“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.