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.