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I know all about it, I have searched in the Obreria, in the archives, in the library; everyone does what interests them, and I and the Señor Obrero have often raged at the indigence of the house, but I console myself by thinking of what we had, long before any of us were born. We were very rich, Gabriel very, very rich.
"Here, as you see him," proceeded Esteban, speaking to his brother, and pointing to his nephew, "he is the worst lot in the Cathedral. The Señor Obrero would more than once have turned him out into the street, were it not for respect to the memory of his father and grandfather, and also to the name he bears, for everybody knows the Lunas are as ancient in the Cathedral as the stones in its walls.
When the feast of Corpus or that of the Virgin of the Sagrario comes round, and I dream of a fine mass worthy of the Cathedral, the Canon Obrero attacks me and begs for something Italian and simple, an affair of half-a-dozen musicians that I must pick up in the town, and then I have to conduct a few bungling musicians, raging to hear how the miserable orchestra sounds under these vaults, which were built for something grander.
So the priest, finding he had no support, and seeing hostility on every side, put off his energetic resolutions till the following day, even reproving his niece when she threw his weakness in his face. The Canon Obrero, from whom he had implored help, did not care to disturb the blessed peace of his existence by mixing himself up in the quarrels of the smaller people.
After its death the Señor Obrero spoke month after month of getting another, but he had never fulfilled his promise. But all the same, without the dog, they two were there and that meant something, eh! He with his old pistol which had never been fired, and Gabriel with his carbine, which was still standing in the corner where his predecessor had left it.
Having come into the world at the wrong time, when faith was weakened and the Church could no longer impose its laws by violence, the good Don Antolin had remained hidden in the lower administration of the Cathedral, assisting the Canon Obrero in the division and assignment of the money that the State allowed to the Primacy, giving long thought over the spending of each handful of farthings, endeavouring that the holy house, like the ruined families, should keep up its good outward appearance without revealing the poverty inside.
Gabriel coughed, his spine aching with the enclosure in the movable prison, and the dignity of the march was disturbed by the words of command from the Canon Obrero, who, in scarlet robes with a staff in his hand, directed the procession, reproving the pilots and those who pushed the car inside for their jerky and irregular movements.
He had been promised several times a chaplaincy of nuns, but he was one of those faithful to the Cathedral, one of those quite in love with the great establishment. He was proud of the confidence that the Lord Archbishop placed in him, and of the frank friendliness with which the canons and beneficiaries spoke to him, and of his administrative conferences with the Obrero and the Treasurer.
His greasy skull cap had been discarded as too old by its former owner, one of the canons; his cassock of a greenish black and his shoes had also belonged to some one of the beneficiaries; in the Claverias they all whispered of the monies hoarded by Don Antolin, and of his savings that were devoted to usury loans that never went beyond two or three duros to the poorer servants of the church ground down by poverty, and which he recovered with interest at the beginning of every month when they were paid by the Canon Obrero.
The most that they dared to do was to comment on the disagreements among the canons, to compare their lists of those who saluted one another in the choir, or who glared at one another between versicle and antiphon like mad dogs ready to fly at one another, or to speak with wonder about a certain polemic discussed by the Doctoral and the Obrero in the Catholic papers in Madrid, which had lasted for three years, as to whether the deluge was partial or universal; answering each other's articles with an interval of four months.
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