Then, there were intervals of solitude when one heard, in these paths, only the buzz of flies, in the yellowed and finishing shade of the trees.

Ramuntcho looked at them, at these rare pa.s.sers-by who crossed his road, surprised at not meeting somebody he knew who would stop before him.

But there were no familiar faces. And the friends whom he met were not effusive, there were only vague good-days exchanged with folks who turned round a little, with an impression of having seen him sometime, but not recalling when, and fell back into the humble dream of the fields.--And he felt more emphasized than ever the primary differences between him and those farm laborers.

Over there, however, comes one of those carts whose sheaf is so big that branches of oaks in its pa.s.sage catch it. In front, walks the driver, with a look of soft resignation, a big, peaceful boy, red as the ferns, red as the autumn, with a reddish fur in a bush on his bare chest; he walks with a supple and nonchalant manner, his arms extended like those of a cross on his goad, placed across his shoulders. Thus, doubtless, on these same mountains, marched his ancestors, farm laborers and cowboys like him since numberless centuries.

And this one, at Ramuntcho's aspect, touches the forehead of his oxen, stops them with a gesture and a cry of command, then comes to the traveller, extending to him his brave hands.--Florentino! A Florentino much changed, having squarer shoulders, quite a man now, with an a.s.sured and fixed demeanor.

The two friends embrace each other. Then, they scan each other's faces in silence, troubled suddenly by the wave of reminiscences which come from the depth of their minds and which neither the one nor the other knows how to express; Ramuntcho, not better than Florentino, for, if his language be infinitely better formed, the profoundness and the mystery of his thoughts are also much more unfathomable.

And it oppresses them to conceive things which they are powerless to tell; then their embarra.s.sed looks return absent-mindedly to the two beautiful, big oxen:

"They are mine, you know," says Florentino. "I was married two years ago.--My wife works. And, by working--we are beginning to get along.--Oh!" he adds, with naive pride, "I have another pair of oxen like these at the house."

Then he ceases to talk, flushing suddenly under his sunburn, for he has the tact which comes from the heart, which the humblest possess often by nature, but which education never gives, even to the most refined people in the world: considering the desolate return of Ramuntcho, his broken destiny, his betrothed buried over there among the black nuns, his mother dying, Florentino is afraid to have been already too cruel in displaying too much his own happiness.

Then the silence returned; they looked at each other for an instant with kind smiles, finding no words. Besides, between them, the abyss of different conceptions has grown deeper in these three years. And Florentino, touching anew the foreheads of his oxen, makes them march again with a call of his tongue, and presses tighter the hand of his friend:

"We shall see each other again, shall we not?"

And the noise of the cow-bells is soon lost in the calm of the road more shady, where begins to diminish the heat of the day--

"Well, he has succeeded in life, that one!" thinks Ramuntcho lugubriously, continuing his walk under the autumn branches--

The road which he follows ascends, hollowed here and there by springs and sometimes crossed by big roots of oaks.

Soon Etchezar will appear to him and, before seeing it, the image of it becomes more and more precise in him, recalled and enlivened in his memory by the aspect of the surroundings.

Empty now, all this land, where Gracieuse is no more, empty and sad as a beloved home where the great Reaper has pa.s.sed!--And yet Ramuntcho, in the depths of his being, dares to think that, in some small convent over there, under the veil of a nun, the cherished black eyes still exist and that he will be able at least to see them; that taking the veil is not quite like dying, and that perhaps the last word of his destiny has not been said irrevocably.--For, when he reflects, what can have changed thus the soul of Gracieuse, formerly so uniquely devoted to him?--Oh, terrible, foreign pressure, surely--And then, when they come face to face again, who knows?--When they talk, with his eyes in her eyes?--But what can he expect that is reasonable and possible?--In his native land has a nun ever broken her eternal vows to follow one to whom she was engaged? And besides, where would they go to live together afterward, when folks would get out of their way, would fly from them as renegades?--To America perhaps, and even there!--And how could he take her from these white houses of the dead where the sisters live, eternally watched?--Oh, no, all this is a chimera which may not be realized--All is at an end, all is finished hopelessly--!

Then, the sadness which comes to him from Gracieuse is forgotten for a moment, and he feels nothing except an outburst of his heart toward his mother, toward his mother who remains to him, who is there, very near, a little upset, doubtless, by the joyful trouble of waiting for him.

And now, on the left of his route, is a humble hamlet, half hidden in the beeches and the oaks, with its ancient chapel,--and with its wall for the pelota game, under very old trees, at the crossing of two paths.

At once, in Ramuntcho's youthful head, the course of thoughts changes again: that little wall with rounded top, covered with wash of kalsomine and ochre, awakens tumultuously in him thoughts of life, of force and of joy; with a childish ardor he says to himself that to-morrow he will be able to return to that game of the Basques, which is an intoxication of movement and of rapid skill; he thinks of the grand matches on Sundays after vespers, of the glory of the fine struggles with the champions of Spain, of all this deprivation of his years of exile. But it is a very short instant, and mortal despair comes back to him: his triumphs on the squares, Gracieuse shall not see them; then, what is the use!--Without her, all things, even these, fall back discolored, useless and vain, do not even exist--

Etchezar!--Etchezar, is revealed suddenly at a turn of the road!--It is in a red light, something like a fantasmagoria image, illuminated purposely in a special manner in the midst of grand backgrounds of shade and of night. It is the hour of the setting sun. Around the isolated village, which the old, heavy belfry, surmounts, a last sheaf of rays traces a halo of the color of copper and gold, while clouds--and a gigantic obscurity emanating from the Gizune--darken the lands piled up above and under, the ma.s.s of brown hills, colored by the death of the ferns--

Oh! the melancholy apparition of the native land, to the soldier who returns and will not find his sweetheart--!

Three years have pa.s.sed since he left here.--Well, three years, at his age, are an abyss of time, a period which changes all things. And, after that lone exile, how this village, which he adores, appears to him diminished, small, walled in the mountains, sad and hidden!--In the depth of his mind of a tall, uncultured boy, commences again, to make him suffer more, the struggle of those two sentiments of a too refined man, which are an inheritance of his unknown father: an attachment almost maladive to the home, to the land of childhood, and a fear of returning to be enclosed in it, when there exist in the world other places so vast and so free. --After the warm afternoon, the autumn is indicated now by the hasty fall of the day, with a coolness ascending suddenly from the valleys underneath, a scent of dying leaves and of moss. And then the thousand details of preceding autumns in the Basque country, of the former Novembers, come to him very precisely; the cold fall of night succeeding the beautiful, sunlit day; the sad clouds appearing with the night; the Pyrenees confounded in vapors inky gray, or, in places, cut in black silhouettes on a pale, golden sky; around the houses, the belated flowers of the gardens, which the frost spares for a long time here, and, in front of all the doors, the strewn leaves of the plane-trees, the yellow strewn leaves cracking under the steps of the man returning in sandals to his home for supper.--Oh, the heedless joy of these returns to the home, in the nights of other times, after days of marching on the rude mountain! Oh, the gaiety, in that time, of the first winter fires--in the tall, smoky hearth ornamented with a drapery of white calico and with a strip of pink paper. No, in the city, with its rows of houses one does not have the real impression of returning home, of earthing up like plants at night in the primitive manner, as one has it here, under those Basque roofs, solitary in the midst of the country, with the grand, surrounding black, the grand, shivering black of the foliage, the grand, changing black of the clouds and the summits.--But to-day, his travels, his new conceptions, have diminished and spoiled his mountaineer's home; he will doubtless find it almost desolate, especially in the thought that his mother shall not be there always--and that Gracieuse shall never be there again.

His pace quickens in his haste to embrace his mother; he turns around his village instead of going into it, in order to reach his house through a path which overlooks the square and church; pa.s.sing quickly, he looks at everything with inexpressible pain. Peace, silence soar over this little parish of Etchezar, heart of the French Basque land and country of all the famous pelotaris of the past who have become heavy grandfathers, or are dead now. The immutable church, where have remained buried his dreams of faith, is surrounded by the same dark cypresses, like a mosque. The ball-game square, while he walks quickly above it, is still lighted by the sun with a finishing ray, oblique, toward the background, toward the wall which the ancient inscription surmounts,--as on the evening of his first great success, four years ago, when, in the joyous crowd, Gracieuse stood in a blue gown, she who has become a black nun to-day.--On the deserted benches, on the granite steps where the gra.s.s grows, three or four old men are seated, who were formerly the heroes of the place and whom their reminiscences bring back here incessantly, to talk at the end of the days, when the twilight descends from the summits, invades the earth, seems to emanate and to fall from the brown Pyrenees.--Oh, the folks who live here, whose lives run here; oh, the little cider inns, the little, simple shops and the old, little things--brought from the cities, from the other places--sold to the mountaineers of the surrounding country!--How all this seems to him now strange, separated from him, or set far in the background of the primitive past!--Is he truly not a man of Etchezar to-day, is he no longer the Ramuntcho of former times?--What particular thing resides in his mind to prevent him from feeling comfortable here, as the others feel? Why is it prohibited to him, to him alone, to accomplish here the tranquil destiny of his dreams, since all his friends have accomplished theirs?--

At last here is his house, there, before his eyes. It is as he expected to find it. As he expected, he recognizes along the wall all the persistent flowers cultivated by his mother, the same flowers which the frost has destroyed weeks ago in the North from which he comes: heliotropes, geraniums, tall dahlias and roses with climbing branches.

And the cherished, strewn leaves, which fall every autumn from the vault-shaped plane-trees, are there also, and are crushed with a noise so familiar under his steps--!

In the lower hall, when he enters, there is already grayish indecision, already night. The high chimney, where his glance rests at first by an instinctive reminiscence of the fires of ancient evenings, stands the same with its white drapery; but cold, filled with shade, smelling of absence or death.

He runs up to his mother's room. She, from her bed having recognized her son's step, has straightened up, all stiff, all white in the twilight:

"Ramuntcho," she says, in a veiled and aged voice.

She extends her arms to him and as soon as she holds him, enlaces and embraces him:

"Ramuntcho!--"

Then, having uttered this name without adding anything, she leans her head against his cheek, in the habitual movement of surrender, in the movement of the grand, tender feelings of other times.--He, then, perceives that his mother's face is burning against his. Through her shirt he feels the arms that surround him thin, feverish and hot. And for the first time, he is frightened; the notion that she is doubtless very ill comes to his mind, the possibility and the sudden terror that she might die--

"Oh, you are alone, mother! But who takes care of you? Who watches over you?"

"Who watches over me?--" she replies with her abrupt brusqueness, her ideas of a peasant suddenly returned. "Spending money to nurse me, why should I do it?--The church woman or the old Doyamburu comes in the day-time to give me the things that I need, the things that the physician orders.--But--medicine!--Well! Light a lamp, my Ramuntcho!--I want to see you--and I cannot see you--"

And, when the clearness has come from a Spanish, smuggled match, she says in a tone of caress infinitely sweet, as one talks to a very little child whom one adores:

"Oh, your mustache! The long mustache which has come to you, my son!--I do not recognize my Ramuntcho!--Bring your lamp here, bring it here so that I can look at you!--"

He also sees her better now, under the new light of that lamp, while she admires him lovingly. And he is more frightened still, because the cheeks of his mother are so hollow, her hair is so whitened; even the expression of her eyes is changed and almost extinguished; on her face appears the sinister and irremediable labor of time, of suffering and of death--

And, now, two tears, rapid and heavy, fall from the eyes of Franchita, which widen, become living again, made young by desperate revolt and hatred.

"Oh, that woman," she says suddenly. "Oh, that Dolores!"

And her cry expresses and summarizes all her jealousy of thirty years'

standing, all her merciless rancor against that enemy of her childhood who has succeeded at last in breaking the life of her son.

A silence between them. He is seated, with head bent, near the bed, holding the poor, feverish hand which his mother has extended to him.

She, breathing more quickly, seems for a long while under the oppression of something which she hesitates to express:

"Tell me, my Ramuntcho!--I would like to ask you.--What do you intend to do, my son? What are your projects for the future?--"

"I do not know, mother.--I will think, I will see.--You ask--all at once.--We have time to talk of this, have we not?--To America, perhaps--"

"Oh, yes," she says slowly, with the fear that was in her for days, "to America--I suspected it. Oh, that is what you will do.--I knew it, I knew it--"

Her phrase ends in a groan and she joins her hands to try to pray--

CHAPTER III.

Ramuntcho, the next morning, was wandering in the village, under a sun which had pierced the clouds of the night, a sun as radiant as that of yesterday. Careful in his dress, the ends of his mustache turned up, proud in his demeanor, elegant, grave and handsome, he went at random, to see and to be seen, a little childishness mingling with his seriousness, a little pleasure with his distress. His mother had said to him:

"I am better, I a.s.sure you. To-day is Sunday; go, walk about I pray you--"

And pa.s.sers-by turned their heads to look at him, whispered the news: "Franchita's son has returned home; he looks very well!"

A summer illusion persisted everywhere, with, however, the unfathomable melancholy of things tranquilly finishing. Under that impa.s.sible radiance of sunlight, the Pyrenean fields seemed dull, all their plants, all their gra.s.ses were as if collected in one knows not what resignation weary of living, what expectation of death.