One clear April morning, they were walking to the church, Gracieuse and
Ramuntcho. She, with an air half grave, half mocking, with a particular
and very odd air, leading him there to make him do a penance which she
had ordered.
In the holy enclosure, the flowerbeds of the tombs were coming into
bloom again, as also the rose bushes on the walls. Once more the new
saps were awakening above the long sleep of the dead. They went in
together, through the lower door, into the empty church, where the old
“benoite” in a black mantilla was alone, dusting the altars.
When Gracieuse had given to Ramuntcho the holy water and they had made
their signs of the cross, she led him through the sonorous nave, paved
with funereal stones, to a strange image on the wall, in a shady corner,
under the men's tribunes.
It was a painting, impregnated with ancient mysticism, representing the
figure of Jesus with eyes closed, forehead bloody, expression lamentable
and dead; the head seemed to be cut off, separated from the body,
and placed there on a gray linen cloth. Above, were written the long
Litanies of the Holy Face, which have been composed, as everybody knows,
to be recited in penance by repentant blasphemers. The day before,
Ramuntcho, in anger, had sworn in an ugly manner: a quite unimaginable
string of words, wherein the sacraments and the most saintly things were
mingled with the horns of the devil and other villainous things still
more frightful. That is why the necessity for a penance had impressed
itself on the mind of Gracieuse.
“Come, my Ramuntcho,” she recommended, as she walked away, “omit nothing
of what you must say.”
She left him then in front of the Holy Face, beginning to murmur his
litanies in a low voice, and went to the good woman and helped her to
change the water of the white Easter daisies in front of the altar of
the Virgin.
But when the languorous evening returned, and Gracieuse was seated in
the darkness meditating on her stone bench, a young human form started
up suddenly near her; someone who had come in sandals, without making
more noise than the silk owls make in the air, from the rear of the
garden doubtless, after some scaling, and who stood there, straight, his
waistcoat thrown over one shoulder: the one to whom were addressed all
her tender emotions on earth, the one who incarnated the ardent dream of
her heart and of her senses--
“Ramuntcho!” she said. “Oh! how you frightened me. Where did you come
from at such an hour? What do you want? Why did you come?”
“Why did I come? In my turn, to order you to do penance,” he replied,
laughing.
“No, tell the truth, what is the matter, what are you coming to do?”
“To see you, only! That is what I come to do--What will you have! We
never see each other!--Your mother keeps me at a distance more and more
every day. I cannot live in that way.--We are not doing any harm, after
all, since we are to be married! And you know, I could come every night,
if you like, without anybody suspecting it--”
“Oh! no!--Oh! do not do that ever, I beg of you--”
They talked for an instant, and so low, so low, with more silence than
words, as if they were afraid to wake up the birds in their nests.
They recognized no longer the sound of their voices, so changed and
so trembling they were, as if they had committed some delicious and
damnable crime, by doing nothing but staying near each other, in the
grand, caressing mystery of that night of April, which was hatching
around them so many ascents of saps, so many germinations and so many
loves--
He had not even dared to sit at her side; he remained standing, ready to
run under the branches at the least alarm, like a nocturnal prowler.
However, when he prepared to go, it was she who asked, hesitating, and
in a manner to be hardly heard:
“And--you will come back to-morrow?”
Then, under his growing mustache, he smiled at this sudden change of
mind and he replied:
“Yes, surely.--To-morrow and every night.--Every night when we shall not
have to work in Spain.--I will come--”