It was early still, and people were hardly arriving for this high mass. Leaning on the railing of his tribune, Ramuntcho looked at the women entering, all like black phantoms, their heads and dress concealed under the mourning cashmere which it is usual to wear at church. Silent and collected, they glided on the funereal pavement of mortuary slabs, where one could read still, in spite of the effacing of ages, inscriptions in Euskarian tongue, names of extinguished families and dates of past centuries.
Gracieuse, whose coming preoccupied Ramuntcho, was late. But, to distract his mind for a moment, a “convoy” advanced slowly; a convoy, that is a parade of parents and nearest neighbors of one who had died during the week, the men still draped in the long cape which is worn at funerals, the women under the mantle and the traditional hood of full mourning.
Above, in the two immense tribunes superposed along the sides of the nave, the men came one by one to take their places, grave and with rosaries in their hands: farmers, laborers, cowboys, poachers or smugglers, all pious and ready to kneel when the sacred bell rang. Each one of them, before taking his seat, hooked behind him, to a nail on the wall, his woolen cap, and little by little, on the white background of the kalsomine, came into line rows of innumerable Basque headgear.
Below, the little girls of the school entered at last, in good order, escorted by the Sisters of Saint Mary of the Rosary. And, among these nuns, wrapped in black, Ramuntcho recognized Gracieuse. She, too, had her head enveloped with black; her blonde hair, which to-night would be flurried in the breeze of the fandango, was hidden for the moment under the austere mantilla of the ceremony. Gracieuse had not been a scholar for two years, but was none the less the intimate friend of the sisters, her teachers, ever in their company for songs, novenas, or decorations of white flowers around the statues of the Holy Virgin.—Then, the priests, in their most sumptuous costumes, appeared in front of the magnificent gold of the tabernacle, on a platform elevated and theatrical, and the mass began, celebrated, in this distant village, with excessive pomp as in a great city. There were choirs of small boys chanting in infantile voices with a savage ardor. Then choruses of little girls, whom a sister accompanied at the harmonium and which the clear and fresh voice of Gracieuse guided. From time to time a clamor came, like a storm, from the tribunes above where the men were, a formidable response animated the old vaults, the old sonorous wainscoting, which for centuries have vibrated with the same song.—
To do the same things which for numberless ages the ancestors have done and to tell blindly the same words of faith, are indications of supreme wisdom, are a supreme force. For all the faithful who sang there came from this immutable ceremony of the mass a sort of peace, a confused but soft resignation to coming destruction. Living of the present hour, they lost a little of their ephemeral personality to attach themselves better to the dead lying under the slabs and to continue them more exactly, to form with them and their future descendants only one of these resisting entireties, of almost infinite duration, which is called a race.
CHAPTER IV.
“Ite missa est!” The high mass is finished and the antique church is emptying. Outside, in the yard, among the tombs, the assistants scatter. And all the joy of a sunny noon greets them, as they come out of the sombre nave where each, according to his naive faculties, had caught more or less a glimpse of the great mystery and of the inevitable death.
Wearing all the uniform national cap, the men come down the exterior stairway; the women, slower to be captivated by the lure of the blue sky, retaining still under the mourning veil a little of the dream of the church, come out of the lower porticoes in black troops; around a grave freshly closed, some stop and weep.
The southern wind, which is the great magician of the Basque country, blows softly. The autumn of yesterday has gone and it is forgotten. Lukewarm breaths pass through the air, vivifying, healthier than those of May, having the odor of hay and the odor of flowers. Two singers of the highway are there, leaning on the graveyard wall, and they intone, with a tambourine and a guitar, an old seguidilla of Spain, bringing here the warm and somewhat Arabic gaieties of the lands beyond the frontiers.