Half an hour later, nothing was to be heard save the stifled groans of the wind which entered by the broken ogive windows of the church, the skurrying flights of night-birds whose nests were built in the stone canopies above the sculptured figures of the walls, and the tramp, now near, now far, of the sentry who was pacing up and down the portico, wound in the wide folds of his military cloak.
In the epoch to which the account of this incident, no less true than strange, reverts, the city of Toledo, for those who knew not how to value the treasures of art which its walls enclose, was, even as now, no more than a great huddle of houses, old-fashioned, ruinous, insufferable.
The officers of the French army who, to judge from the acts of vandalism by which they left in Toledo a sad and enduring memory of their occupation, counted few artists and archæologists in their number, found themselves, as goes without the saying, supremely bored in the ancient city of the Cæsars.
In this frame of mind, the most trifling event which came to break the monotonous calm of those eternal, unvarying days was eagerly caught up among the idlers, so that the promotion of one of their comrades to the next grade, a report of the strategic movement of a flying column, the departure of an official post or the arrival at the city of any military force whatsoever, became a fertile theme of conversation and object of every sort of comment, until something else occurred to take its place and serve as foundation for new grumblings, criticisms and conjectures.
As was to be expected, among those officers who, according to their custom, gathered on the following day to take the air and chat a little in the Zocodover, the dish of gossip was supplied by nothing else than the arrival of the dragoons, whose leader was left in the former chapter stretched out at his ease, sleeping off the fatigues of the march. For upwards of an hour the conversation had been beating about this event, and already various explanations had been put forward to account for the non-appearance of the new-comer, whom an officer present, a former schoolmate, had invited to the Zocodover, when at last, in one of the side-streets that radiate from the square, appeared our gallant captain, no longer obscured by his voluminous army-cloak, but sporting a great shining helmet with a plume of white feathers, a turquoise-blue coat with scarlet facings, and a magnificent two-handed sword in a steel scabbard which clanked as it struck the ground in time to his martial stride and to the keener, sharper clink of his golden spurs.