CHAPTER XIX.
Here come the long, pale twilights of June, somewhat veiled like those of
May, less uncertain, however, and more tepid still. In the gardens, the
rose-laurel which is beginning to bloom in profusion is becoming already
magnificently pink. At the end of each work day, the good folks sit
outside, in front of their doors, to look at the night falling--the night
which soon confuses, under the vaults of the plane-trees, their groups
assembled for benevolent rest. And a tranquil melancholy descends over
villages, in those interminable evenings--
For Ramuntcho, this is the epoch when smuggling becomes a trade almost
without trouble, with charming hours, marching toward summits through
spring clouds; crossing ravines, wandering in lands of springs and of
wild fig-trees; sleeping, waiting for the agreed hour, with carbineers
who are accomplices, on carpets of mint and pinks.--The good odor of
plants impregnated his clothes, his waistcoat which he never wore, but
used as a pillow or a blanket--and Gracieuse would say to him at night:
"I know where you went last night, for you smell of mint of the mountain
above Mendizpi"--or: "You smell of absinthe of the Subernoa morass."
Gracieuse regretted the month of Mary, the offices of the Virgin in the
nave, decked with white flowers. In the twilights without rain, with the
sisters and some older pupils of their class, she sat under the porch of
the church, against the low wall of the graveyard from which the view
plunges into the valleys beneath. There they talked, or played the
childish games in which nuns indulge.
There were also long and strange meditations, meditations to which the
fall of day, the proximity of the church, of the tombs and of their
flowers, gave soon a serenity detached from material things and as if
free from all alliance with the senses. In her first mystic dreams as a
little girl,--inspired especially by the pompous rites of the cult, by
the voice of the organ, the white bouquets, the thousand flames of the
wax tapers--only images appeared to her--very radiant images, it is true:
altars resting on mists, golden tabernacles where music vibrated and
where fell grand flights of angels. But those visions gave place now to
ideas: she caught a glimpse of that peace and that supreme renunciation
which the certainty of an endless celestial life gives; she conceived, in
a manner more elevated than formerly, the melancholy joy of abandoning
everything in order to become an impersonal part of that entirety of
nuns, white, or blue, or black, who, from the innumerable convents of
earth, make ascend toward heaven an immense and perpetual intercession
for the sins of the world--
However, as soon as night had fallen quite, the course of her thoughts
came down every evening fatally toward intoxicating and mortal things.
Her wait, her feverish wait, began, more impatient from moment to moment.
She felt anxious that her cold companions with black veils should return
into the sepulchre of their convent and that she should be alone in her
room, free at last, in the house fallen asleep, ready to open her window
and listen to the slight noise of Ramuntcho's footsteps.
The kiss of lovers, the kiss on the lips, was now a thing possessed and
of which they had not the strength to deprive themselves. And they
prolonged it a great deal, not wishing, through charming scruples, to
accord more to each other.
Anyway, if the intoxication which they gave to each other thus was a
little too carnal, there was between them that absolute tenderness,
infinite, unique, by which all things are elevated and purified.
