Gabriel spent many months of solitary confinement in his prison. From words now and then dropped by his jailors he could guess at the fluctuations of his fate. Sometimes he would gather that he and all his companions in misfortune were to be sent to the jail in Africa, or again they would hint at his immediate liberation, or would prophesy that they were all to be shot en masse. When at the end of two years he left this gloomy castle, it was to be embarked with all his companions for exile. He was only the shadow of a man; his weakness made his walk as uncertain and tremulous as that of a child, but he forgot his own misery in trying to assist those of his companions who were even weaker than himself, and who bore the cruel scars of the torments they had endured.
The return to liberty recalled all his former gentleness and the philosophic pity with which he surrounded all men, pitying and pardoning their faults. On landing in England the more violent of his companions spoke of future vengeance on their persecutors, while Gabriel asked pardon for them, as blind instruments employed by society in a moment of terror, thinking they had saved it by their barbarity.
The climate of London aggravated Gabriel's illness, and in about two years he was obliged to move to the Continent, although England with its absolute liberty was the only land where he could have lived quietly and ignored.
His existence was a cruel one, always a fugitive through the different countries of Europe, driven from one place to another by the vigilance of the police, thrown into prison, or expelled on the slightest suspicion. It was a return to the ancient persecution of the gipsies, the constant hunting of independent people, leading vagabond lives, of the Middle Ages. His illness and his desire for rest and peace made him return to Spain. Time had produced a certain amount of tolerance towards the exiles, and in Spain everything is soon forgotten, and though the authorities are harder and less scrupulous than in other countries, still they interfere less on account of their improvidence and the carelessness natural to the race.
Sick and without any work by which he could earn his living, precluded from seeking work among the printers, as his name was encircled by a halo which terrified the masters, Gabriel fell into such extreme poverty that the little help and succour his companions could afford were unable to relieve it, and he travelled from end to end of the Peninsula begging from his fellows and hiding from the police.
His spirit was broken, he was conquered, and he had no longer strength to continue the struggle. Nothing remained for him but to die, but merciful death came slowly to his call. He thought of his brother, the only affection remaining to him in the world; he remembered the quiet family in the Claverias, of which he had caught a glimpse on his last visit to the Cathedral, and he turned to seek them as his last hope.
On his return to Toledo, he found the happy family dissolved; misfortune had come even to that silent and stagnant corner.
But the Cathedral, insensible to all human vicissitudes was there, the same as ever, and to it he clung, hiding himself in its recesses, hoping to die there in peace, with no other hope but to be forgotten; dying before his proper time, tasting the bitter happiness of annihilation, leaving behind him at the door, like an animal who sheds its skin, all that rebellion which had drawn upon him the hatred of society.
His happiness was not to think, not to speak, to mould himself to that dead world; he would be among the living statues peopling the upper cloister, one more automaton; he would imitate those beings who seemed to have absorbed into themselves something of the austerity of the granite buttresses, he would inhale like a healing balsam the scent of the rusty iron railings and the incense that spread through the church, the ancient perfume of the past centuries.