Oh, whether the adventure fell or not under the blow of justice, well, so much the worse, after all! He had nothing to lose, all was indifferent to him! And from that evening, in the fever of a new desire, he felt more boldly decided to brave the rules, the laws, the obstacles of this world. Saps ascended everywhere around him, on the sides of the brown Pyrenees; there were longer and more tepid nights; the paths were bordered with violets and periwinkles.—But religious scruples held him still. They remained, inexplicably in the depth of his disordered mind: instinctive horror of profanation; belief, in spite of everything, in something supernatural enveloping, to defend them, churches and cloisters—
CHAPTER XII.
The winter had just come to an end.
Ramuntcho,—who had slept for a few hours, in a bad, tired sleep, in a small room of the new house of his friend Florentino, at Ururbil,—awakened as the day dawned.
The night,—a night of tempest everywhere, a black and troubled night,—had been disastrous for the smugglers. Near Cape Figuier, in the rocks where they had just landed from the sea with silk bundles, they had been pursued with gunshots, compelled to throw away their loads, losing everything, some fleeing to the mountain, others escaping by swimming among the breakers, in order to reach the French shore, in terror of the prisons of San Sebastian.
At two o'clock in the morning, exhausted, drenched and half drowned, he had knocked at the door of that isolated house, to ask from the good Florentino his aid and an asylum.
And on awakening, after all the nocturnal noise of the equinoctial storm, of the rain, of the groaning branches, twisted and broken, he perceived that a grand silence had come. Straining his ear, he could hear no longer the immense breath of the western wind, no longer the motion of all those things tormented in the darkness. No, nothing except a far-off noise, regular, powerful, continued and formidable; the roll of the waters in the depth of that Bay of Biscay—which, since the beginning, is without truce and troubled; a rhythmic groan, as might be the monstrous respiration of the sea in its sleep; a series of profound blows which seemed the blows of a battering ram on a wall, continued every time by a music of surf on the beaches.—But the air, the trees and the surrounding things were immovable; the tempest had finished, without reasonable cause, as it had begun, and the sea alone prolonged the complaint of it.
To look at that land, that Spanish coast which he would perhaps never see again, since his departure was so near, he opened his window on the emptiness, still pale, on the virginity of the desolate dawn.
A gray light emanating from a gray sky; everywhere the same immobility, tired and frozen, with uncertainties of aspect derived from the night and from dreams. An opaque sky, which had a solid air and was made of accumulated, small, horizontal layers, as if one had painted it by superposing pastes of dead colors.