And now the image of Gracieuse presented itself naturally to her mind, as it did every time she thought of Ramuntcho's future. She was the little betrothed whom she had been wishing for him for ten years. (In the sections of country unacquainted with modern fashions, it is usual to marry when very young and often to know and select one another for husband and wife in the first years of life.) A little girl with hair fluffed in a gold mist, daughter of a friend of her childhood, of a certain Dolores Detcharry, who had been always conceited—and who had remained contemptuous since the epoch of the great fault.
Certainly, the father's intervention in the future of Ramuntcho would have a decisive influence in obtaining the hand of that girl—and would permit even of asking it of Dolores with haughtiness, after the ancient quarrel. But Franchita felt a great uneasiness in her, increasing as the thought of addressing herself to that man became more precise. And then, she recalled the look, so often sombre, of the stranger, she recalled his vague words of infinite lassitude, of incomprehensible despair; he had the air of seeing always, beyond her horizon, distant abysses and darkness, and, although he was not an insulter of sacred things, never would he pray, thus giving to her this excess of remorse, of having allied herself to some pagan to whom heaven would be closed forever. His friends were similar to him, refined also, faithless, prayerless, exchanging among themselves in frivolous words abysmal thoughts.—Oh, if Ramuntcho by contact with them were to become similar to them all!—desert the churches, fly from the sacraments and the mass!—Then, she remembered the letters of her old father,—now decomposed in the profound earth, under a slab of granite, near the foundations of his parish church—those letters in Euskarian tongue which he wrote to her, after the first months of indignation and of silence, in the city where she had dragged her fault. “At least, my poor Franchita, my daughter, are you in a country where the men are pious and go to church regularly?—” Oh! no, they were hardly pious, the men of the great city, not more the fashionable ones who were in the society of Ramuntcho's father than the humblest laborers in the suburban district where she lived hidden; all carried away by the same current far from the hereditary dogmas, far from the antique symbols.—And Ramuntcho, in such surroundings, how would he resist?—
Other reasons, less important perhaps, retained her also. Her haughty dignity, which in that city had maintained her honest and solitary, revolted truly at the idea that she would have to reappear as a solicitor before her former lover. Then, her superior commonsense, which nothing had ever been able to lead astray or to dazzle, told her that it was too late now to change anything; that Ramuntcho, until now ignorant and free, would not know how to attain the dangerous regions where the intelligence of his father had elevated itself, but that he would languish at the bottom, like one outclassed. And, in fine, a sentiment which she hardly confessed to herself, lingered powerfully in the depths of her heart: the fear of losing her son, of guiding him no longer, of holding him no longer, of having him no longer.—And so, in that instant of decisive reflection, after having hesitated for years, she inclined more and more to remain stubborn in her silence with regard to the stranger and to let pass humbly near her the life of her Ramuntcho, under the protecting looks of the Virgin and the saints.—There remained unsolved the question of Gracieuse Detcharry.—Well, she would marry, in spite of everything, her son, smuggler and poor though he be! With her instinct of a mother somewhat savagely loving, she divined that the little girl was enamoured enough not to fall out of love ever; she had seen this in her fifteen year old black eyes, obstinate and grave under the golden nimbus of her hair. Gracieuse marrying Ramuntcho for his charm alone, in spite of and against maternal will!—The rancor and vindictiveness that lurked in the mind of Franchita rejoiced suddenly at that great triumph over the pride of Dolores.
Around the isolated house where, under the grand silence of midnight, she decided alone her son's future, the spirit of the Basque ancestors passed, sombre and jealous also, disdainful of the stranger, fearful of impiety, of changes, of evolutions of races;—the spirit of the Basque ancestors, the old immutable spirit which still maintains that people with eyes turned toward the anterior ages; the mysterious antique spirit by which the children are led to act as before them their fathers had acted, at the side of the same mountains, in the same villages, around the same belfries.—
The noise of steps now, in the dark, outside!—Someone walking softly in sandals on the thickness of the plane-tree leaves strewing the soil.—Then, a whistled appeal.—
What, already!—Already one o'clock in the morning—!
Quite resolved now, she opened the door to the chief smuggler with a
smile of greeting that the latter had never seen in her:
“Come in, Itchoua,” she said, “warm yourself—while I go wake up my
son.”
A tall and large man, that Itchoua, thin, with a thick chest, clean shaven like a priest, in accordance with the fashion of the old time Basque; under the cap which he never took off, a colorless face, inexpressive, cut as with a pruning hook, and recalling the beardless personages archaically drawn on the missals of the fifteenth century. Above his hollow cheeks, the breadth of the jaws, the jutting out of the muscles of the neck gave the idea of his extreme force. He was of the Basque type, excessively accentuated; eyes caved-in too much under the frontal arcade; eyebrows of rare length, the points of which, lowered as on the figures of tearful madonnas, almost touched the hair at the temples. Between thirty and fifty years, it was impossible to assign an age to him. His name was Jose-Maria Gorosteguy; but, according to the custom he was known in the country by the surname of Itchoua (the Blind) given to him in jest formerly, because of his piercing sight which plunged in the night like that of cats. He was a practising Christian, a church warden of his parish and a chorister with a thundering voice. He was famous also for his power of resistance to fatigue, being capable of climbing the Pyrenean slopes for hours at racing speed with heavy loads on his back.
Ramuntcho came down soon, rubbing his eyelids, still heavy from a youthful sleep, and, at his aspect, the gloomy visage of Itchoua was illuminated by a smile. A continual seeker for energetic and strong boys that he might enroll in his band, and knowing how to keep them in spite of small wages, by a sort of special point of honor, he was an expert in legs and in shoulders as well as in temperaments, and he thought a great deal of his new recruit.
Franchita, before she would let them go, leaned her head again on her son's neck; then she escorted the two men to the threshold of her door, opened on the immense darkness,—and recited piously the Pater for them, while they went into the dark night, into the rain, into the chaos of the mountains, toward the obscure frontier.