what is she?" asked Gabriel with interest.
+
+"Clearly she is what you think. What else could she be? She was from
+her childhood in the college for noble ladies, and as soon as the
+cardinal came to Toledo he took her out, and brought her to the
+palace. What a blind infatuation is Don Sebastian's! And the thing is,
+the object is hardly worth it--a very thin, pale little girl, with
+large eyes and a soft skin; that is all. They say she sings, and plays
+the piano, and reads and knows a great many things that they teach
+in that wealthy college, and by God's grace can keep His Eminence in
+order. She comes sometimes into the Cathedral by the arch, dressed
+as a beatita with the habit and mantilla, accompanied by a very ugly
+servant."
+
+"She cannot be what you think, youngster."
+
+"Go on; all the Chapter affirm it, and even the most steady canons
+thoroughly believe it. Even those who are friends and favourites of
+His Eminence, and carry him tales about all the grumbling against him,
+do not deny it with any warmth. And Don Sebastian gets angry, and is
+furious each time any murmurs about this reach his ears. If they told
+him the choir intended to give a dance he would be less irritated than
+when he hears them wag their tongues about Dona Visita."
+
+The Perrero was silent for a few moments as though he were doubtful
+about saying something serious.
+
+"The lady is very good and kind. They all love her in the palace
+because she speaks so gently. Besides, she makes use of the great
+power she has over the cardinal to prevent the violence of His
+Eminence, who very often, when he is racked with excessive pain, would
+throw cups and plates at the heads of his servants. Why should they
+interfere with her? Does she do them any harm? Let everyone do as he
+likes in his own house, and he who does evil, let God punish him."
+
+He scratched his head as though he were once more doubtful.
+
+"And as to what Dona Visita is to the Cardinal," he added, "I have
+no doubt whatever. I have facts to go on, uncle, and I know how they
+live. One of the servants has often seen them kissing--that is to
+say, not the two kissing. No, she does the kissing, and Don Sebastian
+receives her kittenish ways with the smile of an angel. The poor man
+is so old!"
+
+And the Tato ended his confidences with various indecent remarks.
+
+All this grumbling against the cardinal, that came from the sacristy
+up to the cloister, annoyed Gabriel's brother greatly. The "Wooden
+Staff," who was a staunch private soldier of the Church, could not
+bear to hear with equanimity those attacks on his superiors; in his
+opinion they were all calumnies. The canons had spoken of all the
+preceding archbishops precisely as they now spoke of Don Sebastian,
+but this did not in the least prevent their all being called saints
+after their deaths. When he discovered the Tato repeating in the
+Claverias all the gossip from down below, he threatened him with all
+his authority as head of the house.
+
+Esteban was also very much concerned at the state of his brother's
+health. He was pleased at the very prudent behaviour of the latter,
+who conformed with silent respect to all the customs of the Cathedral,
+never permitting a word to escape him that could reveal his past;
+he felt beyond measure proud of the atmosphere of admiration that
+surrounded his brother, and the attention with which the simple
+inhabitants of the cloister listened to the account of his travels,
+but the state of his health was a continual anxiety, the certainty
+that death had laid its hand upon him, and that it was solely the care
+with which he was surrounded that retarded the fatal moment.
+
+There were days in which the Silenciario smiled with pleasure, seeing
+Gabriel a better colour, and hearing less frequently his painful
+cough.
+
+"You are going on well, brother," he would say joyfully.
+
+"Yes," replied Gabriel, "but do not have any illusions. _That_ will
+come at its own hour, it has me in its grasp. It is only you who are
+holding it back, but one day it will be stronger than you."
+
+The certainty that death would at last be victorious made Esteban
+redouble his efforts. He thought that frequent nourishment was the
+only remedy, and he scarcely ever approached Gabriel without something
+in his hands.
+
+"Eat this. Drink what I bring you."
+
+He struggled valiantly with that broken constitution, with that
+stomach disordered by poverty, with those lacerated lungs and with
+that heart subject to constant disturbance of its functions, with that
+human machine dislocated by a life of suffering and trials.
+
+The constant watching over the sick man had upset Esteban's economic
+life; his miserable wages and the poor assistance the Chapel-master
+could give were insufficient even for that extra mouth, which consumed
+more than all the others in the household put together. At the end of
+the month Esteban was obliged to invoke the aid of Silver Stick to
+enable him to get along the last few days, entering thus into the
+humble and miserable flock bound by the priest's usury. Sometimes the
+Chapel-master, waking for an instant to reality, would give him a few
+pesetas, sacrificing the joy of obtaining a fresh score.
+
+Gabriel guessed the privations that his brother underwent, and was
+anxious to contribute to the expenses of the little household. But
+what work could he obtain in his concealment in the Cathedral? He
+wished for some post in the service of the church, in order to receive
+at the beginning of every month a few pesetas from the hands of Silver
+Stick; but all the posts were occupied, death alone could cause a
+vacancy, and there were many eager ones watching for the opportunity
+to urge their family claims.
+
+The impossibility of being useful to his brother, of helping to
+make his sacrifices less expensive, weighed heavily on Gabriel, and
+disturbed the otherwise placid monotony of his life. He inquired of
+Esteban as to what he could possibly do, not to remain inactive, but
+his brother always answered with his kindly expression: "Take care of
+yourself, only take care of yourself; you have no other duty but to
+look after your own health, I am here to do all the rest."
+
+When Holy Week came round Gabriel found an opportunity of getting a
+few days' work. They were going to put up in the Cathedral the famous
+"Monument" between the choir and the Puerta del Perdon. It was a heavy
+and complicated erection, of a sumptuous and rococo style, which had
+cost the second Cardinal de Bourbon a fortune at the beginning of last
+century. A real forest of woodwork formed the basis of the monument;
+the riches of the cardinal had created a prodigality of solidity and
+sumptuousness, and several days were required to fit together the Holy
+Catafalque, and not a few workmen.
+
+Gabriel interviewed Don Antolin asking for a place on the works. The
+wages were seven reals a day, which he would be able to give his
+brother for two weeks; and he, who had been used in former days to
+have his work so lavishly paid, accepted this small daily wage as a
+piece of unexpected good fortune.
+
+The "Wooden Staff" was indignant. Gabriel was ill and ought not to
+risk his poor health in the fatigues of this work. What was he going
+to do, coughing and suffocating every moment? How was he going to
+undertake the heavy work of carrying the framework and fixing it
+together? The invalid tranquillised him. He knew what those works were
+in the church; everything was done with parsimony, but without much
+regard to time. The workmen in the service of the church worked with
+that calm laziness, and that slow prudence which characterised every
+act of religion. Besides, Silver Stick, knowing his condition, would
+reserve the least heavy work for him; he could fix screws and bolts,
+place the candelabra in line on the steps, and arrange the tapestry;
+he trusted him as a man of good taste who had seen much in his
+travels.
+
+Gabriel worked for two weeks on the monument. This time of relative
+activity seemed to give him a certain amount of relief. He moved
+about, intent on giving orders to his fellow-workers; he went from the
+church to the top of the Claverias, where the monument was stored, and
+seeing himself covered with dust, and with his limbs fatigued by the
+constant coming and going, he deluded himself into thinking he was
+strong again.
+
+During these two weeks he never went to the shoemaker's house, and so
+lost sight of his various friends. The bell-ringer and his friends
+were lost in astonishment. A man of so much learning, to work like one
+of themselves in order to help his brother!
+
+The Senora Tomasa stopped him one morning by the iron railing of the
+garden.
+
+"I have news, Gabriel. I think I know where our child is. I won't say
+any more; but be ready to help me. The day when you least expect it
+you may see her in the Cathedral."
+
+The erection of the monument was finished. All that part of the church
+between the choir and the door del Perdon was occupied by this showy
+and ponderous fabric. According to their traditional custom all the
+Toledans gathered to admire--the steps covered with rows of burning
+lights, the Roman legionaries in alabaster leaning on their lances,
+and the rich curtain with its innumerable folds that hung from the
+vaulting down to the platform of the monument.
+
+On the evening of Holy Thursday Gabriel stood considering what was
+in some sense his work, surrounded by a group of worshippers. The
+Cathedral shone with its immaculate whiteness, in spite of the black
+veils that covered both statues and altars. The clouds of colour from
+the lovely rose windows relieved the funereal aspect of the religious
+ceremony, while from the choir a tenor voice intoned the lamentations
+of the oriental prophet.
+
+Gabriel felt someone pulling his jacket, and turning, saw the
+gardener's widow.
+
+"Come, nephew, we have got her here; she is waiting for you in the
+cloister."
+
+Coming out, the Senora Tomasa pointed to a woman sitting crouched on
+the stone coping of the garden, wrapped in an old cloak, and with the
+headkerchief drawn down over her eyes.
+
+Gabriel would never have recognised her. He remembered the pretty
+smiling face of former years, and he looked almost with horror at
+the tarnished youth, haggard with prominent cheek-bones, of the face
+before him. The eyes deep sunk in the sockets without eyebrows or
+eyelashes, with the pupils still beautiful, but dulled with a glassy
+opacity. Everything about her revealed poverty and desolation; the
+dress was a summer one, and from under it showed her split boots much
+too large for her feet.
+
+"Salute him, child," said the old woman. "It is your Uncle Gabriel,
+one of God's angels, in spite of his misfortunes, and you owe it to
+him that we searched for you."
+
+The gardener's widow pushed Sagrario towards her Uncle, but the young
+woman lowered her head, moved her shoulders and drew back, as though
+she could not endure the presence of a member of her family; she
+covered her face with her wretched cloak to hide her tears.
+
+"Aunt, let us go home," said Gabriel, "it is not good for the child to
+be here."
+
+At the cloister staircase they made the young woman pass on in front;
+she went up with her head bent and without looking, as though her feet
+trod those broken steps instinctively.
+
+"We arrived from Madrid this morning," said the gardener's widow as
+they went up. "I kept her at an inn till it was time to bring her to
+the Cathedral in the evening. It is the best time, for Esteban is in
+the choir, and you will have time to settle things here. I spent three
+days there. Ay, Gabriel, my son, what things I have seen, what hells
+there are for poor women! and we call ourselves Christians, but I
+think we are fiends! Mercifully I had friends at court--some old
+bell-ringers who had been in the Cathedral and who remembered the
+gardener's widow. I wanted everything, even money, to get this unhappy
+girl out of the devil's clutches."
+
+The upper cloister was quite deserted. On arriving at the door of the
+Lunas the girl seemed to wake up, and drew quickly back with a look
+of terror, as though inside the "habitation" some great danger was
+awaiting her.
+
+"Go in, woman, go in," said the aunt; "it is your home. You had to
+come back some time or other."
+
+And she pushed her till she was through the door. Once inside the
+sitting-room her tears ceased; she looked round with astonishment, no
+doubt surprised at finding herself there. Her eyes examined everything
+with a sort of stupefaction, as though marvelling that everything
+should be in the same place as five years before, and with an
+exactitude that made her doubt if such a long time had really elapsed.
+Nothing seemed changed in that little world under the shadow of the
+Cathedral. She only, who had left it in the bloom of her youth, now
+returned aged and broken.
+
+There was a long silence between the three people.
+
+"Your room, Sagrario," said Gabriel at last gently, "is the same as
+when you left it. Go in and do not come out till I call you. Be calm
+and do not cry; trust me. You do not know me well, but the aunt will
+have told you that I am interested in your fate. Your father will soon
+be coming; hide yourself and be silent. I repeat it again, do not come
+out till I call you."
+
+When the old woman and her nephew were alone they could hear the
+girl's suffocating sobs that burst out on seeing her old room.
+Afterwards they heard a sound as though she were throwing herself on
+the bed, and the violence of her grief seemed to become more and more
+uncontrolled.
+
+"Poor child!" said the old woman, who was very nearly crying also,
+"she is good, and she has repented of her sins; if only her father had
+sought her out when that rascal deserted her, what shame and misery
+it would have spared her. And her health? I really think she is worse
+than you are, Gabriel. Oh, those men! with their honour which is
+nothing more than lies! What is honourable is to be charitable and
+compassionate to others, and to harm no one. I said this the other
+day when I was shocked at the shamelessness of my son-in-law, who
+was furious at my going to Madrid to find the child. He spoke of the
+honour of the family, and that if Sagrario returned no decent people
+could live in the Cathedral, and that he could not allow his daughter
+to stand at the door; and he such a thief that he steals the Virgin's
+wax every day, and deceives the devout who pay him for masses that are
+never said; that is why his skin shines so and he is so fat. With so
+much honour."
+
+After a short silence the old woman looked undecidedly at Gabriel.
+
+"Well, shall we begin the struggle? Shall I call Esteban?"
+
+"Yes, call him, he will be in the Cathedral. And you, shall you dare
+to be present at the interview?"
+
+"No, son, manage it yourself. You know Esteban, and you know me. I
+should either begin to cry, or I should turn and rend him for his
+obstinacy. You will manage better by yourself, for this God has given
+you those talents that you have used so badly."
+
+The old woman went away, and Gabriel remained alone for more than
+half an hour, looking out of a window into the deserted cloister. The
+yearly commemoration of the death of God spread in the priestly tribe
+on the roofs, an atmosphere of sadness even more marked than that
+inside the church. All the women and children of the Claverias were
+down below admiring the monument, the "habitacions" seemed quite
+deserted. As he sat Gabriel saw his brother pass by the window, and in
+another moment he appeared at the door.
+
+"What do you want, Gabriel? What has happened to you? The aunt
+frightened me with her summons. Are you worse?"
+
+"Sit down, Esteban. I am well, calm yourself."
+
+The "Wooden Staff" looked with surprise at Gabriel; his strange
+seriousness alarmed him and the prolonged silence in which he appeared
+to be arranging his thoughts without knowing where to begin.
+
+"Speak, man! Do make a beginning; you alarm me."
+
+"Brother," said Gabriel gravely, "you know very well that I have
+respected the mystery in your life that I found on my return here. You
+said to me, 'My daughter is dead,' and you never showed any wish to
+speak of her, and you can say if I have ever touched your old wound by
+the slightest allusion."
+
+"Well, and what then? When are you going to stop?" said Esteban,
+becoming very gloomy; "why do you speak to me on a day so holy of
+things that cause me so much pain?"
+
+"Esteban, we shall never understand each other if you hold on to your
+prejudices. Do not make that gesture, but listen to me calmly; do
+not act like an automaton, pulled by the same wires that moved our
+grandfathers and our ancestors. Be a man, and act according to your
+own thoughts. You and I have different beliefs. Setting aside religion
+which I know is a consolation to you, you know that I am silent as
+to mine, so as not to render my life here impossible. But apart from
+this, you believe that the family is a work of God, an institution of
+supernatural origin. I believe it to be a human institution based
+on the necessities of the species. You condemn for ever anyone who
+betrays the laws of the family, or who deserts his banner, you
+sentence him to death and oblivion. I pity his weakness and forgive.
+We understand honour from a different point of view. You believe in
+the Castillian honour--that traditional and barbarous honour, more
+cruel and dismal even than dishonour; a theatrical honour, whose
+impulses are never founded on human feeling, but on the fear of what
+others will say, the desire to appear greater and more dignified in
+the eyes of others than to your own conscience. For the adulterous
+wife, death; for the murderer, revenge; for the fugitive daughter,
+contempt and forgetfulness; this is your gospel. I have another
+standard; for the wife who forgets her duties, contempt and oblivion;
+for that fragment of our own flesh who flies from us, love, support,
+gentleness, even endeavouring to compass her return to us. Esteban, we
+are separated by our beliefs, the gulf of centuries lies between us,
+but you are my brother, we love each other, and I only desire your
+good. I bear the same name of which you are so proud, and I loved our
+poor parents as much as you could love them, and in the name of all
+these I tell you that this situation must come to an end; you must not
+live insensible and frozen in what you call your dignity, without the
+remembrance of your daughter wandering about the world, troubling you.
+You, who are so kind, who have sheltered me in the most difficult
+crisis of my life, how can you sleep, how can you eat, without your
+life being embittered by the remembrance of your lost daughter? What
+do you know about her now? May she not be dying of hunger while you
+eat? May she not be lying in a hospital while you are living in the
+home of your fathers?"
+
+Esteban's brow contracted, and he wore his gloomiest look as he
+listened to his brother.
+
+"It is useless for you to strive, Gabriel, nothing can come of it.
+Have I denied you anything? Am I not ready to do anything for my
+brother? But do not speak to me of that; she has caused me much pain,
+she has broken my life, how I did not die, I know not. Have you
+thought well that for centuries the family of the Lunas have been the
+mirror of the Cathedral, respected by even the archbishops, and now,
+suddenly to find oneself among the lowest, exposed to the ridicule of
+all and looked upon with compassion by the veriest little acolyte!
+What I have suffered! The times I have wept with rage alone in this
+home, hearing what they were saying behind my back. And then," he
+added quietly as though grief were paralysing his voice, "there was
+that unhappy martyr who died of shame; my poor wife who left the world
+so as not to see my grief and the contempt of others! And do you wish
+me to forget all this? For the rest, Gabriel, I cannot express what
+I feel as well as you do. But honour--is honour. It is to live in my
+house without fear of being shamed, to sleep at night without fearing
+to see in the darkness our father's eyes, asking why I allow a lost
+woman to live under the same roof that the Lunas won for themselves
+by centuries of service to the house of God; it is to avoid people
+mocking at our family. Let them say, 'Those Lunas! how unfortunate
+they are,' but they shall never say the Lunas are a family wanting in
+shame. By our love, brother, leave me; do not speak to me of this.
+Those evil doctrines have poisoned your mind; not only have you ceased
+to believe in God, but you have ceased to believe in honour."
+
+"And what is all this?" said Gabriel, warming. "You yourself do not
+know. 'Honour is honour.' Well, I say, children are children. You, man
+of prejudices, you do not wait to consider that those beings are the
+continuation of our own existence. Your religion makes you think
+children are a fruit from God, nevertheless you think yourself better
+and more perfect when you reject and curse those gifts of Heaven if
+they cause you any trouble. No, Esteban, the love of children and pity
+for their faults ought to come before all prejudices. This eternal
+life of the soul, that lying promise of religion, is only true through
+our children. The soul dies with the body; it is no more than a
+manifestation of our own thoughts, and thought is a cerebral function,
+but children perpetuate our own being throughout the generations and
+the centuries; it is they who make us immortal, and that preserve
+and transmit something of our personality, even as we have inherited
+something from our ancestors. He who forgets those beings who are his
+own creation is more worthy of execration than he who leaves life by
+suicide. The disappointments of life, the laws and customs invented by
+men, what are they before the instinctive affection we feel for beings
+that have proceeded from ourselves, and who perpetuate the infinite
+variety of our habits and thoughts? I abhor those wretches who, in
+order not to disturb the commonplace peace of matrimony, abandon the
+children they have outside the house. Paternity is the most noble of
+all animal functions, but the animals have more courage and dignity
+than man in fulfilling it. No animal of the higher sort abandons or
+disowns its cub, and yet there are many men who turn their backs on
+their children for fear of what people will say. If I, having a son,
+were enamoured of the most beautiful woman in the world, and she
+required me to forget that son, I would stifle my passion sooner than
+abandon the little one. If my son sinned against every human law,
+and was sent to prison, even there would I follow him, defying the
+execration of the world, sooner than deny that he is my work. We
+are united for ever to the creatures to whom we give life, it is a
+compromise of solidarity that we make with the species when we work
+for its continuance. He who breaks the chain and flies is a coward."
+
+"You will not convince me, Gabriel," screamed Esteban. "I will not!--I
+will not!"
+
+"I repeat it is cowardly on your part. This honour that weighs so
+heavily on you is a cruel and antiquated honour that settles all the
+conflicts of life by shedding blood. Why do you not seek the man who
+stole your daughter? Why do you not kill him like a father in an old
+play? Is it because you are a fearful man and have not learnt the art
+of murder, and that arms are his profession? If you had taken lawless
+vengeance, relying only on what you think your right, his powerful
+family would have retaliated on you; but you have not revenged
+yourself through an instinct of self-preservation, through fear of
+prison and all the punishments invented by society; you have been
+afraid in spite of your anger, and this fear you indulge at the
+expense of cruelty to the weaker creature. Your anger only falls on
+your daughter. Come, Esteban, this is not worthy of a man."
+
+The "Wooden Staff" shook his head obstinately.
+
+"You will not convince me, I do not wish to hear you. That woman shall
+not return here; did she not leave me? Let her follow her own path."
+
+"She left you from impulses of that instinct which all healthy beings
+possess. That instinct for the preservation of the species, which
+poetry beautifies and which it calls 'Love.' If she had left you after
+receiving the blessing of a man before an altar, you would have been
+delighted, and would have received her with open arms whenever she
+came to see you. She left you to be deceived, to fall into misery and
+shame, and, seeing her so unhappy, does she not deserve more pity at
+your hands than if you saw her living happily? Reflect, Esteban, on
+the way in which your poor daughter fell. What had you taught her to
+enable her to defend herself from the evil in the world? How was she
+armed to preserve intact what you call honour? You and your wife had
+set her the example of the respect due to wealth and high birth by
+allowing that young man to come to your house, thinking it an honour
+that a gentleman should have fallen in love with your daughter. When
+the inevitable results of social inequality came about she could not
+give him up; she had one of those noble natures that rise in revolt
+against the prejudices of the world, even at the risk of suffering all
+the bitterness of their rebellion, and she fell vanquished. Whom can
+you blame? Her ignorance, her life of isolation from the world, or
+yourselves who never taught her better, and who, blinded by ambition,
+let her wander to the edge of the precipice? Blame her less than
+anybody. Unhappy girl! She has paid with interest her noble defiance
+of social prejudices. She has been vanquished in the social fight--a
+corpse that has to be buried; and you, her father, ought to be the one
+to fulfil that work of mercy."
+
+Esteban, with his head bent, continued to make gestures of refusal.
+
+"Brother," said Gabriel solemnly; "if you hold tenaciously to your
+refusal I have only one thing more to say. If your daughter does not
+return here, I must go. Everyone has his scruples; you fear the gossip
+of the people; I fear myself and what my thoughts can throw in my face
+in my solitary moments. Since I have been your guest I have thought
+constantly of your daughter, and ever since I have known what happened
+in this house I have proposed to myself that the unhappy victim should
+return here. You will not let her return? Well then, I must go. I
+should be a thief if I ate your bread while a creature who is flesh
+of your flesh suffers hunger, or if I should be nursed in my illness
+while she, who is possibly worse than I am, has no friendly hand to
+comfort her. If she does not return, I am not your brother, but an
+intruder, usurping the share of affection and comfort that ought to
+fall to her. Brother, everyone has his own code of morality; yours is
+taught by the priests, mine I have made for myself, and though it is
+less apparent, it may very likely be more strict. In the name of my
+morality I say to you, Esteban, my brother, either your daughter
+returns here or I go away. I must return to the world to be persecuted
+like a wild beast, to the hospital, to the prison, to die like a dog
+in the ditch by the roadside. I do not know what will become of me,
+but one thing is certain, it is that I shall go to-morrow, or even
+to-day, so as not to enjoy a moment more what is not mine. I, who
+consider the appropriation of the goods of the world by a privileged
+minority as an iniquitous robbery, cannot enjoy knowingly the comforts
+that belong by natural right to another unhappy being. I can only
+enjoy them sharing them with her."
+
+Esteban had risen to his feet with a gesture of despair.
+
+"Are you mad, Gabriel? Do you wish to leave me? And you say it so
+calmly? Your presence here is the only joy of my life after so many
+misfortunes. I am accustomed to see you. I must care for you, you are
+my whole family; before I had no interest, I lived without hope. Now
+I have one, to see you strong and well, and can you say so carelessly
+that you will leave me? No, you shall not go--only this was wanting to
+me--after the daughter, the brother; kill me once for all!--Lord God,
+take me to Thyself!"
+
+And the simple servant of the Church raised his hands in supplication
+while his eyes filled with tears.
+
+"Be calm, Esteban. Let us speak like men, without exclamations and
+tears. Look at me, I am calm, but do not think for that it is less
+certain that I shall go to-day if you do not grant me what I pray."
+
+"But--and she? Where is she that you plead so earnestly for her?" said
+Esteban. "Have you seen her and spoken to her? Is she in Toledo? Have
+you with the insolence of your unbelief even brought her into the
+Cathedral?"
+
+Gabriel, seeing him tearful and broken by his threat of leaving,
+thought the decisive moment had arrived, and opening the door of
+Sagrario's room he called:
+
+"Come out, child, ask your father's pardon."
+
+He looked astounded, then he fixed his eyes on Gabriel as though
+he could not guess who that woman was. What joke had his brother
+prepared?
+
+With a brutal impulse he tore the woman's hands from her face, looking
+at her earnestly; even so he did not recognise her. In the midst of
+a painful silence he stood a long while looking at her. Little by
+little, in that face so altered by illness, he began to trace the
+well-known features. In the tearful eyes devoid of eyelashes something
+reminded him of the blue eyes of the lost daughter. The discoloured
+lips, surrounded by deep lines, quivered painfully, murmuring always
+the same word:
+
+"Pardon! pardon!"
+
+At the sight of such a wreck the father felt his courage fail; his
+eyes expressed an immense, an overwhelming sadness.
+
+He retreated backwards to the door of the "habitacion," followed by
+the young woman, dragging herself on her knees and stretching out her
+hands.
+
+"Brother, it is well," he said despairingly; "you are stronger than I
+am, let your will be accomplished. Let her remain, as you wish it, but
+do not let me see her!--remain, both of you. It is I that will go."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+The sewing machine clicked from early morning till night in the house
+of the Lunas. This and the hammering of the shoemaker were the only
+sounds of work that disturbed the holy silence of the upper cloister.
+
+When Gabriel left his bed at sunrise, after a night of painful
+coughing, he would find Sagrario already in the entrance room
+preparing her machine for the day's work. From the day following that
+of her return to the Cathedral she had devoted herself to work with
+sullen silence as a means of returning unnoticed to the Claverias,
+trusting that the people would forgive her past. The gardener's widow
+procured her work, and so the sound of the stitching was continually
+heard in the old "habitacion," accompanied very often by melodies from
+the Chapel-master's harmonium.
+
+The "Wooden Staff" moved about his house like a shadow. He remained
+continually in the Cathedral or in the lower cloister, only coming up
+to the "habitacion" when it was absolutely necessary. He ate his meals
+with his head bent, in order not to look at his daughter, who was
+seated opposite to him at the other end of the table, ready to burst
+into tears at the sight of her father before her. A painful silence
+oppressed the family. Don Luis being so absent-minded, seemed the only
+one not to perceive the situation, and chatted gaily with Gabriel
+about his hopes and his musical enthusiasms. Everything seemed to him
+quite natural; nothing disturbed him, and the return of Sagrario to
+the family hearth had not caused him the slightest surprise.
+
+When dinner was over Esteban fled, not to return to the house till
+night-time; after supper he locked himself into his own room,
+leaving his brother and his daughter in possession of the entrance
+sitting-room. The machine began to work again, and Don Luis fingered
+his harmonium till nine o'clock, when Silver Stick locked the tower
+staircase, rattling his bunch of keys with a noise that equalled a
+curfew. Gabriel felt indignant at his brother's obstinacy.
+
+"You will kill the child; what you are doing is unworthy of a father."
+
+"I cannot help it, brother; it is impossible for me to look at her. It
+is sufficient for me to tolerate such things in the house. Ay! if you
+could only tell how the people's looks wound me!"
+
+In reality the scandal produced by the return of Sagrario to the
+Claverias had been much less than he had feared. She seemed so ill and
+so weary that none of the women felt any animosity against her, and
+the energetic protection of her Aunt Tomasa imposed respect. Besides,
+those simple women of instinctive passions could not now feel towards
+her that hostile envy that her beauty and the cadet's courtship had
+formerly inspired. Even Mariquita, Silver Stick's niece, found a
+certain salve to her vanity in protecting with disdainful tolerance
+that unhappy girl who in former days had attracted the attention of
+every man who visited the upper cloister.
+
+Curiosity only disturbed the calm of the Claverias for about a week.
+Little by little the women ceased to stand about the Luna's door
+to watch Sagrario bending over her machine, and the girl quietly
+continued her sad and hard-working life. Gabriel seldom left the
+"habitacion." He spent whole days by the young woman's side,
+endeavouring by his presence to atone for the hostile aloofness of her
+father. It pained him that she should find herself so despised and
+solitary in her own house. Every now and then the Aunt Tomasa came to
+see them, enlivening them with the optimism of her happy old age. She
+was pleased with her niece's conduct; to work hard so as not to be a
+drag on her obstinate old father, and to help towards the maintenance
+of the house, was clearly what was required; but all the same there
+was no reason she should kill herself with work--calm and good humour,
+this bad time would lead to a better; she was there to get things
+straight with that fiend-possessed Gabriel, and she made the gloomy
+"habitacion" ring with her healthy laugh and lively words.
+
+At other times Gabriel's friends would invade the house, abandoning
+the assemblies at the shoemaker's. They could not bear Luna's absence,
+they wanted to hear him, to consult him, and even the shoemaker when
+his work was not urgent would leave his bench and, smelling of paste,
+with his apron tucked into his belt and his head rolled up in striped
+handkerchiefs, would come and sit by Sagrario's machine.
+
+The young woman fixed her sad eyes with admiration on her uncle. She
+had always from her childhood heard her parents speak with respect of
+that extraordinary relative who was travelling in foreign countries;
+she vaguely remembered him as a shadow crossing her love dream when he
+had spent a few days in the Cathedral before establishing himself in
+Barcelona, astonishing them all by the accounts of his travels and
+his foreign customs. Now she returned to find him aged, as sickly as
+herself, but influencing all who surrounded him by the mysterious
+power of his words, that were like heavenly music to those poor
+narrow-minded souls.
+
+In the midst of her sadness Sagrario had no other pleasure but to
+listen to her uncle; she felt the same as did those simple men who
+left their work to seek Luna in their anxiety to hear fresh things
+from his lips. Gabriel was the modern world that for so many years had
+rolled on far from the Cathedral, never touching it, but which had at
+last entered in to stir and awaken a handful of men who were still
+living in the sixteenth century.
+
+The appearance of Sagrario had brought about a change in Luna's life;
+he became more communicative, and he lost a great deal of the reserve
+he had imposed upon himself when he took refuge in the stony lap of
+the church. He no longer forced himself to keep silence and to hide
+his thoughts; the presence of a woman seemed to enliven him and
+wake once more his propagandist fervour. His companions saw a new
+Gabriel--more loquacious and more disposed to communicate to them the
+"new things," that were already upheaving the traditional course of
+their thoughts, and that even now had on many nights disturbed their
+sleep.
+
+They talked, discussed and consulted Luna, so that he could clear
+their confused ideas, and above the voices of the men sounded the
+continual click, click of the sewing machine, always busy, like an
+echo of the universal work surging in the world, while the calm of the
+Infinite spread itself through the precincts of the church.
+
+All those men, accustomed to the slow, regular, quiet duties of the
+church, with long periods of rest, admired the nervous activity of
+Sagrario.
+
+"You will kill yourself, child," said the old organ-blower. "I know
+very well what it is like, I have done something of the same sort; I
+blow and blow at those bellows, and when it is a mass with much
+music, such as Don Luis loves, I end by cursing the organ and him who
+invented it, for indeed it nearly breaks my arms."
+
+"Work!" said the bell-ringer with emphasis. "Work is a punishment from
+God! You all know its origin. It was the eternal penalty imposed on
+our first parents by the Lord when He drove them out of Paradise. It
+is a chain that we must drag on for ever."
+
+"No, senor," replied the shoemaker. "As I have read in the newspapers,
+work is the greatest of all the virtues, not a punishment; laziness is
+the mother of vice, and work is a virtue. Is it not so, Don Gabriel?"
+
+The shoemaker looked at the master, watching for his words as a
+thirsty man looks for water.
+
+"Work," said Gabriel, "is neither a punishment nor a virtue; it is a
+hard law to which we have to submit for self-preservation and for the
+welfare of the species. Without work life could not exist."
+
+And with the same fervid enunciation with which he had in former times
+swayed the multitude at those meetings of protest against society, he
+explained to this half-dozen men and the quiet sewer, who stopped her
+machine to listen, the greatness of universal work, which every day
+laboured on the earth, to subdue it and force it to yield sustenance
+for man.
+
+It was a struggle the whole twenty-four hours against the blind forces
+of Nature. The army of work extended over the whole globe, exploring
+the continents, leaping to the islands, sailing the seas, and
+descending to the bowels of the earth. How many were its soldiers? No
+one could count them--millions and millions. At daybreak no one was
+absent from the roll-call; the casualties were replaced, the gaps that
+poverty and misfortune opened in the ranks were filled up immediately.
+As soon as the sun rose the factory chimney began to smoke, the hammer
+broke the stone, the file bit the metal, the plough furrowed the
+earth, the ovens were lighted, the pump worked its piston, the hatchet
+sounded in the wood, the locomotive moved amidst clouds of vapour, the
+cranes groaned on the wharves, the steamers cut the waters, and the
+little barks danced on the waves dragging their nets. None were absent
+from work's review. All hurried on, driven by the fear of hunger,
+defying danger, not knowing if they would live till night, or if the
+sun rising over their heads would be the last in their lives. And that
+daily concentration of human energies began with the first light of
+day in all parts of the world, wherever men had assembled and built
+towns and constituted societies, or even in the deserts to be
+reclaimed by their energies.
+
+The stonemason breaks the stone with his hammer, and at every breath
+is poisoned by inhaling the invisible particles. The miner descends to
+the hell of modern times with no other guide than the glimmer from
+his lamp, to wrest from the strata of the earliest ages relics of the
+earth's infancy, those carbonised trees that gave shade to prehistoric
+animals. Far from the sun and far from life, he defies death, just as
+the mason, poised on a slight scaffolding despises giddiness, watched
+only by the birds, surprised to see a creature without wings perched
+on such a dizzy height.
+
+The workman in the factory, changed by a fatal and mistaken progress
+into a slave of machinery, lives fastened to it like another wheel, a
+spring of human flesh, struggling with his physical weariness against
+the iron muscles that never tire; brutalised daily by the deafening
+cadence of pistons and wheels to give us the innumerable products of
+industry rendered necessary by the life of civilisation.
+
+And these millions and millions of men who support the existence
+of society, who fight for it against the blind and cruel forces of
+Nature, who every morning return to the struggle, seeing in this
+monotonous and continual sacrifice the sole aim of their existence,
+form the immense family of wage-earners, living on the surplus of a
+privileged minority, contenting themselves to subsist on the smallest
+part of what these reject, submitting to a wretched remuneration,
+always the lowest, without hope of saving or of emancipation.
+
+"It is this egotistical minority," said Gabriel, having arrived at
+this point, "who have falsified truth, endeavouring to persuade the
+majority of workers that work is a virtue, and that the only mission
+of man on earth is to work till he perishes. This code, invented, by
+the great capitalists, misquotes science, declaring that people can
+only live healthily who devote themselves to work, and that all
+inaction is fatal, but is silent as to what science adds--that
+excessive work destroys men with far greater rapidity than if they
+were living in idleness. They say that work is a painful necessity for
+the preservation of life, but they do not say it is a virtue, because
+repose and sweet inaction are far more grateful to men and to all
+animals than exertion and fatigue. The fable of Paradise, the story of
+the Biblical God imposing the sweat of labour as a punishment in order
+to earn subsistence, shows that in all times the natural temperament
+of man considered rest as the pleasantest condition, and that work
+must be considered as an evil indispensable to life, but all the same
+an evil. Ruled by the instinct of preservation, man ought only to work
+just as much as is necessary for food. But as the immense majority do
+not work for themselves alone, but for the profits of a minority of
+employers, these require that a man should work as much as he is able,
+even if he dies from his over-exertion, and in this way they become
+rich, hoarding the surplus from production. Their contention is that
+a man should work more than is required for himself, that he should
+produce more than is required for his own necessities. In this surplus
+lies their wealth, and to obtain it they have invented a monstrous and
+inhuman morality, that by means of religion and even of philosophy,
+glorifies work, saying that work is the greatest of all virtues and
+idleness the source of all vices. And this makes me ask, if idleness
+is a vice in the poor, how is it that among the rich it is counted as
+a sign of distinction and even of elevation of mind? And if work is
+the greatest of all virtues, how is it that capitalists endeavour to
+amass wealth in order to free themselves and their descendants from
+the practice of so great a virtue? Why is it that this society which
+exalts work with every sort of poetical conception relegates the
+worker to the lowest rank? Why do they receive with greater enthusiasm
+a soldier who has fought, more or less, than an aged workman who has
+spent seventy years working without any one praising him or being
+grateful to him for so much virtue?"
+
+The servants of the Cathedral nodded their heads, assenting to what
+fell from the master; they looked up to him as simple people always
+look up to those who come down to them as apostles of a new idea.
+
+The continual friction with Gabriel had caused to germinate in their
+minds, stunted by the traditional atmosphere, a growth of ideas, like
+the microscopic mosses the winter rains had formed on the granite
+buttresses of the church. Hitherto they had lived resigned to the
+life that surrounded them, moving like somnambulists on the undecided
+boundary which separates soul from instinct, but the unexpected
+presence of that fugitive from social battles was the impulse that
+launched them into full thought, walking tentatively and with no other
+light than that of their master.
+
+"You," went on Gabriel, "do not suffer from the slavery of work like
+those who live among modern factories. The Church does not require
+great exertions from you, and the service of God does not destroy you
+from over-fatigue, though it kills you with hunger. There exists a
+monstrous inequality between the salaries of those down below who sit
+in the choir and sing and what you earn, who lend to worship all the
+strength of your arms. You will not die of fatigue, it is true; many a
+workman in the towns would laugh at the lightness of your duties; but
+you languish from poverty. I see in this cloister the same anaemic
+children that I saw in workmen's slums, I see what you eat and what
+you are paid. The Church pays its servants as in the days of faith;
+she believes that we still live in the times when whole towns would
+throw themselves into the work with the hope of gaining heaven, and
+would help to raise cathedrals without any more positive recompense
+than the workman's stew and the blessing of the bishop; and all this
+while, you, beings of flesh who require nourishment, deceive your
+stomachs and those of your wives and children with potatoes and bread,
+while down below those wooden images are covered with pearls and gold
+in senseless profusion, and without its ever occurring to you to ask
+yourselves why the idols who have no wants should be so rich, while
+you are unable to satisfy your own and live in misery."
+
+The listeners looked at each other in astonishment, as though these
+words were an illuminating flash. They were doubtful for a moment as
+though frightened, and then the faith of conviction illuminated their
+faces.
+
+"It is true," said the bell-ringer in a gloomy tone.
+
+"It is true," repeated the shoemaker, throwing into his words all
+the bitterness of his grinding life of poverty, with a constantly
+increasing family, and with no other help but his inadequate work.
+
+Sagrario remained silent. She did not understand many of her uncle's
+sayings, but she received them all as gospel coming from him, and they
+sounded in her ears like delicious music.
+
+Gabriel's reputation spread among the humble inhabitants of the
+church, and all the servants of the Primacy gossiped about his wisdom.
+The clergy took notice of him, and more than once on rainy evenings
+the canon librarian, taking his walk in the cloisters, tried to make
+Gabriel talk; but the fugitive, with a remnant of prudence, showed
+himself towards the cassocks, as they themselves said, coldly
+courteous and reserved, fearing that they would expel him if they
+became acquainted with his views.
+
+Only one priest of all those he saw in the upper cloister had inspired
+him with any confidence. This was a young man of wretched appearance,
+with worn-out clothes, a chaplain of one of the innumerable convents
+of nuns in Toledo. He received seven duros a month, which were all
+his means of supporting himself and his old mother, a common peasant
+woman, who had denied herself bread in order to give an education to
+her son.
+
+"You see, Gabriel," said the priest. "You see how it is--such a great
+sacrifice to earn less than a common labourer earns in my village. Why
+did they ordain me with so much ceremony? Was it for this I sang mass
+in the midst of so much pomp, as though in wedding the Church I were
+uniting myself to wealth?"
+
+His poverty made him the slave of Don Antolin, and in the last third
+of the month he came almost every day to the cloister, trying to
+soften Silver Stick with his prayers and induce him to lend a few
+pesetas. He even flattered Mariquita, who could not show herself shy
+with him, in spite of his cassock.
+
+"He has a very good appearance," she said to the women of the
+Claverias with the enthusiasm inspired by every man. "I like to see
+him by the side of Don Gabriel and to hear them talk as they walk in
+the cloister. They look like two great noblemen. His mother called him
+Martin, no doubt because he resembled the Saint Martin by that painter
+they call El Greco, that hangs in some parish church, but I forget
+which."
+
+To cajole Don Antolin was a far more arduous task, and the poor little
+curate suffered much in his endeavours to propitiate the miser, who
+was irritated if his miserable loans were not repaid at the proper
+time. Silver Stick with his love of authority was delighted to hold a
+priest and an equal under his thumb, so that those in the Claverias
+should see that he did not order about the small fry only. Don Martin
+was for him only a servant in a cassock, and he made him come up to
+the cloister nearly every evening on various pretexts. His delight
+Was to keep him whole hours standing in front of his door, obliged to
+listen and to pay attention to all his words.
+
+Gabriel felt pity for the moral dependency in which the poor young man
+lived, and he would often leave his niece, going out into the cloister
+to join them. His other friends were not long in discovering him;
+first of all the bell-ringer, then the organ-blower, and presently the
+verger, the Perrero, and the shoemaker would join the group, of which
+Silver Stick was the nucleus. Don Antolin was delighted to see himself
+surrounded by so many people, never imagining that Gabriel was the
+attraction, thinking always it was his authority that inspired fear
+and respect.
+
+Recognising equality with no one but Luna, to him only he addressed
+his conversation, as though the others had no other duty but to listen
+to him in silence; if anyone spoke to him he pretended not to hear,
+but continued addressing Gabriel. Mariquita, huddled up in a shawl,
+followed them with her eyes from the door, sharing her uncle's pride
+in seeing himself surrounded by such a group, who accompanied him in
+his stroll up and down the cloister; the proximity of so many men
+seemed to turn her head.
+
+"Uncle! Don Gabriel!" she called in a coaxing voice. "Won't you come
+in; you will be more comfortable inside the house, because, even
+though it is sunny, it is very cold."
+
+But the uncle paid no attention to her words, and continued his walk
+on the side of the cloister bathed by the sun, talking pompously on
+his favourite theme, the present poverty of the Cathedral and its
+greatness In former times.
+
+"These cloisters in which we are," he said; "do you believe that they
+were built to serve as a refuge to the humble secular people who now
+live in them? No, senor, although the Church was generous, she would
+not have built these 'habitaciones,' with their inner courtyards and
+their colonnades for Wooden Staffs and vergers, etc. This cloister,
+which was to have been as large and beautiful as the one below, was
+begun by the great Cardinal Cisneros" (Don Antolin raised his hand to
+his cap) "so that the canons should live in them subject to conventual
+regulations; but the canons in those days were very rich, and,
+being great lords, would not consent to live shut up here; they all
+protested, and the cardinal, who was very quick-tempered, wished to
+keep them in leading strings, but one of them started to Rome with
+their complaints, sent by his comrades. Cisneros, being governor of
+the kingdom, placed guards at all the ports, and the emissary was
+arrested as he was going to embark at Valencia. The end of it all
+was that after a long suit the gentlemen of the Chapter came off
+victorious, and lived out of the Primacy, and the Claverias remained
+unfinished with this low roof and this balustrade, both provisional.
+But even as it is kings have lived in this cloister; that great
+monarch, Philip II., spent several days here. What glorious times!
+when the kings, who had palaces at their command, preferred living in
+these rooms, so as to be inside the Cathedral and nearer to God. Such
+kings, such people. For this reason Spain was greater then than ever.
+We were masters of the world. We had power and money, and we lived
+happily on earth in the certainty of reaching heaven after death."
+
+"That is true," said the bell-ringer; "those were the good times, and
+for their return we fought in the mountains. Ay! if only Don Carlos
+had been victorious! if only there had not been traitors amongst us!
+Is it not true, Gabriel? You who fought in the war as I did, you can
+say if I am not right."
+
+"Hold your tongue, Mariano," said Gabriel, smiling sadly. "You do not
+know what you are saying. You fought and shed your blood for a cause
+that even now you do not understand. You went to the war as blindly as
+I did. Do not look so sullen; it is no use contradicting. Well then,
+let us see, what did you wish for when you went out to fight for Don
+Carlos?"
+
+"I? First of all that every man should come by his own. Did not the
+crown belong to his family? Well, let it be given to him."
+
+"And is this all?" asked Luna with displeasure.
+
+"That was the least of it. What I wanted, and do want, is that
+the nation should have a good master, an upright lord, and a good
+Catholic, who without restraints of laws or Cortes, should govern us
+all with bread in one hand and a stick in the other. For the robber,
+garrote him! for the honoured, 'you are my friend!' A king who will
+not allow the rich to crush the poor, and who will not allow any one
+to die of hunger who wishes to work. Come, I think I am explaining
+myself clearly."
+
+"And all this, do you believe that it existed at any time, or that
+your king would be able to restore it? Those centuries that you
+describe as those of greatness and well-being were really the worst
+in our history; they were the cause of Spanish decadence, and the
+beginning of all our ills."
+
+"Stop there, Gabrielillo," said Silver Stick. "You know a great deal,
+and have travelled and read much more than I have, but we cannot
+swallow that. I am very much interested in the question, and I will
+not allow you to take advantage of the ignorance of Mariano and these
+others. How can you say that those times were evil, and that the
+fault is theirs of what is happening to us now? The true culprit is
+liberalism, the unbelief of the age, which has let the devil loose in
+our house. Spain, when it does not trust its kings and has no faith in
+Catholicism, is like a lame man who drops his crutches and falls to
+the ground. We are nothing without the throne and the altar, and the
+proof of this is everything that has happened to us since we had
+revolutions. We have lost our islands, we count for nothing among the
+other countries. The Spaniards who are the bravest men in the world,
+have been defeated, there is not a peseta anywhere, and all those
+gentlemen who harangue in Madrid vote fresh taxes and we are always
+involved in difficulties. When was this ever seen in former times?
+When?"
+
+"Worse and more shameful things were seen," said Luna.
+
+"You are mad, youngster! Those travels have corrupted you, till I
+believe you are hardly a Spaniard! Look you, that he denies what
+everybody knows, what is taught in all the schools! And the Catholic
+kings; were they nothing? You need no books to know that. Go into the
+choir, and you will see on the lower stalls all the battles that those
+religious kings gained over the Moors with the help of God. They
+conquered Granada and drove out the infidels who had held it seven
+centuries in barbarism. Afterwards came the discovery of America. Who
+could accomplish that? No one but ourselves; and that good queen who
+pawned her jewels so that Columbus should accomplish his voyage. You
+cannot deny all this, it seems to me. And the Emperor Charles V.! What
+have you to say about him? Do you know any more extraordinary man! He
+fought all the kings of Europe, and half the world was his, 'the sun
+never set on his dominions,' we Spaniards were masters of the world;
+you cannot either deny this. And still we have said nothing of Don
+Philip II., a king so wise and so astute that he made all the monarchs
+of Europe dance at his pleasure, as though he were pulling them with
+a string. Everything was for the greater glory of Spain and the
+splendour of religion. Of his victories and greatness we have said
+nothing; if his father was victorious at Pavia, he overturned his
+enemies at St. Quintin. And what do you say about Lepanto? Down in the
+sacristy we preserve the banners of the ship that Don Juan of Austria
+commanded. You have seen them; one of them represents Jesus crucified,
+and they are so long, so very long, that when they were fastened to
+the triforium, the ends had to be turned up so that they should not
+trail on the ground. So, was Lepanto nothing? Come, Gabriel, you
+really must be mad to deny certain things. If someone had to conquer
+the Moors lest they should possess themselves of all Europe and
+endanger the Christian faith, who did it? The Spaniards. When the
+Turks threatened to become masters of the seas, who went out to meet
+them? Spain and her Don Juan. And who went to discover a new world
+but the ships of Spain; and who sailed round the world but another
+Spaniard, Magallanes; and for everything great it has always been us,
+always us, in those days of religion and prosperity. And what can
+we say about learning? Those centuries produced Spain's most famous
+men--great poets and most eminent theologians; no one has equalled
+them since. And to show that religion is the source of all greatness,
+the most illustrious writers have worn the religious habit. I guess
+what will be your argument, that after such glorious kings came others
+less distinguished, and so the decadence commenced. I know something
+about that also. I have heard the librarian of the Cathedral and other
+people of great learning say this. But this really means nothing.
+These are the designs of God, by which He puts His people to the
+proof, just as He does with individuals, bringing them down to low
+estate, to raise them again to great honour, so that they may continue
+in the right way. But we will not speak of this; if there has been
+a decadence we do not want to know anything about it. We want the
+glorious past, the brilliant times of the Catholic kings, of Don
+Carlos and the two Philips, and it is on them that we fix our eyes
+when we talk of Spain returning to her good old times."
+
+"But those centuries, Don Antolin," said Gabriel calmly, "were those
+of Spanish decadence; in them was begun our ruin. I am not surprised
+at your anger; you repeat what you have been taught. There are people
+here of the highest education who are not less irritated if you touch
+what they call their golden age. The fault is in the education that
+is given in this country. All history is a lie, and to know it so
+misrepresented it would be far better not to know it at all. In the
+schools the past of the country is taught from the point of view of a
+savage, who appreciates a thing because it shines and not because of
+its worth or utility. Spain was great, and was on the high road to
+become the first nation in the world, by solid and positive merits
+that the hazards of war or policy could not have destroyed; but that
+was before the centuries that you praise, before the times of the
+foreign kings: in the Middle Ages which held great hopes, which have
+vanished since the consolidation of national unity. Our Middle Ages
+produced a cultivated, industrious and civilised people like none
+other in the world; they had in them the materials for the building of
+a great nation; but foreign architects came in who hastily ran up this
+edifice; those first few years of existence that astound you with the
+splendour of novelty, and among whose ruins we are still groping."
+
+Gabriel forgot all his prudence in the ardour of discussion. He felt
+no fear of Silver Stick, with his manner of an inquisitor incapable of
+reasoning. He wished to convince him; he felt all the fervour, all the
+irresistible impulse of his proselytising days, without trying in any
+way to disguise his feelings from consideration of the atmosphere
+surrounding him. Don Antolin listened to him in astonishment, fixing
+on him his cold glance. The others listened, feeling confusedly the
+marvel that such ideas should be enunciated in the cloister of a
+cathedral. Don Martin, the chaplain of the nuns, who stood behind his
+miserly protector, showed in his eyes the eager sympathy with which he
+heard Luna's words.
+
+He described the Hispano-Roman people over whom the Gothic invasion
+swept, without, however, causing a gap, because before long the
+conquerors had succumbed to the lower Latin degeneration, remaining
+without strength, spending themselves in theological struggles and
+dynastic intrigues like those of Byzantium. The regeneration of Spain
+did not come from the north with the hordes of barbarians, but from
+the south with the invading Arabs. At first they were few, but they
+were sufficient to conquer Roderick and his corrupt courtiers. The
+instinct of the Christian nationality revolting against the invaders,
+and the gathering together of the whole soul of Spain on the rocky
+heights of Covadonga to fall once more upon their conquerors, was all
+a lie. The Spain of those days gratefully welcomed the people from
+Africa and submitted without resistance. A squadron of Arab horsemen
+was sufficient to make a town open its gates. It was a civilising
+expedition more than a conquest, and a continual current of
+immigration was established over the Straits. Over them came that
+young and vigorous culture, of such rapid and astonishing growth,
+which seemed to conquer though it was scarcely born: that civilisation
+created by the religious enthusiasm of the Prophet, who had
+assimilated all that was best in Judaism and in Byzantine
+civilisation, carrying along with it also the great Indian traditions,
+fragments from Persia and much from mysterious China. It was the
+Orient entering into Europe, not as the Assyrian monarchs into Greece,
+which repelled them seeing her liberties in danger, but the exact
+opposite, into Spain, the slave of theological kings and warlike
+bishops, which received the invaders with open arms. In two years they
+became masters of what it took seven centuries to dispossess them. It
+was not an invasion contested by arms, but a youthful civilisation
+that threw out roots in every part. The principle of religious liberty
+which cements all great nationalities came in with them, and in the
+conquered towns they accepted the Church of the Christians and the
+synagogues of the Jews. The Mosque did not fear the temples it found
+in the country, it respected them, placing itself among them without
+jealousy or desire of domination. From the eighth to the fifteenth
+century the most elevated and opulent civilisation of the Middle Ages
+in Europe was formed and flourished. While the people of the north
+were decimating each other in religious wars, and living in tribal
+barbarity, the population of Spain rose to thirty millions, gathering
+to herself all races and all beliefs in infinite variety, like the
+modern American people. Christians and Mussulmans, pure Arabs,
+Syrians, Egyptians, Jews of Spanish extraction, and Jews from the East
+all lived peaceably together, hence the various crossings and mixtures
+of Muzarabes, Mudejares, Muladies and Hebrews. In this prolific
+amalgamation of peoples and races all the habits, ideas, and
+discoveries known up to then in the world met; all the arts, sciences,
+industries, inventions and culture of the old civilisations budded
+out into fresh discoveries of creative energy. Silk, cotton, coffee,
+oranges, lemons, pomegranates, sugar, came with them from the East, as
+also carpets, silk tissues, gauzes, damascene work and gunpowder. With
+them also came the decimal numeration algebra, alchemy, chemistry,
+medicine, cosmology and rhymed poetry. The Greek philosophers, who
+were nearly vanishing into oblivion, saved themselves by following the
+footsteps of the Arab conquerors. Aristotle reigned in the university
+of Cordoba. That spirit of chivalry arose among the Spanish Arabs,
+which has since been appropriated by the warriors of the north, as
+though it were a special quality belonging to Christian people. While
+in the barbarous Europe of the Franks, the Anglo-Normans, and the
+Germans, the people lived in hovels, and the kings and barons in rocky
+castles blackened by the smoke of their fires, devoured by vermin,
+dressed in coarse serge, and fed like prehistoric man, the Spanish
+Arabs were raising their fantastic Alcazars, and, with the refinement
+of ancient Rome, they met at their baths to converse on all literary
+and scientific questions. If any monk from the north felt the hunger
+of learning, he came to the Arab universities or the Jewish synagogues
+of Spain, and the kings of Europe thought they would be cured of their
+infirmities if, by dint of golden bribes, they could procure a Spanish
+physician.
+
+When little by little the aboriginal element separated itself from the
+invaders and small Christian nationalities arose, the Arabs and the
+old Spaniards (if indeed after the constant mingling of blood there
+was any difference between the two races) fought chivalrously without
+exterminating each other after the battles, mutually respecting one
+another, with long intervals of peace, as though they wished to
+retard the moment of final separation, and often joining in various
+enterprises.
+
+A system of liberty ruled in most of the Christian States. The Cortes
+arose much earlier than in the other western countries of Europe, and
+the Spanish people governed and regulated their expenses themselves,
+seeing only in their king a military chief. The municipalities were
+little republics with their own elected magistrates. The town militia
+realised the ideal of a democratic army. The Church at one with the
+people lived peacefully with the other religions in the country; an
+intelligent bourgeoisie created large industries in the interior, and
+fitted out the first navy of the times at their own cost, and Spanish
+products were more sought after than any other in all the ports
+of Europe. There were towns then as populous as any of the modern
+capitals; whole populations devoted themselves to weaving different
+kinds of stuffs, and everything was cultivated on the soil of the
+Peninsula.
+
+The Catholic kings marked the apogee of national strength, but it was
+the beginning also of its decadence. Their reign was great because the
+flow of energy begun in the Middle Ages lasted till their times; but
+it was execrable, because their tortuous policy turned Spain from the
+right way, rousing in us religious fanaticism and the ambition of
+universal empire. Two or three centuries ahead of the rest of Europe,
+Spain was for the world of those days what England is for our own
+times. If we had followed the same policy of religious toleration, of
+fusion of races, of industrial and agricultural work in preference to
+military enterprises, where should we not be now?
+
+Gabriel asked this question, interrupting his ardent description of
+the past.
+
+"The Renaissance," continued Luna, "was more Spanish than Italian. In
+Italy the literature of antiquity, and Greco-Roman art revived, but
+the Renaissance was not entirely literary. The Renaissance represents
+the springing into life of a new and cultivated society, with arts
+and manufactures, armies and, scientific knowledge, etc. And who
+accomplished this but Spain, that Arab-Hebrew-Christian Spain of the
+Catholic kings? The Gran Capitan taught the world the art of modern
+warfare; Pedro Navarro was a wonderful engineer; the Spanish troops
+were the first to use firearms, and they created also the infantry,
+making war democratic, as it gave the people the superiority over the
+noble horsemen clad in armour; finally, it was Spain who discovered
+America."
+
+"And does all this seem little to you?" interrupted Don Antolin. "Do
+you not exactly agree with what I said? We have never seen so much
+power and greatness united in Spain as in the times of those kings,
+who with reason some call the Catholics."
+
+"I agree that it was a grand period of our history; the last that was
+really glorious, the last gleam that flashed before that Spain, who
+alone walked in the right way, was extinguished. But before their
+deaths the Catholic kings commenced the decadence by dismembering that
+strong and healthy Spain of the Arabs, the Christians and the Jews.
+You are right, Don Antolin, to say that those kings are not called
+the Catholics for nothing. Dona Isabel with her feminine fanaticism
+established the Inquisition, so science extinguished her lamp in the
+mosques and synagogues, and hid her books in Christian convents.
+Seeing that the hour for praying, instead of reading, had come,
+Spanish thought took refuge in darkness, trembling in cold and
+solitude, and ended by dying. What remained devoted itself to poetry,
+to comedies and theological tracts. Science became a pathway that led
+to the bonfire; and then came a fresh calamity, the expulsion of the
+Spanish Jews, so saturated with the spirit of this country, loving it
+so dearly, that even to-day, after four centuries, scattered on the
+shores of the Danube or the Bosphorus there are Spanish Jews who weep,
+like old Castillians, for their lost country:
+
+  'Perdimos la bella Sion;
+  Perdimos tambien Espana
+  Nido de consolacion.'[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: 'We lost our lovely Sion; we also lost our Spain, that
+nest of consolation.]
+
+"That people who had given Maimonides to the science of the Middle
+Ages, and who were the mainstay of all the industries and commerce
+of Spain, left our country _en masse_. Spain, deceived by its
+extraordinary vitality was opening its own veins to satisfy the
+growing fanaticism, believing that it could survive this loss without
+danger. Afterwards came what a modern writer has called 'the foreign
+body,' interposing itself in our national life--those Austrians who
+came to reign and caused Spain to lose her distinctive character."
+
+"Gabriel," interrupted the priest, "you are talking absurdities. The
+true Spain began with the emperor, and went on equally gloriously
+under Don Philip II. This is the pure and uncorrupted Spain that we
+ought to take as an example, and which we hope to restore."
+
+"No. The pure and uncorrupted Spain, the Spanish Spain without foreign
+admixture, is that of the Arabs, Moors and Jews, that of religious
+tolerance, that of industrial and agricultural wealth, and of free
+municipalities; that which perished under the Catholic kings. What
+came after was a Teutonic and a Flemish Spain turned into a German
+colony, serving as a mercenary under foreign standards, ruining itself
+in undertakings in which it had no interest, shedding blood and gold
+for the ambition of the so-called Holy Roman Empire. I can understand
+the enchantment that the emperor exercised over the bigoted and
+ignorant people who worshipped the past. A great man that Don Carlos!
+Brave in fight, astute in politics, jolly and hearty as one of the
+burgomasters of his own country; a great eater, a great drinker, and
+loving to catch the girls round the waist. But he had nothing Spanish
+about him. He only appreciated his mother's heritage for what he could
+wring out of it. Spain became a servant to Germany, ready to supply
+as many men as were required, and to furnish loans and taxes. All the
+exuberant life garnered in this country by Hispano-Arab culture
+was absorbed by the north in less than a hundred years. The free
+municipalities disappeared, their defenders went to the scaffold both
+in Castille and Valencia; the Spaniard abandoned his plough or his
+weaving to range the world with an arquebus on his shoulder, and the
+town militias were transformed into bands which fought all over Europe
+without knowing why. The flourishing towns became villages; churches
+were turned into convents; the popular and tolerant clergy were
+changed into friars who imitated with servile complacency the German
+fanaticism. The fields remained barren for want of hands to cultivate
+them, the poor dreamt of becoming rich from the sack of the enemy's
+towns and left their work; the industrious burghers abandoned commerce
+as only fit for heretics, and became nurseries of clerks and petty
+magistrates; and the armies of Spain as unbeaten and glorious as they
+were ragged, with no pay but pillage and in continual mutiny against
+their chiefs, flooded our country with a swarm of wretched vagabonds,
+from whence proceeded the bully, the beggar with his blunderbuss, the
+highwayman, the wandering hermits, the starving nobleman, and all
+those characters of which picturesque novels have availed themselves."
+
+"But, the devil, Gabriel!" cried indignantly Silver Stick; "do you
+deny that Don Carlos, who built the Alcazar of Toledo, and Don Philip
+II., who lived in this very cloister, were two great kings?"
+
+"I do not deny it; they were two extraordinary men, but they killed
+Spain for ever. They were two foreigners, two Germans; Philip II.
+clothed himself with a false Spaniardism to continue the German policy
+of his father. This masquerading caused us great harm, because there
+are many men now who think of him as the noblest representation of a
+Spaniard. The absurd inventions and lapses from truth to which those
+times give rise are enough to drive one mad. Many Catholics dream of
+canonising Philip II. for the cold cruelty with which he exterminated
+heretics, but such a king had really no Catholicism but his own; he
+was heir to the German Caesarism, that eternal hammer of the Popes.
+Driven by pride, he was always sailing to the windward of schism and
+heresy; that he did not break with the Pontificate was solely that
+this latter feared that the Spanish soldiery, who had twice entered
+Rome, would remain there for ever, and that it would have to submit to
+all their extortions. The father and son robbed us with dissimulation
+of our nationality, and dissipated our life for their purely personal
+plans of reviving the Caesarism of Charlemagne and forming the Catholic
+religion to their own imagination and taste. They nearly destroyed the
+ancient religious feeling of Spain, so cultivated and tolerant from
+its continual intercourse with Mahomedanism and Judaism; that Spanish
+Church, whose priests lived peacefully in the towns with the alfaqui
+and the rabbi, and who punished with moral penalties those who from
+excess of zeal disturbed the worship of the infidels. That religious
+intolerance which foreign historians consider a purely Spanish product
+was really imported by the German Caesars. It was the German friar who
+came with his devout brutality and his crazy theology, not tempered
+as in Spain by Semitic culture. With their intolerance and
+impracticability they provoked the revolution of the Reformation in
+the northern countries, and, driven out of them, they came here to
+plant afresh their ignorance and fanaticism. The ground was well
+prepared. When the free towns whose municipalities were republics
+fell, the people also languished; the foreign seed produced in a
+short time an immense forest, the forest of the Inquisition and the
+fanaticism which still exists; the modern woodmen cut and lop, but
+they soon fall off wearied; the arms of one man can do little against
+a trunk that has grown for centuries. Fire, nothing but fire, can
+exterminate that cursed vegetation."
+
+Don Antolin opened his eyes in horror. He was not angry now, he seemed
+quite thunderstruck by Luna's words.
+
+"Gabriel, my son!" he exclaimed; "you are 'greener' than I thought.
+Just think where you are; remember what you are saying. We are in the
+Holy Metropolitan Church of all the Spains."
+
+But Luna was fairly launched by the renewal of his historical
+remembrances and he was not to be stopped, driven on as he was by his
+propagandist zeal. He was fired by the old oratorical fervour, and he
+spoke as at those meetings when he could scarcely continue his speech
+for the applause, and the protests and surging of the multitude
+obstructing the police.
+
+The horror of the priest only seemed to excite him more.
+
+"Philip II.," he continued, "was a foreigner, a German to the very
+bones. His grave taciturnity, his slow and penetrating mind, were not
+Spanish, they were Flemish. The impassibility with which he received
+the reverses which ruined the nation was that of a foreigner who was
+bound by no ties of affection to the country. 'It is better to reign
+over corpses than over heretics,' he said, and corpses the Spaniards
+really were, condemned not to think, but to lie in order to conceal
+their thoughts. All the ancient offices had disappeared. Outside
+the Church there was no future for any adventurous soul, except in
+America--which ceased to be of any use to the nation after it became
+converted into the treasure chest of the king--or to be a soldier
+fighting in Europe for the rehabilitation of the Holy German Empire,
+for the subjection of the Pope to the Emperor or the extinction of the
+reformed religion, undertakings that in no way concerned Spain, but
+were all the same very blood-letting affairs, even for those who
+escaped with their lives. All the handicraftsmen disappeared, carried
+away to the armies, and the towns became filled with invalids and
+veterans, carrying their rusty swords, their only proof of personal
+valour. All the middle-class guilds were suppressed; there only
+remained nobles proud of being servants to the king and a populace
+who only asked for bread and entertainments, like the Romans, and
+contented themselves with the broth from the convents and the burning
+of heretics organised by the Inquisition.
+
+"After this, ruin overwhelmed us; after the great Caesars, so fatal to
+Spain, came the little ones--Philip III., who gave the final blow by
+expelling the Moors; Philip IV., a degenerate with literary fancies,
+who wrote verses and courted nuns, and the miserable Charles II.
+
+"Spain had never been so religious, Don Antolin," said Luna. "The
+Church was mistress of everything; the ecclesiastical tribunals judged
+even the king himself, but secular justice could not touch even the
+hem of a garment of the lowest sacristan, even though he committed the
+greatest crimes in the public streets. Only the Church could judge its
+own; as Barrioneuva relates in his memoirs, friars armed to the teeth
+wrested from the king's justice at the foot of the scaffold, in broad
+daylight in the midst of the Plaza Mayor in Madrid, one of their own
+brothers condemned for murder. The Inquisition, not satisfied with
+burning heretics, judged and punished gangs of cattle-lifters. Men of
+letters, terrified, took refuge in ornamental literature as the last
+refuge of thought, confining themselves to the production of witty
+novels or plays, in which a fantastic honour was exalted which only
+existed in poets' imagination, while the greatest corruption of morals
+reigned. The great Spanish genius ignored or feigned to ignore what
+the religious revolution beyond the frontiers was saying. Quevedo
+only, who was the most daring, ventured to say:
+
+  'With the Inquisition....
+  Hush! Silence!'
+
+the sad epitaph of Spanish thought which preferred to perish as it
+could not speak the truth. In order to live quietly and support
+themselves in those days of ignorance, many poets sought the shadow
+of the Church and wore its vestments. Lope de Vega, Calderon, Tirsode
+Molina, Miradamerscua, Tarriga, Argensola, Gongora, Rioja, and others
+were priests, many of them after stormy lives. Montalban was a priest
+and employed in the Inquisition, and even the poor Cervantes, in
+his old age, had to take the habit of St. Francis. Spain had eleven
+thousand convents, more than a hundred thousand friars, and forty
+thousand nuns, and to these must be added seventy-eight thousand
+priests and the innumerable servitors and dependents of the Church,
+such as alguaciles, familiars, jailors, and notaries of the
+Inquisition, sacristans, stewards, buleros,[1] convent door-porters,
+choristers, singers, lay brothers, novices--and I know not how many
+other people. In exchange, the nation from a population of thirty
+millions had shrunk to seven millions in less than two hundred
+years. The expulsion of Jews and Moors by religious intolerance, the
+continual foreign wars, the emigration to America in the hopes of
+growing rich without work, hunger, the lack of sanitation, and the
+abandonment of agriculture, had brought about this rapid depopulation.
+The revenues of Spain had fallen to fourteen million ducats, whereas
+the clerical revenue had risen to eight millions; the Church possessed
+more than half the national fortune! What times! Eh, Don Antolin?"
+
+[Footnote 1: _Buleros_--One charged with distributing crusading bulls
+and collecting alms for them.]
+
+Silver Stick listened coldly, as though he had formed some definite
+idea about Luna, and therefore did not make much account of his words.
+
+"However bad they were," he said slowly, "they could not be worse than
+they are at present. At all events no one robbed the Church. Everyone
+was contented in his poverty, thinking of heaven, which is the only
+truth, and the worship of God which corresponds to it. Is it that you
+possibly do not believe in God?"
+
+Gabriel avoided an answer, and went on talking of those times.
+
+"It was a period of barbarism and stagnation, and while Europe was
+developing and progressing the people who had been foremost in all
+civilisation were now left far behind. The kings, inspired by Spanish
+pride and the hereditary pretensions of the German Caesars, conceived
+the mad idea of mastering all Europe, with no more support than
+a nation of seven million of inhabitants, and a few companies of
+ill-paid and starving soldiers. The gold from America had gone to fill
+the Dutchmen's purses, and in this undertaking, worthy of Don Quixote,
+the nation received blow after blow. Spain became more and more
+Catholic, poorer and more barbarous. She aspired to conquer the whole
+world, yet in the interior she had whole provinces uninhabited; many
+of the old towns had disappeared, the roads were obliterated and no
+one in Spain knew for certain the geography of the country though few
+were ignorant of the situation of heaven and of purgatory. The farms
+of any fertility were not occupied by granges but by convents, and
+along the few highways bivouacked bands of robbers, who took refuge,
+when they found themselves pursued, in the monasteries, where they
+were welcomed for their piety, and for the many masses they ordered
+for their sinful souls.
+
+"The ignorance was atrocious, the kings were advised even in warlike
+matters by priests. Charles II., when the Dutch troops offered to
+garrison the Spanish towns in Flanders, consulted with the clerics as
+on a case of conscience, because this might facilitate the diffusion
+of heresy, and he ended by preferring to let them fall into the hands
+of the French, who, although they were enemies, were at all events
+Catholics. In the university of Salamanca the poet Torres de
+Villarroel could not find a single work on geography, and when he
+spoke of mathematics, the pupils assured him it was a kind of sorcery,
+a devilish science that could only be understood by anointing oneself
+with an ointment used by witches. The theologians rejected the project
+of a canal to unite the Tagus and the Manzanares, saying that this
+would be a work against the will of God; but having laid this
+down--fiat--the two rivers joined themselves even though they had
+been separated from the beginning of the world. The doctors of Madrid
+begged Philip IV. to allow the refuse to remain in the streets
+'because the air of the town being exceedingly keen, it would cause
+great ravages unless it were impregnated with the vapours from the
+filth,' and a century later, a famous theologian in Seville registered
+in a public document with those who were discussing with him, 'that
+we would far rather err with Saint Clement, Saint Basil and Saint
+Augustin, than agree with Descartes and Newton.'
+
+"Philip II. had threatened with death and confiscation anyone who
+published foreign books or who circulated manuscripts, and his
+successors forbade any Spaniard to write on political subjects, so,
+finding no ways of expansion for thought, they devoted themselves to
+fine arts and poetry; painting and the theatre rose to a higher level
+than in any other country; they were the safety valves of the national
+genius; but this spring of art was only ephemeral, for in the midst of
+the seventeenth century a grotesque and debasing decadence overwhelmed
+everything.
+
+"The poverty in those centuries was horrible; that same Philip II.,
+though he was lord of the world, put up titles of nobility for sale
+for the sum of six thousand reals, noting on the margin of the decree
+'that it was not necessary to inquire much into the quality and origin
+of the people.' In Madrid the people sacked the bakeries, fighting
+with their fists for the bread. The president of Castille travelled
+through the province with the executioner to wring the scanty harvest
+from the peasants. The collectors of taxes, finding nothing that they
+could collect in the towns, tore off the roofs of the houses, selling
+the woodwork and the tiles. The families fled to the mountains
+whenever they saw in the distance the king's representative, and so
+the towns remained deserted and fell into ruins. Hunger came in even
+to the royal palaces, and Charles II., Lord of Spain and of the
+Indies, was unable on several occasions to procure food for his
+servants. The ambassadors of England and Denmark were obliged to sally
+forth with their armed servants to seek for bread in the suburbs of
+Madrid.
+
+"And amidst all this the innumerable convents, masters of more than
+half the country and the sole possessors of wealth, showed their
+charity by distributing soup to those who had strength to fetch it,
+and by founding asylums and hospitals, where the people died of misery
+though they were certain of reaching heaven. The ancient manufactures
+had all disappeared. Segovia, so famous for its cloth, that had
+employed over 40,000 persons in its manufacture, only held 15,000
+inhabitants, and these had so completely forgotten the art of weaving
+wool that when Philip V. wished to re-establish the industry, he was
+obliged to import German weavers.
+
+"And it was the same thing in Seville, in Valencia, and in Medina del
+Campo, so famous for their fairs and their manufactures," continued
+Gabriel. "Seville which in the fifteenth century had 16,000 silk
+weavers, at the end of the seventeenth could only produce 65. Though
+it is true in exchange its Cathedral clergy numbered 117 canons, and
+it had 78 convents, with more than 4,000 friars and 14,000 priests
+in the diocese. And Toledo? At the close of the fifteenth century
+it employed 50,000 artisans in its silk and wool weaving and in its
+factory of arms, to say nothing of curriers, silversmiths, glovers,
+and jewellers; at the end of the seventeenth century it had hardly
+15,000 inhabitants. Everything was decayed, everything was ruined;
+twenty-five houses belonging to illustrious families had passed into
+the hands of the convents, and the only rich people in the town were
+the friars, the archbishop and the Cathedral. Spain was so exhausted
+at the end of the Austrian rule that she saw herself nearly divided
+among the different powers of Europe, like Poland, another Catholic
+country like ours. The quarrels among the kings were the only thing
+that saved her."
+
+"If those times were so bad, Gabriel," said Silver Stick, "how was
+it the Spaniards showed such unanimity? How was it there were no
+'pronunciamientos' and risings in these deplorable times?"
+
+"What could they do? The despotism of the Caesars had imposed on the
+Spaniards a blind obedience to the kings as the representatives
+of God, and the clergy had educated them in this belief from the
+community of interests between the Church and the throne. Even the
+most illustrious poets corrupted the people, exalting servility to the
+monarchy in their plays. Calderon affirmed that the property and life
+of a citizen did not belong to himself but to the king. Besides,
+religion filled everything; it was the sole end of existence, and the
+Spaniards meditating always on heaven, ended by accustoming themselves
+to the miseries of earth. Do not doubt but the excess of religion was
+our ruin, and came very near exterminating us as a nation. Even now we
+are dragging along the consequences of this plague which lasted for
+centuries. To save this country from death what had to be done? The
+foreigners had to be called in, and the Bourbons came. See how low we
+had fallen that we had not even soldiers. In this land, even if we
+were wanting in other advantages, we could from the earliest days
+reckon on good warlike leaders; but look, in the war of succession we
+had to have English and French generals, and even officers, for there
+was not a Spaniard who could train a cannon or command a company; we
+had no one to serve us as a minister, and under Philip V. and Fernando
+VI. all the Government were foreigners, strangers called in to revive
+the lost manufactures, to reclaim the derelict lands, to repair the
+ancient irrigation channels, and to found colonies in the deserts
+inhabited by wild beasts and bandits. Spain, who had colonised half
+the world after her own fashion, was now re-discovered and colonised
+by Europeans.[1] The Spaniards seemed like poor Indians, guided by
+their Cacique the friar, with their rags covered with scapularies and
+miracle-working relics. Anti-clericalism was the only remedy against
+all this superstition and ruin, and this spirit came in with the
+foreign colonists. Philip V. wished to suppress the Inquisition and to
+end the naval war with the Mussulman nations which had lasted for a
+thousand years, depopulating the shores of the Mediterranean with the
+fear of the Barbary and Turkish pirates. But the natives resisted any
+reform coming from the colonists, and the first Bourbon had to desist,
+finding his crown in danger. Later on his immediate successors, having
+deeper roots in the country dared to continue his work. Carlos III.
+in his endeavour to civilise Spain laid a heavy hand on the Church,
+limiting its privileges and curtailing its revenues, being careful of
+earthly things and forgetful of the heavenly. The bishops protested,
+speaking in letters and pastorals 'of the persecutions of the poor
+Church, robbed of its goods, outraged in its ministers, and attacked
+in its immunities,' but the awakened country rejoiced in the
+only prosperous days it had known in modern times before the
+disestablishment. Europe was ruled by philosophic kings and Charles
+III. was one of them. The echo of the English revolution still
+vibrated through the world; the monarchs now wished to be loved and
+not feared, and in every country they struggled against the ignorance
+and brutality of the masses, bringing about progressive reforms
+by royal enactment and even by force. But the great evil of the
+monarchical system was its heredity, the power settled in one family,
+for the son of a clever man with good intentions might be an imbecile.
+After Charles III. came Charles IV., and as if this were not
+sufficient, in the year of his death the French revolution broke out,
+which made all the kings in Europe tremble, and the Bourbons of Spain
+quite lost their heads, which they were never able to recover. They
+went astray, wandering from the right way, throwing themselves once
+more into the arms of the Church as the only means of avoiding the
+revolutionary danger, and they have not yet returned, nor will they,
+to the right track. Jesuits, friars and bishops became once more the
+counsellors at the palace, as they still are, as in the times when
+Carlos II. concocted his military and political plans with a council
+of theologians. We have had false revolutions which have dethroned
+people, but not ideas. It is true we have advanced a little, but
+timidly, with halting footsteps and disorderly retreats, like one who
+advances fearfully, and suddenly, at the slightest noise, rushes back
+to the point of departure. The transformation has been more exterior
+than interior. The minds of the people are still in the seventeenth
+century; they still feel the fear and cowardice engendered by the
+inquisitorial bonfires. The Spaniards are slaves to their very marrow;
+their pride and their energies are all on the surface; they have not
+lived through three centuries of ecclesiastical servitude for nothing.
+They have made revolutions, they are capable of rebelling, but they
+will always stop short at the threshold of the Church, who was their
+mistress by force and remains so still, even though its power has
+vanished. There is no fear of them entering here. You may remain quite
+easy, Don Antolin, though in justice many accounts might be required
+of her from the past. Is it because they are as religious as formerly?
+You know that this is not the case, though they complain with reason
+of the way in which the ancient grandeur of the Church has been
+extinguished without popular aid."
+
+[Footnote 1: In 1897 an Act was passed "to colonise derelict land in
+Spain."]
+
+"That is true," said Silver Stick; "there is no faith. No one is
+capable of making any sacrifice for the house of God. Only in the hour
+of death, when fear comes in, do some of them remember to assist us
+with their fortune."
+
+"There is no faith, that is the truth. The Spaniard, after that
+religious fever that nearly killed him, lived in a state of perfect
+indifference, not from scientific reflection but from inability to
+think at all. They know they will go either to heaven or hell; they
+believe it because they have been taught so, but they let themselves
+be carried on by the stream of life, without the strength to choose
+either one place or the other. They accept the established, living
+in a sort of an intellectual somnambulism. If now and then thought
+awakening suggests some criticism it is smothered at once by fear;
+the Inquisition still lives among us though we have no longer the
+bonfires, but we are terribly afraid of 'what will be said.' A
+stationary and narrow-minded society is our modern holy office. He
+who raises his protest, rising above the general and common monotony,
+draws upon himself the stupid anger of scandalised man, and suffers
+punishment; if he is poor he is put to the proof of hunger, his means
+of life being cut away from him, and if he is independent he is burned
+in effigy, creating emptiness around him. Everyone must be correct and
+agree to what is established, and hence it arises, that, bound to
+one another by fear, never an original thought arises, there is no
+independent thought, and even the learned keep to themselves the
+conclusions they draw from their studies. As long as this goes on the
+task of the revolutionary is useless in this country; they may change
+the apparent nature of the soil, but when the pickaxe strikes they
+come at once on the stones of ages, solid and compact. The national
+character though it has lost its religious faith is unchanged. Faith
+is dead, but the corpse still remains with the appearance of life,
+occupying the same place and obstructing the pathway. The Church is
+poor and driven into a corner compared to what it was formerly, Don
+Antolin, but do not fear, its situation will not be aggravated, the
+tide has risen to its full height and will not overflow; as long as
+the people in this country are afraid to say what they think, as long
+as they are scandalised by a new idea, and tremble at what their
+neighbours will say, so long will they laugh at revolutions, for
+however much they break out, none of these will bring the water to
+your mouths."
+
+Don Antolin laughed on hearing this.
+
+"But Gabrielillo, man--you must be mad. All this reading and
+travelling has turned your head. At first I was indignant, thinking
+you were among those who wished for another revolution to take
+away the little that is left to us, proclaiming the republic and
+suppressing all ecclesiastical things, but I see that you go much
+beyond this, that you conform to nothing, and that everything seems to
+you the worst; and this rather pleases me, because I see you are not a
+terrible enemy to be feared as you fire from too far. It seems to me
+that your head is as much affected as your chest. But do all these
+revolutions we have had seem as nothing to you? Do you think the
+country is still as savage as you have described it in past years? But
+I," continued the priest ironically, "hear a great deal said about the
+progress of the country, and I know that we have railways, and that
+the long chimneys are arising in all the town suburbs, and many of the
+impious are delighted at this, comparing them to the church belfries."
+
+"Bah!" exclaimed Gabriel indifferently. "There is a little of this
+progress; the revolutions have placed Spain in touch with other
+countries, the progressive current has caught this country and is
+carrying it along as the Asiatics and others are carried; no one
+can escape it nowadays. But we advance at very low water, inert and
+without strength; if we advance it is with the current, and not by
+our own energy, while other people stronger than we swim and swim,
+advancing at every stroke. How have we contributed to this progress?
+Where are our manifestations of modern life? The railways, few and
+bad, are the work of foreigners, and are their property; the grass
+grows between the rails, which shows that we still follow the holy
+calm of carts and wagons. The most important industries, metallurgy
+and mines, are all in the hands of foreigners or of Spaniards who are
+subject to them, living under their bountiful protection. Commerce
+languishes under an old-fashioned protection which enhances the price
+of all commodities, and so there is no capital forthcoming; money
+remains hidden in earthen jars in the fields as treasure, or in the
+towns is devoted to usury as in past times; the most daring venture
+to invest in public stock; Government continues the mismanagement,
+certain of always finding someone to lend, and pointing to this credit
+as a proof of the country's prosperity. There are in Spain two million
+hectares of uncultivated land, twenty-six millions of unirrigated
+arable land, and only one million irrigated. This cultivation of
+unirrigated land, which has come to be almost our only agriculture
+is a concession that Spanish indolence makes to hunger, a perpetual
+demonstration of the fanaticism that trusts in prayer or in the rain
+from heaven more than in human progress. The rivers rush to the sea
+through scorched-up provinces overflowing in winter, not to fertilise,
+but to carry away everything in the volume of the inundation; there is
+plenty of stone for churches and new convents, but none for dykes and
+reservoirs; they build belfries and cut down the trees that attract
+the rain. And do not tell me again, Don Antolin, that the Church is
+poor and in no ways in fault; the poor are yourselves, you of the old
+and traditional Church, you of the religion 'a la Espanola,' for in
+this as in everything else there are fashions, and the faithful
+follow the most recent; for here are the Jesuits, the most modern
+manifestation of Catholicism, the 'latest novelty,' with their Sacred
+Heart of Jesus and other French idolatries, building palaces and
+churches in all directions, diverting the money that formerly went to
+the Cathedrals, the only evidence of wealth in the country. But let us
+return to our progress. Worse even for agriculture than the drought
+is the ignorance and routine of the labourers, every new invention or
+scientific appliance repels them, thinking it evil. 'The old times
+were the good ones, our ancestors cultivated in this way and so ought
+we'; and so ignorance is turned into a sort of national glory, and
+we cannot hope for any remedy at present. In other countries the
+universities and high schools send out reformers, men fighting for
+progress; here the centres of learning only send out a proletariat
+of students who must live, besieging all the professions and public
+appointments, with the sole desire to open themselves a way to
+continuous employment. They study (if you can call it study) for a few
+years, not to learn, but to gain a diploma, a scrap of paper which
+authorises them to earn their bread. They learn anything that the
+professor teaches, without the slightest desire to inquire any
+further. The professors are for the greater part doctors or barristers
+practising their profession, who come between whiles and sit for an
+hour in their chairs, repeating like a phonograph what they have said
+for many previous years, and then they return to their sick or their
+lawsuits, without caring in the least what is being said or written in
+the world since they got their appointments. All Spanish culture is at
+second hand, purely on the surface, 'translated from the French,' and
+even this is only for the scanty minority who read, for the rest of
+those so-called intellectuals have no other library but the text-books
+they studied as children, and all they learn of the progress of human
+thought is from the newspapers. The parents who are desirous of
+securing as soon as possible the future of their sons who are seeking
+a career, send them to these centres of learning when they scarcely
+know how to speak; the man-student of other countries, in the
+full plenitude of his thinking powers, does not exist here. The
+universities are full of children, and in the different institutes you
+only see short trousers, and the Spaniard, before he shaves himself
+for the first time, is a licentiate and on the high road to become
+a doctor; the wet nurse will end by sitting by the professor. These
+children who receive the baptism of science at an age when in other
+countries they are playing with their toys, being confirmed in the
+title that proclaims their scientific acquirements, study no more;
+these are the intellectuals who are to direct and save us, and who
+to-morrow may be legislators and ministers. Come, my good man, it is
+enough to make one laugh!"
+
+Gabriel did not laugh, but Silver Stick and the others applauded his
+words. Any criticism against the present times delighted the priest.
+
+"This country is drained, Don Antolin, nothing remains standing. The
+number of towns which have vanished since our decadence commenced is
+incalculable. In other countries ruins are carefully preserved, as
+so many stone pages of their history; they are cleaned, preserved,
+supported and strengthened, and paths opened round them so that all
+can examine them. Here, where Roman, Byzantine and Arab art have
+passed, and also the Mudejar, the Gothic and the Renaissance--in fact,
+all the styles of Europe--the ruins in the country are hidden and
+disfigured by herbage and creepers, and in the towns they are
+mutilated and disfigured by the vandalism of the people. They are
+constantly thinking of the past, and yet they despise its remains;
+what a country of dreams and desolation! Spain is no longer a country,
+it is an ill-arranged and dusty museum, full of old things that
+attract all the curious of Europe, but in which even the ruins are
+ruined."
+
+The eyes of Don Martin, the young curate, fastened themselves on
+Gabriel. They seemed to speak to him and express the pleasure with
+which he heard his words. The other listeners, silent and with bowed
+heads, did not feel less the enchantment of those propositions which
+sounded so audaciously in the restful and rank atmosphere of the
+cloister. Don Antolin was the only one who laughed, finding Gabriel's
+ideas quite charming but absolutely crazy It was getting late and the
+sun had sunk below the roofs of the Cathedral. Silver Stick's niece
+called to them once again from the door of her house.
+
+"We are coming, child," said the priest, "but I have one thing first
+to say to this gentleman."
+
+And addressing himself to Luna, he continued:
+
+"But, Hombre de Dios![1]--but I ought not to call you that as you
+are so turbulent--you think everything is out of joint. The Spanish
+Church, worn out as you say, has become very poor, and still you say
+this revolution is a very small affair. What do you wish for? What
+is it that you desire so that things might be settled? Tell us your
+secret quickly and let us go, for the cold is very sharp."
+
+[Footnote 1: Man of God.]
+
+And he laughed again, looking at Gabriel with paternal pity as though
+he were a child.
+
+"My remedy!" exclaimed Gabriel, taking no notice of the priest's
+gesture. "I have no remedy whatever, it is the progress of humanity
+that alone offers one. All the nations on earth have passed through
+the same evolutions; first of all they were ruled by the sword, then
+by faith, and now by science. We ourselves have been ruled by warriors
+and priests, but now we tarry at the gate of modern life, without the
+strength or wish to take science by the hand, who is the only guide
+we could have, hence our sad situation. Science is nowadays in
+everything--in agriculture, in all manufactures, in arts and crafts,
+in the culture and well-being of the people; it is even in war. Spain
+still lives far from the sun of science, at most she knows a pale
+reflection, cold and feeble, that comes to us from foreign countries.
+The failure of faith has left us without strength, like those
+creatures who, having suffered from a severe illness in their youth,
+remain anaemic for ever, without possible recuperation, condemned to
+premature old age."
+
+"Bah! Science!" said Silver Stick, turning towards his house; "that
+is the eternal cry of all the enemies of religion. There is no better
+science than to love God and His works. Good evening."
+
+"Very good evening, Don Antolin; but remember this, we have not yet
+done with faith and the sword; sometimes one directs us or the other
+drives us; but of science, never a word, unless Spain has changed in
+the last twenty-four hours."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+After this evening Gabriel avoided the meetings in the cloister, so
+as to have no more discussions with Silver Stick. He repented of his
+audacity, and when he was alone reflected on the danger to which
+he had exposed himself in expressing his views so freely. He felt
+terrified at the possibility of being expelled from the Cathedral to
+roam the world afresh; he reproached himself, throwing in his own
+teeth his folly in hurling himself against the prejudices of the past.
+What could he hope to effect by changing the thoughts of these poor
+people? What weight could the conversion of these few men, stuck
+like limpets to the stones of the past, have in the emancipation of
+humanity?
+
+The Cathedral was to Gabriel like a gigantic tumour, which blistered
+the Spanish epidermis, like scars of its ancient infirmities. It was
+not a muscle capable of development, but an abscess which bided its
+time either to be extirpated, or to disappear of itself through the
+working of the germs it contained; he had chosen this ruin as
+his refuge and he ought to be silent, to be prudent so that his
+ingratitude should not be flung in his face.
+
+Moreover, his brother Esteban, breaking the cold reserve into which he
+had retired since the arrival of his daughter, counselled prudence.
+
+"His mind seems possessed by the demon, Esteban," said the priest,
+"and he explains his views with the most perfect calmness in this holy
+house, as though he were in one of those infernal clubs which exist in
+foreign countries. Where on earth has your brother been to learn such
+things? Never have I heard such frightful heresies. Tell him that I
+shall forget it all as I have known him since his childhood, and that
+I remember he was the pride of our seminary, but more especially
+because he is ill, and it would be inhuman to drive him out of the
+Cathedral; but he must not repeat this scandal. Silence! Let him keep
+all those atrocities in his own head, if it so pleases him to lose his
+soul; but in this holy house, and especially before its staff, not a
+word. Do you understand? not a word. The next thing will be that he
+will hold meetings in the Holy Metropolitan Church. Besides, your
+brother must remember that, after all, at this moment, he is eating
+the bread of the Church, as he lives on you, and is supported by you,
+and it is not right to speak in this way of the most excellent work of
+God, and try to point out all its defects."
+
+This last consideration weighed the most with Gabriel, and it wounded
+his dignity. Don Antolin said rightly, he was no more than a parasite
+of the Cathedral, and having taken refuge in her lap, he owed her
+gratitude and silence. He would keep silence. Had he not decided
+when he took refuge there to live as one dead? He would live like an
+animated corpse, which in some religious orders is the supreme of
+human perfection. He would think like everyone else, or rather, he
+would try not to think at all, but would simply vegetate there till
+his last hour came, like the plants in the garden or the fungus on the
+buttresses of the cloister.
+
+The Cathedral servants seated themselves round the sewing machine,
+hoping in vain that their master would come down, but content on the
+whole, though they did not see him, to be near him, to look at his
+empty seat, and to talk to the girl who expressed such ingenuous
+admiration for her uncle's conversation. The Chapel-master was
+delighted that Luna, his sole admirer, had returned to visit him;
+during his temporary eclipse the poor musician had suffered all the
+bitterness of solitude, despairing with almost infantile rage, as
+though an immense audience had turned its back on him. He caressed
+Gabriel as though he was the woman he loved, listening to his
+coughing, and recommending all sorts of fantastic remedies imagined
+by himself, uneasy at the progress of his malady and trembling at the
+idea that death might tear from him his only listener.
+
+He told Gabriel of all the music he had studied during his absence.
+When the sick man coughed much, he would cease playing his harmonium,
+and begin long talks with his friend, always on the subject of his
+constant preoccupation, musical art.
+
+"Gabriel," said the musician one evening; "you who are so keen an
+observer, and who knows so much, has it ever struck you that Spain is
+sad, and has not the sweet sentimentality of true poetry? She is not
+melancholy, she is sad, with a wild and savage silence. She either
+laughs in wild peals, or weeps moaning. She has not the gentle smile,
+the joyful brightness that distinguishes the man from the animal. If
+she laughs it is showing all her teeth; her inner meaning is always
+gloomy, with the obscurity of a cavern in which all passions rage like
+wild beasts seeking for an outlet."
+
+"You say truly, Spain is sad," replied Luna. "She does not now go
+dressed in black, with the rosary hanging to the pommel of her sword
+as in former years. Still in her heart she is always dressed in
+mourning and her soul is gloomy and wild. For three hundred years the
+poor thing has endured the inquisitorial anguish of burning or being
+burnt, and she still feels the spasm of that life of terror. There is
+no joy here."
+
+"There certainly is not, and you find this more in music than in any
+other phase of Spanish life. The Germans dance the gay and voluptuous
+waltz with a 'bock' in their hand, singing the _Gaudeamus igitur_,
+that students' hymn glorifying the material life free from care. The
+French sing amid rippling laughter, and dance with their free and
+elastic limbs, greeting with rapturous applause their fantastic and
+monkey-like movements. The English have turned their dance into
+gymnastics, with the energy of a healthy body delighting in its own
+strength. But all these people, when they feel the sweet sadness of
+poetry, sing Lieds, romances, ballads, something soft and flowing,
+that rests the soul and speaks to the imagination. Here even the
+popular dances have much that is priestly, recalling the priestly
+stiffness of the sacred dances, and the circling frenzy of the
+priestess, who ended by falling in front of the altar with foaming
+mouth and bloodshot eyes. And our songs? They are most beautiful, the
+products of many civilisations, but most sad, despairing, gloomy,
+revealing the soul of a sick and tainted people, who find their
+greatest pleasure in human bloodshed, or urging on dying horses in the
+enclosure of a circus. Spanish joy! Andalusian merriment! I cannot
+help laughing at it. One night in Madrid I assisted at an Andalusian
+fete, all that was most typical, most Spanish. We went to enjoy
+ourselves immensely. Wine and more wine! And accordingly the bottle
+went round, with ever frowning brows, gloomy faces, abrupt gestures.
+'Ole! come along here! This is the joy of the world!' but the joy did
+not appear in any part. The men looked at one another with scowling
+brows, the women stamped their feet and clapped their hands with a
+stupid vacuity in their looks, as though the music had emptied their
+brains. The dancers swayed like erect serpents, with their mouths
+open, their looks hard, grave, proud, unapproachable, like dancers who
+were performing a sacred rite. Now and then above the monotonous and
+sleepy rhythm, a song, harsh and strident like a roar, like the scream
+of one who falls with his body run through. And the poetry? As dreary
+as a dungeon, sometimes very beautiful, but beautiful as might be the
+song of a prisoner behind his bars, dagger thrusts to the faithless
+wife, offences against the mother washed out in blood, complaints
+against the judge who sends to prison the caballeros[1] of the
+broad-brimmed sombreros and sashes. The adieus of the culprit who
+watches in the chapel the light of his last morning dawn. A poetry
+of death and the scaffold that wrings the heart and robs it of all
+happiness; even the songs to the beauty of women contain blood and
+threats. And this is the music that delights the people in their hours
+of relaxation and that will go on 'enlivening' them probably for
+centuries. We are a gloomy people, Gabriel, we have it in our very
+marrow, we do not know how to sing unless we are threatening or
+weeping, and that song is the most beautiful which contains most
+sighs, most painful groans and gasps of agony."
+
+[Footnote 1: Highwaymen.]
+
+"It is true, the Spanish people must necessarily be so. It believes
+with its eyes shut in its kings and priests as the representatives of
+God, and it moulds itself in their image and likeness. Its merriment
+is that of the friars--a coarse merriment of dirty jests, of greasy
+words and hoarse laughs. Our spicy novels are stories of the refectory
+composed in the hours of digestion, with the garments loosened, the
+hands crossed on the paunch, and the triple chin resting on
+the scapulary. Their laughter arises always from the same
+sources--grotesque poverty, the troublesome hangers on, the tricks
+of hunger to rob a companion of his provision of begged scraps. The
+tricks to filch purses from the gaily-dressed ladies who flaunt in the
+churches, who serve as models to our poets of the golden age to depict
+a lying world devoid of honour. The woman enslaved behind iron bars
+and shutters, more dishonest and vicious than the modern woman with
+all her liberty. The Spanish sadness is the work of her kings, of
+those gloomy invalids who dreamt of conquering the whole world while
+their own people were dying of hunger. When they saw that their deeds
+did not correspond to their hopes, they became hypochondriacs and
+despairingly fanatical, believing their ruin to be a punishment from
+God, giving themselves over to a cruel devotion in order to appease
+the divinity. When Philip II. heard of the wreck of the _Invincible_,
+the death of so many thousand men, and the sorrow of half Spain, he
+never even winked an eyelid. 'I sent it to fight with men, not with
+the elements,' and he went on with his prayers in the Escorial. The
+imperturbable gloom and ferocity of the kings re-acted on the nation,
+and this is why for many centuries black was the favourite colour at
+the court of Spain. The sombre groves in the royal palaces, with their
+gloomy winter foliage, were and still are their favourite resorts; the
+roofs of their country palaces are black, with towers surmounted by
+weather-cocks, and dark cloisters like monasteries."
+
+Shut into that small room with no other listener than the
+Chapel-master, Gabriel forgot the discretion he had imposed on
+himself with a view to the continuance of his quiet existence in
+the Cathedral. He could speak without fear in the presence of the
+musician, and he spoke warmly about the Spanish kings and of the gloom
+that from them had filtered through the country.
+
+Melancholy was the punishment imposed by Nature on the despots of the
+Western decadence. When a king had any artistic predispositions, like
+Fernando VI., instead of tasting the joy of life he nearly died of
+weariness listening to the airs on the guitar feebly tinkled by
+Farinelli. As they were born with their minds closed to every
+inspiration of beauty or poetry, they spent their lives gun in hand in
+the woods near Madrid, shooting the deer and yawning with disgust at
+the fatigues of the chase, while the queens amused themselves at a
+distance hanging on to the arm of one of the bodyguard. They could
+not live with impunity for three centuries in close contact with the
+Inquisition, exercising power simply as papal delegates, under the
+direction of bishops, Jesuits, confessors, and monastic orders, who
+only left to the Spanish monarchy the appearance of power, turning
+it, in fact, into an oppressed theocratic republic. The gloom of
+Catholicism penetrated into their very bones, and while the fountains
+of Versailles were playing among their marble nymphs, and the
+courtiers of Louis XIV. were decked like butterflies in their
+multi-coloured garments, as shameless as pagans among the beautiful
+goddesses, the court of Spain, dressed in black, with a rosary hanging
+at its girdle, assisted at the burnings and, girt with the green scarf
+of the holy office, honoured itself by undertaking the duties of
+alguacil at the bonfires of heretics. While humanity, warmed by the
+soft breath of the Renaissance, was admiring the Apollos and adoring
+the Venus' discovered by the plough amid the ruins of mediaeval
+catastrophes, the type of supreme beauty for the Spanish monarchy
+was the criminal of Judea. The black and dusty Christs in the old
+cathedrals, with the livid mouth, the skeleton and distorted body, the
+feet bony, and dripping with blood, much blood,--that liquid so loved
+by the religious when doubt begins and faith weakens, and to impose
+dogma they place their hand on the sword.
+
+"For this reason the Spanish monarchy has been steeped in gloom,
+transmitting its melancholy from one generation to another. If by any
+chance there appeared among them anyone happy and pleased with life,
+it was because in the blue blood of the maternal veins there was a
+plebeian drop, which pierced like the rays of the sun into a sick
+room."
+
+Don Luis listened to Gabriel, receiving his words with affirmative
+gestures.
+
+"Yes, we are a people governed by gloom," said the musician. "The
+sombre humour of those dark centuries lives in us still. I have often
+thought how difficult life must have been to an awakened spirit. The
+Inquisition listening to every word, and endeavouring to guess every
+thought. The conquest of heaven the sole ideal of life! And that
+conquest becoming daily more difficult! Money must be paid to the
+Church to save one's self, and poverty was the most perfect state; and
+again, besides the sacrifice of all comfort, prayers at all hours,
+the daily visits to the church, the life of confraternities, the
+disciplines in the vaults of the parish church, the voice of the
+brother of Mortal Sin interrupting sleep to remind one of the approach
+of Death; and added to this fanatical and weary life the uncertainty
+of salvation, the threat of falling into hell for the slightest fault,
+and the impossibility of ever thoroughly appeasing a sullen and
+revengeful God. And then again, the more tangible menace, the terror
+of the bonfire, engendering cowardice and debasing suspected men."
+
+"In this way we can understand," said Gabriel, "the cynical confession
+of the Canon Llorente explaining why he became secretary to the Holy
+Office: 'They began to roast, and in order not to be roasted I took on
+me the part of roaster.' For intelligent men there was nothing else
+to be done. How could they resist and rebel? The king, master of all
+lives and property, was only the servant of bishops, friars, and
+familiars. The kings of Spain, except the first Bourbons, were nothing
+but servants of the Church; in no country has been seen as palpably
+as in this one the solidarity between Church and State. Religion
+succeeded in living without the kings, but the kings could not exist
+without religion. The fortunate warrior, the conqueror who founded
+a throne, had no need of a priest. The fame of his exploits and his
+sword were enough for him, but as death drew near he thought of his
+heirs, who would be unable to dispose of glory and fear to make
+themselves respected as he had done, and he drew near to the priest,
+taking God as a mysterious ally who would watch over the preservation
+of the throne. The founder of a dynasty reigned 'by the grace of
+strength' but his descendants reigned 'by the grace of God.' The king
+and the Church were everything for the Spanish people. Faith had made
+them slaves by a moral chain that no revolutions could break; its
+logic was indisputable--the belief in a personal God, who busied
+Himself with the most minute concerns of the world, and granted His
+grace to the king that he might reign, obliged them to obey under pain
+of going to hell. Those who were rich and well placed in the world
+grew fat, praising the Lord who created kings to save men the trouble
+of governing themselves; those who suffered consoled themselves by
+thinking that this life was but a passing trial, after which they
+would be sure to gain a little niche in heaven. Religion is the best
+of all auxiliaries to the kings; if it had not existed before the
+monarchs these last would have invented it. The proof is that in these
+times of doubt they are firmly anchored to Catholicism, which is the
+strongest prop of the throne. Logically the kings ought to say, 'I am
+king because I have the power, because I am supported by the army.'
+But no, senor, they prefer to continue the old farce and say, 'I, the
+king, by the grace of God.' The little tyrant cannot leave the lap of
+the greater despot; it is impossible to them to maintain themselves by
+themselves."
+
+Gabriel was silent for some time; he was suffocating, his chest was
+heaving with the spasms of his hollow cough. The Chapel-master drew
+near alarmed.
+
+"Do not be uneasy," said Luna, recovering himself; "it is so every
+day. I am ill and I ought not to talk so much, but these things excite
+me, and I feel irritated by the absurdities of the monarchy and
+religion, not only in this country, but all over the world. But,
+notwithstanding, I have felt real pity, profound commiseration for a
+being with royal blood. Can you believe it? I saw him quite close in
+one of my journeys through Europe. I do not know how the police
+who guarded his carriage did not drive me away, fearing a possible
+attempt, but what I felt was compassion for the kings who have come
+so late into a world that no longer believes in the divine right; and
+these last twigs, sprouting from the worm-eaten and rotten trunk of a
+dynasty, carry in their poor sap the decay of the rotten branches. It
+was a youth, as sick as I am, not by the chances of life, but weakly
+from his cradle, condemned before his birth to suffer from the malady
+that came to him with his life. Just imagine, Don Luis, if at this
+time for the preservation of my own interests I begot a son, would it
+not be a coldly premeditated attempt against the future?"
+
+And the revolutionist described the young invalid: his thin body,
+artificially strengthened by hygiene and gymnastics, his eyes heavy
+and sunk deep in their sockets, the lower jaw hanging loose like that
+of a corpse, wanting the strength that keeps it fixed to the skull.
+
+"Poor youth! Why was he born? What would be accomplished in his
+journey through the world? Why had Nature, who so often refuses
+fecundity to the strong, shown herself prodigal to the loveless union
+of a dying consumptive? What was the use to him of having carriages
+and horses, liveried servants to salute him, and ninnies to give him
+food; it would have been far better had he never appeared in the world
+but had remained in the limbo of those who are never born. Like the
+squire of Don Quixote, who finding himself at last in the plenty of
+Barataria, had by his side a doctor Recio to restrain his appetite,
+this poor creature could never enjoy with freedom the pleasures of the
+remains of life left to him."
+
+"They pay him thousands of duros," added Gabriel, "for every minute of
+his life, but no amount of gold can procure him a drop of fresh blood
+to cure the hereditary poison in his veins. He is surrounded by
+beautiful women, but if he feels arising the happy tremors of youth,
+the sap of the spring of life, the predisposition of a family who have
+only been notable for the victories won in love's battles, he must
+remain cold and austere, under his mother's vigilant eye, who knows
+that carnal passion would rapidly end a life so weak and uncertain.
+And the end of all these sad-and painful privations--inevitable death.
+Why was this poor creature born? Often the greatness of the earth is
+worse than a malediction, and reasons of State are the most cruel of
+all torments for an invalid, obliging him to feign a health he does
+not feel. To speak of the illness of the king is a crime, and the
+courtiers living under the shadow of the throne consider the slightest
+allusion to the king's health as a sacrilege, a crime worthy of
+punishment, as though he were not a human being subject like others to
+death."
+
+"I do not care much for politics," said the Chapel-master; "kings and
+republics are all the same to me, I am a votary of art. I do not know
+what monarchy may be in the other countries that you have seen, but in
+Spain it seems quite played out. It is tolerated like so many relics
+of the past, but it inspires no enthusiasm and no one is inclined to
+sacrifice themselves for it, and I believe that even the people who
+live in its shadow, and whose interests are most bound up with those
+of the crown, have more devotion on their tongues than in their
+hearts."
+
+"It is so, Don Luis," said Gabriel; "for nearly a century the monarchy
+has been dead in Spain; the last loved and popular king was Fernando
+VII. Since then the nation has asserted itself, becoming emancipated
+from the old traditions, but the kings have not progressed; on the
+contrary, they have gone back, withdrawing themselves daily more and
+more from the anticlerical and reforming tendencies of the first
+Bourbons. If in educating a prince nowadays his masters were to say,
+'We will try and make a Carlos III. of him,' even the stones of the
+palace would be scandalised. The Austrians have revived like those
+parasitic plants which, having been torn up, reappear after a little
+while. If in the life of the kings they seek for examples in the past,
+they remember the Austrian Caesars, but it is complete oblivion of
+those first Bourbons who morally killed the Inquisition, expelled
+the Jesuits, and fostered the material progress of the country; they
+renounce the memory of those foreign ministers who came to civilise
+Spain. Jesuits, friars and clerics order and direct as in the best
+times of Charles II. To have had as minister a Count of Aranda, the
+friend of Voltaire, is a shame of the past and to be passed over in
+silence. Yes, Don Luis, you say well, the monarchy is dead. Between it
+and the country there is the same relation as between a corpse and a
+living man. The secular laziness, the resistance to all change, and
+the fear of the unknown that all stationary people feel, are the
+causes of the continuance of this institution, that has not like other
+countries the military outlet or the aggrandisement of its territory
+as a justification of its existence."
+
+With this the conversation ended that evening in the Chapel-master's
+little room.
+
+Gabriel found himself drawn afresh by the affection of his admirers
+in the Claverias. They coaxed him and followed him, lamenting his
+absence. They could not live without him, so declared the shoemaker.
+They had become accustomed to listen to him, they felt the desire of
+being enlightened, and they begged the master not to desert them.
+
+"We meet in the tower now," said the bell-ringer; "Silver Stick
+looks on our meetings with an evil eye, and he has gone so far as
+to threaten the shoemaker to turn him out of the Claverias if the
+meetings continue to be held in his house. He will not interfere with
+me; he knows my character. Besides, if he rules in the upper cloister,
+I rule in my tower. I am quite capable, if he comes to disturb us with
+his spying, of throwing him down the stairs, the miserly devil!"
+
+And he added with an affectionate expression, a great contrast to his
+usual rough and taciturn character:
+
+"Come, Gabriel, we expect you in my house. When you are tired of
+keeping your niece and that crazy Don Luis company, come up for a
+little while. We cannot get on without your words. Don Martin has been
+quite enthusiastic since he heard you the other evening; he wants to
+see you; he says he would go from one end of Toledo to the other to
+hear you. He wishes me to let him know if you decide on rejoining your
+friends, because Don Antolin in speaking to him sets you down as a
+madman and a heretic who does not know what to be after. But he is an
+ignoramus who, after studying for his profession, can do no better
+than sell tickets and squeeze the poor."
+
+Luna returned to the meetings in the bell-ringer's house. The greater
+part of the morning he sat by his niece, soothed by the tic-tac of the
+machine, which caused a gentle drowsiness, watching the cloth pass
+under the presser with little jumps, spreading the peculiar chemical
+scent of new stuffs.
+
+He watched Sagrario always sad, devoting herself to her work with
+taciturn tenacity; when now and then she raised her head to regulate
+her cotton and met Gabriel's glance, a faint smile would pass over her
+face.
+
+In the isolation in which the anger of her father had left them they
+felt obliged to draw together as though a common danger threatened
+them, and their bodily infirmities were a further bond of union.
+Gabriel pitied the fate of the poor young woman, seeing how hardly the
+world had treated her after her flight from the family hearth. Her
+long illness had changed her greatly and still caused her pain, her
+once beautiful teeth were no longer white and regular, and the lips
+were pallid and drawn; her hair had grown thin in places, but she
+contrived to conceal this with locks of the auburn hair, remains of
+her former beauty, which she dressed with great skill; but in spite
+of this her youth was beginning to assert itself, giving light to her
+eyes and charm to her smile.
+
+Many nights Gabriel, tossing on his bed unable to sleep, coughing, and
+with his head and chest bathed in cold sweat, would hear in the room
+adjoining the suppressed moans of his niece, timid and smothered so
+that the rest of the household should not be disturbed.
+
+"What was the matter with you last night?" asked Gabriel the following
+morning. "What were you moaning for?"
+
+And Sagrario, after many denials, finally admitted her discomfort:
+
+"My bones ache; directly I get to bed the pain begins and I feel as
+though my limbs were being torn asunder. And you, how are you? All
+night I heard you cough, and I thought you were suffocating."
+
+And the two invalids stricken by life forgot their own aches and pains
+to sympathise with those of the other, establishing between their
+hearts a current of loving pity, attracted to each other not by the
+difference of sex, but by the fraternal sympathy aroused by each
+other's misfortunes.
+
+Very often Sagrario would try to send her uncle away; it pained her
+to see him sitting close by her, doing nothing, coughing painfully,
+fixing his eyes upon her as though she were an object of adoration.
+
+"Get up from here," the girl would say gaily--"it makes me nervous
+seeing you so very quiet keeping me company when what you want is
+life and movement. Go to your friends; they are expecting you in the
+bell-ringer's tower. They have been talking about me, thinking it is
+I who keep you in the house. Go out to walk, uncle! Go and speak of
+those things that stir you so much, and that those poor people listen
+to open-mouthed. Be careful as you go up the stairs; go slowly and
+stop often, so that the demon of the cough, may not get hold of you."
+
+Gabriel spent the later hours of the morning in the bell-ringer's
+"habitacion." The walls of ancient whitewash were adorned by faded
+and yellow engravings, representing episodes in the Carlist war,
+remembrances of the mountain campaign which for long years had been
+the pride of Mariano, but of which now he never spoke.
+
+Here Gabriel met all his admirers. Even the shoemaker worked at night
+in order not to deprive himself of this meeting. Don Martin, the
+curate, also came up, concealing himself carefully so that Silver
+Stick should not see him. It was a small community grouping itself
+round the sick apostle, with all the zeal inspired by the unknown.
+
+Gabriel answered all these men's questions, that so often betrayed the
+simplicity of their minds. When a fit of coughing seized him, they all
+surrounded him with concern written on their faces. They would have
+wished even at the cost of their own lives to restore him to health.
+Luna, carried away by his enthusiasm, ended by narrating to them the
+story of his life and sufferings, and so the prestige of martyrdom
+came to increase the ardour of these people. The narrowed minds of
+these sedentary men, living tranquil and safe in the Cathedral, made
+them admire the adventures and torments of this fighter; for them he
+was a martyr to this new religion of the humble and oppressed, and
+besides, their innocence converted him into a victim of that social
+injustice which they daily hated more.
+
+For them there was no other truth but Gabriel's words; the
+bell-ringer, although the roughest and most silent among them, was
+the most advanced in his conversion. His admiration for Gabriel which
+dated from their childhood, his dog-like fidelity, carried him on with
+leaps and bounds, making him accept at once even the most distant
+ideals.
+
+"I am whatever you are, Gabriel," he said firmly. "Are you not an
+anarchist? I will be one also--indeed, I think I have always been one.
+Do you not preach that the poor should live and the rich should work;
+that everyone should possess what he earns, and that we should all
+help one another? Well, this is just what I thought when we wandered
+over the country with our guns and our scarf. And as far as religion
+is concerned, which formerly nearly drove us mad, I feel perfectly
+indifferent. I am convinced on hearing you that it is a sort of fable
+invented by clever people in order that we, the poor and unfortunate,
+should submit to the miseries of this world hoping for heaven; it
+is not badly imagined, for in the end those who die and do not find
+heaven will not return to complain."
+
+One day Gabriel wished to go up where the bells were hung. It was now
+well on in spring; it was warm, and the intense blue of the sky seemed
+to attract him.
+
+"I have not seen the 'big bell' since I was a child," he said. "Let us
+go up; I should like to see Toledo for the last time."
+
+And accompanied by his admirers, indeed, almost carried by them, he
+went slowly up the narrow spiral staircase. Arrived at the top, the
+soft wind was murmuring through the great iron railings, the cages of
+the bells. From the centre of the vault hung the famous "Gorda," an
+immense bronze bell, with all one side split by a large crack; the
+clapper, which was the author of the mischief, lay below it, engraved
+and as thick as a column, and a smaller one now occupied the cavity.
+The roofs of the Cathedral, dark and ugly, lay at their feet, and in
+front on a hill rose the Alcazar, higher and larger than the church,
+as though keeping up the spirit of the emperor who built it, Caesar
+of Catholicism, champion of the faith, but who nevertheless strove to
+keep the Church at his feet.
+
+The city spread out around the Cathedral, the houses disappearing in
+the crowd of towers, cupolas and absides. It was impossible to look on
+any side without meeting with chapels, churches, convents and ancient
+hospitals. Religion had absorbed the industrious Toledo of old, and
+still guarded the dead city beneath its hood of stone. From some of
+the belfries a red flag was floating, bearing a white chalice; this
+meant that some newly-ordained priest was singing his first mass.
+
+"I have never been up here," said Don Martin, sitting by Gabriel's
+side on one of the rafters, "without seeing some of these flags;
+ecclesiastical recruiting never ceases, there are always visionaries
+to fill its ranks. Those who really have faith are the minority, the
+greater part enter because they see the Church still triumphant and
+seemingly commanding, and they think that in her ranks some tremendous
+career is waiting for them. Unlucky wights! I also was led to the
+altar with music and oratorical shouts, as though I were walking to a
+triumph. Incense spread its clouds before my eyes, all my family wept
+with emotion at seeing me nothing less than a minister of God. And
+the day following all this theatrical pomp, when the lights and the
+censers were extinguished and the church had recovered its ordinary
+aspect, began this miserable life of poverty and intrigue to earn
+one's bread--seven duros a month! To endure at all hours the
+complaints of those poor women, with their tempers embittered by
+seclusion, common as the lowest servants, who spend their lives
+gossiping in the parlour of what is passing in the towns, inventing
+scandals to please the canons, or the families who protect the house.
+And there are priests who envy me! hungering against me for this
+coveted chaplaincy of nuns! looking upon me as a flattering hanger-on
+of the archiepiscopal palace, not understanding how otherwise, being
+so young, I could have hooked out this preferment that allows me to
+live in Toledo on seven duros a month!"
+
+Gabriel nodded his head, sympathising with the young priest's
+complaints.
+
+"Yes, it is you who are deceived. The day for making great fortunes in
+the Church is past, and the poor youths who now wear the cassock and
+dream of a mitre make me think of those emigrants who go to distant
+countries famous through long centuries of plunder, and find them even
+more poverty-stricken than their own land."
+
+"You are right, Gabriel. The day of the all-powerful Church is past;
+she has still in her udders milk enough for all, but there are few who
+can fasten on to them and fill themselves to repletion, while others
+groan with hunger. One could die of laughing when one hears of the
+equality and the democratic spirit of the Church. It is all a lie; in
+no other institution does so cruel a despotism reign. In early days
+Popes and bishops were elected by the faithful, and were deposed from
+power if they used it badly. The aristocracy of the Church exists
+still; it may be a canon upwards, or one who succeeds in crowning
+himself with a mitre; from them no account is required. Among the
+laity appointments are changed, ministers are turned out, soldiers are
+degraded--even kings are dethroned; but who exacts responsibility from
+Pope or bishops once they are anointed and in more or less frequent
+intercourse with the Holy Spirit? If you want Justice you are sent
+before tribunals equally formed by the aristocrats of the Church;
+there is no power more absolute on earth, not even the Grand Turk, who
+in a measure is responsible through fear of revolts in his seraglio.
+Here, in the seraglio of the Church, we are all less than women. If it
+happens that a priest, weary of persecution, feeling the man once more
+rising beneath his cassock, deals a heavy blow at his tyrant, he is
+declared mad; the climax of hypocrisy! They try to demonstrate that in
+the Church one lives in the best of worlds, and it is only the lack of
+reason that causes any rebellion against its authority."
+
+Don Martin was silent for a long while as though he were searching in
+his memory; at length he continued:
+
+"You also laugh at the idea of the actual poverty of the Church in
+Spain. She is like the great ruined noblemen, who still have enough
+to live upon in idleness, but who think themselves miserably poor
+compared to their former wealth; the Church has the nostalgia of those
+former centuries when she possessed half the wealth of Spain. Poor
+she is if she thinks of those times, but if you compare her with the
+Catholicism of other modern nations you find that, as in former years,
+she is by far the most favoured and best paid establishment in the
+State. She absorbs forty-one millions of the revenue, which is
+enormous in a country which only devotes nine millions to schools and
+teaching, and one million to the relief of the poor. To maintain an
+intercourse with God costs a Spaniard five times as much as to learn
+to read. But this forty-one millions is a blind. My own poverty made
+me inquisitive, and I wished to know what the clergy in Spain really
+receive, and what comes to our hands, the rank and file. The demands
+and pensions of the Church are an intricate tangle, apart from the
+forty-one millions. There is not a single ministry in which the Church
+has not struck her roots; she is paid by the Ministers of State for
+foreign missions, which are no use to anyone, by the Ministers of
+War and Marine for military clergy, and by the Ministers of Public
+Instruction and Justice. She is paid to support the pomp of the Roman
+Pontiff, as we maintain his ambassador in Spain, which is as though
+I allowed myself the luxury of keeping servants, and laid on my
+neighbour the obligation of paying them. She is paid for the repairs
+to churches, for episcopal libraries, for the colonisation of
+Fernando Po, for unforeseen occurrences, and I do not know how many
+supplemental items besides! And you must take into account what the
+Spanish people pay the Church voluntarily apart from what the State
+gives. The Bull of the Holy Crusade produces two and a half million
+pesetas annually; besides this you must consider what the parochial
+clergy draw from their congregations, the annual gifts to the
+religious orders for their ministry and offices (and this is
+the fattest portion), and the ecclesiastical revenue from the
+Ayuntamientos and deputations. In short, this Church, which is
+continually speaking of its poverty, draws from the State and the
+country more than three hundred million pesetas annually--nearly
+double what the army costs; although they are always complaining
+in the sacristies of these modern times, saying that everything is
+devoured by the military, and that the fault of everything that has
+happened is theirs, as they threw themselves on to the side of that
+cursed liberty. Three hundred millions, Gabriel! I have calculated it
+carefully! And I, who form part of this great establishment, receive
+seven duros a month; the greater part of the vicars in Spain are paid
+less than an excise officer, and thousands of clergy live from hand to
+mouth, wandering from sacristy to sacristy trying to obtain a mass to
+put the stew on the fire; and if bands of clergy do not go into the
+highways to rob, it is only from fear of the civil guard, and because
+after a couple of days of hunger a third may come in which they may
+beg some scraps to eat; there is always a crumb to allay hunger, and
+no cassock ever falls in the street dying of want, but there are a
+great many clerics who spend their existence deceiving their stomachs,
+trying to imagine they nourish themselves, till some sudden illness
+comes which hurries them out of the world. Where, then, does all this
+money go? To the aristocracy of the Church, to the true sacerdotal
+caste; but we who are in religion are people of the backstairs. What a
+terrible mistake, Gabriel! To renounce love and family affection, to
+fly all worldly pleasures, the theatre, concerts, the cafe; to be
+looked upon by people, even by those who think themselves religious,
+as a strange being, a sort of intermediate, neither a man nor a woman;
+to wear petticoats and to be dressed like a lugubrious doll; and in
+exchange for all these sacrifices to earn less than a man who breaks
+stones on the road. We live idly, certain that we shall never fall
+from over-work, but our poverty is greater than that of many workmen;
+we cannot acknowledge it, nor put ourselves in the way of begging
+alms, for the honour of our cloth. And besides, why should they keep
+us if we are of no practical use and cost the country so dear? When
+the religious domination came to an end in Spain it was only we, the
+lower ones, who suffered in consequence. The priest is poor, the
+temple is poor also; but the prince of the Church retains his
+thousands of duros yearly, and his great ecclesiastical state, and
+he sings his psalms tranquilly, certain that his pittance is in no
+danger. The revolution up to now has only prejudiced the lower clergy;
+the power of the Church is ended, it is gone; what we see is only its
+corpse, but an enormous corpse that will cost a great deal to remove,
+and whose preservation will swallow up a great deal of money."
+
+"It is true the Church is defunct; what we fight are only its remains.
+The vulgar believe it still lives because they can see and touch it,
+forgetting that a religion counts centuries in its life as minutes,
+and that generation after generation pass between its death and
+burial. Centuries before the birth of Jesus Paganism had fallen.
+The Athenian poets mocked the gods of Olympus on the stage, and the
+philosophers despised it. All the same Christianity required many
+years of propaganda and the political support of the Caesars to bring
+it to an end, and even then it was not done with, for dogmas are like
+men who leave behind something of themselves in the family who succeed
+them. Religions do not disappear suddenly through a trapdoor; they
+are extinguished slowly, leaving some of their beliefs and their
+ceremonies to the religions that follow them. We have been born in one
+of those times of transition, we are present at the death of a whole
+world of beliefs. How long will the agony last? Who knows? Two
+centuries? Possibly less may be wanted to crystallise in humanity a
+fresh proof of its uncertainty and of its fear of the great mystery of
+nature, but death is certain, inevitable. But what religion has been
+eternal? The symptoms of dissolution are visible everywhere. Where is
+that faith that drove those warlike multitudes to the crusades? Where
+is that fervour which continued building cathedrals for a couple of
+hundred years with angelic patience to shelter a host under a mountain
+of stone? Who scourges themselves to-day, or tortures their flesh,
+or lives in the desert musing continually on death and hell? Three
+centuries of intolerance and of excessive clerical severity have
+made our nation the most indifferent to all religious matters. The
+ceremonies of worship are followed by routine, because they appeal
+to the imagination, but no one takes the trouble to understand the
+foundations of the beliefs they profess; they live as they please,
+certain that in their last hours it is sufficient to save their souls,
+to die surrounded by priests with a crucifix in their hands. In former
+days the pressure from clergy, friars, and inquisitors was so great
+that the machine of faith burst into a thousand pieces, and there
+is no one now who can fit the pieces together, which require the
+co-operation of all. And that was a piece of good luck, friend Don
+Martin; a century more of religious intolerance and we should have
+been like those Mussulmen in Africa, who live in barbarism on account
+of their excessive bigotry, after having been the civilising Arabs of
+Cordoba and Granada."
+
+"Do you know," said the young curate, "why Catholicism has held up its
+appearances of power? It is because from ancient times, in all Latin
+countries, it has possessed itself of every avenue through which human
+life must pass."
+
+"It is true, no religion has been so cautious as ours, or has ambushed
+itself better to entrap men. None has chosen with such certainty in
+the time of power the positions it can hold strongly in its decadence.
+It is impossible to move without stumbling against her. She knows of
+old that man as long as he is healthy, in the plenitude of his vital
+strength, is by instinct irreligious. When he lives comfortable the
+so-called eternal life concerns him very little. He only believes in
+God and fears Him in the hour of supreme cowardice, when death opens
+before him the bottomless pit of nothingness, and his pride as a
+rational animal revolts against the complete extinction of his being.
+He wishes his soul to be immortal, and so he accepts the religious
+phantasies of heaven and hell. The Church, fearing the irreligiousness
+of health, has occupied, as you say, all the avenues of life, so that
+no man shall accustom himself to live without her, appealing solely to
+her in the hour of death. The dead provide much money, they are her
+best asset; but she wishes equally to reign over the living. Nothing
+escapes her despotism and her spying. She insinuates herself into
+all human concerns from the greatest to the most insignificant, she
+interferes in both public and private life; she baptizes the child
+when it comes into the world, accompanies the child to school,
+monopolises love, declaring it shameful and abominable if it does
+not submit to her benediction, and divides the earth into two
+categories--the consecrated, for those who die in her bosom, and the
+dunghill in the open air for the heretic. The Church interferes in
+dress, laying down what is honest and Christian wear and what is
+scandalous frivolity. She interferes in the most intimate relations
+of domestic life, and even penetrates into the kitchen, turning
+Catholicism into a culinary art, ruling what ought to be eaten, what
+ought or ought not to be mixed, and anathematizing certain foods,
+which, being good enough the rest of the year, become the most
+horrible sacrilege if partaken on certain days. She accompanies a man
+from his birth, and does not leave him even after he is laid in the
+tomb; she keeps him chained by his soul, making it wander through
+space, passing from one place to another, ascending the pathway to
+heaven, according to the sacrifices imposed on themselves by his
+successors for the benefit of the Church. A greater or more complete
+despotism no tyrant could possibly imagine."
+
+It was mid-day. The bell-ringer had disappeared; suddenly the rattle
+of chains and pulleys was heard and a dull thunder made the tower
+tremble; all the stones and metal and even the surrounding ether
+vibrated. The big "Gorda" had just rung, deafening the bystanders. A
+few moments afterwards, from the front of the Alcazar, came the sound
+of martial music, trumpets, and drums.
+
+"Let us go," said Gabriel. "Really, Mariano might have warned us and
+spared us this surprise."
+
+And he added, smiling ironically:
+
+"It is always the same; it is the parasites who shine the most and
+make the most noise; they make up in noise what they lack in utility."
+
+The festival of Corpus drew near without anything occurring to ruffle
+the quiet life of the Cathedral. Sometimes in the upper cloister they
+spoke of His Eminence's health. His serious quarrels with the Chapter
+had obliged him to keep his bed, and he had just had an attack which
+made them fear for his life.
+
+"It is his heart," said the Tato--who was usually very well informed
+about things in the palace--"Dona Visita is weeping like a Magdalen
+and cursing the canons, seeing Don Sebastian so ill."
+
+As Wooden Staff sat down to table with his family he began to speak
+of the decadence of the feast of Corpus, which had been so famous in
+Toledo in former times. In his desire to complain he forgot the bitter
+silence he had imposed on himself in his daughter's presence.
+
+"You will hardly recognise our Corpus," he said to Gabriel. "Of all
+that we remember nothing remains but the famous tapestries that are
+hung outside the Cathedral. The giants are not drawn up before the
+Puerta del Perdon, and the procession is shorn of its glory."
+
+The Chapel-master also complained bitterly.
+
+"And the mass, Senor Esteban? Just think what a mass for such a solemn
+festivity! Four instruments from outside the house, and a Rossini mass
+of the lightest description so as not to cost much. It would have been
+far better for this to have played the organ alone."
+
+According to an ancient custom, on the vesper before the feast, the
+band of the Academy of Infantry played in the evening before the
+Cathedral. All Toledo came to hear the serenade, which was an event in
+the monotonous life of the town, and from the province of Madrid many
+strangers came for the bull-fight on the following day.
+
+Mariano, the bell-ringer, invited his friends to listen to the
+serenade from the Greco-Roman gallery on the principal front. At the
+hour when the lights were usually extinguished in the Claverias and
+Don Antolin locked the street door, Gabriel and his friends glided
+cautiously to the bell-ringer's "habitacion." Sagrario was also
+persuaded to come by her uncle, who in this way managed to tear her
+from her machine. She really must enjoy some little amusement; she
+ought to appear in the world now and then; she was killing herself
+with all that tiresome work.
+
+They all sat in the gallery. The shoemaker had brought his wife,
+always with a small baby at her flabby breast. The Tato was talking
+delightedly to the organ-blower and the verger about the bull-fight on
+the following day, and Mariano stood by his adored comrade, while his
+wife, a woman as rough as himself, spoke with Sagrario.
+
+The men were deploring the absence of Don Martin. Probably he had gone
+down below among the people who filled the square, doubtless dreading
+that he must be up before daybreak to say mass to the nuns.
+
+The palace of the Ayuntamiento was decorated with strings of light,
+which were reflected on to the facade of the Cathedral, giving the
+stones a rosy flush as of fire.
+
+Among the trees walked groups of girls with flowers and white blouses,
+like the first appearances of spring. The cadets followed them,
+their hands on the pommels of their swords, walking along with
+their pinched-in waists and their full pantaloons _a la Turc_. The
+archiepiscopal palace remained entirely closed. Above the rosy light
+in the piazza, spread the beautiful summer sky, clear and deep,
+spangled with innumerable brilliant stars.
+
+When the music ceased, and the lights began to fade, the inhabitants
+of the Cathedral felt unwilling to leave their seats. They were very
+comfortable there, the night was warm, and they, accustomed to the
+confinement and the silence of the Claverias, felt the joy of freedom,
+sitting on that balcony with Toledo at their feet and the immensity of
+space above them.
+
+Sagrario, who had never been out of the upper cloister since her
+return to the paternal roof, looked at the stars with delight.
+
+"How many stars!" she murmured dreamily.
+
+"There are more than usual to-night," said the bell-ringer. "The
+summer sky seems a field of stars in which the harvest increases with
+the fine weather."
+
+Gabriel smiled at the simplicity of his companions. They all wondered
+at God, so foreseeing and so thoughtful, who had made the moon to give
+light to men by night, and the stars so that the darkness should not
+be complete.
+
+"Well, then," inquired Gabriel, "why is there not a moon always if it
+was made to give us light?"
+
+There was a long silence. They were all thinking over Gabriel's
+question. The bell-ringer, being most intimate with the master,
+ventured to put the question about which they were all thinking. "What
+were the heavens, and what was there beyond the blue?"
+
+The square was now deserted and in darkness, there was no light but
+the gentle shimmering of the stars scattered in space like golden
+dust. From the immense vault there seemed to fall a religious calm, an
+overwhelming majesty that stirred the souls of those simple people.
+The infinite seemed to bewilder them with its vast grandeur.
+
+"You," said Gabriel, "have your eyes closed to immensity, you cannot
+understand it. You have been taught a wretched and rudimentary origin
+of the world, imagined by a few ragged and ignorant Jews in a corner
+of Asia, which, having been written in a book, has been accepted down
+to our days. This personal God, like to ourselves in His shape and
+passions, is an artificer of gigantic capacity, who worked six days
+and made everything existing. On the first day He created light, and
+on the fourth the sun and stars; from whence then came that light if
+the sun had not then been created? Is there any distinction between
+one and the other? It seems impossible that such absurdities should
+have been credited for centuries."
+
+The listeners nodded their heads in assent; the absurdity appeared to
+them palpable--as it always did when Gabriel spoke.
+
+"If you wish to penetrate the heavens," continued Luna, "you must get
+rid of the human conception of distance. Man measures everything by
+his own stature, and he conceives dimensions by the distance his eyes
+can reach. This Cathedral seems to us enormous because underneath its
+naves we seem like ants; but, nevertheless, the Cathedral seen from
+far is only an insignificant wart; compared with the piece of land we
+call Spain it is less than a grain of sand, and on the face of the
+earth it is a mere atom--nothing. Our sight makes us consider thirty
+or forty yards a dizzy height. At this moment we think we are very
+high because we are near the roof of the Cathedral, but compared to
+the infinite this height is as small as when an ant balances on the
+top of a pebble not knowing how to come down. Our sight is short, and
+we who can only measure by yards, and apprehend short distances, must
+make an immense effort of imagination to realise infinity. Even then
+it escapes us and we speak of it very often as of a thing that has no
+meaning. How shall I make you understand the immensity of the world?
+You must not believe, as our ancestors did, that the earth is flat
+and stationary and that the heaven is a crystal dome on which God has
+fastened the stars like golden nails, and in which the sun and moon
+move to give us light, you must understand that the earth is round,
+and whirls round in space."
+
+"Yes, we do know a little about that," said the bell-ringer
+doubtfully, "for we were taught so at school. But, really, do you
+think it moves?"
+
+"Because in your littleness as human beings, because to our
+microscopic mole-like sight the immense mechanism of the world is
+lost, do not for a moment doubt it. The earth turns. Without moving
+from where you are, in twenty-four hours you will have made the
+complete circuit with the globe. Without moving our feet we rush along
+at the rate of four hundred leagues an hour, a velocity that the
+fastest trains cannot attain. You are astonished? We rush along
+without knowing it. Our planet does not only turn on itself, but at
+the same time it turns round the sun at the rate of nearly a hundred
+thousand miles an hour. Every second we cover thirty thousand miles.
+Men have never invented a cannon ball that could fly so quickly. You
+move through space fixed to a projectile which whirls with dizzy
+speed, and, deceived by your smallness, you think you are living
+immovable in a dead cathedral. And this velocity is as nothing
+compared with others. The sun round which we turn, flies and flies
+through space, carrying on by its attraction the earth and the other
+planets. It goes through immensity, dragging us along, travelling
+towards the unknown, without ever striking other bodies, finding
+always sufficient space to move in with a rapidity which makes one
+giddy; and this has gone on for thousands and millions of centuries
+without either it or the earth who follows it in its flight ever
+passing twice over the same spot."
+
+They all listened to Gabriel open-mouthed with astonishment, and their
+bright eyes seemed dazed and bewildered.
+
+"It is enough to drive one mad," murmured the bell-ringer. "What then
+is man, Gabriel?"
+
+"Nothing; even as this earth, which seems so large, and that we have
+peopled with religions, kingdoms and revelations from God, is nothing.
+Dreams of ants! even less! This same sun which seems so enormous
+compared to our globe is nothing more than an atom in immensity. What
+you call stars are other suns like ours, surrounded by planets like
+our earth, but which are invisible on account of their small size. How
+many are they? Man brings his optical instruments to perfection and
+is able to pierce further into the fields of heaven, discovering ever
+more and more. Those which are scarcely visible in the infinite appear
+much nearer when a new telescope is invented, and beyond them in
+the depths of space others and again others appear, and so on
+everlastingly. They are unaccountable. Some are worlds inhabited like
+ours; others were so, and revolve solitary in space, waiting for a
+fresh evolution of life; many are still forming; and yet all these
+worlds are no more than corpuscles of the luminous mist of the
+infinite. Space is peopled by fires that have burnt for millions,
+trillions and quadrillions of centuries, throwing out heat and light.
+The milky way is nothing but a cloud of stars that seem to us as one
+mass, but which in reality are so far apart that thousands of suns
+like ours with all their planets could revolve among them without ever
+coming into collision."
+
+Gabriel remembered the travelling of sound and light. "Their velocity
+is insignificant compared with the distances in space. The sun, which
+is the nearest to us, is still so far that for a sound to go from us
+to it would take three millions of years. Poor human beings will never
+be able to travel with the rapidity of sound.
+
+"These suns travel like ours towards the unknown with giddy flight,
+but they are so distant that three or four thousand years may pass
+without man being aware that they have moved more than a finger's
+breadth. The distances of infinity are maddening. The sun is a nebula
+of inflammatory gas, and the earth an imperceptible molecule of sand.
+
+"The luminous ray of the Polar star requires half a century to reach
+our eyes; it might have disappeared forty-nine years ago, and still we
+should see it in space.
+
+"And all these worlds are created, grow and die like human beings.
+In space there is no more rest than on earth. Some stars are
+extinguished, others vary, and others shine with all the power of
+their young life. The dead planets dissolved by fires furnish
+the material for new worlds; it is a perpetual renewal of forms,
+throughout millions and millions of centuries, that represent in their
+lives what the few dozen years to which we are limited, are in our
+own. And beyond all those incalculable distances there is space, and
+more space on every side, with fresh conglomerations of worlds without
+limit or end."
+
+Gabriel spoke in the midst of solemn silence. The listeners closed
+their eyes as if such immensity stunned them. They followed in
+imagination Gabriel's description, but their narrowed minds wished to
+place a term to the infinite, and in their simplicity they imagined
+beyond these incalculable distances a vault of firm matter millions of
+leagues thick. Surely all that strange and fantastic work must have a
+limit. What was at the back of it? And the barrier created by their
+imagination fell suddenly; and again they flew through space, always
+infinite, with ever new worlds.
+
+Gabriel spoke of them and of their life with absolute certainty.
+Spectral analysis showed the same composition in the stars as on the
+earth, consequently if life had arisen in our atom, most certainly it
+must exist in other celestial bodies, though probably in different
+forms; in many planets it had already ended, in many it was still to
+come; but surely all those millions of worlds had had, or would have,
+life.
+
+Religions, wishing to explain the origin of the world, paled and
+trembled before the infinite. It was like the Cathedral tower, which
+covered with its bulk a great part of the heavens, hiding millions of
+worlds, but which was of insignificant size compared to the immensity
+it hid, less than an infinitesimal part of a molecule--nothing. It
+seemed very great because it was close to men, concealing immensity,
+but when men looked above it, getting a full grasp of the infinite,
+they laughed at its Lilliputian pride.
+
+"Then," inquired timidly the old organ-blower, pointing to the
+Cathedral, "what is it they teach us in there?"
+
+"Nothing," replied Gabriel.
+
+"And what are we--men?" asked the Perrero.
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"And the governments, the laws, and the customs of society?" inquired
+the bell-ringer.
+
+"Nothing. Nothing."
+
+Sagrario fixed her eyes, grown larger by her earnest contemplation of
+the heavens, on her uncle.
+
+"And God," she asked in a soft voice; "where is God?"
+
+Gabriel stood up, leaning on the balustrade of the gallery; his figure
+stood out dark and clear against the starry space.
+
+"We are God ourselves, and everything that surrounds us. It is life
+with its astonishing transformations, always apparently dying, yet
+always being infinitely renewed. It is this immensity that astounds us
+with its greatness, and that cannot be realised in our minds. It is
+matter that lives, animated by the force that dwells in it, with
+absolute unity, without separation or duality. Man is God, and the
+world is God also."
+
+He was silent for a moment and then added with energy:
+
+"But if you ask me for that personal God invented by religions, in the
+likeness of a man, who brought the world out of nothing, who directs
+our actions, who classifies souls according to their merits, and
+commissions Sons to descend into the world to redeem it, I say seek
+for Him in that immensity, see where He hides His littleness. But even
+if you were immortal you might spend millions of years passing from
+one star to another without ever finding the corner where He hides His
+deposed despotic majesty. This vindictive and capricious God arose in
+men's brains, and the brain is a human being's most recent organ, the
+last to develop itself. When man invented God the world had existed
+millions of years."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+On the morning of Corpus the first person Gabriel saw on leaving the
+cloister was Don Antolin, who was looking over his tickets, placing
+them in line in front of him on the stone balustrade.
+
+"This is a great day," said Luna, wishing to smooth down Silver Stick.
+"You are preparing for a great crowd; no doubt many strangers will
+come."
+
+Don Antolin looked intently at Gabriel, evidently doubting his
+sincerity; but seeing that he was not laughing, he answered with a
+certain satisfaction.
+
+"The feast is not beginning badly; there are a great many who wish to
+see our treasures. Ay, son! indeed we want it badly. You who rejoice
+in our troubles may be satisfied. We live in horrible straits. Our
+feast of Corpus is worth very little compared with former times; but
+all the same, what economies we have had to make in the Obreria, to
+provide the four ochavos[1] that the extra festivity will cost!"
+
+[Footnote 1: _Ochavo_--small Spanish brass coin, value two maravedis.]
+
+Don Antolin remained silent for some time, still looking intently at
+Luna, as though some extraordinary idea had just occurred to him. At
+first he frowned as though he were rejecting it, but little by little
+his face lit up with a malicious smile.
+
+"By the way, Gabriel," he said in a honeyed tone which contained
+something very aggressive, "I remember at the time of the monument in
+Holy Week you spoke to me of your wish to earn some money for your
+brother. Now you have an opportunity. It will not be much; still it
+will be something. Would you care to be one of those who carry the
+platform of the Sacrament?"
+
+Guessing the wish of the malicious priest to annoy him, Gabriel was on
+the point of answering haughtily, but suddenly he was tempted by the
+wish to foil Silver Stick by accepting his proposal; he wished to
+astound him by acceding to his absurd idea; besides, he thought that
+this would be a sacrifice worthy of the generosity with which his
+brother treated him. Even though he could not assist with much money,
+he could show his wish to work, and the scruples of his self-love
+vanished before the hope of carrying home a couple of pesetas.
+
+"You do not care about it," said the priest in mocking accents, "you
+are too 'green,' and your dignity would suffer too much by carrying
+the Lord through the streets of Toledo."
+
+"You are mistaken. As for wishing it, I do wish it, but you must
+remember it is very heavy work for an invalid."
+
+"Do not let that trouble you," said Don Antolin resolutely; "you will
+be at least ten inside the car, and I have chosen all strong men; you
+would go to complete the number, and I should recommend you to accept
+in order to earn a little."
+
+"Then we will clench the business, Don Antolin; you may reckon on me,
+I am always ready to earn a day's wage whenever it turns up."
+
+His great wish to get out of the Cathedral had finally decided him,
+his wish once more to walk through the streets of Toledo, that he had
+not seen during his seclusion in the cloister, and without anyone
+being able to take notice of him. Besides, the ironical situation
+tickled him extremely, that he of all men with his round religious
+denials should be the one to pilot the God of Catholicism through the
+devout crowd.
+
+This spectacle made him smile, possibly it was a symbol; certainly
+Wooden Staff would greatly rejoice, he would look upon it as a small
+triumph for religion, that obliged His enemies to carry Him on their
+shoulders. But he himself would look upon it in a different way;
+inside the eucharistic car he would represent the doubt and denials
+hidden in the heart of worship, splendid in its exterior pomp, but
+void of faith and ideals.
+
+"Then we are agreed, Don Antolin. I will come down shortly into the
+Cathedral."
+
+They parted, and Gabriel, after quietly digesting the milk his niece
+brought him, went down into the Cathedral without saying a word to
+anyone about the work he intended carrying out; he was afraid of his
+brother's objections.
+
+In the lower cloister he again met Silver Stick, who was talking to
+the gardener's widow, showing her contemptuously a bunch of wheat ears
+tied with a red ribbon. He had found it in the holy water stoup by the
+Puerta del Alegria. Every year on the day of Corpus he had found the
+same offering in the same place; an unknown had thus dedicated to the
+Church the first wheat of the year.
+
+"It must be a madman," said the priest. "What is the good of this?
+What does this bunch mean? If at least it had been a cart of sheaves
+as in the good old times of the tenths!"
+
+And while he threw the ears with contempt into a flower border in the
+garden, Gabriel thought with delight of the atavic force which had
+resuscitated in a Catholic church, the pagan offering: the homage to
+the divinity of the firstfruits of the earth fertilised by the spring.
+
+The choir was ended and the mass beginning when Gabriel entered the
+Cathedral, the lower servants were discussing at the door of the
+sacristy the great event of the day. His Eminence had not come down to
+the choir and would not assist at the procession. He said he was ill,
+but those of the household laughed at this excuse, remembering that
+the evening before he had walked as far as the Hermitage of the Virgin
+de la Vega. The truth was he would not meet his Chapter; he was
+furious with them, and showed his anger by refusing to preside over
+them in the choir.
+
+Gabriel strolled through the naves. The congregation of the faithful
+was greater than on other days, but even so the Cathedral seemed
+deserted. In the crossways, kneeling between the choir and the high
+altar, were several nuns in starched linen bibs and pointed hoods, in
+charge of sundry groups of children dressed in black, with red or
+blue stripes according to the colleges to which they belonged; a
+few officials from the academy, fat and bald, listened to the mass
+standing, bending their heads over their cuirass. In this scattered
+assemblage, listening to the music, stood out the pupils from the
+school of noble ladies, some of them quite girls, others proud-looking
+young women in all the pride of their budding beauty, looking on with
+glowing eyes, all dressed in black silk, with mantillas of blonde
+mounted over high combs with bunches of roses--aristocratic ladies
+with "_manolesca_" grace, escaped from a picture by Goya.
+
+Gabriel saw his nephew the Tato dressed in his scarlet robes like the
+noble Florentine, striking the pavement with his staff to scare the
+dogs. He was talking with a group of shepherds from the mountains,
+swarthy men twisted and gnarled as vine shoots, in brown jackets,
+leather sandals, and thonged leggings; women with red kerchiefs
+and greasy and mended garments that had descended through several
+generations. They had come down from their mountains to see the Corpus
+of Toledo, and they walked through the naves with wonder in their
+eyes, starting at the sound of their own footsteps, trembling each
+time the organ rolled, as though fearing to be turned out of that
+magic palace, which seemed to them like one in a fairy tale. The women
+pointed out with their fingers the coloured glass windows, the great
+rosettes on the porches, the gilded warriors on the clock of the
+Puerta de la Feria, the tubes of the organs, and finally remained
+open-mouthed in stupid wonder. The Perrero in his scarlet garments
+seemed like a prince to them, and overwhelmed with the respect they
+felt for him, they could not succeed in understanding what he said,
+but when the Tato threatened with his staff a mastiff following
+closely at his master's heels, those simple people decided to leave
+the church sooner than abandon the faithful companion of their wild
+mountain life.
+
+Gabriel looked through the choir railings; both the upper and lower
+stalls were full. It was a great festival, and not only were all the
+canons and beneficiaries in their places, but all the priests of the
+chapel of the kings,[1] and the prebends of the Muzarabe chapel--those
+two small churches who live quite apart with traditional autonomy
+inside the Cathedral of Toledo.
+
+[Footnote 1: The kings of Spain are canons of Toledo Cathedral, and
+are fined in case of absence on festival days.]
+
+In the middle of the choir Luna saw his friend the Chapel-master in
+his crimped and pleated surplice, waving a small baton. Around him
+were grouped about a dozen musicians and singers, whose voices and
+instruments were completely smothered each time the organ sounded from
+above, while the priest directed with a resigned look the music, which
+lost itself feeble and swamped in the solitude of the immense naves.
+
+At the High Altar, on its square car, stood the famous Custodia,
+executed by the celebrated master Villalpando. A Gothic shrine,
+exquisitely worked and chiselled, bright with the shimmering of its
+gold in the light of the wax tapers, and of such delicate and airy
+work that the slightest motion made it shiver, shaking its finials
+like ears of corn.
+
+Those invited to the procession were arriving in the Cathedral. The
+town dignitaries in black robes, professors from the academy in full
+dress with all their decorations, officers of the Civil Guard, whose
+quaint uniform reminded one of that of the soldiers of the early part
+of the century. Through the naves with affectedly skipping steps
+came the children, dressed as angels--angels _a la Pompadour_, with
+brocaded coat, red-heeled shoes, blonde lace frills, tin wings
+fastened to their shoulders, and mitres with plumes on their white
+wigs. The Primacy got out for this festivity all its traditional
+vestments. The gala uniform of all the church attendants belonged to
+the eighteenth century, the time of its greatest prosperity. The two
+men who were to guide the car had powdered hair, black coats, and knee
+breeches, like the priests of the last century. The vergers and Wooden
+Staffs wore starched ruffs and perukes, and though they had scarcely
+enough to eat, brocade and velvet covered all the people from the
+Claverias; even the acolytes wore gold embroidered dalmatics.
+
+The High Altar was decorated by the "Tanta Monta" tapestries--those
+famous hangings of the Catholic kings, with emblems and shields, given
+by Cisneros to the Cathedral. The auxiliary bishop said mass, and his
+attendant deacons were perspiring under the traditional mantles
+and chasubles covered with beautiful raised embroidery in high and
+splendid relief, as stiff and uncomfortable as ancient armour.
+
+The surroundings of the Cathedral were disturbed by the gathering for
+the procession; the doors of the sacristies slammed, opened and shut
+hurriedly by the various officials and people employed. In that quiet
+and monotonous life the annual occurrence of a procession which had to
+pass through many streets caused as much confusion and disturbance as
+an adventurous expedition to a distant country.
+
+When the mass ended the organ began to play a noisy and disorderly
+march, rather like a savage dance, while the procession was being
+marshalled in order. Outside the Cathedral the bells were ringing,
+the band of the academy had ceased playing its quick march, and the
+officers' words of command and the rattle of the muskets could be
+heard as the cadets drew up in companies by the Puerta Llana.
+
+Don Antolin, with his great silver staff and a pluvial of white
+brocade, went from one place to another collecting the employees of
+the Church; Gabriel saw him approaching, red-faced and perspiring.
+
+"To your post; it is time."
+
+And he led him to the High Altar by the Custodia. Gabriel and eight
+other men crept inside the scaffolding, raising the cloth with which
+its sides were covered. They were obliged to bend themselves inside
+the erection, and their duty was to push it, so that it should move
+along on its hidden wheels. Their only duty was to push it; outside,
+the two servants in black clothes and white wigs were in charge of
+the front and back shaft or tiller, which guided the eucharistic car
+through the tortuous streets. Gabriel was placed by his companions in
+the centre; he was to warn them when to stop and when to recommence
+their march. The monumental Custodia was mounted on a platform with a
+great counterpoise, and between it and the framework of the car was
+about a hand's breadth of space, through which Gabriel looked, thus
+transmitting the orders of the front pilot.
+
+"Attention! March!" shouted Gabriel, obeying an outside signal.
+
+And the sacred car began to move slowly down the inclined wooden plane
+that covered the steps of the High Altar. It was obliged to stop on
+passing the railings. All the people knelt, and Don Antolin and the
+Wooden Staffs having opened a way between them, the canons advanced in
+their ample red robes, the auxiliary bishop with his gilded mitre,
+and the other dignitaries in white linen mitres without ornament
+whatsoever. They all knelt around the Custodia. The organ was silent,
+and, accompanied by the hoarse blare of a trombone, they intoned a
+hymn in adoration of the Sacrament; the incense rose in blue clouds
+around the Custodia, veiling the brilliancy of its gold. When the hymn
+ceased the organ began to play again, and the car once more resumed
+its march. The Custodia trembled from base to summit, and the motion
+made a quantity of little bells hanging on to its Gothic adornments
+tinkle like a cascade of silver. Gabriel walked along holding on to
+one of the crossbeams, with his eyes fixed on the pilots, feeling
+on his legs the movements of those who pushed this scaffolding, so
+similar to the cars of Indian idols.
+
+On coming out of the Cathedral by the Puerta Llana, the only door in
+the church on a level with the street, Gabriel could take in the whole
+procession at a glance. He could see the horses of the Civil Guards
+breaking the regularity of the march, the players of the city
+kettledrums dressed in red, and the crosses of the different parishes
+grouped without order round the enormous and extremely heavy banner
+of the Cathedral, like a huge sail covered with embroidered figures.
+Beyond, all the centre of the street was clear, flanked on either side
+by rows of clergy and soldiers carrying tapers, the deacons with their
+censers, assisted by the roccoco angels carrying the vessels for the
+Asiatic perfume, and the canons in their extremely valuable historical
+capes. Behind the sacrament were grouped the authorities, and the
+battalion of cadets brought up the rear, their muskets on their arms,
+their shaven heads bare, keeping step to the time of the march.
+
+Gabriel breathed with delight the air of the public streets. He who
+had seen all the great capitals of Europe admired the streets of the
+ancient city after his long seclusion in the Cathedral. They seemed
+to him very populous, and he felt the surprise that great modern
+improvements must cause to those used to a retired and sedentary life.
+
+The balconies were hung with ancient tapestries and shawls from
+Manilla; the streets were covered with awnings, and the pavement
+spread thickly with sand, so that the eucharistic car should glide
+easily over the pointed cobble stones.
+
+Up the hills the Custodia advanced laboriously, the men inside the
+car sweating and gasping. Gabriel coughed, his spine aching with the
+enclosure in the movable prison, and the dignity of the march was
+disturbed by the words of command from the Canon Obrero, who, in
+scarlet robes with a staff in his hand, directed the procession,
+reproving the pilots and those who pushed the car inside for their
+jerky and irregular movements.
+
+Apart from these discomforts, Gabriel was delighted with his
+extraordinary escapade through the town; he laughed, thinking what the
+crowd, kneeling in veneration, would have said had they known whose
+eyes were looking out at them from underneath the car. No doubt many
+of those officials escorting God, in their white trousers, red coats,
+with swords by their sides and cocked hats would have news of his
+existence; they would surely have heard some one speak of him, and
+they probably kept his name in their memory as that of a social enemy.
+And this reprobate, rejected by all, concealed in a hole in the
+Cathedral like those adventurous birds who rested in its vaultings,
+was the man who was guiding the footsteps of God through this most
+religious city!
+
+A little after mid-day the Custodia returned to the Cathedral, passing
+in front of the Puerta del Mollete. Gabriel saw the exterior walls
+hung with the famous tapestries. As soon as the farewell hymns were
+ended the canons despoiled themselves quickly of their vestments,
+rushing to the door on their dismissal without saluting. They were
+going to their dinners much later than usual, as this extraordinary
+day upset the even course of their lives. The church, so noisy and
+illuminated in the morning, emptied itself rapidly, and silence and
+twilight once more reigned in it.
+
+Esteban was furious when he saw Gabriel emerging from the eucharistic
+car.
+
+"You will kill yourself, such work is not for you. What caprice could
+have seized you?"
+
+Gabriel laughed. Yes, it was a caprice, but he did not repent of it.
+He had taken a turn through the town without being seen, and he could
+give his brother sufficient for two days' maintenance; he wished to
+work, not to be a heavy charge on him.
+
+Wooden Staff was softened.
+
+"You idiot, have I asked anything of you? Do I want anything else but
+that you should live quietly and get better?"
+
+But, as though he wished to acknowledge this exertion on his brother's
+part by something which would please him, when he returned to the
+Claverias he dropped his usual sullen face, and spoke to his daughter
+during the meal.
+
+Towards evening the Claverias were quite deserted. Don Antolin hurried
+down with his tickets, rejoicing in the knowledge that many strangers
+were waiting for him. The Tato and the bell-ringer had slipped
+furtively down the tower stairs, dressed in their best clothes; they
+were going to the bull-fight. Sagrario obliged to be idle in order to
+keep the feast day holy, had gone to the shoemaker's house, and while
+he was showing the giants to the servants and soldiers of the academy,
+and the peasants from the country, Luna's niece helped to mend the
+clothes for the poor woman crushed by poverty and the superabundance
+of children.
+
+When the Chapel-master and the Wooden Staff went down to the choir,
+Gabriel went out into the cloister. He could only see there a cadet
+who was walking up and down, with his hand on the pommel of his sword,
+holding it horizontally like the fiery tizonas[1] of former days. Luna
+recognised him by the full pantaloons and the wasplike waist, which
+made the Tato declare that this particular cadet wore stays--it was
+Juanito the cardinal's nephew. He often walked in the cloister, hoping
+for an opportunity to talk with Leocadia, the beautiful daughter of
+the Virgin's sacristan. From the parents he had nothing to fear, but
+the future warrior had a certain dread of Tomasa, as the old lady
+looked on these visits with an evil eye, and threatened to make them
+known to his uncle the Cardinal.
+
+[Footnote 1: _Tizona_--name of the Cid's sword.]
+
+Gabriel had often spoken to the cadet, for when the youth met him
+in the cloister he always stopped to speak, endeavouring by the
+platitudes of his conversation to justify his presence in the
+Claverias; but Luna was surprised to meet him there on a festival
+afternoon.
+
+"Are you not going to the bull-fight?" he inquired. "I thought
+everyone from the academy would be in the Plaza."
+
+Juanito smiled, caressing his moustache; it was his favourite gesture,
+as it raised his arm, giving him the satisfaction of displaying the
+sleeve adorned with sergeant's stripes. He was not a common cadet, he
+had his stripes, and though this did not seem much to one who dreamed
+of being a general, still it was a step in the right direction. No;
+he did not go to bull-fights. In truth he was an _habitue_ but he had
+sacrificed himself in order to talk for a whole afternoon with his
+sweetheart at the door of her house in the silence of the Claverias.
+The grandmother had gone down into the garden, and "Virgin's Blue"
+would not be long in going out and leaving the coast clear, as if
+the matter in no way concerned him. "The beautiful evening, friend
+Gabriel!" He had far more serious and important affairs than the new
+comers at the academy, who spent all their Sundays at the cafes, or
+walking up and down like fools--everyone at the academy, even the
+professors, envied him his sweetheart.
+
+"And when is the wedding to be?" said Gabriel gaily.
+
+Master Stripes looked most important as he replied: "There were many
+things to be done before--first of all to bring his uncle to consent,
+which might not be easy, and to follow the guiding of his good star to
+attain a certain rank; but he was intended for great things, so it was
+only a matter of a few years.
+
+"I, friend Luna, am of the stuff of young generals; it is the good
+luck of the family. My uncle, when he was only an acolyte, was certain
+he would become a cardinal, and he succeeded. I shall rise much
+faster. Besides, you know that to be an archbishop of Toledo is not a
+small thing. My uncle has many friends in the palace, and commands in
+the ministry of war just as though he were a general. In point of fact
+he is far more a soldier than a cleric! And to prove it to you, there
+is the only thing he has ever written, a prayer to the Virgin for the
+soldiers to recite before they go into action."
+
+"And you, Juanito, do you really feel any vocation for a military
+life?"
+
+"A great deal--ever since I knew how to open books and read them I
+have wished to rival those great captains that I saw in the prints,
+erect on their horses, with swords in their hands, proud and handsome.
+Believe me, no one enters on this career without a vocation; many are
+entered in the seminaries against their will, but no one can make a
+soldier by force; anyone who comes to the academy has the longing in
+himself."
+
+"And are all of them as sure of the result as you are?"
+
+"Oh, yes; all," said the cardinal's nephew smiling, "except that the
+immense majority have not such probabilities of making a name.
+But, such as we are, there is not one amongst us who dreams of the
+possibility of vegetating as a captain in a reserve regiment, or of
+dying of old age as a commandant. We all of us see first of all youth
+glorified by the uniform, full of adventures (for you know all
+the women fight for us), by the joy of life, loved and respected
+everywhere, head and shoulders above our countrymen; and when old age
+approaches, and we begin to get fat and bald, the gold braid of a
+general, politics, and, who knows, possibly the portfolio of war! This
+is in everyone's thoughts. No one believes but that the future holds a
+baton for him, and that he has only to unhook it and fasten it to his
+belt. I know for certain what is awaiting me, the rest dream and hope
+for it, and so we go on living."
+
+Gabriel smiled as he listened to the cadet.
+
+"You are all deceiving yourselves, like those poor youths who enter
+the seminaries, believing that a mitre awaits them or a fat benefice
+on the other side of the door. It is the influence and attraction
+still exercised by the great things that have been. Let us see--apart
+from the material result of the profession--why do you become
+soldiers?"
+
+"For the sake of glory!" said the cadet pompously, remembering the
+harangues of the colonel director of the academy. "For our country,
+whose defence is entrusted to us! and for the honour of our flag!"
+
+"Glory!" said Gabriel, ironically. "I know all about that. Very often,
+seeing you all so young and inexperienced, so full of vain hopes, I
+have reconstructed in my own mind what might be called the psychology
+of the cadet. I can guess all that you thought before entering the
+academy, and I foresee the bitter and crushing disillusion that awaits
+you on leaving it. The history of wars and the artistic trappings of
+the uniform have seduced your youth. Afterwards, warlike tales of an
+irresistible fascination--Bonaparte with his little band crossing the
+bridge at Arcola amid showers of bullets. And then our own generals,
+not to go further--Espartero at Luchana, O'Donnel in Africa, and,
+above all, Prim, that almost legendary leader, directing the battalion
+at Castillejos with his sword. 'I wish to be the same,' say these
+youths; 'where one man has arrived another may also succeed';
+enthusiasm is taken for predestination, and each one thinks himself
+created by God on purpose to be a famous leader. In the meanwhile you
+live in Toledo, dreaming of glory, of hairbreadth enterprises, of
+gigantic battles and noisy triumphs. But when, with the two stars on
+your arm you go to a regiment, the first thing that comes to meet you
+at the barrack gate, even before you receive the salute of the sentry,
+is the ugly and disagreeable reality. He who dreams of covering
+himself with glory and becoming a great leader before he is thirty,
+thinking of nothing but strategic combinations and original
+fortifications, must occupy himself with the washing and decency of a
+lot of wild lads, who come in from the fields reeking with excessive
+health; try the rations, discuss drawers and shirts, calculate the
+lasting of ankle boots and hempen shoes, and he who never went near
+the kitchen at home, was most carefully looked after by his mother,
+and thought that everything was women's work except giving words
+of command and drawing soldiers up in line, now finds the first
+requirement in a regiment is to be cook, tailor, shoemaker, etc., very
+often receiving reprimands from his superiors if he prove lazy in
+those duties."
+
+"That is true," said Juanito laughing; "but without these things there
+cannot be an army, and an army is necessary."
+
+"We are not discussing if it is necessary or no. I only wish to point
+out that you (or perhaps not you, as you enter on a good footing,
+but certainly your companions) are self-deceivers, and are preparing
+without knowing it the shipwreck of your lives, precisely like those
+other youths who, poorer, or perhaps less energetic, crowd to enter
+the Church. The Church has come to an end as there is no longer faith;
+military glory has ended in Spain as there are no longer wars of
+conquest, and our character as strong fighting men has been lost for
+centuries. If we have a war, it is either civil or colonial--wars that
+might be called disasters--without glory and without profit, but in
+which men die as at Thermopyle or Austerlitz, as a man can only die
+once; but without the consolation of fame, or of public applause,
+without in fact that aureole that you call glory. You have all been
+born too late; you are the warriors of a people who must perforce live
+in peace; just as those seminarists will be the future priests in a
+country where there are no longer miracles nor faith, only routine and
+utter stagnation of thought."
+
+"But if we have no foreign wars, if conquests have come to an end, we
+serve at least to defend the integrity of Spanish soil, to guard our
+own homes. Is it that you think," said the cadet nettled, "we are
+incapable of dying for our country?"
+
+"I do not doubt it; that is the only thing Spaniards are capable of
+doing, to die most heroically, but in the end to die. Our history
+for the last two centuries has been nothing but a tale of heroic
+deaths--'Glorious defeat in such a place,' 'Heroic disaster in some
+other.' By sea and by land we have astonished the world, throwing
+ourselves blindly into danger, showing a good front, without
+flinching, with the stoicism of a Chinaman. But nations do not grow
+great from their contempt of death, but through their ability to
+preserve life. The Poles were the terror of the Turks, and some of the
+best soldiers in Europe, yet Poland has ceased to exist. If any great
+European power _could_ invade us--you will remark I say _could_, for
+in these things the wish is not the same as the power, I know exactly
+what would happen; the Spaniards would know how to die, but you may be
+perfectly certain the invaders would not require more than two battles
+to sweep away entirely all our military preparations. And all this,
+which could be scattered in a couple of days, what sacrifices it costs
+the country!"
+
+"Then," said the cadet ironically, "I presume we must suppress the
+army, and leave the nation undefended."
+
+"As things are to-day there is no hope of that happening. As long as
+all Europe is armed and the smallest country has an army, Spain will
+have one also. It is not for her to set an example; and besides, the
+example would be of no use, it is as though one having a few thousand
+pesetas should endeavour to initiate the remedy to social injustice by
+sacrificing himself and giving them up."
+
+After a long silence Gabriel spoke again very quietly, noticing the
+ironical and even aggressive manner of the cadet.
+
+"No doubt you are pained by what I say; believe me I feel it, as I
+have no wish to wound the beliefs of anyone, least of all of those who
+have formed to themselves an ideal of life. But truth is truth. The
+social question does not trouble you. Is it not so? You know nothing
+about it, you have never thought about it for an instant and it is the
+same with all your, companions, but nevertheless, what you suffer in
+your prestige, in your love of country and of your standard, has no
+other cause but the social disorder at present rampant in the world.
+Wealth is everything, capital is lord of the world. Science directs
+humanity as the successor of faith, but the rich have possessed
+themselves of its discoveries, and have monopolised them to continue
+their tyranny. In the economic world they have made themselves masters
+of machinery and of all progress, using them as chains to enslave the
+workman, forcing an excess of production, but limiting his daily wage
+to what is strictly necessary. In the life of nations the same thing
+repeats itself--war to-day is nothing but an appliance of science, and
+the richest countries have acquired the greatest improvements in the
+art of extermination. They have crowds of recruits, thousands of
+enormous cannon, they can keep millions of men under arms, with every
+sort of modern improvement, without becoming bankrupt. But to poor
+countries, their only remaining course is to hold their tongues, or to
+rage uselessly, as the disinherited do against those in possession of
+their property. The most cowardly and sedentary people on the face of
+the globe may become invincible warriors if they have the money. The
+bravery of chivalry came to an end with the invention of powder, and
+the pride of race has faded for ever before the advent of trade. If
+the Cid came to life again he would be in jail, he would have become a
+highwayman, unable to adjust himself to the inequalities and injustice
+of modern life. If the Gran Capitan were now minister of war, he would
+probably be unable even with this military tax which oppresses the
+country to put his regiments in condition to undertake a fresh war in
+Italy. It is money, that cursed money! which has killed the finest
+part of soldiering--personal bravery, initiative, originality--just as
+it has crushed the workman, making his life a hell."
+
+The cadet listened attentively to Gabriel, understanding for the first
+time that in great nations there is something more than the warlike
+sympathies of the monarch and the bravery of the army. He saw suddenly
+that wealth was the basis and mainspring of all military enterprise.
+
+"Then," he said thoughtfully, "if foreign nations do not attack us it
+is not because they fear us."
+
+"No; that we are permitted to live in peace is because these
+omnipotent powers with all their ambitions and jealousies preserve a
+certain equilibrium. They are like the great capitalists who, occupied
+with vast projects of speculation, neglect either from carelessness or
+contempt the small undertakings that lie at their door. Do you believe
+that Switzerland or Belgium or other small countries live in peace
+surrounded by great powers because they have an army? They would exist
+just the same if they had not a single soldier, and the military power
+of Spain is not greater than that of one of these small countries;
+the poverty of the country and the scanty population oblige us to be
+humble. In these days there are two kinds of armies those organised
+for conquest and those whose only use is to keep order at home, that
+are no more than police on a large scale, with guns and generals. That
+of Spain, however much it costs, and however much they increase it,
+comes under the latter classification."
+
+"And if it is only this," said the cadet, "is it not something?
+We keep peace at home, and we watch over the tranquillity of our
+country."
+
+"Yes, but that could be done by fewer people and for less money.
+Besides, how about glory? Will you youths, full of illusions,
+overflowing with aggressiveness and energy for new undertakings,
+resign yourselves to this profession of watchmen and caretakers to a
+country? Your future will be as monotonous as that of a priest in his
+cathedral. Every day the same--to drill men to move this or that way,
+to play at dominoes or billiards in a cafe, to walk about in uniform
+or take a nap in the guard-room. There can be nothing for you beyond
+a small disturbance at the tax on provisions, a strike, a closing of
+shops to protest against the taxes, and then to fire on a mob armed
+with sticks and stones. If at any time in your life you are ordered to
+fire, you may be sure it will be on Spaniards. The Government do not
+wish for an army as they know it is useless for the exterior defence
+of the nation; besides, the national finances do not admit of its
+maintenance, and they are consequently satisfied with an embryonic
+organisation which is always insubordinate, distracted by incessant
+and contradictory reforms, copying foreign improvements as a poor
+girl copies the robes of a great lady. Believe me, there is nothing
+pleasant in living such a narrowed and monotonous life, with no other
+chance of glory but that of shooting a workman who protests or a
+people who complain."
+
+"But, how about liberty? How about political progress?" inquired the
+cadet. "I have heard it said by a captain at the academy that if the
+Liberal party exists in Spain it is through the army."
+
+"There is a great deal in that," said Gabriel. "It is indubitably the
+most important service the army has rendered to the State; without it,
+who knows where the civil wars would have ended in this country, so
+stationary and so timid about all reforms! I repeat it, I do not
+ignore this service, but, believe me, that civil wars between liberty
+and political absolutism will never be repeated, neither could the
+guerilla warfare of the Independence with any definite issue. The
+means of communication and military progress have put an end to
+mountain warfare. The Mauser, which is the arm of the day, requires
+well-provided parks of ammunition to follow it, cartridge magazines at
+its back, and all this is incompatible with party fighting."
+
+"But you will admit that we are of some use, and that we render the
+nation good service."
+
+"I admit it in the actual state of things, but I should admit it more
+fully if you were fewer. The greater part of the grant is spent, but
+all the same you live in poverty, decent and hidden, but poverty all
+the same. A lieutenant earns less than many operatives, but he must
+buy himself showy uniforms, be smart, and frequent when he wants
+amusement the same places as the rich. He can only see before him long
+years of waiting and of hidden poverty, borne with dignity, until some
+promotion provides him with a few duros more monthly. You all suffer
+dragging on this existence of slaves to the sword, the nation who
+pays grumbles at seeing you inactive, and forgets other superfluous
+expenses to fix its complaints solely on the military. Believe me, for
+a modern army, you are too few and badly organised; to keep the peace
+at home you are too many and too dear. The fault is not yours, your
+vocation has come too late, when fate has rendered Spain powerless for
+adventurous undertakings. If she revives she will have to follow a
+direction which will certainly not be that of the sword. For this
+reason I say that these youths stray from the right path when they
+seek for glory where their ancestors thought to find it."
+
+The appearance of Silver Stick cut short the dialogue. He ran in, pale
+with excitement, gasping, rattling his bunch of keys.
+
+"His Eminence is coming," he said, hurriedly. "He is already under the
+arch; he wishes to spend the evening in the garden; it is a whim! They
+say he is quite unmanageable to-day."
+
+And he ran on to open the staircase del Tenorio, which put the
+Claverias in communication with the lower cloister.
+
+The cadet was alarmed at the unexpected proximity of his uncle. He did
+not wish to meet him there, he feared the cardinal's temper, and fled
+towards the tower staircase on his way to the bull-fight, sacrificing
+his sweetheart sooner than meet with Don Sebastian.
+
+Gabriel, who now found himself alone in the cloister, leant against a
+column and watched the progress of this terrible prince of the Church.
+He saw him come out of the doorway leading to the abode of the giants,
+followed by two servants. Luna was able to examine him well for the
+first time. He was enormous; but in spite of his age carried himself
+erectly; over his black cassock with the red borders hung his gold
+cross. He was leaning with a martial air on a staff of command, and
+the gold tassels of his hat fell on the pink skin of his fat neck,
+which was fringed with white hair. His small and penetrating eyes
+looked on all sides in the hopes of discovering some delinquency,
+something contravening the established rules, which would enable him
+to break out into shouts and menaces and so give vent to his ill
+humour and to the anger which furrowed his brows.
+
+He disappeared by the staircase del Tenorio, preceded by Don Antolin,
+who, after opening the iron gates, had placed himself at his orders,
+shaking with fear. The silence and solitude of the Claverias were
+undisturbed, it seemed as though the people hidden in their houses
+remained absolutely still, guessing the danger that was passing.
+
+Gabriel, leaning on the balustrade, watched the cardinal enter the
+lower cloister, walking round two sides till he came to the garden
+gate. A slight gesture from the prelate was sufficient to stop the two
+servants, and he walked on alone through the central avenue towards
+the summer-house where Tomasa was fast asleep between its leafy walls,
+her knitting in her hands.
+
+The old woman awoke at the sound of footsteps, and seeing the prelate,
+gave a cry of surprise.
+
+"Don Sebastian! You here!"
+
+"I wished to visit you," said the cardinal with a benevolent smile,
+seating himself on a bench. "It must not be always you who come to
+seek me. I owe you many visits, and here I am."
+
+Plunging one hand into the depths of his cassock, he drew forth a
+small gold case and lighted a cigarette. He stretched out his legs
+with the complacency of one who being always accustomed to wear
+the frowning brow of authority, finds himself for a few moments at
+liberty.
+
+"But have you not been ill?" inquired the gardener's widow. "I had
+thought of coming round to the palace this afternoon to inquire after
+your health from Dona Visita."
+
+"Hold your tongue, you fool; I have never felt better, especially
+since this morning. The slap I have given to _those_ by not going into
+the choir to pray with them has put me in a splendid humour, and in
+order that they may thoroughly understand my meaning I have come to
+see you. I wish them all to know that I am quite well, and that what
+is said about my illness is untrue. I wish all in Toledo to understand
+that the archbishop will not see his canons, and that he does so from
+a sense of dignity, not from pride, as at the same time he can come
+down to see his old friend the gardener's widow."
+
+And the terrible old man laughed like a child to think of the
+annoyance this visit would cause his Chapter.
+
+"Do not believe, however, Tomasa," he continued, "that I have come to
+see you solely for this reason. I felt sad and worried in the palace
+this afternoon. Visitacion was busy with some friends from Madrid, and
+I had that heartache I sometimes feel when I think of the past. I felt
+that I must come and see you, more especially as it is always cool in
+the Cathedral garden, whereas outside it is as hot as an oven. Ah!
+Tomasa! how strong I see you! So slim and so active. You wear better
+than I do; you are not wrapped in fat like this sinner, and you have
+not the pains that disturb my nights. Your hair is still dark, your
+teeth are well preserved, and you do not need like this old cardinal
+to have a mechanism inside your mouth; but all the same, Tomasa, you
+are just as old as I am. We have very few years of life left to us,
+however much the Lord may wish to preserve us. What would I not give
+to return to those days when I ran up to your house in my red gown in
+search of your father, the sacristan, and stole your breakfast. Eh,
+Tomasa?"
+
+The two old people, forgetting social differences, recalled the past
+with the friendly resignation of those advancing towards death.
+Everything was the same as in their childhood--the garden, the
+cloister; nothing about the Cathedral had changed.
+
+His Eminence, closing his eyes, fancied himself once more the restless
+acolyte of fifty years before; the blue spirals from his cigarette
+seemed to carry his thoughts back through the interminable labyrinths
+of the past.
+
+"Do you remember how your poor father used to laugh at me? 'This boy,'
+he would say in the sacristy, 'is a Sixtus V. What do you wish to be?'
+he would ask me, and I always gave the same answer, 'Archbishop of
+Toledo.' And the good sacristan would laugh again at the certainty
+with which I spoke of my hopes. Believe me, Tomasa, I thought much of
+him when I was consecrated bishop, regretting his death. I should have
+been delighted with his tears of joy seeing me with the mitre on my
+head. I have always loved you, you are an excellent family, and have
+often satisfied my hunger."
+
+"Silence, senor, silence, and do not recall those things. I am the one
+who ought to be grateful for your kindness, so simple and genuine in
+spite of your rank, which comes next after the Pope. And the truth
+is," added the old woman with the pride of her frankness, "that no one
+is the loser. Friends like I am you can never have; like all the great
+ones of the earth, you are surrounded by flatterers and rascals. If
+you had remained a simple mass priest no one would have sought you
+out, but Tomasa would have always been your friend, always ready to do
+you a service. If I love you so much it is because you are kind and
+affable, but if you had put on pride like other archbishops, I should
+have kissed your ring and--'Good-bye.' The cardinal to his palace, the
+gardener's widow to her garden."
+
+The prelate received the old woman's frankness smilingly.
+
+"You will always be Don Sebastian to me," she continued. "When you
+told me not to call you Eminence or to use the same ceremonies as
+other people, I was as pleased as if I had been given the mantle of
+the Virgin del Sagrario. Such ceremonies would have stuck in my throat
+and made me ready to cry out, 'Let him have his fill of Eminence and
+Illustrious, but we have scratched each other thousands of times when
+we were little, and this big thief could never see a scrap of bread or
+an apricot in my hand without trying to snatch and devour it!' You may
+be thankful I spoke of you as 'usted'[1] when you became a beneficiary
+of the Cathedral, for, after all, it would not do to 'thou' a priest
+as if he were an acolyte."
+
+[Footnote 1: Contraction of _vuestra merced_--your worship.]
+
+Silence fell on the two old people, their eyes wandered tenderly over
+the garden, as if each tree or arcade covered with foliage contained
+some memory.
+
+"Do you know what I have just remembered," said Tomasa. "I remember
+that we saw each other just here many many years ago, at least
+forty-eight or fifty. I was with my poor elder sister who had just
+married Luna the gardener, and in the cloister wandering round me was
+he who afterwards became my husband. We saw a handsome sergeant come
+into the summer-house with a great jingle of spurs, a sword on his
+arm, and a helmet with a tail just like the Jews on the Monument. It
+was you, Don Sebastian, who had come to Toledo to visit your uncle
+the beneficiary, and who would not leave without visiting your friend
+Tomasita. How handsome and smart you were. I do not say it to flatter
+you, it is truth. You looked like being a rogue with the girls! And I
+still remember you said something to me about how pretty and fresh you
+thought me after so many years absence. You don't mind my reminding
+you of this? Really? It was only a soldier's gallant jests. How many
+would say that now? When you left, I said to my brother-in-law, 'He
+has put on the uniform for good and all; it is useless his uncle, the
+beneficiary, thinking of making a priest of him.'"
+
+"It was a youthful sally," said the cardinal smiling, remembering with
+pride the dashing sergeant of dragoons. "In Spain, there are only
+three professions worthy of a man--the sword, the Church and the toga.
+My blood was hot and I wanted to be a soldier, but unluckily I fell on
+times of peace, my promotion would have been very slow, and in order
+not to embitter my uncle's last years, I renewed my studies and turned
+to the Church. One can serve God or one's country as well in one place
+as another, but, believe me, very often in spite of the pomp of my
+cardinalate I think with envy of that soldier you saw. What happy
+times they were! Even now the sword draws me. When I see the cadets I
+would gladly exchange with some of them, giving them my crozier and
+cross. And possibly I might have done better than any of them! Ah! if
+only the great times of the reconquest could return when the prelates
+went out to fight the Moors! What a great Archbishop of Toledo I
+should have been!"
+
+And Don Sebastian drew up his fat old body, and proudly stretched out
+his arms with all the remains of his former strength.
+
+"You have always been a strong man," said the gardener's widow. "I say
+very often to some of the priests who speak of you and criticise you:
+'You must not trifle with His Eminence, he is quite capable of going
+one day into the choir--some he likes and some he does not--and
+driving you all out at one fell swoop.'"
+
+"I have more than once been tempted to do so," said the prelate
+firmly, his eyes flashing with energy, "but I have been prevented by
+the thought of my charge and my character as a peaceful priest. I am
+the shepherd of a Catholic flock, not a wolf who tears the sheep in
+his fierceness. But sometimes I can bear no more, and God forgive me!
+I have often been tempted to raise the shepherd's crook and chastise
+with blows that rebel flock who harbour in the Cathedral."
+
+The prelate became excited, speaking of his quarrels with the Chapter;
+the placidity of mind produced by the quiet of the garden disappeared
+as he thought of his hostile subordinates. He felt obliged as at
+other times to confide his troubles to the gardener's widow with that
+instinctive kindly feeling which often causes highly-placed people to
+confide in humble friends.
+
+"You cannot imagine, Tomasa, what those men make me suffer. I will
+subdue them because I am the master, because they owe me obedience by
+the rule of discipline without which there can be neither Church nor
+religion; but they oppose and disobey me. My orders are carried out
+with grumbling, and when I assert myself even the last ordained priest
+stands on what he calls his rights, lays complaints against me and
+appeals either to the Rota[1] or to Rome. Let us see, am I the master
+or am I not? Ought the shepherd to argue with his sheep and consult
+how to guide them in the right way? They sicken and weary me with
+their complaints and questions. There is not half a man amongst them,
+they are all cowardly tale-bearers. In my presence they lower their
+eyes, smile and praise His Eminence, and as soon as I turn my back
+they are vipers trying to bite me, scorpion tongues which respect
+nothing. Ay, Tomasa, my daughter! pity me! when I think of all this it
+makes me quite ill."
+
+[Footnote 1: Ecclesiastical court.]
+
+The prelate turned pale, rising from his seat as though he felt a
+sudden spasm of pain.
+
+"Do not worry yourself so much," said the old woman, "you are above
+them all, and you will overcome them."
+
+"Clearly, I shall defeat them; if not, it would fill my cup, for it
+would be the first time I had been vanquished. These squabbles among
+comrades do not trouble me much after all, for I know in the end I
+shall see my detested enemies at my feet. But it is their tongues,
+Tomasa!--what they say about the beings I love most in the world, that
+is what wounds me, and is killing me."
+
+He sat down again, coming quite close to the gardener's widow, so as
+to speak in a very low voice.
+
+"You know my past better than anyone; I have such great confidence in
+you that I have told you everything. Besides, you are very quick,
+and if I had not told you, you would have guessed. You know what
+Visitacion is to me, and most certainly you are aware of what those
+wretches say about her. Do not play the fool; everyone inside and
+outside the Cathedral listens to these calumnies and believes them.
+You are the only one who does not credit them because you know the
+truth. But ay! the truth cannot be told, I cannot proclaim it, these
+robes forbid me."
+
+And he seized a handful of his cassock with his clenched fingers as if
+he would rend it.
+
+A long silence followed. Don Sebastian looked fixedly at the ground,
+clutching with his hands as though he were trying to grasp invisible
+enemies; every now and then he felt a stab of pain and sighed
+uneasily.
+
+"Why do you think about these things?" said the gardener's widow;
+"they only make you ill, and you ought not to have disturbed yourself
+to come and see me, you would have done better to remain in the
+palace."
+
+"No, you distract my mind from them, it is a great comfort to tell you
+of my troubles. Up there I feel in despair, and have to exert all
+my self-command to suppress my anger. I do not wish my servants to
+understand, for they are quite capable of laughing at me, neither do I
+wish poor Visitacion to know anything. I cannot dissimulate. I cannot
+feign happiness when I am so irritated! What a hell I suffer! I cannot
+say that I have been a man, and that I have been weak as the flesh of
+which I am made, that I have with me the fruit of my faults, and that
+I will not separate myself from them, though persecuted by calumny.
+Every man acts as he is able, and I wish to be good in spite of my
+faults. I might have separated from my children, I might have deserted
+them, as others have done to preserve their reputation as saints, but
+I am a man, and I am proud of them; I am a man with all his defects
+and all his virtues, neither greater nor less than the general run of
+humanity. The feeling of paternity is so deeply rooted in me that I
+would sooner lose my mitre than abandon my children. You remember when
+Juanito's father, who passed as my nephew, died, how deeply I felt it,
+I thought I should have died also. Such a fine, handsome man, and
+with such a brilliant future before him! I would have made him a
+magistrate, president of the supreme court, minister, anything I
+wished! And in twenty-four hours he was dead as though Heaven wished
+to punish me. It is true I have my grandson remaining, but this
+Juanito in no way resembles his father, and I confess it to you, I
+do not care much for him. I can only see in him the most distant
+reflection of my poor son. Of my past, of that time which was the
+happiest of my life, all I have left me is Visitacion. She is the
+living image of the poor dead one. I worship her! and this feeble ray
+of happiness these wretched people disturb with their calumnies. It is
+enough to make one kill them!"
+
+Overcome by the happy recollection of the spring-time which had
+flowered during the first years of his episcopate, far away in an
+Andalusian diocese, he repeated once again to Tomasa the tale of his
+relations with a certain devout lady, who from her childhood had felt
+a horror of the world. Devotion had drawn them together, but life
+was not long in asserting her rights, opening herself a way by their
+almost mystical relations, and finally uniting them in a carnal
+embrace. They had lived faithful to each other in the secrecy of
+ecclesiastical life, loving each other with scrupulous prudence, so
+that no rumour of their relations had ever publicly transpired,
+until she died, leaving two children. Don Sebastian, a man of strong
+passions, was almost vehement in his paternal feelings--those two
+beings were the image of the poor dead woman, the remembrance of the
+only idyll which had softened a life wholly given over to ambition,
+and the calumnies circulated by his enemies, founded on the presence
+of his daughter in the archiepiscopal palace nearly drove him mad.
+
+"They believe her to be my mistress!" he said angrily. "My poor
+Visitacion, so good, so affectionate, so gentle to all, changed to a
+courtesan by these wretches! A sweetheart that I have taken for my
+amusement from the college of Noble Ladies! As if I, old and infirm,
+were able to think of such things! Brutes! wretches! Crimes have been
+committed for less!"
+
+"Let them say on. God is in heaven and sees us all."
+
+"I know it, but this is not enough to quiet me. You have children,
+Tomasa, and you know what it is to love them. It is not only what
+is done against them that wounds us, but what is said. What days of
+suffering I endure! You know since my boyhood all my dreams have been
+to rise to where I am. I used to look at the throne in the choir and
+think how comfortable I should be in it--of the immense happiness of
+being a prince of the Church. Well, now I am on the throne. I have
+spent half a century removing the stones from my path, leaving my skin
+and even my flesh on the brambles of the hillside. I only know how
+I was able to rise from the black mass and obtain a bishopric!
+Afterwards--now I am an archbishop! now I am a cardinal! At last I can
+rise no higher! And what is it all? Happiness always floats before us
+like the cloud of light which guided the Israelites. We see it, we
+almost touch it, but it never lets itself be caught. I am more unhappy
+now than in the days when I struggled to rise, and thought myself the
+most unfortunate of men. I am no longer young; the height on which
+I stand draws all eyes to me and prevents me defending myself. Ay,
+Tomasa! pity me, for I am worthy of compassion! To be a father and
+to be obliged to hide it as a crime! To love my daughter with an
+affection which increases more and more as I draw nearer to death, and
+have to endure that people should imagine this pure affection to be
+something so repugnant!"
+
+And the terrible glance of Don Sebastian, which terrified all the
+diocese, was clouded with tears.
+
+"Moreover, I have other troubles," he went on, "but they are those of
+a far-seeing man who fears the future. When I die, all that I have
+will be my daughter's. Juanito inherits what belonged to his mother,
+who was rich; besides, he has his profession and the support of my
+friends. Visitacion will be very rich. You know my adversaries throw
+in my face what they call my avarice. Avaricious I am not, but
+foreseeing, and anxious for the well-being of those belonging to me. I
+have saved a great deal. I am not one of those who distribute bread at
+the gate of his palace, nor who seek popularity through almsgiving.
+I have pasture lands in Estremadura, many vineyards in La Mancha,
+houses, and above all State stock--much stock. As a good Spaniard I
+have wished to help the Government with my money, more especially
+as it bears interest. I do not quite know how much I possess, but
+certainly twenty millions of reals, and probably more, all saved by
+myself and increased by fortunate speculations. I cannot complain
+of fate, and the Lord has helped me. Everything is for my poor
+Visitacion. I should delight in seeing her married to a good man; but
+she will not leave me. She is drawn to the Church, and that is my
+fear. Do not be surprised, Tomasa; I, a prince of the Church, fear to
+see how she is attracted by devotion, and I do all I can to turn her
+from it. I respect a religious woman, but not one who is only happy in
+the Church. A woman ought to live; she ought to be happy as a mother.
+I have always looked badly on nuns."
+
+"Let her be, senor," said the gardener's widow; "there is nothing
+strange in her love for the Church. Living as she does she could
+scarcely do otherwise."
+
+"For the present time, I have no fear. I am by her side, and her being
+fond of the society of the nuns signifies very little to me. But I
+may die to-morrow, and just imagine what a splendid mouthful
+poor Visitacion and her millions would be, left alone, with this
+predilection to religious life, of which those cunning people would
+be sure to take advantage! I have seen a great deal. I belong to the
+class, and I am in the secret. There is no lack of religious orders
+who devote themselves to hunting heiresses for the greater glory of
+God, as they say. Besides, there are many foreign nuns with great
+flapping caps travelling about here, who are lynxes for that sort of
+work, and I am terrified lest they should pounce on my daughter. I
+belong to the ancient Catholicism, to that pure Spanish religion, free
+from all modern extravagances. It would be sad to have spent my life
+in saving, only to fatten the Jesuits or those sisters who cannot
+speak Castilian. I do not wish my money to share the fate of that of
+the sacristans in the proverb. For this reason, to the annoyance
+I feel at my struggles with this inimical Chapter, I must add the
+distress I feel at my daughter's feeble character. Probably she will
+be hunted; some rake will laugh at me and possess himself of my
+money."
+
+Excited by his gloomy thoughts, he gave vent to an interjection both
+caustic and obscene, a memory of his soldiering days; in the presence
+of the gardener's widow there was no need to control himself, and the
+old woman was accustomed to this relief of his temper.
+
+"Let us see," he said imperiously after a long silence. "You, who know
+me better than anyone, am I as bad as my enemies suppose? Do I deserve
+that the Lord should punish me for my faults? You are one of God's
+souls, simple and good, and you know more of all this by your instinct
+than all the doctors of theology."
+
+"You bad, Don Sebastian? Holy Jesus! You are a man like all others,
+neither more nor less; but you are sincere, all of one piece, without
+deceit or hypocrisy."
+
+"A man--you have said it. I am a man like the rest. We who attain a
+certain height are like the saints on the fronts of the churches: from
+below we cause admiration for our beauty, but viewed closely we cause
+horror from the ugliness of the stones corroded by time. However much
+we wish to sanctify ourselves, keeping ourselves apart, we are still
+nothing but men--creatures of flesh and blood like those who surround
+us.
+
+"In the Church those who free themselves from human passion are most
+rare. And who knows if, even among those few privileged ones, some are
+not driven by the demon of vanity to increase the asceticism of their
+lives, thinking of the glory of being on an altar! The priest who
+succeeds in subduing his flesh falls into avarice, which is the
+ecclesiastical vice _par excellence_. I have never hoarded from vice;
+I have saved for my own, but never for myself."
+
+The prelate was silent for a long while; but in his irresistible
+desire to confide in the simple old woman he went on.
+
+"I am sure that God will not despise me when my hour comes. His
+infinite mercy is above all the littleness of life. What has been my
+fault? To have loved a woman, as my father loved my mother; to
+have had children as the apostles and saints had. And why not?
+Ecclesiastical celibacy is an invention of men, a detail of discipline
+agreed upon at the councils; but the flesh and its exigencies are
+anterior by many centuries; they date from Paradise. Whoever crosses
+this barrier, not from vice, but from irresistible passion, because he
+cannot conquer the impulse to create a family and to have a companion,
+fails indubitably towards the laws of the Church, but he does not
+disobey God. I fear the approach of death; many nights I doubt and
+tremble like a child. But I have served God in my own way. In former
+times I would have served Him with my sword, fighting against the
+heretics. Now I am His priest and do battle for Him whenever I see the
+impiety of the age curtailing anything of His glory. The Lord will
+forgive me, receiving me into His bosom. You, who are so good, Tomasa,
+and have the soul of an angel beneath your rough exterior, do you not
+think so?"
+
+The gardener's widow smiled, and her words fell slowly on the silence
+of the dying evening.
+
+"Tranquillise yourself, Don Sebastian. I have seen many saints in this
+house, and they have been worth much less than you. To ensure their
+salvation they would have abandoned their children. To maintain what
+they call purity of soul they would have renounced their family.
+Believe me, no saints enter here; they are men, nothing but men. You
+have nothing to repent of in following the impulse of your heart. God
+created us in His image and likeness, and also planted in us family
+love. All the rest, chastity, celibacy and other trifles, you invented
+for yourselves, to distinguish yourselves from the common herd of
+people. Be a man, Don Sebastian, and the more you show yourself such
+the better it will be for you, and the better the Lord will receive
+you in His glory."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+A few days after Corpus Don Antolin went one morning in search of
+Gabriel. Silver Stick smiled at Luna, speaking to him in a patronising
+way.
+
+He had thought of him all night; it pained him to see him idle,
+walking about the cloister; it was the want of occupation that
+inspired him with such perverse ideas.
+
+"Let us see," he continued, "would it suit you to come down with me
+every afternoon into the Cathedral, to show the Treasury and the
+other curiosities? A great many foreigners come who can scarcely make
+themselves understood when they question me; you will understand them,
+as you know French and English, and, your brother says, many other
+languages. The Cathedral would be a gainer, as it would show these
+strangers that we have an interpreter at our disposal; you would
+be doing us a favour and would lose nothing by it. It is always an
+amusement to see new faces; and about the recompense ..."
+
+Don Antolin stopped here, scratching his head beneath his skull cap.
+He would see what he could screw out of the funds of the Obreria; if
+just at first nothing could be managed, as the revenues of the Primacy
+were meagre and at their lowest ebb, no doubt something could be given
+later on.
+
+He looked anxiously for Gabriel's answer, who, however, was quite
+agreeable; when all was said and done he was a guest of the Cathedral
+and owed it something. And from that afternoon he went down at the
+hour of choir to show the foreigners all the treasures of the church.
+
+There was no lack of travellers who showed Don Antolin's coloured
+tickets waiting for the time to see the jewels. Silver Stick could
+never see a stranger without imagining that he was a lord or a
+duke, and often felt very much surprised at the shabbiness of their
+clothing; according to his ideas only the great ones of the earth
+could give themselves the pleasure of travelling, and he opened wide
+his incredulous and scandalised eyes when Gabriel told him that many
+were shoemakers from London or shopkeepers from Paris, who during
+their holidays treated themselves to a trip through the ancient
+country of the Moors.
+
+Five canons in their choir surplices advanced up the nave, each one
+holding a key in his hand; these were the guardians of the treasure.
+Each one opened the lock confided to his custody, the door swung
+heavily, and the chapel, with its antique treasures, was opened. In
+large glass cases, like a museum, was displayed the ancient opulence
+of the Cathedral: statues of chiselled silver, large globes crowned
+by graceful little figures all of precious metal, ivory caskets of
+complicated work, custodias and viriles[1] of gold, enormous gilt
+dishes, embossed with mythological subjects reviving the joy of
+paganism in that sordid and dusty corner of the Christian Church, and
+precious stones spread their varied colours over pectorals, mitres and
+mantles for the Virgin. There were diamonds so immense as to make one
+doubt their being genuine, emeralds the size of pebbles, amethysts,
+topaz, and pearls--very many pearls, strewn by the hundreds and
+thousands on the Virgin's garments. The foreigners were amazed at all
+this wealth and dazzled by the quantity, while Gabriel, who had become
+accustomed to see it daily, looked at it carelessly. The Treasury
+presented a deplorable spectacle of neglect: the riches had aged with
+the Cathedral, the diamonds did not flash, the gold seemed tarnished
+and dusty, the silver was blackened, the pearls were opaque and sick,
+the smoke from the wax tapers and the damp atmosphere of the church
+had sadly dulled everything.
+
+[Footnote 1: _Virile_--small box with double glass in which the Host
+is exhibited.]
+
+"The Church," said Gabriel to himself, "ages everything she touches.
+The treasures lose their brilliancy in her hands, like jewels that
+fall into the power of usurers. The diamond becomes dulled in the
+bosom of the great miser, and the most beautiful picture becomes
+blackened on her altars."
+
+After the visit to the Treasury came the exhibition of the Ochavo, the
+octagonal chapel of dark marbles, that pantheon of relics where
+the most repulsive human remains--skulls with their ghastly grin,
+mummified arms and worn-eaten vertebras--were shown in gold or silver
+shrines. The gross and credulous piety of former days displayed
+itself in the full tide of unbelief, so that even Don Antolin, so
+uncompromising when he spoke of the glories of his Cathedral, lowered
+his voice and hurried over his explanations as he showed a piece
+of the mantle worn by Santa Leocadia when she "appeared" to the
+Archbishop of Toledo, quite understanding the difficulty of explaining
+how an apparition could wear garments of stuff.
+
+Gabriel translated faithfully Don Antolin's explanation, repeating
+it again and again with imperturbable gravity, while the canons who
+escorted the batch of strangers drew a few paces away with an absent
+look, to avoid questions.
+
+One day a phlegmatic Englishman interrupted the interpreter.
+
+"And have you not amongst all these things a feather from the wings of
+St. Michael?"
+
+"No, senor, and it is a great pity," said Luna, equally seriously,
+"but you will probably find it in some other Cathedral; we cannot have
+everything here."
+
+In the Chapter-house, a mixture of Arab and Gothic architecture, the
+foreigners were much interested by the double row of portraits of the
+Toledan archbishops hanging on the wall, with their mitres and golden
+croziers. Gabriel called their attention to the picture of Don
+Cerebruno, a mediaeval prelate, so called from his enormous head; but
+it was the wardrobe which more especially surprised the foreigners.
+
+It was a room surrounded by large cupboards and shelves of old wood;
+above these the walls were covered with dusty and torn pictures,
+copies of Flemish paintings that the canons had relegated to this
+corner; round the room were placed in line the ancient armchairs of
+the church, some of Spanish workmanship, austere, with straight lines
+and ravelled coverings, others of Greek design with curved feet
+inlaid with ivory. The capes and chasubles were piled on the shelves,
+according to colours, with the collars outside the heap, so that
+people could examine the wonderful embroidery. A whole world of
+patterns appeared with every possible brilliancy of colour on a few
+inches of stuff. The astonishing art of the ancient embroiderers made
+the silk a series of vivid pictures; the collar and the narrow stripes
+on the front of a cape were large enough to reproduce all the scenes
+of the biblical creation and the passion of Jesus. Brocade and silk
+unrolled the magnificence of their textures. One cape was a garden
+of flame-coloured carnations, another was a bed of roses and other
+fantastic flowers with twisted stamens and metallic petals. The
+sacristans produced from the deep shelves, as though they were books,
+the splendid and famous frontals of the high altar. There were special
+ones for each festival; that for St. John's Day was brightly coloured
+with verbenas, purple bunches of grapes, and golden lambs that fat
+little angels were caressing with their chubby hands. The most
+ancient, of soft and rather faded colours, showed Persian gardens with
+blue waters in which fabulous reddish beasts were drinking.
+
+The visitors were bewildered seeing all this vast collection of
+stuffs and embroideries unrolled piece after piece--all the past of
+a Cathedral which, having millions of revenue, employed for its
+embellishment armies of embroiderers, acquiring the richest textures
+of Valencia and Seville, reproducing in gold and colours all the
+episodes from the Holy books, and the torments of the martyrs, all the
+glorious legends of the Church, immortalised by the needle, before
+printing had been able to do so.
+
+Gabriel returned every evening to the upper cloister, wearied out with
+walking the length and breadth of the Cathedral. During the first few
+days he was delighted with the novelty of seeing fresh faces, to hear
+the rustle of the visitors who, branching off from the great stream of
+travellers who inundated Europe, came as far as Toledo. But after a
+little while the people he saw every afternoon seemed to him just the
+same. There were the same questions, the same stiff and hard-featured
+Englishwomen, and the same o-o-o-h's of cold and conventional
+admiration, and the same identical way of turning their backs with
+rude pride when there was nothing else to be shown. Returning to
+the quiet of the upper cloister after the daily exhibition of the
+Treasury, Gabriel thought the poverty of the Claverias even more
+revolting and intolerable. The shoemaker seemed sadder and yellower in
+the rank atmosphere of his den, bending over his bench hammering the
+soles, his wife more feeble and ill, the miserable slave of maternity,
+weakened by hunger, and offering to her little son as his only hope of
+food those flaccid breasts in which there was nothing left but a drop
+of blood. The little child was dying! Sagrario, who had left her
+machine to spend the greater part of the day in the shoemaker's room
+said so in a low voice to her uncle. She did all the work of the
+house, while the poor mother, motionless in a chair, with the little
+one in her lap, looked at it with weeping eyes. When the baby woke
+from its stupor it would wearily raise its head from its little neck,
+which had become a mere thread; the mother to stifle its feeble moans
+would press it to her breast, but the child would turn away its mouth
+guessing the inutility of expending its strength on that rag of flesh
+from which it could only succeed in extracting the last drop.
+
+Gabriel examined the child, noting its extreme emaciation and the
+spots that scrofula had spread over its straw-coloured skin. He shook
+his head incredulously when the neighbours who had gathered round the
+invalid each diagnosed some particular ailment, and recommended every
+imaginable sort of household remedy, from decoctions of rare herbs and
+stinking ointments to applications on the chest of miracle working
+prints, and tracing seven crosses on the navel with as many
+paternosters.
+
+"It is hunger," said Luna to his niece, "nothing but hunger." And
+depriving himself of part of his own food, he sent to the shoemaker's
+house the milk that had been brought up for himself. But the child's
+stomach could not retain the liquid too substantial for its weakness,
+and threw it up as soon as swallowed. The Aunt Tomasa, with her
+energetic and enterprising character, brought a woman from outside the
+Cathedral to nourish the child, but after two days, and before the
+effects became visible, she came no more, as if she had felt disgusted
+at the miserable and corpse-like little body touching her. In vain the
+gardener's widow searched; it was not easy to find generous breasts
+who would give their milk for very little pay.
+
+In the meanwhile the child was dying. All the women came in and out of
+the shoemaker's house, and even Don Antolin would stand at the door in
+the mornings.
+
+"How is the little one? Just the same? It is all in God's hands."
+
+And he would retire, doing the shoemaker the great charity of not
+speaking to him about the pesetas he owed him, on account of the sick
+child.
+
+"Virgin's Blue" was annoyed by this incident, which upset the calm of
+the cloister, and disturbed the bliss of his digestion as a happy and
+well-fed servant of the Church. It was a shame that that shoemaker
+should be allowed to live in the Claverias with all that flock of
+wretched and scurvy children; one would die every month; all sorts
+of illness would lay hold on them. By what right were they in the
+Cathedral when they drew no wage from the Obreria? Such stinking
+excrescences ought to remain outside the Lord's house.
+
+His mother-in-law was furious.
+
+"Silence, you thief of the saints!" she cried. "Silence, or I will
+throw a dish at you! We are all sons of God, and if things were as
+they should be, all the poor ought to live in the Cathedral. Instead
+of saying such things it would be much better if you gave those
+unhappy people part of what you have stolen from the Virgin."
+
+The sacristan shrugged his shoulders with contempt. If they had not
+enough to eat they should not have children. There he was himself with
+only one daughter--he did not think he had any right to more--and so
+thanks to Our Lady he was able to save a scrap for his old age.
+
+Tomasa spoke of the shoemaker's child to the good gentlemen of the
+Chapter when they came into the garden for a few minutes after choir.
+They listened absently, putting their hands in their cassocks.
+
+"It is all God's will! What poverty!"
+
+And some gave her ten centimes, others a real, one or two even a
+peseta. The old woman went one day to the Archbishop's palace. Don
+Sebastian was engaged and unable to see her, but he sent her two
+pesetas by one of the servants.
+
+"They don't mean badly," said the gardener's widow, giving her
+collection to the poor mother, "but each one lives for himself, and
+his neighbour may manage as he can. No one divides his cloak with
+another--take this, and see how you can get out of your trouble."
+
+They fed a little better in the shoemaker's house; the miserable
+scrofulous children collected in the cloister profited most by the
+baby's illness; it was growing daily weaker, lying motionless for
+hours, with almost imperceptible breathing, on its mother's lap.
+
+When the unhappy child died, all the people of the Claverias rushed
+to the home. Inside could be heard the mother's wailings, strident,
+interminable, like the bellowing of a wounded beast; outside the
+father wept silently, surrounded by his friends.
+
+"It died just like a bird," he said with long pauses, his words broken
+by sobs. "His mother held him on her knees--I was working--'Antonio,
+Antonio!' she called, 'see, what is the matter with the child, it is
+moving its mouth and making grimaces?' I ran up quickly, its face
+was quite dusky--as if it had a veil over it. It opened its mouth, a
+couple of twitches with its eyes staring, and its neck fell over--just
+the same as a bird, just the same."
+
+He wept, repeating constantly the resemblance between his son and
+those birds who die in winter from the cold.
+
+The bell-ringer looked gloomily at Gabriel.
+
+"You who know everything, is it true that it died of hunger?"
+
+And the Tato with his scandalous impetuosity shouted loudly--
+
+"There is no justice in the world! All this must be altered! Fancy a
+child dying of hunger in this house, where money runs like water, and
+where all those creatures are dressed in gold!"
+
+When the little corpse was carried to the cemetery, the cloister
+seemed quite deserted; all its life was concentrated in the
+shoemaker's house, all the women surrounded the mother. Despair had
+rendered that sick and feeble woman furious. She no longer wept: her
+child's death had made her ferocious--she wished to bite or to dash
+her skull against the wall.
+
+"Ay! my s-o-o-o-n! my Antonio!"
+
+At night Sagrario and the other women remained in the house to look
+after her. In her desperation she wished to make some one responsible
+for her misfortune, and she fixed on those highest in the cloister.
+Don Antolin had not helped her with the smallest alms; his affected
+niece had scarcely been in to see the little one, nothing interested
+her but men.
+
+"It is all Silver Stick's fault," wailed the poor mother--"he is
+a thief. He grinds our poverty with his usurer's snares. Never a
+farthing did he give for my son. And that Mariquita is just the same.
+Yes, senor, I do say so. She only thinks of decking herself out so
+that the cadets may see her."
+
+"For mercy's sake, woman, they will hear you," begged some of the
+terrified women.
+
+But others scouted this fear. "Let Don Antolin and his niece hear
+them! What did it matter? The Claverias were tired of the rapacity
+of the uncle, and the magnificent airs that ugly woman gave herself!
+Because they were poor they were not going to spend their lives
+trembling before that couple. God only knew what the uncle and niece
+did when they were alone in the house together!"
+
+A breath of rebellion had passed over that sleepy world. It was the
+unconscious influence of Gabriel. What he had said to his friends had
+been passed on to all the men in the Claverias, getting even to the
+women. They were confused and garbled ideas, that very few could
+understand, but they cherished them like fresh pure air reviving
+their minds. They sounded in their ears like a pleasant echo from the
+outside world. It was sufficient for them to know that this quiet life
+of submission they had led up to now was not immutable--they had
+a right to something better--and that human beings ought to rebel
+against injustice and oppression.
+
+Don Antolin, who knew well enough the crew confided to his care,
+was not long in perceiving this moral upturn. He felt hostility and
+rebellion on every side. The debtors answered him haughtily, alleging
+their poverty as a reason for no longer enduring his avarice; his
+imperious orders were tardily executed, and he had a clear perception
+that they were laughing behind his back as he walked through the
+cloister, and making threatening gestures. One day his legs trembled
+beneath him and his eyes were dimmed, hearing how the Perrero replied
+to one of his reprimands, having returned late to the Cathedral, and
+obliging him to descend and open the door after he had gone to bed.
+The Tato made him understand, with an insolent expression, that he had
+bought a knife, and that he intended its first fleshing to be in the
+bowels of some priest or other who ground down the poor.
+
+His niece complained to Don Antolin, they paid no attention to her and
+flouted her, no woman now ever came to help her gratuitously in her
+household duties. They replied insolently that those who wanted
+servants must pay for them. What was her uncle thinking about? It was
+certainly time to assert his authority and to lay a heavy hand on
+these people.
+
+She herself, so lively and energetic in her own house, was now obliged
+to retire snorting with rage or weeping, whenever she stationed
+herself at her door. All the women of the Claverias wished to revenge
+themselves for their former thraldom, standing already on the
+declivity of disrespect.
+
+"Look at her!" screamed the shoemaker's wife to her neighbours,
+"always so dressed up, the ugly jade. She decks herself with the blood
+that vampire of an uncle sucks from the poor."
+
+And from the iron gratings of the upper Claverias, giving on the
+roofs, there was generally a voice singing the ancient couplet, no
+doubt inspired by the Cathedral garden--
+
+  "Las amas de los curas y los laureles
+  Como nunca dan fruto siempre estan verdes." [1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Priest's housekeepers--like laurels--never have any
+fruit, because they are evergreens.]
+
+It was this that ended the patience of Don Antolin; this insulting
+conjecture about himself and his niece that disturbed his miserly
+chastity. He visited the cardinal to complain of the inhabitants of
+the cloister, but His Eminence, who lived in a perpetual rage, grew
+furious listening to him and very nearly thrashed him. Why did he
+come to him with such tales? For what reason had he been given any
+authority? Was there nothing left of a man beneath his cassock? He who
+was wanting in the good discipline of the house--turn him out into the
+street at once! More energy, and be careful never to trouble him again
+with such insignificant tales, otherwise the person who would be
+turned into the street would be Silver Stick himself.
+
+Don Antolin felt a little braver after this interview, although he
+swore mentally never again to visit that terrible prelate. He was
+determined to reassert his authority, by punishing the weakest, whom
+he considered as the origin of all these scandals. The shoemaker
+should be expelled from the Claverias, as he was there through
+no other right but that his wife had been born there. Mariquita,
+bewildered by her uncle's energy, must needs speak to some one about
+these intentions, and so the news circulated through the cloister.
+
+Don Antolin did not dare to move a step further, terrified by the
+silent unanimity with which the whole population rose against him.
+
+The Tato looked at him with mocking and threatening eyes, in which
+Silver Stick could plainly read "Remember the knife"; but what
+terrified Don Antolin more than anything was the silence of the
+bell-ringer, and the savage and hostile glance with which he responded
+to his words.
+
+Even the good Wooden Staff, Esteban, protested in his own way, saying
+quietly to Don Antolin:
+
+"Is it really true that you intend turning out the shoemaker? You will
+do wrong, very wrong, for after all he is very poor, and his wife was
+born in the cloister. These innovations always bring misfortune, Don
+Antolin."
+
+So the priest, finding he had no support, and seeing hostility on
+every side, put off his energetic resolutions till the following day,
+even reproving his niece when she threw his weakness in his face.
+
+The Canon Obrero, from whom he had implored help, did not care to
+disturb the blessed peace of his existence by mixing himself up in the
+quarrels of the smaller people. It was Silver Stick's own affair; he
+could punish or expel any one he thought fit without fear of anybody.
+But Don Antolin, dreading the responsibility that might accrue from
+energetic action, ended by delivering himself over to Gabriel and
+begging for his assistance. That man was the one who wielded the real
+authority in the upper cloister; all those who had listened to him
+followed his advice blindly.
+
+"Help me, Gabrielillo," said the priest with an agonised expression.
+"If you cannot restore order, this will end badly; they even insult my
+poor niece, and some day I shall turn half the people of the Claverias
+out into the street, as I hold authority from His Eminence for
+everything. Ay, senor! I do not know what has happened here; surely
+the devil must have got loose in our upper cloister! How these people
+have changed to me!"
+
+Luna guessed Don Antolin's thoughts and his allusions to the devil who
+had got loose in the cloister. That devil was himself. No doubt Silver
+Stick was right. Without intending it he had introduced discord into
+the Cathedral. He had sought calm and forgetfulness in that refuge,
+and the spirit of rebellion had followed him even into this
+concealment. He recalled his thoughts on the first day, when he was
+alone in the silent cloister; he wished to be another stone in the
+Cathedral, without thought, without feeling, to spend the rest of his
+life fixed to that ruin, with the embryonic life of the fungus on the
+buttress, but the spirit of the outside world had entered in with him.
+
+Luna remembered how travellers in time of plague had crossed the
+sanitary cordon--they were well and happy, nothing betrayed the
+infection in their bodies; but the poisonous germs travelled in the
+folds of their clothes and in their hair, carrying death without
+knowing it, helping it to leap all barriers and obstacles, without
+being in the least aware of it. He was the same, but instead of
+spreading death, he spread tumultuous and rebellious life. The protest
+of the lower orders that had been surging throughout the world, for
+more than a century, had entered with him into this still remaining
+fragment of the sixteenth century. He had awakened those men, who had
+been like the sleepers in the legend, motionless in their cave for
+ages, while the centuries rolled on and the world was transformed.
+
+The awakening of these people was sudden and violent, like that of a
+people in revolution. They were ashamed of the old errors that they
+had worshipped, and this made them receive as gospel everything that
+was new, without quailing before the consequences.
+
+It was the faith of a people which, once it takes form, rushes
+onwards, accepting everything, justifying everything, the only
+requirement being its novelty, and casting aside contemptuously those
+traditional principles which it had just abandoned.
+
+The cowardly submission of Silver Stick was the first victory of those
+more daring souls who formed Luna's surrounding. The avaricious and
+despotic priest lowered his eyes before them, smilingly anxious to
+make himself agreeable. This they owed to the master, for he was now
+the true ruler of the upper cloister. Don Antolin consulted him before
+making any arrangements, and his ugly niece smiled on Gabriel as the
+daughters of the conquered might smile on a triumphant hero.
+
+They now no longer hid themselves in the bell-ringer's house for their
+meetings; they formed a circle in the cloister during the evenings,
+discussing the audacious doctrines taught by Luna, without now being
+intimidated by the religious atmosphere. They sat with the look of
+lords, surrounding their master, while in the opposite gallery walked
+Silver Stick like a black phantom, reading his book of hours, and
+casting now and then an uneasy glance on the group. Even his ancient
+vassal, the chaplain of the nuns, had dared to leave him to go and
+listen to Gabriel.
+
+Don Antolin with the keenness of his ecclesiastical training, guessed
+the intensity of the evil produced by Luna. But for the moment his
+egoism was stronger than his reflection. Let them talk--what did it
+matter? It was only a little ebullition of pride in those people,
+nothing more. All words and wind in the head. Meanwhile they had
+better not ask for any more money! In exchange he had a very good
+auxiliary in Luna, who, sharing his authority, spared him many
+annoyances, and the Cathedral disposed of his services gratuitously as
+interpreter to the foreigners.
+
+These already began to talk of the great intelligence and education
+of the Toledan sacristans, a praise Don Antolin received as though it
+were entirely deserved by himself.
+
+Gabriel was far more alarmed than Don Antolin at the effect of his
+words; he bitterly repented having been led to speak of his past and
+of his ideals. He had sought for peace and silence, but he was
+still surrounded, though in a smaller degree, by the atmosphere of
+proselytism and blind enthusiasm, as in the days of his martyrdom.
+He had wished to efface himself and to disappear on entering the
+Cathedral, but fate mocked him, reviving the agitation in the midst
+of his concealment, to disturb the peace of that ruin. Society had
+forgotten him, but he unconsciously was agitating, and drawing to
+himself the attention of the outside world.
+
+The enthusiasm of these neophytes was a danger, and his brother, the
+Wooden Staff, without understanding the full extent of the evil,
+warned him with his usual good sense.
+
+"You are turning the heads of these poor men, with the things you
+tell them. Be careful; they are very well meaning, but they are very
+ignorant. And having been ignorant all their lives, it is dangerous to
+turn such men into sages at one blow. It is as if I, being accustomed
+to the homely stew, were taken to-day to His Eminence's table. I
+should gorge myself and drink too much; at night I should have a
+colic, and should probably hop the twig."
+
+Gabriel acknowledged the truth of this prudent advice, but he could
+not draw back--he was driven on by the affection of his disciples and
+his own ardour as propagandist. It was a great delight to him to see
+the wonder in those virgin minds, entering tumultuously into the
+luminous palaces constructed by human thought during the last century.
+
+The description of the future of humanity inflamed all Luna's ardour.
+He spoke of the happiness of men, after a revolutionary crisis which
+would change all the organisation of humanity with mystic rapture,
+like a Christian preacher describing heaven.
+
+"Man ought to seek happiness solely in this world, for after death
+there only existed the infinite life of matter with its endless
+combinations, but the human being was effaced as entirely as a plant
+or an animal--he fell into oblivion when he sank into the tomb.
+Immortality of the soul was one of the illusions of human pride worked
+up by religions, who laid their foundations on this lie. It was
+only in this life that man could find heaven. Everyone embarked on
+immensity in the same ship, the earth. We were all comrades in our
+dangers and our struggles, and we ought to look upon one another
+as brothers seeking the common welfare. And what about the unequal
+distribution of goods, the division of classes, the ability to work,
+and, above all, the struggle for existence, that the philosophers and
+poets of the oppressing classes paint as an indispensable condition of
+progress? Communism is the holiest aspiration of humanity, the
+divine dream of man since he began to think in the first dawn of
+civilisation. Religions had endeavoured to establish it, but religion
+had been shipwrecked and was moribund, and only science could enforce
+it in the future. They must stop on the way they were going, as
+humanity was marching on the road to perdition, therefore it was
+necessary to return to the point of departure. The first man who had
+cultivated a portion of the earth and garnered the fruits of his
+toil, thought it was his for ever, and left it to his sons as their
+property; they engaged other men to cultivate it for them--so these
+men became robbers, appropriators of the universal heritage. It was
+the same with those who possessed themselves of the invention of
+human genius, machines, etc., for the benefit of a small majority,
+subjecting the rest of mankind to the law of hunger. No, everything
+was for everyone. The earth belonged to all human beings without
+exception, like the sun and the air; its products ought to be divided
+between everyone with due regard to their necessities. It was shameful
+that man, who only appeared for an instant on this planet--a minute,
+a second, for his life was no more than this in the life of
+immensity--should spend this mere breath of existence fighting with
+his kin, robbing them, excited by the fever of plunder, not even
+enjoying the majestic calm of a wild beast, which when it has eaten,
+rests, without ever thinking of doing harm from vanity or avarice.
+There ought to be neither rich nor poor--nothing but men. The only
+inevitable division must be that between brains more or less highly
+organised. But the wise, from the fact of being so, ought to show
+their greatness, sacrificing themselves for the more simple, without
+seeking to assist the greatness of their minds by material advantages;
+for in stomachs there were no categories or ranks. Everything that
+exists, even the smallest production that man considers his exclusive
+work, is the work of the past and present generations. By what right
+can anyone say 'This is mine, mine only'? Man is not consulted before
+he is formed if he wishes to burst forth into life. He is born--and
+from the fact of being born he has a right to well-being." Gabriel
+proclaimed his supreme formula, "Everything for everyone, and
+well-being for all."
+
+His friends listened in profound silence. The right to well-being
+sank profoundly into their minds; it was the saying that most cruelly
+touched their poverty, taunted by the contrast of the wealth of the
+Church.
+
+Don Martin, the young chaplain, was the only one who timidly raised
+any objections to the master's sayings. He wished to know if, when
+everything was for everyone, when man should have recognised his
+right to happiness, without laws or compulsion to force him to
+production--would he work? seeing that work was a necessity, and not a
+virtue, as those who employ labour say, to glorify it.
+
+Gabriel loudly affirmed the necessity of work in the future. The
+man of the future would work without being forced to do so by his
+necessities; he would not be ruled by the body and its imperious
+requirements; his conscience would be inspired with the clear
+understanding of solidarity with his fellows and the certainty that
+if one abandoned social duties others would follow the example, thus
+rendering life in common impossible and so returning to the actual
+times of poverty and robbery.
+
+"Why do not the few men of culture and sound conscience living at
+present kill and rob?" exclaimed Gabriel. "It is not through fear of
+the law and its representatives, for a clear intelligence, if it takes
+the trouble, can easily find ways of evading both; neither can it be
+through fear of eternal penalties and divine punishment, as such
+men do not believe in these inventions of the past. It is from that
+respect to his fellows which is felt by every elevated mind, from the
+consideration that all violence should be avoided, for if everyone
+gave themselves over to it, all social life must disappear. When this
+understanding, which now only belongs to a few, embraces all humanity,
+men will live ruled by their own consciences without laws or police,
+working from social duty, without requiring man to be the only spring
+of activity, and sweating without compassion to be the only way to
+ease."
+
+Throughout all his revolutionary raptures Luna had no illusions as to
+the present. Humanity was at present an infected land, in which the
+best seeds rotted, or which at best produced only poisonous fruits; we
+must wait till the equalising revolution begun in the human conscience
+a century ago should be completed, after that it would be possible
+and easy to change the basis of society; he had a blind faith in
+the future. Man must progress in the same way as communities; these
+reckoned their evolutions by centuries, but man by millions of
+years. How could a man of to-day be compared to the biped animal of
+prehistoric times, though bearing visibly the traces of the animalism
+from which he had lately emerged? Living in fellowship with his
+ancestors the monkeys, the principal difference being the first
+babblings of speech, and the first trembling spark that began to burn
+in his brain.
+
+From the ravenous beast of former days, suffering from all the cruel
+forces of nature and living in fraternal misery with the lower
+animals, the man of to-day was evolved, asserting his superiority to
+his ancestors, dominating all nature. From the men of to-day, in whom
+the passions of their former animalism are finding their equilibrium
+with the gradual unfolding of the mind, will arise that superior and
+perfect being indicated by philosophers, pure from all animal egoism,
+and endeavouring to change the actual cruel, restless, and uncertain
+life, into a period of happy and prosperous equality.
+
+The animalism at present dominant in man exasperated Gabriel; it was
+the great stumbling-block to all his generous views of the future,
+and he explained to his astonished listeners the transformations of
+natural creatures and of the origin of man, and the wondrous poem of
+the evolution of nature from the original protoplasm to the infinite
+varieties of life. We still carry in us the marks of our origin. One
+could not help laughing at the God of the Jews, who had modelled a man
+from clay, like a sculptor. Unlucky artist! Science pointed out much
+carelessness and bungling in His work, without being able to justify
+such mistakes. The skin of our bodies did not serve us as a covering
+like the fur of an animal. How could we then believe it? Why were
+nipples given to human males, if they were of no use for milk giving?
+Why was the vertebral column at the back of the body as in quadrupeds,
+when it would have been more logical, in creating a man who stands on
+his feet, to place it in the centre of the body as a strong support,
+thus avoiding the curvatures and weakness of the spine that are now
+suffered by this disequilibrium in the support of its weight?
+
+Gabriel enumerated the various inexplicable inconsistencies and
+incongruities found in the human body, presuming it to be of divine
+origin.
+
+"I feel prouder," said he, "of my animal origin; to be a lineal
+descendant of inferior beings than to have emerged imperfect from the
+hand of a stupid God. I feel the same satisfaction that a nobleman
+feels in speaking of his ancestors when I think of our remote
+forefathers, those men-beasts, exposed like the animals to all the
+cruel severity of nature, who, little by little, through hundreds of
+centuries, have transformed themselves, triumphing in the unfolding of
+their minds, their brains, and their social instincts. Making clothes,
+edible foods, arms, tools and houses, neutralising the exterior
+influences of nature. What hero or discoverer in the four thousand
+years comprising our history can compare with those elementary men who
+have slowly evolved and maintained on the earth the existence of our
+species, exposed thousands of times to annihilation. The day on which
+our ancestors cared for the sick and wounded, instead of abandoning
+them as all animals had previously done; on which the first seed was
+planted, the first arrow shot, brought nature face to face with the
+greatest of her revolutions. Only one in the future will be able to
+equal it; if man in remote times was able to free his body, now he
+requires the great revolution to free his mind. The races who go
+furthest in their intellectual development will be the ultimate
+survivors; they will be masters of the earth, destroying all others.
+The least wise in those days will probably be far superior to the most
+cultivated intellects of the present times. Each individual will find
+his happiness in the happiness of his fellows, and no one will try to
+exercise compulsion on his neighbour. No laws or penalties will exist,
+and voluntary associations will supply through the influence of reason
+the present power of authority. This will be in the future--far, very
+far off. But what do centuries matter in the life of humanity! They
+are like seconds in our existence. On the day when man shall be
+transformed into this superior being, with the full development of
+all his intellectual faculties, now so embryonic, this earth will no
+longer be the vale of tears spoken of by religion, but the paradise
+dreamed of by the poets."
+
+In spite of the enthusiasm with which Gabriel spoke, his hearers did
+not appear to share these illusions. They were silent, and their
+attitude was one of coldness before the immense distance of that
+future to which their master confided all his hopes of universal
+prosperity. They wished for it at once, with the eagerness of a child
+who is shown a dainty which is afterwards put out of its reach. The
+sacrifices, the slow work for the future, struck no chord in their
+minds. From Gabriel's explanations they only drew the fact that they
+were unhappy, but that they had the same right to happiness and
+comfort as those privileged few whom they had formerly respected in
+their ignorance. As a certain portion of human felicity belonged to
+them they wished to possess it at once, without delay or resistance,
+with all the fervour of one claiming what belongs to him. Luna
+remarked in this silence a certain rebellion, like those ironical
+gestures with which his companions in Barcelona had received his
+illusions about the future and his anathemas against violence of
+action.
+
+These ardent neophytes outdistanced their teacher; they listened to
+him with respect, but they were obliged to isolate themselves from him
+in order to digest his teachings in their own fashion. Don Martin was
+the only one who followed him in his visionary excursions into the
+future. The bell-ringer, the organ-blower, the shoemaker and the Tato
+now went up nightly to the bell-ringer's house, without summoning
+the master, and there they gave vent to their hatred of everything
+existing, under the forgotten old prints, yellow and wrinkled, which
+pictured the inglorious episodes of the Carlist war.
+
+This nocturnal reunion was a continual complaint against social
+injustice. They thought themselves even more unfortunate when they
+took an exact review of their situation. The shoemaker recalled with
+tearful eyes the little child who had died of hunger, and spoke of the
+misery of his offspring, so numerous as to render his work useless.
+The organ-blower spoke of his miserable old age, the six reals daily
+during his life, without any hope of earning more. The Tato, in the
+fits of rage of a bullying coxcomb, proposed to behead all the canons
+in the choir some evening and then to set fire to the Cathedral. And
+the bell-ringer, gloomy and scowling, said aloud, following up the
+course of his thoughts:
+
+"And below so much wealth that is of no use to anybody--amassed from
+pure pride--thieves! robbers!"
+
+Gabriel returned to pass his days by Sagrario's side. His disciples
+hid themselves daily more carefully in their isolation in the tower.
+Don Martin had his mother ill, and could not leave the convent.
+
+Silver Stick felt quite satisfied with Luna seeing him alone,
+believing that it was he who had alienated his disciples, cutting
+short in this way his dangerous conversations so as to restore order
+in the cloister. One day he addressed him smilingly with a patronising
+manner.
+
+"You will be rewarded for your good conduct, Gabrielillo, much sooner
+than you expect. Did I not say I would look out for something for you
+in exchange for the help you gave me in showing the treasury? Well,
+now you have it. From next week two pesetas daily will fall into
+your purse like two suns. Are you equal to staying all night in the
+Cathedral? The older watchman, the one who was a civil guard, is tired
+of it, and is going home to his own village. It appears that since his
+dog died he has taken a dislike to the duties. The other watchman is
+very poorly and wants a companion. Will you undertake it? If it were
+winter I should not say anything about it, as you cough too much to
+spend the night down there; but in summer the Cathedral is the coolest
+place in Toledo. What lovely nights! And by the time bad weather comes
+on we will have found you some better place. You are trustworthy,
+though your head is rather light; but you come of an honoured and
+well-known family, which is what is wanted. Do you accept?"
+
+Luna accepted, declaring his intention to Esteban, when the latter
+objected on account of his weak health. He would only undertake the
+watchman's duties during the summer; besides, two pesetas a day were
+even more than Wooden Staff earned; the income of the family would be
+doubled, and it would be a pity to lose such a good opportunity.
+
+That evening Sagrario spoke to her uncle praising the energy which
+prompted him to undertake any sort of work so as not to be a charge on
+the family.
+
+They were in the cloister leaning on the balustrade; below was the
+dark garden with its waving branches, above a summer sky veiled by the
+heat haze which dulled the brightness of the stars. They were alone
+in the four-sided gallery. The lighted windows of the Chapel-master's
+little room threw a square of red on the opposite roofs. They could
+hear the harmonium playing slowly and sadly, and when it stopped the
+shadow of the musician passed and repassed over the square of light
+with his nervous gestures, which, enlarged by the reflection, appeared
+the most grotesque contortions.
+
+The nocturnal calm and darkness surrounded Gabriel and Sagrario with a
+gentle caress; that mysterious freshness was falling from above which
+seems to revive drooping spirits and magnify old remembrances. The
+Church seemed to them as an immense sleeping beast, in whose lap they
+had found peace and protection.
+
+Gabriel spoke of his past, in order to convince the young woman that
+his work in the Cathedral would not be very arduous. He had suffered
+much; there was no bitterness that he had not tasted; he had endured
+hunger, terrible hunger, in his peregrinations through the world.
+He did not know which were the most painful, his martyrdom in the
+dungeons of the gloomy castle, or his days of despair in the streets
+of crowded cities, seeing food and gold through the glass windows of
+the shops while his head was swimming with the dizziness of hunger.
+He could endure his misery while he wandered alone through the cruel
+selfishness of civilisation; but the most horrible days were those
+in which he shared his vagabond poverty with Lucy, his gentle and
+melancholy companion.
+
+Gabriel spoke of the Englishwoman as of a dead sister.
+
+"Had you known her, Sagrario, you would have loved her. She was a
+strong woman, a brave companion, united to me more by the community of
+thought than by carnal attraction. I loved her when I first saw her.
+I hardly know if it was love that we felt; poets have written so many
+lies about love, and have falsified it in such an exaggerated way,
+that I do not for certain know what it is."
+
+He spoke to the young woman of love, explaining it according to his
+beliefs. Goethe had defined it as an "elective affinity," speaking
+as a man of science and not as a poet, using the term that chemistry
+gives to the tendency of two substances to unite and form a distinct
+product. Two beings between whom no affinity existed could meet
+through false laws of life in perpetual contact, but they could not
+mix or merge into one another. This happened more often than not
+between the individuals of different sexes who peopled the earth; a
+passing sentimentality could exist, or carnal caprice, but seldom
+love. The poor invalid Lucy was his affinity; they met and they loved.
+In their pity for human miseries, their hatred of inequalities and
+injustice, their self-abnegation in the cause of the humble and
+unfortunate they were equal; they were not only united by their hearts
+but by their brains.
+
+She was plain, with a soft and sad plainness that seemed to Luna the
+supreme ideal of beauty in the midst of that struggling world of
+unfortunates and victims. She was the image of a woman of the people
+reared in the workmen's slums of great cities, anaemic from the
+mephitic air of the den in which she was born and from bad and
+insufficient food, with a wretched body, all feminine graces paralysed
+in their development by the rough work done in her childhood. Her
+lips, that great ladies paint red, were violet; the only beauty of her
+face lay in her eyes, those windows of sorrow, made larger by the cold
+nights passed in the street from horror of the scenes she saw in her
+childhood; her father, drunken, with the brutal wish of a workman to
+forget, who, after imagining that his tavern was a paradise, would
+become infuriated with the poverty of his home and beat the whole
+family.
+
+"She was like all you women of the lower orders, Sagrario. Your beauty
+only lasts an instant; in fact, it can only exist in the first flush
+of youth. A woman of the poor cannot be beautiful unless she gets
+out of her class. Daily labour makes her lose all her freshness and
+strength, and maternity in the midst of poverty absorbs even the
+marrow in her bones. When her daily work is ended and she returns
+home, she has to sweep and wash, and shrivel herself to a mummy before
+the smoky kitchen stove. I loved Lucy for that reason, because she was
+consumed and drained by sweating, because she was the girl worker
+in all her melancholy decadence, born beautiful and made hideous by
+social injustice."
+
+He recalled the unbending and deadly hatred with which that little
+woman spoke so quietly of the supreme vengeance of the fallen, of the
+revenge for long years of oppression. She showed herself more firmly
+rooted and fiercer in her illusions than Gabriel, and he would praise
+her daring as a propagandist, her perilous expeditions into the great
+towns, running the gauntlet of watchful police, carrying on her arm
+that old bonnet-box full of pamphlets that might have sent her to
+prison. She was the "miss" animated by evangelical propaganda, who
+travels over the globe distributing Bibles with a cold smile, fearless
+alike of the mockery of civilisation, or the brutality of savages; but
+what Lucy distributed were incitements to revolution; she did not seek
+out the happy but the despairing, in the factories and infected
+slums. The two endured hunger, finding themselves often separated by
+persecution and prison, but they met again, continuing their romantic
+career, till poverty and consumption ended her life.
+
+Gabriel wept, remembering their last interview in an Italian hospital,
+clean and sweet, but with the frozen atmosphere of charity. As he was
+not her husband he could only visit her twice a week. He presented,
+himself ragged and downcast, seeing her in an armchair daily paler
+and weaker, her skin of a waxen transparency and her eyes immensely
+enlarged. He knew a little about everything, and he could not conceal
+from himself the gravity of her illness. She waited quietly for death.
+"Bring me some roses," she said, smiling to Gabriel, as if in the last
+moment of her life she wished to acknowledge the natural beauty of the
+world made hideous and darkened by man. The "companion" lived on dry
+bread, refusing the help of his comrades only a little less poor than
+himself, sleeping on the ground, in order to take her on his next
+visit a bunch of flowers.
+
+"She died, Sagrario," groaned Luna, "and I know not where they buried
+her; possibly she may have served for a lecture at the school of
+anatomy; she fell into the common grave like those soldiers whose
+heroism remains in obscurity. But I still see her; she has followed me
+in all my misfortunes, and I think she lives again in you."
+
+"But uncle," said Sagrario, gently, touched by his recital, "I cannot
+do what she did. I am an unhappy woman, without strength or will."
+
+"Call me Gabriel," said Luna, vehemently. "You are my Lucy, who again
+crosses my path; I knew it from the first, and for a long while I have
+been searching my feelings, analysing my will, and I have arrived at
+one certainty--that I love you, Sagrario."
+
+The young woman made a gesture of surprise, drawing further from him.
+
+"Do not draw away, do not fear me. I am a feeble man, you are a weak
+woman; you have suffered much, and have bid good-bye to the joys of
+the earth, but you are strong through misfortune and can look the
+truth in the face. We are both wrecks of life, and the only hope
+left us is to wait and die quietly in the desert island which is our
+refuge. We are undone, rent and swept away; Death has laid his hand
+upon us; we are fallen and shapeless rags after having passed through
+the mills of an absurd society. For this reason I love you, because
+you are my equal in misfortune; elective affinity unites us. Poor Lucy
+was the work-girl enfeebled by sweating, weakened from her birth by
+poverty. You were the girl of the people drawn from her home by the
+attraction of the well-being of the privileged; seduced, not by love,
+but by the caprices of the happy; the girl offered as a sacrifice to
+the Minotaur whose remains were afterwards thrown on to the dunghill.
+I love you, Sagrario; we are two fugitives from society, whose paths
+must join; I am hated as dangerous, you are despised as an outcast;
+misfortune has laid hold on us. Our bodies are weakened and we bear
+the wounds of the conquered, but before death claims us, let us make
+our lives sweet by love. Let us seek for roses as did poor Lucy."
+
+He pressed the young woman's hands, who, bewildered by Gabriel's
+words, knew not what to say, and wept softly. Upstairs, in the upper
+storey of the Claverias, the Chapel-master played his harmonium.
+Gabriel knew the music: it was Beethoven's last lament, the "Must it
+be," that the great genius sang before his death with a melancholy
+that made one shiver.
+
+"I love you, Sagrario," continued Gabriel, "ever since I saw you
+return to this house, bravely facing the odious curiosity of the
+people around. I have spent weeks and months by the side of your
+machine, seeing how industriously you worked. I have studied you and
+read you. You are a sincere and simple creature; your mind has none
+of the doublings and hidden corners of those complicated and tortuous
+souls used to the artifices of civilisation. I guessed day by day, by
+your gentle glance and the attention with which you listened to me,
+your gratitude for the little I was able to do for you. I remembered
+the dark period of your life, your slavery to the flesh; and finding
+me always gentle with you, protecting you from your father's anger,
+your gratitude has grown and grown, till to-day you love me, Sagrario.
+You yourself have not realised it, you know not how to explain it, but
+your being responds to mine like those chemical substances I spoke of.
+That single and eternal love is a lying invention of the poets, of
+which facts often make a mockery. One can love several people with
+equal warmth: the indispensable thing is the affinity. You who
+formerly loved a man to madness, what do you feel for me? Have I
+deceived myself? You really love me?"
+
+Sagrario continued weeping, with her head bent, as though she did
+not dare to look at Luna. He reassured her gently: she must call
+him Gabriel, speak to him as "thou." Were they not companions in
+misfortune?
+
+"I am ashamed," murmured the young woman. "So much happiness disturbs
+me. Yes, I like you. No, I love you, Gabriel. I would never have
+confessed it; I would have died sooner than reveal my secret. What am
+I that anyone should love me? For many days I have not looked in the
+glass, for I should weep at the remembrance of my lost youth. And
+then my story--my terrible story. How could I imagine that you--or, I
+should say, that thou, wouldst read my thoughts so clearly? See how
+I tremble; the shock has not yet ceased, the surprise of finding my
+secret discovered. A man like you to descend to me, ugly and sick for
+ever. No, do not speak of the other man; I forgot him long ago. And am
+I going to remember him now that you give me the charity of your love?
+No, Gabriel, you are the greatest and best of men; you are like a god
+to me."
+
+They remained silent a long while with their hands clasped, looking
+into the darkness of the murmuring garden. From above still sounded
+the lament of the genius at his fading life.
+
+Sagrario leant on Gabriel as though her strength were failing, and as
+if terrified at so much happiness, she wished to take refuge in his
+arms.
+
+"Why have I known you so late!" she said in a low voice. "I should
+have wished to love you in my youth, to be beautiful and healthy only
+for you, to have the beauty and charm of a great lady to soften the
+rest of your life. But my gratitude can offer you little, nothing but
+ill-health; the seeds of death are in me, and slowly I shall fade
+away. Gabriel, why did you set your heart on me?"
+
+"Because you are an invalid, and unfortunate as I am. Our misery is
+the loving affinity. Besides, I have never loved like most men. In my
+travels I have seen the most beautiful women in the world without the
+slightest glow of desire. I am not of an amorous temperament. From my
+adventures in Paris when I was young I always returned with a feeling
+of disgust. My love for the unfortunate has mastered me to the point
+of blunting my feelings. I am like a drunkard or a gambler, who,
+obsessed by their passion, feel nothing before a woman. A studious
+man, buried in his books, feels very little the calls of sex. My
+passion is pity for the disinherited, and hatred of injustice
+and inequality. It has so entirely absorbed me, enslaving all my
+faculties, that I have never had time to think of love. The female
+does not attract me, but I worship a woman when I see her sad and
+unfortunate. Ugliness makes more impression on me than beauty, because
+it speaks to me of social infamies, it shows me the bitterness of
+injustice, it is the only wine which revives my strength. I loved Lucy
+because she was unfortunate and dying. I love you, Sagrario, because
+in your early youth you were a wanderer in life, one whom no one would
+love. My love is for you, to brighten what remains to you of life."
+
+Sagrario leant on Gabriel's breast.
+
+"How good you are!" she sighed; "what a beautiful soul!"
+
+"Yours is the same, poor Sagrario. Your life has been a snare. You
+sold yourself through hunger and despair as do thousands of others;
+you thought to find bread in the false pretences of love. Everything
+is for the privileged of this world: the arms of the father, the sex
+of the daughter, and when those arms are weakened, or the youthful
+body loses its charms, they are thrown on one side and replaced. The
+market is abundant; I love you for your misfortunes. Had I seen you
+young and beautiful as in former times, I should not have felt the
+slightest attraction. Beauty is a bar to sentiment. The Sagrario of
+former times, with her dreams of being a great lady flattered by the
+words of youthful lovers, brightly dressed like brilliant birds, would
+never have thought of a vagabond aged by misery, ugly and sick. We
+understand each other because we are unfortunate; misery allows us to
+see into each other's souls; in full happiness we should never have
+met."
+
+"It is true," she murmured, leaning her head on Gabriel's shoulder. "I
+love that misery which has allowed us to know, each other."
+
+"You will be my companion," continued Luna, in a soft tone. "We will
+pass our lives together till death breaks the chain. I will protect
+you, although the protection of a sick and persecuted man is not worth
+much."
+
+He passed his arm round the woman, raising her head with his other
+hand, fixing his eyes on those of Sagrario, which were shining in the
+starlight bright with tears.
+
+"We shall be two souls, two minds who cherish one another without
+giving rein to passion, and with a purity such as no poets have
+imagined. This night in which we have mutually confessed one to
+another, in which our souls have been laid open to one another is our
+wedding night; kiss me, companion of my life!"
+
+And in the silence of the cloister they kissed each other noiselessly,
+slowly, as though with their lips joined they were weeping over the
+misery of their past, and the brevity of a love around which death was
+circling. Above, the lament of Beethoven went on unfolding its sad
+modulations, which floated through the cloister and round the sleeping
+Cathedral.
+
+Gabriel stood erect sustaining Sagrario, who seemed almost fainting
+from the strength of her feelings; he looked up at the luminous space
+with almost priestly gravity, and said, whispering close to the young
+woman's ear:
+
+"Our life will be like a deserted garden, where amid fallen trunks and
+dead branches fresh foliage springs up. Companion, let us love one
+another. Above our misery as pariahs let spring arise. It will be a
+sad spring, without fruit, but it will have flowers. The sun shines
+for those who are in the open, but for us, dear companion, it is very
+far. But from the black depths of our well we will clasp each other,
+raising our heads, and though his heat will not revive us, we will
+adore him like a distant star."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+In the beginning of July Gabriel began his nocturnal watch in the
+Cathedral.
+
+At nightfall he went down into the cloister, and at the Puerta del
+Mollete, joined the other watchman, a sickly-looking man who coughed
+as badly as Luna, and who never left off his cloak even in the height
+of summer.
+
+"Come along, we are going to lock up!" said the bell-ringer, rattling
+his bunch of keys.
+
+After the two men had entered the church, he locked the doors from
+outside and walked away.
+
+As the days were long, there still remained two hours of daylight
+after the watchmen entered the Cathedral.
+
+"All the church is ours, companion," said the other watchman.
+
+And like a man used to the imposing appearance of the deserted church,
+he settled himself comfortably in the sacristy as in his own house,
+opening his supper basket on the chests, and spreading out his
+eatables between candelabras and crucifixes.
+
+Gabriel wandered about the fane. After many nights of watching, the
+impression produced when he first saw the immense church deserted and
+locked up had not yet faded. His footsteps resounded on the pavement,
+his strides shortened by the tombs of prelates and great men of former
+days. The silence of the church was disturbed by the strange echoes
+and mysterious rustlings; the first day Gabriel had often turned his
+head in alarm, thinking he heard footsteps following him.
+
+Outside the church the sun was still shining, the coloured wheel
+of the rose window above the great doorway glowed like a luminous
+flower-bed; below, among the pillars, the light seemed overcome by the
+darkness; the bats began to descend, and with their wings made the
+dust fall from the shafts in the vaulting. They fluttered round about
+the pillars, circling as in a forest of stone; in their blind flight
+they often struck the cords of the hanging lamps, or shook the old red
+hats with dusty and ragged tassels that hung high above the cardinals'
+tombs.
+
+Gabriel made his rounds throughout the church. He shook the iron
+railings in front of the altars to make sure they were securely
+locked, pushed the doors of the Muzarabe Chapel, and that of the
+Kings, threw a glance into the Chapter-house, and finally stopped
+before the Virgin del Sagrario; through the grating he could see the
+lamps burning, and above, the image covered with jewels. After this
+examination he went in search of his comrade, and they both sat down
+in the crossways, either on the steps of the choir or of the high
+altar; from there you could take in the whole of the church at one
+glance.
+
+The two watchmen began by carefully putting on their caps.
+
+"They will probably have ordered you," said Gabriel's companion, "to
+respect the Church, and that if you want to smoke a cigar you must go
+up to the gallery of the Locum; and that if you wish to sup you must
+go into the sacristy. They said the same to me when I first entered
+into the service of the Church. But these are only the words of people
+who sleep comfortably and quietly in their own houses. Here the
+principal thing is to keep good watch, and beyond that, each one may
+do as seems best to him to pass the night. God and the saints sleep
+during these hours; they really must want some rest after spending the
+whole day listening to prayers and hymns, receiving incense, and being
+scorched by wax tapers close to their faces. We watch their sleep,
+and, the devil! we are surely not wanting in respect if we allow
+ourselves a little liberty. Come along, companion, it is getting dark;
+let us club our suppers."
+
+So the two watchmen supped in the crossways, spreading the contents of
+their baskets on the marble steps.
+
+Gabriel's comrade carried at his belt, as his only arm, an ancient
+pistol, a present to the Obreria which had never been fired; to Luna,
+Silver Stick pointed out a carbine, a legacy to the sacristy from the
+ex-civil guard, in memory of his years of service. Gabriel made a
+gesture of repulsion. It was all right standing there, he would get it
+if it were wanted; so he left it in the corner with some packets of
+cartridges, mouldy from the damp and covered with cobwebs.
+
+As the night fell the colours from the windows above became obscured,
+and in the darkness of the naves all the lights from the various lamps
+began to shine like wavering stars; all the outlines of the church
+were lost, and Gabriel fancied himself once more sleeping at night on
+the open ground. It was only when he went the rounds with his lantern
+in his hand that the outlines of the Cathedral rose out of the shadow
+ever vaster and more mysterious. The pillars seemed to start out to
+meet him, rising suddenly up to the roof with the flashes of light
+from the lantern, the squares in the tiled floor seemed to dance with
+every swing of the light, and every now and then Gabriel could feel on
+his head the flutter of passing wings. To the screams of the bats
+were added the hooting of other frightened birds, who in their flight
+knocked against the pilasters; they were the owls who came down
+attracted by the oil in the lamps, and who nearly extinguished them
+with the sweep of their wings.
+
+Every half-hour the silence was disturbed by the sound of rusty wheels
+and springs, and then a bell with a silvery tone struck; these were
+the gilded giants of the Puerta del Reloj, marking the passing of time
+with their hammers.
+
+Gabriel's companion complained greatly of the innovations introduced
+by the cardinal for the annoyance of poor folks. In former times he
+and his old comrade, once they were locked up, could sleep as they
+pleased without fear of being reproved by the Chapter. But His
+Eminence, who was always endeavouring to find some means of annoying
+his neighbour, had placed in different parts of the Cathedral certain
+little clocks brought from abroad, and now they had to go every
+half-hour, open them and record their visit. The following day they
+were examined by Silver Stick, and if any carelessness was discovered
+he imposed a fine.
+
+"An invention of the demon not to allow us to sleep, comrade. But
+all the same we might manage a nap if we help one another. While one
+sleeps a bit the other must undertake to check these cursed machines.
+No carelessness, eh, fresh man? The pay is short and hunger great, and
+we cannot afford fines."
+
+Gabriel, always good-natured, was the one who made most rounds,
+looking scrupulously after the markers, while his companion, the Senor
+Fidel, rested quietly, praising his generosity. They had given him a
+good companion; he liked him much better than the old one, with his
+imperious manners of an old guard, always squabbling as to whose turn
+it was to get up and make the round.
+
+The poor man coughed as much as Gabriel; his catarrhs disturbed
+the silence, echoing through the naves till it seemed like several
+monstrous dogs barking.
+
+"I do not know how many years I have had this hoarseness," said the
+old man; "it is a present from the Cathedral. The doctors say I ought
+to give up this employment; but what I say is--who is to support me?
+You, companion, have begun at the best time. There is a coolness here
+that all those would envy who are generally perspiring about this time
+in the cafes of the Zocodover. We are still in summer, but you can
+imagine the damp which penetrates everything; and you should see what
+it is in winter! we must really dress up as maskers, covered with
+caps, shawls and cloaks. They have the charity to leave us a little
+fire in the sacristy, but many mornings they find us almost frozen.
+Those of the Chapter call the choir 'kill canon,' and if those
+gentlemen complain of one hour's stay in this ice-house, having eaten
+well and drunk better, you may just fancy what it is for us. You have
+had the good luck to begin in summer, but when the winter comes on you
+will just have a good time of it!"
+
+But even though it was the best part of the year, Gabriel coughed
+much, his illness increasing from the dampness of the Cathedral.
+
+On moonlight nights the church was strangely transfigured, and Gabriel
+remembered sundry operatic effects he had seen during his travels.
+The white tracery of the windows stood out against the blackness with
+milky whiteness, splashes of light glided down the pilasters, some
+even from the vaulting. These mocking spectres moved slowly along the
+pavement, mounting the opposite pillars and losing themselves in the
+darkness; those rays of cold and diffused light made the shadows seem
+even darker as they brought out of the darkness here a chapel, beyond,
+a sepulchral stone or the outline of some pilaster; and the great
+Christ, who crowned the railings of the high altar, glowed against its
+background of shadow with the brilliancy of its old gilding, like some
+miraculous apparition floating in space in a halo of light.
+
+When the cough would not allow the old watchman to sleep, he told
+Gabriel of the many years he had carried on this nocturnal life in the
+Primacy. The office had some resemblance to that of a sexton, for he
+spent most of it among the dead in the silence of desertion, never
+seeing anyone till his watch was finished. He had ended by becoming
+used to it, and it had cured him of many fears he had in his youth.
+Before, he had believed in the resurrection of the dead, in souls, and
+the apparitions of saints. But now he laughed at all that. Whole years
+he had carried on this night work in the Cathedral, and if he heard
+anything it was only the scampering of rats, who respected neither
+saints nor altars, for after all they were only wood!
+
+He only feared men of flesh and blood, those robbers who in former
+times had more than once entered the Cathedral, obliging the Chapter
+to establish this night vigilance.
+
+He entertained Gabriel with the account of all the attempts at robbery
+which had happened during the century. In the Cathedral was enough
+wealth to tempt a saint, Madrid was near, and he much feared the
+"swell" thieves. But thieves would have to be clever and fortunate
+to get the better of them. Silver Stick, the bell-ringer, and the
+sacristan made their nightly inspection before locking up, Mariano
+then taking the keys away with him to the belfry. No one could
+think of breaking the locks and bolts, for they were of antique and
+extremely strong work; besides, they two were there inside to give the
+alarm on hearing the slightest noise. Formerly, by the help of the
+dog, the watching had been more complete, for the animal was so alert
+that no passer-by could approach the doors for an instant without his
+barking. After its death the Senor Obrero spoke month after month of
+getting another, but he had never fulfilled his promise. But all the
+same, without the dog, they two were there and that meant something,
+eh! He with his old pistol which had never been fired, and Gabriel
+with his carbine, which was still standing in the corner where his
+predecessor had left it. He plumed himself upon the fear he and his
+companion would excite, but, called back to reality by Luna's smile,
+he added:
+
+"At any rate, in case of emergency we can reckon on the bell that
+summons the canons; the rope hangs down in the choir, and we have
+only to ring it. And just imagine what would happen if it rang in
+the silence of the night! All Toledo would be on foot, knowing that
+something serious was taking place in the Cathedral. With this and
+those cursed markers that will not let one sleep, one might say that
+even the king was not so well guarded at night as this church."
+
+In the morning when the watch was ended, Gabriel would return to his
+house, perished with cold, longing to stretch himself in bed. He would
+find Sagrario in the kitchen, warming the milk he was to drink before
+turning in. His gentle companion still called him "uncle" in the
+presence of the household, and only used the loving "thou" when they
+were alone. When he was in bed she would bring the steaming milk,
+making him drink it with maternal caresses, smoothing the pillows;
+after which she would carefully close the windows and doors so that no
+ray of light should disturb him.
+
+"Those nights in the Cathedral!" said she complainingly. "You are
+killing yourself, Gabriel. It is not fit for you. My father says the
+same. As it is certain there is nothing beyond death, and that we
+shall not see one another, do try and prolong your life by being
+careful. Now that we know each other, and are so happy, it would be so
+sad to lose you!"
+
+Gabriel reassured her. This would not go on beyond the summer; after
+that they would give him something better. She must not be so sad;
+such a little thing did not kill one. He would cough just as much
+living in the Claverias as passing the night in the Cathedral.
+
+After dinner he would go into the cloister, completely rested by his
+morning's sleep. It was the only time of the day in which he could see
+his friends; they either came to find him, or he went in search of
+them, going to the shoemaker's house or up into the tower.
+
+They greeted him respectfully, listening to his words with the same
+attention as before; but he noted in them a certain air of proud
+independence, and at the same time of pity, as if, although grateful
+to him for having transmitted his ideas to them, they pitied him for
+his gentle character, so inimical to all violence.
+
+"Those birds," said Gabriel to his brother, "are flying on their own
+account. They do not want me, and wish to be alone."
+
+Wooden Staff shook his head sadly.
+
+"God grant, Gabriel, that some day you may not repent of having spoken
+to them of things they cannot understand! They have greatly changed,
+and no one can endure our nephew, the Perrero. He says that if he is
+not allowed to kill bulls in order to get rich, he will kill men to
+get out of his poverty; that he has as much right to enjoyment as any
+gentleman, and that all the rich are robbers. Really, brother, by the
+Holy Virgin! have you taught them such horrible things?"
+
+"Let them alone," said Gabriel, laughing; "they have not yet digested
+their new ideas, and are vomiting follies. All this will pass, for
+they are good souls."
+
+The only thing that vexed him was that Mariano withdrew from him. He
+fled his company as if he were afraid. He seemed to fear that Gabriel
+would read his thoughts, with that irresistible power that from
+boyhood he had held over him.
+
+"Mariano, what is the matter with you?" said he, seeing him pass
+through the cloisters.
+
+"Much that is out of gear," answered his surly friend.
+
+"I know it, man--I know it; but you seem to avoid me. Why is this?"
+
+"Avoid you--I?--never. You know I always love you. When you come to
+my house you see how we all welcome you. We owe you a great deal; you
+have opened our eyes and we are no longer brute beasts. But I am tired
+of knowing so much and being so poor, and my companions are thinking
+the same. We do not care to have our heads full and our bellies
+empty."
+
+"Well, then, what remedy have we? We have all been born too-soon.
+Others will come after us, finding things better arranged. What can
+you do to right the present, when there are millions of workers in
+the world more wretched than yourselves, who have not succeeded in
+finding a better way out even at the cost of their blood, fighting
+against authority?"
+
+"What shall we do?" grumbled his companion. "That is what we shall
+see, and you will see also. We are not such fools as you think. You
+are very clever, Gabriel, and we respect you as our master, for
+everything you say is true. But it seems to us that when you have to
+do with things--practical things: you understand me? when one must
+call bread, bread, and wine, wine: am I explaining myself?--you are,
+begging your pardon, rather soft, like all those who live much in
+books. We are ignorant, but we see more clearly."
+
+He walked away from Gabriel, who-was quite unable to understand the
+true bearing of this aberration among his disciples. Several times
+when he went up to the tower to spend a few moments with his friends,
+they would suddenly cease their conversation, looking anxiously at him
+as though they feared he might have overheard their words.
+
+It was several days since Don Martin had been in the cloister. Gabriel
+knew through Silver Stick that the chaplain's mother had died, and a
+week afterwards he saw him one evening in the Claverias. His eyes were
+bloodshot, his cheeks thin, and his skin drawn as though he had wept
+much.
+
+"I come to take farewell, Gabriel. I have spent a month of sorrow and
+sleeplessness nursing my mother. The poor thing is dead; she was
+far from young, and I expected this ending, but however strong and
+resigned one may be, these blows must be felt. Now the poor old woman
+is gone I am free; she was the only tie that bound me to this Church,
+in which I no longer believe. Its dogma is absurd and puerile, its
+history a tissue of crimes and violence. Why should I lie like others,
+feigning a faith I do not feel? To-day I have been to the palace to
+tell them they may dispose of my seven duros monthly and my chaplaincy
+of nuns. I am going away. I wish not only to fly the Church, I wish
+to get out of her atmosphere; and a renegade priest could not live in
+Toledo. You see this masquerade? I wear it to-day for the last time;
+to-morrow I shall taste the first joy of my life, tearing this shroud
+into shreds, such small shreds that no one will be able to use them.
+I shall be a man. I will go far away, as far as I can. I wish to know
+what the world is like as I have to live in it. I know no one, I shall
+have no assistance. You are the most extraordinary man I have ever
+known, and here you are hidden in this dungeon by your own free will,
+concealed in a Church which to your views must be empty. I am not
+afraid of poverty. When one has been God's representative on six reals
+a day one can look hunger in the face. I will be a workman; I will dig
+the earth, if necessary. I will get employment on something--but I
+shall be a free man."
+
+As the two friends walked up and down the cloister Gabriel counselled
+Don Martin in determining the place to which he should direct his
+steps, as his thoughts wavered between Paris and the American
+republics, where emigration was most needed.
+
+As the evening fell, Gabriel took leave of his disciple; his
+fellow-watchman was waiting for him in the cloister ready for
+locking-up time.
+
+"Probably we shall never meet again," said the chaplain sadly. "You
+will end your days here, in the house of a God in whom you do not
+believe."
+
+"Yes, I shall die here," said Gabriel, smiling. "He and I hate one
+another, but all the same it seems as if He could not do without me.
+If He goes out into the streets it is I who guide His steps, and again
+at night, it is I who guard His wealth. Good-bye, and good-luck,
+Martin. Be a man without weakness. Truth is well worth poverty."
+
+The disappearance of the chaplain of nuns was effected without
+scandal. Don Antolin and the other priests thought the young man
+had moved to Madrid through ambition, to help swell the number of
+place-hunting clerics. Gabriel was the only one who knew Don Martin's
+real intentions. Besides, an astonishing piece of news, that fell on
+the Cathedral like a thunderbolt, soon caused the young priest to be
+forgotten, throwing all the gentlemen of the choir, all the smaller
+folk in the sacristies, and the whole population of the upper cloister
+into the greatest commotion.
+
+The quarrels between the Archbishop and his Chapter had ended,
+everything that had been done by the cardinal was approved of in Rome,
+and His Eminence fairly roared with joy in his palace, with the fiery
+impetuosity of his usual feelings.
+
+As the canons entered the choir they walked with bent heads, looking
+ashamed and frightened.
+
+"Well, have you heard?" they said to one another as they disrobed in
+the sacristy.
+
+In a great hurry, with flying cloaks they all left the church, every
+man his own way, without forming groups or circles, each one anxious
+to free himself from all responsibility, and to appear free from all
+complicity with the prelate's enemies.
+
+The Tato laughed with joy seeing the sudden dispersion, and the
+agitation of the gentlemen of the choir.
+
+"Run! run I The old gossip will give you something to think about!"
+
+The same preparations were made every year in the middle of August for
+the festival of the Virgin del Sagrario. In the Cathedral they spoke
+of this year's festival with mystery and anxiety, as though they were
+expecting great events. His Eminence, who had not been into the church
+for many months, in order not to meet his Chapter, would preside in
+the choir on the feast day. He wished to see his enemies face to
+face, crushed by his triumph, and to enjoy their looks of confused
+submission. And accordingly, as the festival drew near many of the
+canons trembled, thinking of the harsh and proud look the angry
+prelate would fix on them.
+
+Gabriel paid very little attention to these anxieties of the clerical
+world; he led a strange life, sleeping the greater part of the
+day, preparing himself for the fatiguing night watch, which he now
+undertook alone. The Senor Fidel had fallen ill, and the Obreria to
+avoid expense, and not to deprive the old man of his wretched pay, had
+not engaged a new companion for him. He spent the nights alone in the
+Cathedral as calmly as if he had been in the upper cloister, quite
+accustomed to the grave-like silence. In order not to sleep, he read
+by the light of his lantern any books he could get in the Claverias,
+uninteresting treatises on history in which Providence played the
+principal _role_; lives of the saints, amusing from their simple
+credulity, bordering on the grotesque; and that family Quixote of the
+Lunas', that he had so often spelt out when little, and in which he
+still found some of the freshness of his childhood.
+
+The Virgin's feast day arrived; the festival was the same as in
+other years. The famous image had been brought out of its chapel and
+occupied on its foot-board a place on the high altar. They brought out
+her mantle kept in the Treasury and all her jewels, that scintillated
+kissed by the innumerable lights, glittering and flashing with endless
+brilliancy.
+
+Before the commencement of the festival, the inquisitive of the
+Cathedral, pretending absent-mindedness, strolled between the choir
+and the Puerta del Perdon. The canons in their red robes assembled
+near the staircase lighted by the famous "stone of light." His
+Eminence would come down this way, and the canons grouped themselves,
+timidly whispering, asking each other what was going to happen.
+
+The cross-bearer appeared on the first step of the staircase, holding
+his emblem horizontally with both hands so that it should pass under
+the arch of the doorway. After, between servitors, and followed by the
+mulberry-coloured robe of the auxiliary bishop, advanced the cardinal,
+dressed in his purple, which quenched the reddish-violet of the
+canons.
+
+The Chapter were drawn up in two rows with bowed heads, offering
+homage to their prince. What a glance was Don Sebastian's! The canons,
+bending, thought they felt it on the nape of their necks with the
+coldness of steel. He held his enormous body erect in its flowing
+purple with a gallant pride, as if at the moment he felt himself
+entirely cured of the malady which was tearing his entrails, and of
+the weak heart which oppressed his lungs. His fat face quivered with
+delight, and the folds of his double chin spread out over his lace
+rochet. His cardinal's biretta seemed to swell with pride on his
+little, white and shining head. Never was a crown worn with such pride
+as that red cap.
+
+He stretched out his hand, gloved in purple, on which shone the
+episcopal emerald ring, with such an imperious gesture that one after
+another of the canons found themselves forced to kiss it. It was the
+submission of churchmen, accustomed from their seminary to an apparent
+humility which covered rancours and hatreds of an intensity unknown in
+ordinary life. The Cardinal guessed their disinclination, and gloated
+over his triumph.
+
+"You have no idea what our hatreds are," he had often said, to his
+friend, the gardener's widow. "In ordinary life few men die of
+ill-humour; he who is annoyed gives vent to it, and recovers his
+equanimity. But in the Church you may count by the hundred men who
+die in a fit of rage, because they are unable to revenge themselves;
+because discipline closes their mouths and bows their heads. Having no
+families, and no anxieties about earning their bread, most of us only
+live for self-love and pride."
+
+The Chapter formed their procession accompanied by His Eminence. The
+scarlet Perrero headed the march, then came the black vergers and
+Silver Stick, making the tiles of the pavement ring with the blows of
+their staffs. Behind came the archiepiscopal cross and the canons in
+pairs, and finally the prelate with his scarlet train spread out at
+full length, held up by two pages. Don Sebastian blessed to the right
+and to the left, looking with his penetrating eyes at the faithful who
+bowed their heads.
+
+His imperious character and the joy of his triumph made his glance
+flash. What a splendid victory! The Church was his home, and he
+returned to it after a long absence with all the majesty of an
+absolute master, who could crush the evil-speaking slaves who dared to
+attack him.
+
+The greatness of the Church seemed to him at that moment more glorious
+than ever. What an admirable institution! The strong man who arrived
+at the top was an omnipotent god to be feared. Nothing of pernicious
+and revolutionary equality. Dogma exalted the humility of all before
+God; but when you came to examples, flocks were always spoken of, and
+shepherds to direct them. He was that shepherd because the Omnipotent
+has so ordered it. Woe to whoever attempted to dethrone him!
+
+In the choir his delighted pride tasted an even greater satisfaction.
+He was seated on the throne of the archbishops of Toledo, that seat
+which had been the star of his youth, the remembrance of which had
+disturbed him in his Episcopacy, when the mitre had travelled through
+the provinces, waiting for the hour to rise to the Primacy. He stood
+erect under the artistic canopy of the Mount Tabor, at the top of four
+steps, so that all in the choir could see him and recognise that he
+was their prince. The heads of the dignitaries seated at his side were
+thus on a level with his feet. He could trample on them like vipers
+should they dare to rise again, striking at his most intimate
+affections.
+
+Fired by the appreciation of his own grandeur and triumph, he was the
+first to rise, or to sit down; as is directed in the rubric of the
+services, he joined his voice to those in the choir, astonishing them
+all by the harsh energy of his singing; the Latin words rolled from
+his mouth like blows upon those hated people, and his eyes passed with
+a threatening expression over the double row of bent heads.
+
+He was a fortunate man, who had risen from place to place, but he
+never felt a satisfaction so deep, so complete as at that moment. He
+himself was startled at his own delight, at that orgy of pride that
+had extinguished his chronic ailments; it seemed to him as though he
+were spending in a few hours the stores of enjoyment of his whole
+life.
+
+As the mass was ending, the singers and lower people in the choir, who
+were the only ones who dared to look at him, were alarmed, seeing him
+suddenly grow pale, rise with his face discomposed, pressing his hands
+to his breast. The canons noticing it, rushed towards him, forming a
+crowded mass of red vestments in front of his throne. His Eminence was
+suffocating, fighting against that circle of hands who instinctively
+clutched at him.
+
+"Air!" he moaned, "air! Get out from before me with a thousand curses!
+Take me home!"
+
+Even in the midst of his agony, he recovered his majestic gesture
+and his old soldiering oaths to drive away his enemies. He was
+suffocating, but he would not allow the canons to see it: he guessed
+the delight many of them must feel beneath their compassionate manner.
+Let no one touch him! He could manage for himself! So leaning on two
+faithful servants, he began his march, gasping, towards the episcopal
+staircase, followed by great part of the Chapter.
+
+The religious function ended hurriedly. The Virgin Would forgive it,
+she should have a better solemnity next year; and all the authorities
+and invited guests left their seats to run in search of news to the
+archiepiscopal palace.
+
+When Gabriel woke, past mid-day, every one in the upper cloister was
+talking of His Eminence's health. His brother inquired of the Aunt
+Tomasa who had just come from the palace.
+
+"He is dying, my sons," said the gardener's widow; "he cannot escape
+from it. Dona Visitacion signalled it to me from afar, weeping, poor
+thing! He cannot be put to bed, for his chest is heaving like a
+broken bellows. The doctors say he will not last till night. What a
+misfortune! And on a day like this!"
+
+The agony of the ecclesiastical prince was received in funereal
+silence. The women of the Claverias went backwards and forwards with
+news from the palace to the upper cloister; the children were shut up
+in the houses, frightened by their mothers' threats if they attempted
+to play in the galleries.
+
+The Chapel-master, who was generally indifferent to events in the
+Cathedral, went nevertheless to inquire of His Eminence's condition.
+He had a plan which he quickly explained to the family during dinner.
+The funeral of a cardinal deserved the execution of a celebrated mass,
+with a full orchestra recruited in Madrid. He had already cast his
+eyes on the famous Requiem of Mozart; that was the only reason for
+which he was interested in the prelate's fate.
+
+Gabriel, looking at his companion, felt the gentle selfishness that a
+living man feels when a great man dies.
+
+"So the great fall, Sagrario, and we, the sickly and wretched, have
+still some life before us."
+
+At the hour of locking up the church he went down to begin his watch.
+The bell-ringer was waiting for him with the keys.
+
+"How about the Cardinal?" inquired Gabriel.
+
+"He will certainly die to-day, if he is not already dead."
+
+And afterwards he added:
+
+"You will have a great illumination to-night, Gabriel. The Virgin is
+on the high altar till to-morrow morning, surrounded by wax tapers."
+
+He was silent for a moment, as if undecided about Something.
+
+"Possibly," he added, "I may come down and keep you company a little.
+You must be dull alone; expect me."
+
+When Gabriel was locked into the church, he caught sight of the high
+altar, resplendent with lights. He made his usual trial of doors and
+railings; visited the Locum and the large lavoratories, where once
+some thieves had concealed themselves, and after he was quite certain
+that there was no human being in the church except himself, he seated
+himself in the crossways with his cloak round him, and his basket of
+supper.
+
+He sat there a long while, looking through the railings at the Virgin
+del Sagrario. Born in the Cathedral and brought up as a child by his
+mother, who knelt with him before the image, he had always admired it
+as the most perfect type of beauty. Now he criticised it coldly with
+his artistic eye. She was ugly and grotesque like all the very rich
+images; sumptuous and wealthy piety had decked her out with their
+treasures. There was nothing about her of the idealism of the Virgin
+painted by Christian artists; she was much more like an Indian idol
+covered with jewels. The embroidered dress and mantle stood out with
+the stiffness of stone folds, and over the head-dress sparkled a crown
+as large as a helmet, diminishing the face. Gold, pearls and diamonds
+shone on every part of her vestments, and she wore pendants and
+bracelets of immense value.
+
+Gabriel smiled at the religious simplicity which dressed heavenly
+heroes according to the fashions of the earth.
+
+The faint twilight glimmering through the windows and the wavering
+flame of the tapers animated the face of the image as if she were
+speaking.
+
+"Even as I am!" said Gabriel to himself. "If a holy person were in my
+place he would think the Virgin was laughing one moment and crying the
+next; with a little imagination and faith, behold here is a miracle!
+These flickerings of light have been an inexhaustible mine for the
+priests, even the Venus' of former times changed the expression of
+their faces at the pleasure of the faithful, just like a Christian
+image."
+
+He thought a long time about miracles, the invention of all religions,
+and as old as human ignorance and credulity.
+
+It was now quite dark. After supping frugally, Gabriel opened a book
+that he carried in his basket and began to read by the light of his
+lantern. Now and then he raised his head, disturbed by the fluttering
+and screams of the night birds, attracted by the extraordinary
+brilliancy of the countless wax tapers. The time passed slowly in the
+darkness; the silvery sound of the warriors' hammers re-echoed through
+the vaulting. Luna got up and visited the markers to record his visit.
+
+Ten o'clock had struck when Gabriel heard the wicket of the Puerta de
+Santa Catalina open quickly but without violence, as though a key had
+been used. Luna remembered the bell-ringer's offer, but soon he heard
+the sound of many steps magnified by the echo as if a whole host were
+advancing.
+
+"Who goes there?" shouted Gabriel, rather alarmed.
+
+"It is us, man," answered from the darkness the husky voice of
+Mariano. "Did I not tell you we should come down?"
+
+As they came into the crossways, the light from the high altar fell
+full upon them, and Gabriel saw the Tato and the shoemaker with the
+bell-ringer. They wished to keep Luna company part of the night, so
+that his watch should not be so wearisome, and they produced a bottle
+of brandy, of which they offered him some.
+
+"You know I do not drink," said Gabriel. "I have never cared for
+alcohol; wine sometimes, and very little of that. But where are you
+all going to, dressed out as for a feast day?"
+
+The Tato answered hurriedly. Silver Stick locked up the Claverias at
+nine, and they wished to spend the night out of bounds. They had been
+some time at a cafe in the Zocodover, feasting like lords. They
+had had all sorts of adventures, that was a night quite out of the
+ordinary way, more especially as all the town was in commotion about
+the Archbishop.
+
+"How is he going on?" inquired Gabriel.
+
+"I believe he died half-an-hour ago," said the bell-ringer. "When
+I went up to my house for the keys, a doctor was coming out of the
+palace and he told one of the canons. But let us sit down."
+
+They all sat down, in their embroidered caps, on the steps of the high
+altar railing. Mariano put his bunch of keys on the ground, a mass of
+iron as big as a club. There were keys of every age, some of iron,
+very large, rough and rusty, showing the old hammer marks and with
+coats of arms near the bows; others, more modern were clean and bright
+as silver, but they were all very large and heavy, with powerful
+indented teeth, proportionate to the size of the edifice.
+
+The three friends seemed extraordinarily happy, with a nervous gaiety
+which made them catch hold of each other and laugh. They cast sidelong
+looks at the Virgin and then looked at each other, with a mysterious
+gesture that Gabriel was quite unable to understand.
+
+"You have all drunk a good deal, is it not so?" said Luna. "You do
+wrong, for you know that drink is the degradation of the poor."
+
+"A day is a day, uncle," said the Perrero; "it delights us that the
+great ones are dying. You see, I esteem His Eminence highly, but let
+him go to the devil! The only satisfaction a poor man has is to see
+that the end comes also to the rich."
+
+"Drink," said the bell-ringer, offering him the bottle. "It is a
+pleasure to find ourselves here, well and happy, while to-morrow His
+Eminence will find himself between four boards; we shall have to ring
+the little bell all day!"
+
+The Tato drank, passing the bottle to the shoemaker, who held it a
+long time glued to his gullet. Of the three he seemed the most tipsy;
+his eyes were bloodshot, he stared stonily on every side and remained
+silent, he only gave a forced laugh when anyone spoke to him, as if
+his thoughts were very, very far off.
+
+On the other hand, the bell-ringer was far more loquacious than usual.
+He spoke of the cardinal's fortune, at the wealth that would fall to
+Dona Visitacion, of the joy many of the Chapter must feel that night.
+He interrupted himself to take a pull at the brandy bottle, passing it
+afterwards to his companions. The smell of the alcohol spread through
+that atmosphere impregnated with incense and the smoke of wax tapers.
+
+More than an hour passed in this way. Mariano had stopped the
+conversation several times as if he had something serious to say and
+was vacillating, wanting courage.
+
+"Gabriel, time is passing and we have much to do and to talk about.
+It is a little past eleven, but we have still several hours to do the
+thing well."
+
+"What do you mean to say?" asked Luna, surprised.
+
+"Few words--in a nut-shell. It concerns your becoming rich and us
+also; we intend to get out of this poverty. You have noticed for
+some time that we have avoided you, that we preferred talking among
+ourselves to the pleasure of listening to you. We all know that you
+are very learned, but as far as things of this life go you are not
+worth a farthing. We have learnt a great deal from you, but that does
+not get us out of our poverty. We have spent months thinking how to
+make a lucky stroke. These revolutions of which you speak seem to us
+very far off; our grandchildren may see them, but we never shall. It
+is all right for clever people to look to the future, but ignorant
+people like us look to the present. We have employed our time
+discussing all sorts of schemes, to kidnap Don Sebastian and require
+a million of ransom, to break into the palace one night, and I don't
+know what besides! All wild ideas started by your nephew. But this
+morning in my house, while we were lamenting our poverty, we suddenly
+saw our salvation close at hand. You as the sole guardian of the
+Cathedral. The Virgin on the high altar, with the jewels that are
+locked up in the Treasury all the rest of the year, and I with the
+keys in my power. The easiest thing in the world. Let us clean out the
+Virgin and take the road to Madrid, where we shall arrive at dawn; the
+Tato knows a lot of people there among cloak stealers. We will hide
+ourselves there for a little while, and then you, who know the world,
+will guide us. We will go to America, sell the stones, and we shall be
+rich. Get up, Gabriel! We are going to strip the idol, as you say."
+
+"But this is a robbery that you are proposing!" exclaimed Luna,
+alarmed.
+
+"A robbery?" said the bell-ringer. "Call it so, if you like--and, what
+then? Are you afraid of it? More has been robbed from us, who were
+born with the right to a share of the world, but however much we look
+round we cannot find a vacant place. Besides, what harm do we do to
+anybody? These jewels are of no use to the bit of wood they cover, it
+does not eat, it does not feel the cold in winter, and we are poor
+miserable creatures. You yourself have said it, Gabriel, seeing our
+poverty. Our children die of hunger on their mother's knees, while
+these idols are covered with wealth, come along, Gabriel, do not let
+us lose any more time."
+
+"Come along, uncle," said the Tato, "have a little courage. You must
+admit we ignorant people know how to manage things when it comes to
+the point."
+
+Gabriel was not listening to them; surprise had made him fall into a
+reverie of self-examination. He thought--terrified of the great error
+he had committed--he saw an immense gulf opening between himself and
+those he had believed to be his disciples. He remembered his brother's
+words. Ah, the good sense of the simpleminded! He, with all his
+reading, had never foreseen the danger of teaching these ignorant
+people in a few months what required a whole life of thought and
+study. What happened to people stirred up by revolution was happening
+here on a small scale. The most noble thoughts become corrupted
+passing through the sieve of vulgarity; the most generous aspirations
+are poisoned by the dregs of poverty.
+
+He had sown the revolutionary seed in these outcasts of the Church,
+drowsing in the atmosphere of two centuries ago. He had thought to
+help on the revolution of the future by forming men, but on awaking
+from his dreams he found only common criminals. What a terrible
+mistake! His ideas had only tended to destruction. In removing from
+the dulled brains the prejudices of ignorance, and the superstitions
+of the slave, he had only succeeded in making them daring for evil.
+Selfishness was the only passion vibrating in them. They had only
+learnt that they were wretched and ought not to be so. The fate of
+their companions in misfortune, of the greater part of humanity,
+wretched and sad, had no interest for them. If they could get out of
+their present state, bettering themselves in whatever way they could,
+they cared very little if the world went on just as it did before;
+that tears, and pain and hunger should reign below, in order to ensure
+the comfort of those above. He had sown his thoughts in them hoping
+to accelerate the harvest, but like all those forced and artificial
+cultivations, that grow with astonishing rapidity only to give rotten
+fruit, the result of his propaganda was moral corruption. Men in the
+end, like all of them! The human wild beast, seeking his own welfare
+at the cost of his fellow, perpetuating the disorders of pain for the
+majority, as long as he can enjoy plenty during the few years of his
+life. Ah! Where could he meet with that superior being, ennobled by
+the worship of reason, doing good without hope of reward, sacrificing
+everything for human solidarity, that man-God who would glorify the
+future!
+
+"Come along, Gabriel," continued the bell-ringer. "Do not let us lose
+time it is only a few minutes' work; and then--flight!"
+
+"No," said Luna firmly, coming out of his reverie, "you shall not do
+this; you ought not to do it. It is a robbery you suggest to me, and
+my pain is great, seeing that you reckoned on me; others rob from
+fatal instinct or from corruption of soul, you have come to it because
+I tried to enlighten you, because I tried to open your minds to the
+truth. Oh! it is horrible, most horrible!"
+
+"What is the use of all these objections, Gabriel? Is it not a bit of
+wood? Whom do we harm by taking its jewels? Do not the rich rob, and
+everyone who possesses anything? Why should we not imitate them?"
+
+"For this very reason, because what you propose doing is a suggestion
+of evil, because it perpetuates once more that system of violence and
+disorder which is the root of all misery. Why do you hate the rich,
+if what they do in sweating the poor is just the same as what you are
+doing in taking possession of a thing for yourselves--understand me
+well--for yourselves--and not for all. The robbery does not scare me,
+for I do not believe in ownership nor in the sanctity of things, but
+for this very reason I detest this appropriation to yourselves and
+I oppose it. Why do you wish to possess all this? You say it is to
+remedy your poverty. That is not true. It is to be rich, to enter into
+the privileged group, to be three individual men of that detested
+minority which desires to enjoy prosperity by enslaving humanity. If
+all the poor of Toledo were now shouting outside the doors of the
+Cathedral, rebellious and emboldened, I would open the way for them, I
+would point out those jewels that you covet, and I would say, 'Possess
+yourselves of those, they are so many drops of sweat and blood wrung
+from your ancestors; they represent the servile work on the land of
+the lords, the brutal plundering of the king's cavaliers, so that
+magnates and kings may cover with jewels those idols which can open to
+them the gates of heaven. These things do not belong to you because
+you happen to be the most daring; they belong to all, as do all the
+riches of the earth. For men to lay their hands on everything existing
+in the world would be a holy work, the redeeming revolution of the
+future. To possess yourselves of some portion of what by moral right
+is not yours, would only be for you a crime against the laws of the
+land, for me it would be a crime against the disinherited, the only
+masters of the existing----"
+
+"Silence, Gabriel," said the bell-ringer harshly; "if I let you, you
+would go on talking till dawn. I do not understand you, nor do I wish
+to. We came to do you a good turn, and you treat us to a sermon. We
+wish to see you as rich as ourselves, and you answer us by talking of
+others, of a lot of people that you don't know, of that humanity who
+never gave you a scrap of bread when you wandered like a dog. I must
+treat you as I did in our youth when we were campaigning. I have
+always loved you and I admire your talents, but we must really treat
+you like a child. Come along, Gabriel! Hold your tongue, and follow
+us! We will lead you to happiness! Forward, companions!" The Tato
+and the shoemaker stood up, walking towards the railings of the high
+altar, the Tato seized one of its gates, and half opened it.
+
+"No!" shouted Gabriel with energy. "Stop! Mariano, you do not know
+what you are doing. You believe your happiness will be accomplished
+when you have possessed yourselves of those jewels. But afterwards?
+Your families remain here. Tato, think of your mother. Mariano, you
+and the shoemaker have wives--you have children."
+
+"Bah!" said the bell-ringer. "They will come and join us when we are
+in safety far away. Money can do everything--the thing is to get it."
+
+"And your children? Shall they be told their fathers were thieves!"
+
+"Bah! they will be rich in other countries. Their history will not be
+worse than that of other rich men's sons."
+
+Gabriel understood the fierce determination that animated those men.
+His endeavours to restrain them were useless. Mariano seized him,
+seeing he was trying to push between them and the altar.
+
+"Stand aside, little one," he said. "You are no use for anything. Let
+us alone. Are you afraid of the Virgin? Undeceive yourself, even if we
+carry off all she has, she will work no miracle."
+
+Gabriel attempted one final effort.
+
+"You shall do nothing. If you pass the railings, if you approach the
+high altar, I will ring the call bell, and before ten minutes all
+Toledo will be at the gates."
+
+And opening the iron gate of the choir, he entered with a decision
+that surprised the bell-ringer.
+
+The shoemaker in tipsy silence was the only one who followed him.
+
+"My children's bread!" he murmured in thickened speech. "They wish to
+rob them! They wish to keep them poor!"
+
+Mariano heard a metallic clatter, and saw the shoemaker raise his hand
+armed with the bunch of keys which had fallen on the marble steps of
+the railing, then he heard a strangely sonorous sound, as if something
+hollow was being struck.
+
+Gabriel gave one scream, and fell forwards on the ground; the
+shoemaker continued striking his head.
+
+"Do not give him any more--stop!"
+
+These were the last words Gabriel heard confusedly, as he lay
+stretched at the entrance of the choir; a warm and sticky liquid ran
+over his eyes; afterwards--silence, darkness and--nothing!
+
+His last thought was to tell himself he was dying--that probably he
+was already dead, and that only the last vital struggle remained to
+him, the last struggle of a life vanishing for ever.
+
+Still he came back to life. He opened his eyes with difficulty and saw
+the sun coming through a barred window, white walls, and a dirty and
+darned cotton counterpane. After great wandering and stumbling, he
+could collect his thoughts sufficiently to' form one idea: they had
+placed the Cathedral on his temples--the huge church was hanging over
+his head crushing him. What terrible pain! He could not move; he
+seemed fastened by his head. His ears were buzzing, his tongue seemed
+paralysed. His eyes could see feebly, as though the light were muddy
+and a reddish haze enveloped all things.
+
+He thought that a face with whiskers, surmounted by the hat of a civil
+guard, bent over him, looking into his eyes. He moved his lips, but
+no one heard a sound. No doubt it was the nightmare of his old
+persecutions returning again.
+
+They looked at him, seeing that he opened his eyes. A gentleman
+dressed in black advanced towards his bed, followed by others who
+carried papers under their arms. He guessed they were speaking to him
+by the movement of their lips, but he could hear nothing. Was he in
+another world? Were all his beliefs false, and after death did another
+life exist the same as the one he had left?
+
+He fell again into darkness and unconsciousness. A long time passed--a
+very long time. Again he opened his eyes, but now the haze was denser,
+it was not red but black.
+
+Through this veil he thought he saw his brother's face, horrified
+and drawn with fear; and the cocked hats of the civil guards, those
+nightmares, surrounding poor Wooden Staff. Afterwards, more misty,
+more uncertain, the face of his gentle companion, Sagrario, looking
+at him with weeping eyes in terrible grief, caressing him with her
+glance, fearless of the black, armed men who surrounded her.
+
+This was his last look, uncertain and clouded, as though seen by
+the light of a flying spark. Afterwards, eternal darkness and
+annihilation.
+
+As his eyes were closing for ever, a voice close to him said:
+
+"We have followed your scent, rascal; you were well hidden, but we
+have discovered you through one of your own. Now we shall see what
+account you can give of the Virgin's jewels, thief!"
+
+But the terrible enemy of God and social order could give no account
+to man.
+
+The following day he was carried out of the prison infirmary on men's
+shoulders to disappear in the common grave.
+
+The earth kept the secret of his death, that frowning Mother who
+watches men's struggles impassively, knowing that all grandeur and
+ambitions, all miseries and follies must rot in her breast, with no
+other object than the fertilisation and renovation of life.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+N.B.--The jewels were stolen from the sacristy of Toledo Cathedral in
+1868.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Shadow of the Cathedral
+by Vicente Blasco Ibanez
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SHADOW OF THE CATHEDRAL ***
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