While they were day-dreaming, they approached the French shore, the smugglers. On the other side of the strange zone which they were traversing as in a sled, that silhouette of an old city, which fled from them slowly, was Fontarabia; those highlands which rose to the sky with figures so harsh, were the Spanish Pyrenees. All this was Spain, mountainous Spain, eternally standing there in the face of them and incessantly preoccupying their minds: a country which one must reach in silence, in dark nights, in nights without moonlight, under the rain of winter; a country which is the perpetual aim of dangerous expeditions; a country which, for the men of Ramuntcho's village, seems always to close the southwestern horizon, while it changes in appearance according to the clouds and the hours; a country which is the first to be lighted by the pale sun of mornings and which masks afterward, like a sombre screen the red sun of evenings.—
He adored his Basque land, Ramuntcho,—and this morning was one of the times when this adoration penetrated him more profoundly. In his after life, during his exile, the reminiscence of these delightful returns at dawn, after the nights of smuggling, caused in him an indescribable and very anguishing nostalgia. But his love for the hereditary soil was not as simple as that of his companions. As in all his sentiments, as in all his sensations, there were mingled in it diverse elements. At first the instinctive and unanalyzed attachment of his maternal ancestors to the native soil, then something more refined coming from his father, an unconscious reflection of the artistic admiration which had retained the stranger here for several seasons and had given to him the caprice of allying himself with a girl of these mountains in order to obtain a Basque descendance.—
CHAPTER III.
It is eleven o'clock now, and the bells of France and Spain mingle above the frontier their religious festival vibrations.
Bathed, rested, and in Sunday dress, Ramuntcho was going with his mother to the high mass of All-Saints' Day. On the path, strewn with reddish leaves, they descended toward their parish, under a warm sun which gave to them the illusion of summer.
He, dressed in a manner almost elegant and like a city denizen, save for the traditional Basque cap, which he wore on the side and pulled down like a visor over his childish eyes. She, straight and proud, her head high, her demeanor distinguished, in a gown of new form; having the air of a society woman, except for the mantilla; made of black cloth, which covered her hair and her shoulders. In the great city formerly she had learned how to dress—and anyway, in the Basque country, where so many ancient traditions have been preserved, the women and the girls of the least important villages have all taken the habit of dressing in the fashion of the day, with an elegance unknown to the peasants of the other French provinces.
They separated, as etiquette ordains, in the yard of the church, where the immense cypress trees smelled of the south and the Orient. It resembled a mosque from the exterior, their parish, with its tall, old, ferocious walls, pierced at the top only by diminutive windows, with its warm color of antiquity, of dust and of sun.
While Franchita entered by one of the lower doors, Ramuntcho went up a venerable stone stairway which led one from the exterior wall to the high tribunes reserved for men.
The extremity of the sombre church was of dazzling old gold, with a profusion of twisted columns, of complicated entablements, of statues with excessive convolutions and with draperies in the style of the Spanish Renaissance. And this magnificence of the tabernacle was in contrast with the simplicity of the lateral walls, simply kalsomined. But an air of extreme old age harmonized these things, which one felt were accustomed for centuries to endure in the face of one another.