Ramuntcho | Page 4

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, a sentiment which she hardly confessed to herself, lingered powerfully in the depths of her heart: the fear of losing her son, of guiding him no longer, of holding him no longer, of having him no longer.--And so, in that instant of decisive reflection, after having hesitated for years, she inclined more and more to remain stubborn in her silence