They are going to part, and probably forever: Arrochkoa puts into his friends hands the reins of the little wagon which, according to his promise, he lends to him:
“Well, my poor Ramuntcho!” he says, in a tone of commiseration hardly affectionate.
And the unexpressed end of the phrase signifies clearly:
“Go, since you have failed; and I have to go and meet my friends—”
Ramuntcho would have kissed him with all his heart for the last farewell,—and in this embrace of the brother of the beloved one, he would have shed doubtless good, hot tears which, for a moment at least, would have cured him a little.
But no, Arrochkoa has become again the Arrochkoa of the bad days, the gambler without soul, that only bold things interest. Absentmindedly, he touches Ramuntcho's hand:
“Well, good-bye!—Good luck—”
And, with silent steps, he goes toward the smugglers, toward the frontier, toward the propitious darkness.
Then Ramuntcho, alone in the world now, whips the little, mountain horse who gallops with his light tinkling of bells.—That train which will pass by Aranotz, that vessel which will start from Bordeaux—an instinct impels Ramuntcho not to miss them. Mechanically he hastens, no longer knowing why, like a body without a mind which continues to obey an ancient impulsion, and, very quickly, he who has no aim and no hope in the world, plunges into the savage country, into the thickness of the woods, in all that profound blackness of the night of May, which the nuns, from their elevated window, see around them—
For him the native land is closed, closed forever; finished are the delicious dreams of his first years. He is a plant uprooted from the dear, Basque soil and which a breath of adventure blows elsewhere.