Ramuntcho | Page 4

as his friend Arrochkoa was beginning, in the

same band as he; then, little by little, he had made a necessity of this
continual adventure in dark nights; he deserted more and more, for this
rude trade, the open air workshop of the carpenter where she had placed
him as an apprentice to carve beams out of oak trunks.
And that was what he would be in life, her little Ramuntcho, so coddled
formerly in his white gown and for whom she had formed naively so
many dreams: a smuggler! Smuggler and pelota player,--two things
which go well together and which are essentially Basque.
She hesitated still, however, to let him follow that unexpected vocation.
Not in disdain for smugglers, oh, no, for her father had been a smuggler;
her two brothers also; the elder killed by a Spanish bullet in the
forehead, one night that he was swimming across the Bidassoa, the
second a refugee in America to escape the Bayonne prison; both
respected for their audacity and their strength. No, but he, Ramuntcho,
the son of the stranger, he, doubtless, might have had pretensions to
lead a less harsh life than these men if, in a hasty and savage moment,
she had not separated him from his father and brought him back to the
Basque mountains. In truth, he was not heartless, Ramuntcho's father;
when, fatally, he had wearied of her, he had made some efforts not to
let her see it and never would he have abandoned her with her child if,
in her pride, she had not quitted him. Perhaps it would be her duty
to-day to write to him, to ask him to think of his son--
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,