“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.