“Come, Sister, say good-bye,” the old, tranquil Fate has said. Then, seeing that Gracieuse has only taken Arrochkoa's hand, she adds:
“Well, you do not kiss your brother?—”
Doubtless, the little Sister Mary Angelique asks for nothing better, to kiss him with all her heart, with all her soul; to clasp him, her brother, to lean on his shoulder and to seek his protection, at that hour of superhuman sacrifice when she must let the cherished one leave her without even a word of love.—And still, her kiss has in it something frightened, at once drawn back; the kiss of a nun, somewhat similar to the kiss of one dead.—When will she ever see him again, that brother, who is not to leave the Basque country, however? When will she have news of her mother, of the house, of the village, from some passer-by who will stop here, coming from Etchezar?—
“We will pray,” she says again, “to the Holy Virgin to protect you in your long voyage—” And how they go; slowly they turn back, like silent shades, toward the humble convent which the cross protects, and the two tamed smugglers, immovable on the road, look at their veils, darker than the night of the trees, disappearing in the obscure avenue.
Oh! she is wrecked also, the one who will disappear in the darkness of the little, shady hill.—But she is nevertheless soothed by white, peaceful vapors, and all that she suffers will soon be quieted under a sort of sleep. To-morrow she will take again, until death, the course of her strangely simple existence; impersonal, devoted to a series of daily duties which never change, absorbed in a reunion of creatures almost neutral, who have abdicated everything, she will be able to walk with eyes lifted ever toward the soft, celestial mirage—
O crux, ave, spes unica—!
To live, without variety or truce to the end, between the white walls of a cell always the same, now here, then elsewhere, at the pleasure of a strange will, in one of those humble village convents to which one has not even the leisure to become attached. On this earth, to possess nothing and to desire nothing, to wait for nothing, to hope for nothing. To accept as empty and transitory the fugitive hours of this world, and to feel freed from everything, even from love, as much as by death.—The mystery of such lives remains forever unintelligible to those young men who are there, made for the daily battle, beautiful beings of instinct and of strength, a prey to all the desires; created to enjoy life and to suffer from it, to love it and to continue it—
O crux, ave, spes unica!—One sees them no longer, they have re-entered their little, solitary convent.
The two men have not exchanged even a word on their abandoned undertaking, on the ill-defined cause which for the first time has undone their courage; they feel, toward one another, almost a sense of shame of their sudden and insurmountable timidity.
For an instant their proud heads were turned toward the nuns slowly fleeing; now they look at each other through the night.