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—”
