And the noise of the cow-bells is soon lost in the calm of the road more shady, where begins to diminish the heat of the day—
“Well, he has succeeded in life, that one!” thinks Ramuntcho lugubriously, continuing his walk under the autumn branches—
The road which he follows ascends, hollowed here and there by springs and sometimes crossed by big roots of oaks.
Soon Etchezar will appear to him and, before seeing it, the image of it becomes more and more precise in him, recalled and enlivened in his memory by the aspect of the surroundings.
Empty now, all this land, where Gracieuse is no more, empty and sad as a beloved home where the great Reaper has passed!—And yet Ramuntcho, in the depths of his being, dares to think that, in some small convent over there, under the veil of a nun, the cherished black eyes still exist and that he will be able at least to see them; that taking the veil is not quite like dying, and that perhaps the last word of his destiny has not been said irrevocably.—For, when he reflects, what can have changed thus the soul of Gracieuse, formerly so uniquely devoted to him?—Oh, terrible, foreign pressure, surely—And then, when they come face to face again, who knows?—When they talk, with his eyes in her eyes?—But what can he expect that is reasonable and possible?—In his native land has a nun ever broken her eternal vows to follow one to whom she was engaged? And besides, where would they go to live together afterward, when folks would get out of their way, would fly from them as renegades?—To America perhaps, and even there!—And how could he take her from these white houses of the dead where the sisters live, eternally watched?—Oh, no, all this is a chimera which may not be realized—All is at an end, all is finished hopelessly—!
Then, the sadness which comes to him from Gracieuse is forgotten for a moment, and he feels nothing except an outburst of his heart toward his mother, toward his mother who remains to him, who is there, very near, a little upset, doubtless, by the joyful trouble of waiting for him.
And now, on the left of his route, is a humble hamlet, half hidden in the beeches and the oaks, with its ancient chapel,—and with its wall for the pelota game, under very old trees, at the crossing of two paths. At once, in Ramuntcho's youthful head, the course of thoughts changes again: that little wall with rounded top, covered with wash of kalsomine and ochre, awakens tumultuously in him thoughts of life, of force and of joy; with a childish ardor he says to himself that to-morrow he will be able to return to that game of the Basques, which is an intoxication of movement and of rapid skill; he thinks of the grand matches on Sundays after vespers, of the glory of the fine struggles with the champions of Spain, of all this deprivation of his years of exile. But it is a very short instant, and mortal despair comes back to him: his triumphs on the squares, Gracieuse shall not see them; then, what is the use!—Without her, all things, even these, fall back discolored, useless and vain, do not even exist—
Etchezar!—Etchezar, is revealed suddenly at a turn of the road!—It is in a red light, something like a fantasmagoria image, illuminated purposely in a special manner in the midst of grand backgrounds of shade and of night. It is the hour of the setting sun. Around the isolated village, which the old, heavy belfry, surmounts, a last sheaf of rays traces a halo of the color of copper and gold, while clouds—and a gigantic obscurity emanating from the Gizune—darken the lands piled up above and under, the mass of brown hills, colored by the death of the ferns—
Oh! the melancholy apparition of the native land, to the soldier who returns and will not find his sweetheart—!
Three years have passed since he left here.—Well, three years, at his age, are an abyss of time, a period which changes all things. And, after that lone exile, how this village, which he adores, appears to him diminished, small, walled in the mountains, sad and hidden!—In the depth of his mind of a tall, uncultured boy, commences again, to make him suffer more, the struggle of those two sentiments of a too refined man, which are an inheritance of his unknown father: an attachment almost maladive to the home, to the land of childhood, and a fear of returning to be enclosed in it, when there exist in the world other places so vast and so free. —After the warm afternoon, the autumn is indicated now by the hasty fall of the day, with a coolness ascending suddenly from the valleys underneath, a scent of dying leaves and of moss. And then the thousand details of preceding autumns in the Basque country, of the former Novembers, come to him very precisely; the cold fall of night succeeding the beautiful, sunlit day; the sad clouds appearing with the night; the Pyrenees confounded in vapors inky gray, or, in places, cut in black silhouettes on a pale, golden sky; around the houses, the belated flowers of the gardens, which the frost spares for a long time here, and, in front of all the doors, the strewn leaves of the plane-trees, the yellow strewn leaves cracking under the steps of the man returning in sandals to his home for supper.—Oh, the heedless joy of these returns to the home, in the nights of other times, after days of marching on the rude mountain! Oh, the gaiety, in that time, of the first winter fires—in the tall, smoky hearth ornamented with a drapery of white calico and with a strip of pink paper. No, in the city, with its rows of houses one does not have the real impression of returning home, of earthing up like plants at night in the primitive manner, as one has it here, under those Basque roofs, solitary in the midst of the country, with the grand, surrounding black, the grand, shivering black of the foliage, the grand, changing black of the clouds and the summits.—But to-day, his travels, his new conceptions, have diminished and spoiled his mountaineer's home; he will doubtless find it almost desolate, especially in the thought that his mother shall not be there always—and that Gracieuse shall never be there again.