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