"'Well,' he said at last, 'since you are going back there, you will say good-day to them for Ignacio.'

"And after offering a drink to me he went away--"

Franchita had risen, trembling and paler than ever. Ignacio, the most adventurous in the family, her brother who had disappeared for ten years without sending any news--!

How was he? What face? Dressed how?--Did he seem happy, at least, or was he poorly dressed?

"Oh!" replied the sailor, "he looked well, in spite of his gray hair; as for his costume, he appeared to be a man of means, with a beautiful gold chain on his belt."

And that was all he could say, with this naive and rude good-day of which he was the bearer; on the subject of the exile he knew no more and perhaps, until she died, Franchita would learn nothing more of that brother, almost non-existing, like a phantom.

Then, when he had emptied a gla.s.s of cider, he went on his road, the strange messenger, who was going to his village. Then, they sat at table without speaking, the mother and the son: she, the silent Franchita, absent minded, with tears shining in her eyes; he, worried also, but in a different manner, by the thought of that uncle living in adventures over there.

When he ceased to be a child, when Ramuntcho began to desert from school, to wish to follow the smugglers in the mountain, Franchita would say to him:

"Anyway, you take after your uncle Ignacio, we shall never make anything of you!--"

And it was true that he took after his uncle Ignacio, that he was fascinated by all the things that are dangerous, unknown and far-off--

To-night, therefore, if she did not talk to her son of the message which had just been transmitted to them, the reason was she divined his meditation on America and was afraid of his answers. Besides, among country people, the little profound and intimate dramas are played without words, with misunderstandings that are never cleared up, with phrases only guessed at and with obstinate silence.

But, as they were finishing their meal, they heard a chorus of young and gay voices, coming near, accompanied by a drum, the boys of Etchezar, coming for Ramuntcho to bring him with them in their parade with music around the village, following the custom of New Year's eve, to go into every house, drink in it a gla.s.s of cider and give a joyous serenade to an old time tune.

And Ramuntcho, forgetting Uruguay and the mysterious uncle, became a child again, in the pleasure of following them and of singing with them along the obscure roads, enraptured especially by the thought that they would go to the house of the Detcharry family and that he would see again, for an instant, Gracieuse.

CHAPTER X.

The changeable month of March had arrived, and with it the intoxication of spring, joyful for the young, sad for those who are declining.

And Gracieuse had commenced again to sit, in the twilight of the lengthened days, on the stone bench in front of her door.

Oh! the old stone benches, around the houses, made, in the past ages, for the reveries of the soft evenings and for the eternally similar conversations of lovers--!

Gracieuse's house was very ancient, like most houses in that Basque country, where, less than elsewhere, the years change the things.--It had two stories; a large projecting roof in a steep slope; walls like a fortress which were whitewashed every summer; very small windows, with settings of cut granite and green blinds. Above the front door, a granite lintel bore an inscription in relief; words complicated and long which, to French eyes resembled nothing known. It said: "May the Holy Virgin bless this home, built in the year 1630 by Peter Detcharry, beadle, and his wife Damasa Irribarne, of the village of Istaritz." A small garden two yards wide, surrounded by a low wall so that one could see the pa.s.sers-by, separated the house from the road; there was a beautiful rose-laurel, extending its southern foliage above the evening bench, and there were yuccas, a palm tree, and enormous bunches of those hortensias which are giants here, in this land of shade, in this lukewarm climate, so often enveloped by clouds. In the rear was a badly closed orchard which rolled down to an abandoned path, favorable to escalades of lovers.

What mornings radiant with light there were in that spring, and what tranquil, pink evenings!

After a week of full moon which kept the fields till day-light blue with rays, and when the band of Itchoua ceased to work,--so clear was their habitual domain, so illuminated were the grand, vaporous backgrounds of the Pyrenees and of Spain--the frontier fraud was resumed more ardently, as soon as the thinned crescent had become discreet and early setting.

Then, in these beautiful times, smuggling by night was exquisite; a trade of solitude and of meditation when the mind of the naive and very pardonable defrauders was elevated unconsciously in the contemplation of the sky and of the darkness animated by stars--as it happens to the mind of the sea folk watching, on the nocturnal march of vessels, and as it happened formerly to the mind of the shepherds in antique Chaldea.

It was favorable also and tempting for lovers, that tepid period which followed the full moon of March, for it was dark everywhere around the houses, dark in all the paths domed with trees,--and very dark, behind the Detcharry orchard, on the abandoned path where n.o.body ever pa.s.sed.

Gracieuse lived more and more on her bench in front of her door.

It was here that she was seated, as every year, to receive and look at the carnival dancers: those groups of young boys and of young girls of Spain or of France, who, every spring, organize themselves for several days in a wandering band, and, all dressed in the same pink or white colors, traverse the frontier village, dancing the fandango in front of houses, with castanets--

She stayed later and later in this place which she liked, under the shelter of the rose-laurel coming into bloom, and sometimes even, she came out noiselessly through the window, like a little, sly fox, to breathe there at length, after her mother had gone to bed. Ramuntcho knew this and, every night, the thought of that bench troubled his sleep.

CHAPTER XI.

One clear April morning, they were walking to the church, Gracieuse and Ramuntcho. She, with an air half grave, half mocking, with a particular and very odd air, leading him there to make him do a penance which she had ordered.

In the holy enclosure, the flowerbeds of the tombs were coming into bloom again, as also the rose bushes on the walls. Once more the new saps were awakening above the long sleep of the dead. They went in together, through the lower door, into the empty church, where the old "benoite" in a black mantilla was alone, dusting the altars.

When Gracieuse had given to Ramuntcho the holy water and they had made their signs of the cross, she led him through the sonorous nave, paved with funereal stones, to a strange image on the wall, in a shady corner, under the men's tribunes.

It was a painting, impregnated with ancient mysticism, representing the figure of Jesus with eyes closed, forehead b.l.o.o.d.y, expression lamentable and dead; the head seemed to be cut off, separated from the body, and placed there on a gray linen cloth. Above, were written the long Litanies of the Holy Face, which have been composed, as everybody knows, to be recited in penance by repentant blasphemers. The day before, Ramuntcho, in anger, had sworn in an ugly manner: a quite unimaginable string of words, wherein the sacraments and the most saintly things were mingled with the horns of the devil and other villainous things still more frightful. That is why the necessity for a penance had impressed itself on the mind of Gracieuse.

"Come, my Ramuntcho," she recommended, as she walked away, "omit nothing of what you must say."

She left him then in front of the Holy Face, beginning to murmur his litanies in a low voice, and went to the good woman and helped her to change the water of the white Easter daisies in front of the altar of the Virgin.

But when the languorous evening returned, and Gracieuse was seated in the darkness meditating on her stone bench, a young human form started up suddenly near her; someone who had come in sandals, without making more noise than the silk owls make in the air, from the rear of the garden doubtless, after some scaling, and who stood there, straight, his waistcoat thrown over one shoulder: the one to whom were addressed all her tender emotions on earth, the one who incarnated the ardent dream of her heart and of her senses--

"Ramuntcho!" she said. "Oh! how you frightened me. Where did you come from at such an hour? What do you want? Why did you come?"

"Why did I come? In my turn, to order you to do penance," he replied, laughing.

"No, tell the truth, what is the matter, what are you coming to do?"

"To see you, only! That is what I come to do--What will you have! We never see each other!--Your mother keeps me at a distance more and more every day. I cannot live in that way.--We are not doing any harm, after all, since we are to be married! And you know, I could come every night, if you like, without anybody suspecting it--"

"Oh! no!--Oh! do not do that ever, I beg of you--"

They talked for an instant, and so low, so low, with more silence than words, as if they were afraid to wake up the birds in their nests.

They recognized no longer the sound of their voices, so changed and so trembling they were, as if they had committed some delicious and d.a.m.nable crime, by doing nothing but staying near each other, in the grand, caressing mystery of that night of April, which was hatching around them so many ascents of saps, so many germinations and so many loves--

He had not even dared to sit at her side; he remained standing, ready to run under the branches at the least alarm, like a nocturnal prowler.

However, when he prepared to go, it was she who asked, hesitating, and in a manner to be hardly heard:

"And--you will come back to-morrow?"

Then, under his growing mustache, he smiled at this sudden change of mind and he replied:

"Yes, surely.--To-morrow and every night.--Every night when we shall not have to work in Spain.--I will come--"

CHAPTER XII.

Ramuntcho's lodging place was, in the house of his mother and above the stable, a room neatly whitewashed; he had there his bed, always clean and white, but where smuggling gave him few hours for sleep. Books of travel or cosmography, which the cure of the parish lent to him, posed on his table--unexpected in this house. The portraits, framed, of different saints, ornamented the walls, and several pelota-players'

gloves were hanging from the beams of the ceiling, long gloves of wicker and of leather which seemed rather implements of hunting or fishing.

Franchita, at her return to her country, had bought back this house, which was that of her deceased parents, with a part of the sum given to her by the stranger at the birth of her son. She had invested the rest; then she worked at making gowns or at ironing linen for the people of Etchezar, and rented, to farmers of land near by, two lower rooms, with the stable where they placed their cows and their sheep.