Gabriel much enjoyed his aunt’s talk.  She was the only person born in the cloister who seemed to have freed herself from the soporific influence of the church.  She loved the Cathedral, as being her ancient roof-tree, but she did not retain much respect for the saints in the chapels, nor for the human dignitaries who sat in the choir.  She laughed with the happiness of a healthy and placid old woman, her seventy years being, as she said, quite free from any evil done to her neighbour.  Her language was free and easy, like that of a woman who has seen much, and does not believe in human majesty or irreproachable virtues; but the bed-rock of her character was its tolerance, her compassion for all faults, but she Was indignant with those who attempted to hide them.

“They are all men, Gabriel,” she would say to her nephew, speaking of the clergy of the Cathedral.  “Don Sebastian is only a man; all sinners who have much to answer for before God.  They cannot be anything else, and so I forgive them.  But believe me, nephew, I often feel inclined to laugh when I see the people kneeling before them.  I believe in the Virgin of the Sagrario, and a little in God; but in these gentlemen!  If you only knew them as I do!  But, when all is said and done, we must all live, and the evil is not in having faults, but in attempting to hide them; playing a farce with the shamelessness of my son-in-law who, here as you see him, is as proud as a castle, beats his breast, kisses the ground like the Beatas,[1] and yet he is anxious for my death, thinking I have something laid away in my chest; he filches what he can from the Virgin’s poor-box, steals the wax tapers, and plays tricks with what is paid for masses, and yet he would be in the street if it were not for me, who always think of my poor sick daughter and my poor little grandchildren.”

[Footnote 1:  Beata—­woman engaged in works of charity who wears the religious habit.]

When Gabriel went down to see her in the garden, she always received him with the same salutation: 

“Hola, you ghost! but to-day you are looking better, you are being patched up.  I believe your brother will pull you through with all his care.”

And then followed a comparison between her healthy and vigorous old age and his ruined youth, which was fighting so tenaciously against death.

“Here you see my seventy years, and never an illness in all my life.  Summer and winter I never hear four o’clock strike in bed, and all my teeth are as sound as in the days when Don Sebastian came in his red dress as server in the church and wanted to steal half my breakfast.  You Lunas have always been delicate; your father, long before he was my age, could barely walk, and was always complaining of rheum and of the damp in this garden.  Here am I in it constantly, and I feel just the same as when I am upstairs in the Claverias.  We, the Villalpandos, are made of iron; for, of course, we are descended from that famous Villalpando who made the screen of the high altar, the custodia, and an innumerable quantity of other things.  He really must have been a giant, to judge by the ease with which he twisted and moulded every sort of metal.”