Ramuntcho | Page 9

pelota game of the afternoon that they are consulting, and they
make a sign to Ramuntcho who pensively comes to them. Several old
men come also and surround them, caps crushed on white hair and
faces clean shaven like those of monks: champions of the olden time,
still proud of their former successes, and sure that their counsel shall be
respected in the national game, which the men here attend with pride as
on a field of honor.--After a courteous discussion, the game is arranged;
it will be immediately after vespers; they will play the "blaid" with the
wicker glove, and the six selected champions, divided into two camps,
shall be the vicar, Ramuntcho and Arrochkoa, Gracieuse's brother,
against three famous men of the neighboring villages: Joachim of
Mendiazpi; Florentino of Espelette, and Irrubeta of Hasparren--
Now comes the "convoy", which comes out of the church and passes by
them, so black in this feast of light, and so archaic, with the envelope of

its capes, of its caps and of its veils. They are expressive of the Middle
Age, these people, while they pass in a file, the Middle Age whose
shadow the Basque country retains. And they express, above all, death,
as the large funereal slabs, with which the nave is paved, express it, as
the cypress trees and the tombs express it, and all the things in this
place, where the men come to pray, express it: death, always
death.--But a death very softly neighboring life, under the shield of the
old consoling symbols--for life is there marked also, almost equally
sovereign, in the warm rays which light up the cemetery, in the eyes of
the children who play among the roses of autumn, in the smile of those
beautiful brown girls who, the mass being finished, return with steps
indolently supple toward the village; in the muscles of all this
youthfulness of men, alert and vigorous, who shall soon exercise at the
ball-game their iron legs and arms.--And of this group of old men and
of boys at the threshold of a church, of this mingling, so peacefully
harmonious, of death and of life, comes the benevolent lesson, the
teaching that one must enjoy in time strength and love; then, without
obstinacy in enduring, submit to the universal law of passing and dying,
repeating with confidence, like these simple-minded and wise men, the
same prayers by which the agonies of the ancestors were cradled.--
It is improbably radiant, the sun of noon in this yard of the dead. The
air is exquisite and one becomes intoxicated by breathing it. The
Pyrenean horizons have been swept of their clouds, their least vapors,
and it seems as if the wind of the south had brought here the limpidities
of Andalusia or of Africa.
The Basque guitar and tambourine accompany the sung seguilla, which
the beggars of Spain throw, like a slight irony into this lukewarm
breeze, above the dead. And boys and girls think of the fandango of
to-night, feel ascending in them the desire and the intoxication of
dancing.--
At last here come the sisters, so long expected by Ramuntcho; with
them advance Gracieuse and her mother, Dolores, who is still in
widow's weeds, her face invisible under a black cape closed by a crape
veil.

What can this Dolores be plotting with the Mother
Superior?--Ramuntcho, knowing that these two women are enemies, is
astonished and disquiet to-day to see them walk side by side. Now they
even stop to talk aside, so important and secret doubtless is what they
are saying; their similar black caps, overhanging like wagon-hoods,
touch each other and they talk sheltered under them; a whispering of
phantoms, one would say, under a sort of little black vault.--And
Ramuntcho has the sentiment of something hostile plotted against him
under these two wicked caps.
When the colloquy comes to an end, he advances, touches his cap for a
salute, awkward and timid suddenly in presence of this Dolores, whose
harsh look under the veil he divines. This woman is the only person in
the world who has the power to chill him, and, never elsewhere than in
her presence, he feels weighing upon him the blemish of being the
child of an unknown father, of wearing no other name than that of his
mother.
To-day, however, to his great surprise, she is more cordial than usual,
and she says with a voice almost amiable: "Good-morning, my boy!"
Then he goes to Gracieuse, to ask her with a brusque anxiety: "To-night,
at eight o'clock, say if you will be on the square to dance with me?"
For some time, every Sunday had brought to him the same fear of being
deprived of dancing with her in the evening. In the week he hardly ever
saw her. Now