Since the times of the second Cardinal de Bourbon Senior Esteban Luna
had been gardener of the Cathedral, by the right that seemed firmly
established in his family. Who was the first Luna that entered the
service of the Holy Metropolitan Church? As the gardener asked himself
this question he smiled complacently, raising his eyes to heaven, as
though he would inquire of the immensity of space. The Lunas were as
ancient as the foundations of the church; a great many generations
had been born in the abode in the upper cloister, and even before the
illustrious Cisneros built the Claverias the Lunas had lived in houses
adjacent, as though they could not exist out of the shadow of the
Primacy. To no one did the Cathedral belong with better right than
to them. Canons, beneficiaries, archbishops passed; they gained the
appointment, died, and others came in their places. It was a constant
procession of new faces, of masters who came from every corner of
Spain to take their seats in the choir, to die a few years afterwards,
leaving the vacancies to be filled again by other newcomers; but the
Lunas always remained at their post, as though the ancient family were
another column of the many that supported the temple. It might happen
that the archbishop who to-day was called Don Bernardo, might next
year be called Don Caspar, or again another Don Fernando. But what
seemed utterly impossible was that the Cathedral could exist without
Lunas in the garden, in the sacristy, or in the crossways of the
choir, accustomed as it had been for centuries to their services.
The gardener spoke with pride of his descent, of his noble and
unfortunate relative the constable Don Alvaro, buried like a king in
his chapel behind the high altar; of the Pope Benedict XIII., proud
and obstinate like all the rest of his family; of Don Pedro de Luna,
fifth of his name to occupy the archiepiscopal throne of Toledo, and
of other relatives not less distinguished.
"We are all from the same stem," he said with pride. "We all came
to the conquest of Toledo with the good King Alfonso VI. The only
difference has been, that some Lunas took a fancy to go and fight
the Moors, and they became lords, and conquered castles, whereas my
ancestors remained in the service of the Cathedral, like the good
Christians they were."
With the satisfaction of a duke who enumerates his ancestors, the
Señor Esteban carried back the line of the Lunas till it became misty
and was lost in the fifteenth century. His father had known Don
Francisco III. Lorenzana, a magnificent and prodigal prince of the
church, who spent the abundant revenues of the archbishopric in
building palaces and editing books, like a great lord of the
Renaissance. He had known also the first Cardinal Bourbon, Don Luis
II., and used to narrate the romantic life of this Infante. Brother of
the King Carlos III., the custom that dedicated some of the younger
branches to the church had made him a cardinal at nine years old. But
that good lord, whose portrait hung in the Chapter House, with white
hair, red lips and blue eyes, felt more inclination to the joys of
this world than to the grandeurs of the church, and he abandoned the
archbishopric to marry a lady of modest birth, quarrelling for ever
with the king, who sent him into exile. And the old Luna, leaping
from ancestor to ancestor through the long centuries, remembered the
Archduke Alberto, who resigned the Toledan mitre to become Governor of
the Low Countries, and the magnificent Cardinal Tavera, protector
of the arts, all excellent princes, who had treated his family
affectionately, recognising their secular adhesion to the Holy
Metropolitan Church.
The days of his youth were bad ones for the Señor Esteban; it was the
time of the war of Independence. The French occupied Toledo, entering
into the Cathedral like pagans, rattling their swords and prying into
every corner at full High Mass. The jewels were concealed, the canons
and beneficiaries, who were now called _prebendaries_, were living
dispersed over the Peninsula. Some had taken refuge in places that
were still Spanish, others were hidden in the towns, making vows for
the speedy return of "the desired." It was pitiful to hear the choir
with its few voices; only the very timid, who were bound to their
seats and could not live away from them, had remained, and had
recognised the usurping king. The second Cardinal de Bourbon, the
gentle and insignificant Don Luis Maria, was in Cadiz, the only one of
the family remaining in Spain, and the Cortes had laid their hands
on him to give a certain dynastic appearance to their revolutionary
authority.
When the war was over and the poor cardinal returned to his seat, the
Señor Esteban was moved to pity to see his sad and childlike face,
with the small round head, and insignificant appearance; he returned
discouraged and disheartened, after receiving his nephew Ferdinand
VII. in Madrid. All his colleagues in the regency were either in
prison or in exile, and that he did not suffer a like fate was solely
due to his mitre and to his name. The unfortunate prelate thought
he had done good service in maintaining the interests of his family
during the war, and now he found himself accused of being Liberal, an
enemy to religion and the throne, without being able to imagine how he
had conspired against them. The poor Cardinal de Bourbon languished
sadly in his palace, devoting his revenues to works in the Cathedral,
till he died in 1823 at the beginning of the reaction, leaving his
place to Inguanzo, the tribune of absolutism, a prelate with iron-grey
whiskers, who had made his career as deputy in the Cortes at Cadiz,
attacking as deputy every sort of reform, and advocating a return to
the times of the Austrians as the surest means of saving his country.
The good gardener saluted with equal cordiality the Bourbon Cardinal,
hated by the kings, as the prelate with the whiskers, who made all
the diocese tremble with his bitter and harassing temper, and his
arrogance as a revolutionary Absolutist. For him, whoever occupied the
throne of Toledo was a perfect man, whose acts no one should dare to
discuss, and he turned a deaf ear to the murmurs of the canons and
beneficiaries, who, smoking their cigarettes in the arbour of his
garden, spoke of the genialities of this Señor de Inguanzo, and were
indignant at the Government of Ferdinand VII. not being sufficiently
firm, through fear of the foreigners, to re-establish the wholesome
tribunal of the Inquisition.
The only thing that troubled the gardener was to watch the decadence
of his beloved Cathedral. The revenues of the archbishop and of the
Chapter had been greatly wasted during the war. What had occurred was
what happens after a great flood, when the waters begin to subside
and carry everything away with them, leaving the land bare and
uninhabited. The Primacy lost many of its rights, the tenants made
themselves masters, taking advantage of the disorders of the State;
the towns refused to pay their feudal services, as though the
necessity of defending themselves and helping in the war had freed
them for ever from vassalage; further, the turbulent Cortes had
decreed the abolition of all lordships, and had very much curtailed
the enormous revenues of the Cathedral, acquired in the centuries when
the archbishops of Toledo put on their casques, and went out to fight
the Moors with double-handed swords.
Even so, a considerable fortune remained to the church of the Primacy,
and it maintained its splendour as if nothing had happened, but the
Señor Esteban scented danger from the depths of his garden, hearing
from the canons of the Liberal conspiracies, the executions by
shooting and hanging, and the exiling, to which the king Señor Don
Fernando appealed, in order to repress the audacity of the "Negros,"
the enemies of the Monarchy and of religion.
"They have tasted the sweets," said he, "and they will return--see if
they do not return, and take what is left! During the war they took
the first bite, taking from the Cathedral more than half that was
hers, and now they will come and take the rest; they will try and
catch hold of the handle of the fryingpan."
The gardener was angry at the possibility of such a thing happening.
Ay! and was it for this that so many lord archbishops of Toledo fought
against the Moors? Conquering towns, assaulting castles and annexing
pasture lands, which all came to be the property of the Cathedral,
contributing to the great splendour of God's worship! And was
everything to fall into the dirty hands of the enemies of anything
that was holy? Everything that so many faithful souls had willed to
them on their deathbeds, queens and magnates, and simple country
gentlemen, who left the best part of their fortunes to the Holy
Metropolitan Church, in the hope of saving their souls! What would
happen to the six hundred souls, big and little, clerics and seculars,
dignitaries and simple servants who lived from the revenues of the
Cathedral?.... And was this called liberty? To rob what did not
belong to them, leaving in poverty innumerable families who were now
supported by the "great pot" of the Chapter?
When the sad forebodings of the gardener began to be realised, and
Mendizabal decreed the dismemberment, the Señor Esteban thought he
would have died of rage. But the Cardinal Inguanzo did better. Placed
in his seat by the Liberals as his predecessor had been by the
Absolutists, he thought it best to die in order to take no part in
these attempts against the sacred revenues of the Church.
The Señor Luna, who was only a humble gardener, and who therefore
could not imitate the illustrious Cardinal, went on living. But every
day he felt more and more sorrowful, knowing that for shamefully low
prices, many of the Moderates, who still came to High Mass, were
stealthily acquiring to-day a house, to-morrow a farm, another day
pasture lands, properties all belonging to the Primacy, but which had
lately been put on the list of what was called national property.
Robbers! this slow subversion and sale, that rent in pieces the
revenues of the Cathedral, caused the Señor Esteban as much
indignation as though the bailiffs had entered his house in the
Claverias to remove the family furniture, each piece of which embalmed
the memory of some ancestor.
There were times in which he thought of abandoning his garden, and
going to Maestrazgo, or to the northern provinces, in search of some
of the loyal defenders of the rights of Charles V. and of the return
to the old times. He was then forty years of age, strong and active,
and though his temperament was pacific and he had never touched a
musket, he felt himself fired by the example of certain timid and
pious students, who had fled from the seminary, and were now, so it
was said, fighting in Catalonia behind the red cloak of Don Ramon
Cabrera.
But the gardener, in order not to be alone in his big "habitacion" in
the Claverias, had married three years previously the daughter of the
sacristan, and he had now one son; besides, he could not tear himself
away from the church, he was another square block in the mountain of
stone, he moved and spoke as a man, but he felt a certainty that he
should perish at once if he left his garden. Besides, the Cathedral
would lose one of the most important props if a Luna were wanting in
its service, and he felt terrified at the bare thought of living out
of it. How could he wander over the mountains fighting, and firing
shots, when years had passed without his treading any other profane
soil beyond the little bit of street between the staircase of the
Claverias and the Puerta del Mollete?
And so he went on cultivating his garden, feeling the melancholy
satisfaction that he was at least sheltered from all the wicked
revolutionaries under the shadow of that colossus of stone, which
inspired awe and respect from its majestic age. They might curtail
the revenues of the temple, but they would be powerless against the
Christian faith of those who lived under its protection.
The garden, deaf and insensible to the revolutionary tempests that
broke over the church, continued to unfold its sombre beauty between
the arcades, the laurels grew till they reached the balustrade of the
upper cloister, and the cypresses seemed as though they aspired
to touch the roofs; the creepers twined themselves among the iron
railings, making thick lattices of verdure, and the ivy mantled the
wall of the central arbour, which was surmounted by a cap of black
slate with a rusty iron cross. After the evening choir the clergy
would come and sit in here and read, by the soft green light that
filtered through the foliage, the news from the Carlist Camp, and
discuss enthusiastically the great exploits of Cabrera, while above,
the swallows quite indifferent to human presence, circled and screamed
in the clear blue sky. The Señor Esteban would watch, standing
silently, this bat-like evening club, which was kept quietly hidden
from those belonging to the National Militia of Toledo.
When the war terminated, the last illusions of the gardener vanished,
he fell into the silence of despair and wished to know of nothing
outside the Cathedral. God had abandoned the good and faithful, and
the traitors and evil-doers were triumphant; his only consolation
was the stronghold of the temple, which had lived through so many
centuries of turmoil, and could still defy its enemies for so many
more.
He only wished to be the gardener, to die in the upper cloister like
his forefathers, and to leave fresh Lunas to perpetuate the family
services in the Cathedral. His eldest son, Tomas, was now twelve years
old, and able to help him in the care of the garden. After an interval
of many years a second son had been born, Esteban, who, almost before
he could walk, would kneel before the images in the "habitacion,"
crying for his mother to carry him down into the church to see the
saints.
Poverty entered into the Cathedral, reducing the number of canons and
prebendaries; at the death of any of the old servants, their places
were suppressed, and a great many carpenters, masons, and glaziers
who previously had lived there as workmen specially attached to the
Primacy, and were continually working at its repairs, were dismissed.
If from time to time certain repairs were indispensable, workmen were
called in from outside, by the day; many of the "habitacions" in the
Claverias were unoccupied, and the silence of the grave reigned where
previously the population of a small town had gathered and crowded.
The Government of Madrid (and you should have seen the expression of
contempt with which the old gardener emphasised those words) was in
treaty with the Holy Father to arrange something called the Concordat.
The number of canons was limited as though the Holy Metropolitan was
a college, they were to be paid by the Government the same as the
servants, and for the maintenance of worship in this most famous
Cathedral of all Spain--which, when it formerly collected its tithe,
scarcely knew where to lock up such riches--a monthly pension of
twelve hundred pesetas was now granted.
"One thousand two hundred pesetas, Tomas!" said he to his son, a
silent boy, who took very little interest in anything but his garden.
"One thousand two hundred pesetas, when I can remember the Cathedral
having more than six millions of revenue! Bad times are in store for
us, and were I anyone else I would bring you up to an office, or
something outside the church; but the Lunas cannot desert the cause of
God, like so many traitors who have betrayed it. Here we were born,
here we must die, to the very last one of the family." And furious
with the clergy, who seemed to put a good face on the Concordat and
their salaries, thankful to have come out of the revolutionary tumults
even as well as they had done, he isolated himself in his garden,
locking the door in the iron railing, and shrinking from the
assemblies of former times!
His little floral world did not change, its sombre verdure was like
the twilight that had enveloped the gardener's soul. It had not the
brilliant gaiety, overflowing with colours and scents of a garden in
the open, bathed in full sunlight, but it had the shady and melancholy
beauty of a conventual garden between four walls, with no more light
than what came through the eaves and the arcades, and no other birds
but those flying above, who looked with wonder at this little paradise
at the bottom of a well. The vegetation was the same as that of the
Greek landscapes, and of the idylls of the Greek poets--laurels,
cypress and roses, but the arches that surrounded it, with their
alleys paved with great slabs of granite in whose interstices wreaths
of grass grew, the cross of its central arbour, the mouldy smell of
the old iron railings, and the damp of the stone buttresses coloured a
soft green by the rain, gave the garden an atmosphere of reverend age
and a character of its own.
The trees waved in the wind like censers, the flowers, pale and
languid with an anaemic beauty, smelt of incense, as though the air
wafted through the doors of the Cathedral had changed their natural
perfumes.
The rain, trickling from the gargoyles and gutters of the roofs, was
collected in two large and deep stone tanks; sometimes the gardener's
pail would disturb their green covering, letting one perceive for an
instant the blue-blackness of their depths, but as soon as the circles
disappeared, the vegetation once more drew together and covered them
over afresh, without a movement, without a ripple, quiet and dead as
the temple itself in the stillness of the evening.
At the feast of Corpus, and that of the Virgin of the Sagrario in the
middle of August, the townspeople brought their pitchers into the
garden, and the Señor Esteban allowed them to be filled from these two
cisterns. It was an ancient custom and one much appreciated by the
old Toledans, who thought much of the fresh water of the Cathedral,
condemned as they were during the rest of the year to drink the red
and muddy liquid of the Tagus. At other times people came into the
garden to give little presents to Señor Esteban, the devout entrusted
him with palms for their images, or bought little bunches of flowers,
believing them to be better than those they could buy at the farms,
because they came from the Metropolitan Church, and the old women
begged branches of laurel for flavouring and for household medicines.
These incomings, and the two pesetas that the Chapter had assigned to
the gardener after the final dismemberment, helped the Señor Esteban
and his family to get on. When he was getting well on in years his
third son Gabriel was born, a child who from his fourth year attracted
the attention of all the women in the Claverias; his mother affirmed
with a blind faith that he was a living image of the Child Jesus that
the Virgin of the Sagrario held in her arms. Her sister Tomasa, who
was married to the "Virgin's Blue," and was the mother of a numerous
family which occupied nearly the half of the upper cloister, talked a
great deal about the intelligence of her little nephew, when he could
hardly speak, and about the infantile unction with which he gazed at
the images.
"He looks like a saint," she said to her friends. "You should see how
seriously he says his prayers.... Gabrielillo will become somebody;
who knows if we may not see him a bishop! Acolytes that I knew when
my father had charge of the sacristy now wear the mitre, and possibly
some day we may have one of them in Toledo."
The chorus of caresses and praises surrounded the first years of the
child like a cloud of incense; the family only lived for him, the
Señor Esteban, a father in the good old Latin style who loved his
sons, but was severe and stern with them in order that they might grow
up honourable, felt in the presence of the child a return of his own
youth; he played with him, and lent himself smilingly to all his
little caprices; his mother abandoned her household duties to please
him, and his brother hung on his babbling words. The eldest, Tomas,
the silent youth who had taken the place of his father in the care of
the garden, and who even in the depths of winter went barefooted over
the flower-beds and rough stones of the alleys, came up often bringing
handfuls of sweet-scented herbs, so that his little brother might play
with them. Esteban, the second, who was now thirteen and who enjoyed
a certain notoriety among the other acolytes on account of his
scrupulous care in assisting at the mass, delighted Gabriel with his
red cassock and his pleated tunic, and brought him taper ends and
little coloured prints, abstracted from the breviary of some canon.
Now and then he carried him in his arms to the store-room of the
giants, an immense room between the buttresses and the arches of the
nave, vaulted with stone. Here were the heroes of the ancient
feasts and holidays. The Cid with a huge sword, and four set pieces
representing as many parts of the world: huge figures with dusty and
tattered clothes and broken faces, which had once rejoiced the streets
of Toledo, and were now rotting under the roofs of its Cathedral. In
one corner reposed the Tarasca, a frightful monster of cardboard,
which terrified Gabriel when it opened its jaws, while on its wrinkled
back sat smiling, idiotically, a dishevelled and indecent doll, whom
the religious feeling of former ages had baptised with the name of
Anne Boleyn.
When Gabriel went to school all were astonished at his progress. The
youngsters of the upper cloister who were such a trial to "Silver
Stick," the priest charged with maintaining good order among the tribe
established in the roofs of the Cathedral, looked upon the little
Gabriel as a prodigy. When he could scarcely walk he could read
easily, and at seven he began to recite his Latin, mastering it
quickly, as though he had never spoken anything else in his life, and
at ten he could argue with the clergy who frequented the gardens, and
who delighted in putting before him questions and difficulties.
The Señor Esteban, growing daily more bent and feeble, smiled
delightedly before his last work; he was going to be the glory of his
house! His name was Luna, and therefore he could aspire to anything
without fear, because even Popes had come from that family.
The canons would take the boy into the sacristy after choir, and
question him as to his studies. One of the clergy belonging to the
archbishop's household presented him to the cardinal, who, after
hearing him, gave him a handful of sugared almonds and the promise of
a scholarship, so that he could continue his studies at the seminary
gratuitously.
The Lunas and all their relations more or less distant, who were
really nearly the whole population of the upper cloister, were
rejoiced at this promise; what else could Gabriel be but a priest? For
these people, attached to the church from the day of their birth, like
excrescences of its stones, who considered the archbishops of Toledo
as the most powerful beings in the world after the Pope, the only
profession worthy of a man of talent was the Church.
Gabriel went to the Seminary, and to all the family the Claverias
seemed quite deserted. The long, pleasant evenings in the house of
the Lunas came to an end, at which the bell-ringer, the vergers, the
sacristans and other church servants had been used to assemble, and
listen to the clear and well modulated voice of Gabriel, who read like
an angel--sometimes the lives of the saints, at other times Catholic
newspapers that came from Madrid, or chapters from a Don Quixote with
pages of vellum and antiquated writing--a venerable copy which had
been handed down in the family for generations.
Gabriel's life in the Seminary was the ordinary and monotonous life of
a hard-working student: triumphs in theological controversies, prizes
in heaps, and the satisfaction of being held up to his companions as a
model.
Sometimes one of the canons who lectured in the seminary would come
into the garden:--
"The lad is getting on very well, Esteban; he is first in everything,
and besides, is as steady and pious as a saint. He will be the comfort
of your old age."
The gardener, always growing older and thinner, shook his head. He
should only be able to see the end of his son's career from the
heavens, should it please God to call him there. He would die before
his son's triumph; but this did not sadden him, for the family
would remain to enjoy the victory and to give thanks to God for His
goodness.
Humanities, theology, canons, everything, the young man mastered with
an ease which surprised his masters, and they compared him to the
Fathers of the Church, who had attracted attention by their precocity.
He would very soon finish his studies, and they all predicted that his
Eminence would give him a professorship in the seminary, even before
he sang his first mass. His thirst for learning was insatiable, and it
seemed as though the library really belonged to him. Some evenings he
would go into the Cathedral to pursue his musical studies, and talk
with the Chapel-master and the organist, and at other times in the
hall of sacred oratory he would astound the professors and the Alumni
by the fervour and conviction with which he delivered his sermons.
"He is called to the pulpit," they said in the Cathedral garden. "He
has all the fire of the apostles; he will become a Saint Bernard or
a Bossuet. Who can tell how far this youth will go, or where he will
end?"
One of the studies which most delighted Gabriel was that of the
history of the Cathedral, and of the ecclesiastical princes who had
ruled it. All the inherent love of the Lunas for the giantess who was
their eternal mother surged up in him, but he did not love it blindly
as all his belongings did. He wished to know the why and the wherefore
of things, comparing in his books the vague old stories that he had
heard from his father, that seemed more akin to legends than to
historical facts.
The first thing that claimed his attention was the chronology of the
archbishops of Toledo--a long line of famous men, saints, warriors,
writers, princes, each with his number after his name, like the kings
of the different dynasties. At certain times they had been the real
kings of Spain. The Gothic kings in their courts were little more than
decorative figureheads that were raised or deposed according to the
exigencies of the moment. The nation was a theocratic republic, and
its true head was the Archbishop of Toledo.
Gabriel grouped the long line of famous prelates by characters. First
of all the saints, the apostles in the heroic age of Christianity,
bishops as poor as their own people, barefooted, fugitives from the
Roman persecution, and bowing their heads at last to the executioner,
firm in the hope of gaining fresh strength to the doctrine for which
they sacrificed their lives--Saint Eugenio, Melancio, Pelagio, Patruno
and other names that shone in the past scarcely breaking through the
mists of legend. Then came the archbishops of the Gothic era; those
kingly prelates who exercised that superiority over the conquering
kings by which the spiritual power succeeded in dominating the
barbarian conquerors. Miracles accompanied them to confound the
Arians, and celestial prodigies were at their orders to terrify and
crush those rude men of war. The Archbishop Montano, who lived with
his wife, and was indignant at the consequent murmurs, placed red-hot
coals in his sacred vestments the while he said mass, and did not
burn, demonstrating by this miracle the purity of his life. Saint
Ildefonso, not content with only writing books against heretics,
induced Santa Leocadia to appear to him, leaving in his hands a piece
of her mantle, and he enjoyed the further honour of this same Virgin
descending from heaven to present him with a chasuble embroidered by
her own hands. Sigiberto, many years after, had the audacity to
vest himself in this chasuble, and was in consequence deposed,
excommunicated and exiled for his temerity.
The only books that were produced in those times were written by the
prelates of Toledo. They compiled the laws, they anointed the heads
of the monarchs with the holy oil, they set up Wamba as king, they
conspired against the life of Egica, and the councils assembled in
the basilica of Santa Leocadia were political assemblies in which the
mitre was on the throne and the crown of the king at the feet of the
prelate.
At the coming of the Saracen invasion the series of persecuted
prelates begins again. They did not now fear for their lives as during
the time of Roman intolerance; for Mussulmen as a rule do not martyr,
and furthermore, they respect the beliefs of the conquered.
All the churches in Toledo remained in the hands of the Christian
Muzarabés[1] with the exception of the Cathedral, which was converted
into the principal mosque.
[Footnote 1: Muzarabés--Christians living among the Moors and mixing
with them; also an ancient form of service still continued in one
chapel in Toledo and in one at Salamanca.]
The Catholic bishops were respected by the Moors, as were also the
Hebrew rabbis; but the Church was poor, and the continual wars between
the Saracens and the Christians, together with the reprisals which set
a seal on the barbarities of the reconquest, made the continuance and
life of worship extremely difficult.
Having arrived at this point Gabriel read the obscure names of Cixila,
Elipando and Wistremiro. Saint Eulogio termed this last "the torch of
the Holy Spirit, and the light of Spain"; but history is silent as to
his deeds, and Saint Eulogio was martyred and killed by the Moors
in Cordova on account of his excessive religious zeal. Benito,
a Frenchman who succeeded to the chair, not to be behind his
predecessors, made the Virgin send him down another chasuble to a
church in his own country before he came to Toledo.
After these, came the interesting chronology of the warrior
archbishops, warriors of coat-of-mail and two-edged sword, the
conquerors who, leaving the choir to the meek and humble, mounted
their war-horses and thought they were not serving God unless during
the year they added sundry towns and pasture lands to the goods of the
Church. They arrived in the eleventh century, with Alfonso VI., to the
conquest of Toledo. The first were French monks from the famous Abbey
of Cluny, sent by the Abbot Hugo to the convent of Sahagun, and they
were the first to use the "don" as a sign of lordship. To the pious
tolerance of the preceding bishops, accustomed to friendly intercourse
with Arabs and Jews in the full liberty of the Muzarabé worship,
succeeded the ferocious intolerance of the Christian conqueror. The
Archbishop Don Bernardo was scarcely seated in the chair before he
took advantage of the absence of Alfonso VI. to violate all his
promises. The principal mosque had remained in the hands of the Moors
by a solemn compact with the king, who, like all the monarchs of the
reconquest, was tolerant in matters of religion. The archbishop,
using his powerful influence over the mind of the queen, made her
the accomplice of his plans, and one night, followed by clergy and
workmen, he knocked down the doors of the mosque, cleansed it and
purified it, and next morning when the Saracens came to pray towards
the rising sun, they found it changed into a Catholic cathedral. The
conquered, trusting in the word given by the conqueror, protested,
scandalised, and that they did not rise was solely due to the
influence of the Alfaqui Abu-Walid, who trusted that the king would
fulfil his promises. In three days Alfonso VI. arrived in Toledo from
the further end of Castille, ready to murder the archbishop and even
his own wife for their share in this villainy that had compromised his
word as a cavalier, but his fury was so great that even the Moors were
moved, and the Alfaqui went out to meet him, begging him to condone
the deed as it was accomplished, as the injured parties would agree to
it, and in the name of the conquered he relieved him from keeping his
word, because the possession of a building was not a sufficient reason
for breaking the peace.
Gabriel admired as he read the prudence and moderation of the good
Moor Abu-Walid; but with his enthusiasm as a seminarist he admired
still more those proud, intolerant and warlike prelates, who trampled
laws and people under foot for the greater glory of God.
The Archbishop Martin was Captain-General against the Moors in
Andalusia, conquering towns, and he accompanied Alfonso VIII. to the
battle of Alarcos. The famous prelate Don Rodrigo wrote the chronicle
of Spain, filling it with miracles for the greater prosperity of the
Church, and he practically made history, passing more time on his
war-horse than on his throne in the choir. At the battle de las Navas
he set so fine an example, throwing himself into the thick of the
fight, that the king gave him twenty lordships as well as that of
Talavera de la Reina. Afterwards, in the king's absence, he drove
the Moors out of Quesada and Cazorla, taking possession of vast
territories, which passed under his sway, with the name of the
Adelantamiento.[1] Don Sancho, son of Don Jaime of Aragon, and brother
to the Queen of Castille, thought more of his title of "Chief Leader"
than of his mitre of Toledo, and on the advance of the Moors went out
to meet them in the martial field. He fought wherever the fighting was
fiercest, and was finally killed by the Moslems, who cut off his hands
and placed his head on a spear.
[Footnote 1: _Adelantamiento_--Advancement.]
Don Gil de Albornoz, the famous cardinal, went to Italy, flying from
Don Pedro the Cruel, and, like a great captain, reconquered all the
territory of the Popes, who had taken refuge in Avignon. Don Gutierre
III. went with Don Juan II. to fight against the Moors. Don Alfonso de
Acuna fought in the civil war during the reign of Enrique IV.; and as
a fitting end to this series of political and conquering prelates,
rich and powerful as true princes, there arose the Cardinal Mendoza,
who fought at the battle of Toro, and at the conquest of Granada,
afterwards governing that kingdom; and Jimenez de Cisneros, who,
finding no Moors left in the Peninsula to fight, crossed the sea and
went to Oran, waving his cross and turning it into a weapon of war.
The seminarist admired these men, magnified by the mists of ancient
history and the praises of the Church. For him they were the greatest
men in the world after the Popes, and, indeed, often far superior to
them. He was astonished that the Spaniards of the present times were
so blind that they did not entrust their direction and government to
the archbishops of Toledo, who in former centuries had performed
such heroic deeds. The glory and advancement of the country was so
intimately connected with their history, their dynasty was quite as
great as that of the kings, and on more than one occasion they had
saved these latter by their counsels and energy.
After these eagles came the birds of prey; after the prelates with
their iron morions and their coats-of-mail came the rich and luxurious
prelates, who cared for no other combats but those of the law courts,
and were in perpetual litigation with towns, guilds, and private
individuals in order to retain the possessions and the vast fortune
accumulated by their predecessors.
Those who were generous like Tavera built palaces, and encouraged
artists like El Greco, Berruguete and others, creating a Renaissance
in Toledo, an echo from Italy. Those who were miserly, like Quiroga,
reduced the expenses of the pompous church, to turn themselves into
money-lenders to the kings, giving millions of ducats to those
Austrian monarchs on whose dominions the sun never set, but who,
nevertheless, found themselves obliged to beg almost as soon as their
galleons returned from their voyages to America.
The Cathedral was the work of these priestly ecclesiastics; each one
had done something in it which revealed his character. The rougher
and more warlike its framework, that mountain of stone and wood which
formed its skeleton; those who were more cultivated, elevated to the
See in times of greater refinement, contributed the minutely-worked
iron railings, the doors of lace-like stonework, the pictures, and
the jewels which made its sacristy a veritable treasure house. The
gestation of the giantess had lasted for three centuries; it seemed
like those enormous prehistoric animals who slept so long in their
mother's womb before seeing the light.
When its walls and pilasters first rose above the soil Gothic art was
in its first epoch, and during the two and a half centuries that its
building lasted architecture made great strides. Gabriel could follow
this slow transformation with his mind's eye as he studied the
building, discovering the various signs of its evolution.
The magnificent church was like a giantess whose feet were shod with
rough shoes, but whose head was covered with the loveliest plumes. The
bases of the pillars were rough and devoid of ornament, the shafts of
the columns rose with severe simplicity, crowned by plain capitals
at the base of the arches, on which the Gothic thistle had not yet
attained the exuberant branching of a later florid period; but the
vaulting which was finished perhaps two centuries after the first
beginning, and the windows with their multi-coloured ogives, displayed
the magnificence of an art at its culminating point.
At the two extreme ends of the transepts Gabriel found the proof
of the immense progress made during the two centuries in which the
Cathedral had been rising from the ground. The Puerta del Reloj[1],
called also de la Feria[2], with its rude sculptures of archaic
rigidity, and the tympanum, covered with small scenes from the
creation, was a great contrast to the doorway at the opposite end
of the crossway, that of Los Leones[3], or by its other name, de la
Alegria[4], built nearly two hundred years afterwards, elegant and
majestic as the entrance to a palace, showing already the fleshly
audacities of the Renaissance, endeavouring to thrust themselves into
the severity of Christian architecture, a siren fastened to the door
by her curling tail serving as an example.
[Footnote 1: _Reloj_--Clock.]
[Footnote 2: _Feria_--Of the fair.]
[Footnote 3: _Los Leones_--Lions.]
[Footnote 4: _Alegria_--Joy.]
The Cathedral, built entirely of a milky white stone from the quarries
close to Toledo, rose in one single elevation from the base of the
pillars to the vaulting, with no triforium to cut its arcades and to
weaken and load the naves with superimposed arches. Gabriel saw in
this a petrified symbol of prayer, rising direct to Heaven, without
assistance or support. The smooth, soft stone was used throughout
the building, harder stone being used for the vaultings, and on
the exterior the buttresses and pinnacles, as well as the flying
buttresses like small bridges between them, were of the hardest
granite, which from age had taken a golden colour, and which protected
and supported the airy delicacy of the interior. The two sorts of
stone made a great contrast in the appearance of the Cathedral, dark
and reddish outside, white and delicate inside.
The seminarist found examples of every sort of architecture that had
flourished in the Peninsula. The primitive Gothic was found in the
earliest doorways, the florid in those del Perdon and de los Leones,
and the Arab architecture showed its graceful horseshoe arches in the
triforium running round the whole abside of the choir, which was the
work of Cisneros, who, though he burnt the Moslem books, introduced
their style of architecture into the heart of the Christian temple.
The plateresque style showed its fanciful grace in the door of the
cloister, and even the chirruguesque showed at its best in the famous
lanthorn of Tome, which broke the vaulting behind the high altar in
order to give light to the abside.
In the evenings of the vacation Gabriel would leave the seminary,
and wander about the Cathedral till the hour at which its doors were
closed. He delighted in walking through the naves and behind the high
altar, the darkest and most silent spot in the whole church. Here
slept a great part of the history of Spain. Behind the locked gates of
the chapel of the kings, guarded by the stone heralds on pedestals,
lay the kings of Castille in their tombs, their effigies crowned, in
golden armour, praying, with their swords by their sides. He would
stop before the chapel of Santiago, admiring through the railings of
its three pointed arches the legendary saint, dressed as a pilgrim,
holding his sword on high, and tramping on Mahomedans with his
war-horse. Great shells and red shields with a silver moon adorned the
white walls, rising up to the vaulting, and this chapel his father,
the gardener, regarded as his own peculiar property. It was that of
the Lunas, and though some people laughed at the relationship, there
lay his illustrious progenitors, Don Alvaro and his wife, on their
monumental tombs. That of Doña Juana Pimental had at its four corners
the figures of four kneeling friars in yellow marble, who watched over
the noble lady extended on the upper part of the monument. That of
the unhappy constable of Castille was surrounded by four knights of
Santiago, wrapped in the mantle of their Order, seeming to keep guard
over their grand master, who lay buried without his head in the stone
sarcophagus, bordered with Gothic mouldings. Gabriel remembered what
he had heard his father relate about the recumbent statue of Don
Alvaro. In former times the statue had been of bronze, and when mass
was said in the chapel, at the elevation of the Host, the statue, by
means of secret springs, would rise and remain kneeling till the
end of the ceremony. Some said that the Catholic queen caused the
disappearance of this theatrical statue, believing that it disturbed
the prayers of the faithful; others said that some soldiers, enemies
of the constable, on a day of disturbance, had broken in pieces the
jointed statue. On the exterior of the church the chapel of the Lunas
raised its battlemented towers, forming an isolated fortress inside
the Cathedral.
In spite of his family considering this chapel as their own, the
seminarist felt himself more attracted by that of Saint Ildefonso
close by, which contained the tomb of the Cardinal Albornoz. Of all
the great past in the Cathedral, that which excited his greatest
admiration was the romantic figure of this warlike prelate; lover of
letters, Spanish by birth, and Italian by his conquests. He slept in a
splendid marble tomb, shining and polished by age, and of a soft
fawn colour; the invisible hand of time had treated the face of the
recumbent effigy rather roughly, flattening the nose, and giving the
warlike cardinal an expression of almost Mongolian ferocity. Four
lions guarded the remains of the prelate. Everything in him was
extraordinary and adventurous even to his death. His body was brought
back from Italy to Spain with prayers and hymns, carried on the
shoulders of the entire population, who went out to meet it in order
to gain the indulgences granted by the Pope. This return journey to
his own country after his death lasted several months, as the good
cardinal only went by short journeys from church to church, preceded
by a picture of Christ, which now adorns his chapel, and spreading
among the multitude the sweet scent of his embalming.
For Don Gil de Albornoz nothing seemed impossible; he was the sword of
the Apostle returned to earth in order to enforce faith. Flying from
Don Pedro the Cruel, he had taken refuge in Avignon, where lived
exiles even more illustrious than himself. There were the Popes driven
out of Rome by a people who, in their mediaeval nightmare, tried to
restore at the bidding of Rienzi the ancient republic of the Consuls.
Don Gil was not a man to live long in the pleasant little Provençal
court; like a good archbishop of Toledo, he wore the coat-of-mail
underneath his tunic, and as there were no Moors to fight he wished to
strike at heretics instead. He went to Italy as the champion of the
Church; all the adventurers of Europe and the bandits of the country
formed his army. He killed and burnt in the country, entered and
sacked the towns, all in the name of the Sovereign Pontiff, so that
before long the exile of Avignon was again able to return and occupy
his throne in Rome. The Spanish cardinal after all these campaigns,
which gave half Italy to the Papacy, was as rich as any king, and he
founded the celebrated Spanish college in Bologna. The Pope, well
aware of his robberies and rapacity, asked him to give some sort of
accounts. The proud Don Gil presented him with a cart laden with keys
and bolts.
"These," said he proudly, "belong to the towns and castles I have
gained for the Papacy. These are my accounts."
The irresistible glamour that a powerful warrior throws over a man
physically feeble was strongly felt by Gabriel, and it was augmented
by the thought that so much bravery and haughtiness had been joined
in a servant of the Church. Why could not men like this arise now, in
these impious times, to give fresh strength to Catholicism?
In his strolls through the Cathedral Gabriel greatly admired the
screen before the high altar, a wonderful work of Villalpando, with
its foliage of old gold, and its black bars with silvery spots like
tin. These spots made the beggars and guides in the church declare
that all the screen was made of silver, but that the canons had had
it painted black so that it might not be plundered by Napoleon's
soldiers.
Behind it shone the majestic decorations of the high altar, splendid
with soft old gilding, and a whole host of figures under carved
canopies representing various scenes from the Passion. Behind the
altar and the screen the gilding seemed to spring spontaneously from
the white walls, marking with brilliant lights the divisions between
the stalls. Beneath highly-decorated pointed arches were the tombs of
the most ancient kings of Castille, and that of the Cardinal Mendoza.
Under the arches of the triforium an orchestra of Gothic angels with
stiff dalmatics and folded wings sang lauds, playing lutes and flutes,
and in the central parts of the pillars the statues of holy bishops
were interspersed with those of historical and legendary personages.
On one side the good Alfaqui Abu-Walid, immortalised in a Christian
church for his tolerant spirit, on the opposite side the mysterious
leader of Las Navas who, after showing the Christians the way to
victory, suddenly disappeared like a divine envoy--a statue of
exceeding ugliness with a haggard face covered by a rough hood. At
either end of the screen stood as evidences of the past opulence of
the church two beautiful pulpits of rich marbles and chiselled bronze.
Gabriel cast a glance at the choir, admiring the beautiful stalls
belonging to the canons, and he thought enthusiastically that perhaps
some day he might succeed in gaining one to the great pride of his
family. In his wanderings about the church he would often stop before
the immense fresco of Saint Christopher, a picture as bad as it
was huge--a figure occupying all one division of the wall from the
pavement to the cornice, and which by its size seemed to be the
only fitting inhabitant of the church. The cadets would come in the
evenings to look at it; that colossus of pink flesh, bearing the child
on its shoulders, advancing its angular legs carefully through the
waters, leaning on a palm tree that looked like a broom, was for them
by far the most noticeable thing in the church. The light-hearted
young men delighted in measuring its ankles with their swords and
afterwards calculating how many swords high the blessed giant could
be. It was the readiest application that they could make of those
mathematical calculations with which they were so much worried in the
academy. The apprentice of the church was irritated at the impudence
with which these dressed up popinjays, the apprentices of war,
sauntered about the church.
Many mornings he would go to the Muzarabé Chapel, following
attentively the ancient ritual,[1] intoned by the priests especially
devoted to it. On the walls were represented in brilliant colours
scenes from the conquest of Oran by the great Cisneros. As Gabriel
listened to the monotonous singing of the Muzarabe priests he
remembered the quarrels during the time of Alfonso VI. between the
Roman liturgy and that of Toledo--the foreign worship and the national
one. The believers, to end the eternal disputes, appealed to the
"Judgment of God." The king named the Roman champion, and the Toledans
confided the defence of their Gothic rite to the sword of Juan Ruiz,
a nobleman from the borders of Pisuerga. The champion of the Gothic
breviary remained triumphant in the fight, demonstrating its
superiority with magnificent sword thrusts, but, in spite of the will
of God having been manifested in this warlike way, the Roman rite by
slow degrees became master of the situation, till at last the Muzarabé
ritual was relegated to this small chapel as a curious relic of the
past.
[Footnote 1: The Muzarabé ritual is still sung in Arabic both in
Toledo and Salamanca.]
Sometimes in the evenings, when the services were ended and the
Cathedral was locked up, Gabriel would go up to the abode of the
bell-ringer, stopping on the gallery above the door del Perdon.
Mariano, the bell-ringer's son, a youth of the same age as the
seminarist, and attached to him by the respect and admiration his
talents inspired, would act as guide in their excursions to the upper
regions of the church; they would possess themselves of the key of the
vaultings and explore that mysterious locality to which only a few
workmen ascended from time to time.
The Cathedral was ugly and commonplace seen from above. In the very
early days the stone vaultings had remained uncovered, with no other
concealment beyond the light-looking carved balustrade, but the rain
had begun to damage them, threatening their destruction, and so the
Chapter had covered the Cathedral with a roof of brown tiles, which
gave the Church the appearance of a huge warehouse or a great barn.
The pinnacles of the buttresses seemed ashamed to appear above this
ugly covering, the flying buttresses became lost and disappeared among
the bare-looking buildings, built on to the Cathedral, and the little
staircase turrets became hidden behind this clumsy mass of roofing.
The two youths climbing along the cornices, green and slippery from
the rain, would mount to quite the upper parts of the building. Their
feet would become entangled in the plants that a luxuriant nature
allowed to grow amid the joints of the stones, flocks of birds would
fly away at their approach; all the sculptures seemed to serve as
resting-places for their nests, and every hollow in the stone where
the rain-water collected was a miniature lake where the birds came
to drink; sometimes a large black bird would settle on one of the
pinnacles like an unexpected finial; it was a raven who settled there
to plume his wings, and it would remain there sunning itself for
hours; to the people who saw it from below it appeared about the size
of a fly.
These vaultings caused Gabriel a strange impression; no one could
guess the existence of such a place in the upper regions of the
building. He would walk through the forest of worm-eaten posts which
supported the roof, through narrow passages between the cupolas of the
vaulting that arose from the flooring like white and dusty tumours;
sometimes there would be a shaft through which he could see down into
the Cathedral, the depth of which made him giddy. These shafts were
like narrow well-mouths at the bottom of which could be seen people
walking like ants on the tile flooring of the church. Through these
shafts were lowered the ropes of the great chandeliers, and the golden
chains that supported the figure of Christ above the railing of the
high altar. Enormous capstans showed through the twilight their cogged
and rusty wheels, their levers and ropes like forgotten instruments
of torture. This was the hidden machinery belonging to the great
religious festivals; by these artifices the magnificent canopy of the
holy week was raised and fastened.
As the sun's rays shone in between the wooden posts the dust of ages
that lay like a thick mantel on the roof of the vaulting would rise
and dance in them for a few seconds, and the huge old spiders' webs
would wave like fans in the wind, while the footsteps of the intruders
would occasion wild and precipitous scrambles of rats from all the
dark corners. In the furthest and darkest corners roosted those black
birds who by night flew down into the church through the shafts in
the vaulting, and the eyes of the owls glowed with phosphorescent
brilliancy, while the bats flew sleepily about sweeping the faces of
the lads with their wings.
The bell-ringer's son would examine the deposits dropped in the dust,
and would enumerate all the different birds who took refuge in the
summit of the mountains of stone: this belonged to the hooting owl,
and that to the red owl, and this again to the raven, and he spoke
with respect of a certain nest of eagles that his father had seen as a
young man, fierce birds who had endeavoured to tear out his eyes,
and who had so thoroughly frightened him that he had been obliged to
borrow the gun belonging to the night watchers on each occasion that
his duties took him to the roof.
Gabriel loved that strange world, harbouring above the Cathedral with
its silence and its imposing solitude. It was a wilderness of wood,
inhabited by strange creatures who lived unnoticed and forgotten under
the roof-tree of the church. Truly the good God had a house for the
faithful down below, and an immense garret above for the creatures of
the air.
The savage solitude of the higher regions was a great contrast to the
wealth of the chapel of the Ochava, full of relics in golden vessels
and caskets of enamel and precious marbles, to the quantities of
pearls and emeralds in the magnificent treasury, heaped up as though
they had been peas, and to the elegant luxury of the wardrobe, full
of rare and costly stuffs and vestments exquisitely embroidered with
every colour of the rainbow.
Gabriel was just eighteen when he lost his father. The old gardener
died quietly, happy in seeing all his family in the service of the
Cathedral and the good old tradition of the Lunas continued without
interruption. Thomas, the eldest son, remained in the garden, Esteban,
after serving many years as acolyte and assistant to the sacristans,
was Silenciario, and had been given the Wooden Staff and seven reals
a day, the height of all his ambition; and as far as regarded the
youngest, the good Señor Esteban had the firm conviction that he
had begotten a Father of the Church, for whom a place in heaven was
especially reserved at the right hand of God Omnipotent.
Gabriel had acquired in the seminary that ecclesiastic sternness that
turns the priest into a warrior more intent on the interest of the
Church than on the concerns of his family. For this reason he did
not feel the death of his father very greatly; besides, much greater
misfortunes soon occurred to preoccupy the young seminarist.