The Shadow of the Cathedral

m morning till night the news from Madrid, for these were the days of the September revolutio

lt 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

s of Alava, Guipuscoa

sc

nging his mass. What would happen to his career now that the Church was in peril, and that the sleepy poetry of past ages,

seminary, and the professors would reply to

t. They could not see quietly what wa

llies made them smile wi

e 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

ut 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-rin

wandering life, with its continual ala

mendation that certain of the prebends of the Metropolitan Church had given him; letters lamenting gr

n 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, anxi

stealing the stranger's bread and women by force of arms, the ancient Celtiberic love of f

naries 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; sim

ves 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 s

feel shocked. The former scruples of the seminarist vanished, smothere

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

ng 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 t

ere 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

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 ho

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 charg

revented 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 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 friend

he 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 a

nt 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, a

ated, 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

se, 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

s 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

ny 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

ofs 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 t

bles 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 n

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

ind sacrifices, its self-contained and masterful manhood, in which the early sweetness was changed by the authoritative imposition of its powe

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 utterl

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

e 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

at the humanity of the future would be an immense Athens, an artistic and learned democracy governed by great thinkers, with no strifes but those o

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

e history of the creation, lost at once all His attributes, and being magnified to fill the infinite

ver which the whirlwind had passed, for his last belief, which had remained standing lik

o 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 renewin

f 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 an

uartier 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 pamphlet

ons," taking up different work with that facility of adaptation which seems universal among revolutionaries, who wander over the world penniles

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 sus

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 h

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 hi

ful 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 s

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 h

ison 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 mem

ce of former ages, with its violent procedure was resuscitated in full civilisation. The judge was distrusted as being too cultured and sc

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

ore, 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

e ravings; often Gabriel was surprised at finding himself on all fou

ights 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

ivations, 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; h

om 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 p

er member of the council, speaking in

d, so that they may be warned not to lecture any more on Tolstoi or

l 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 sh

ing their faults. On landing in England the more violent of his companions spoke of future vengeance on their persecutors, while Gabri

he was obliged to move to the Continent, although England with its absolu

ient 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 to

by a halo which terrified the masters, Gabriel fell into such extreme poverty that the little help and succour his companions could a

erciful death came slowly to his call. He thought of his brother, the only affection remaining to him in the world; he remembered the quiet

ppy family dissolved; misfortune had com

oping to die there in peace, with no other hope but to be forgotten; dying before his proper time, tasting the bitter happiness of annihil

ore automaton; he would imitate those beings who seemed to have absorbed into themselves something of the austerity of the granite buttresses, he would in