She stopped her spinning and gazed at him with wistful, wondering eyes. Could it be that they were not beautiful to him? those deep red, glowing, sun-basked dahlia flowers?
"Do you know," she said very softly, with a flush of penitence that came and went, "when I saw them, I hated them; I confessed it to Father Francis next day. You seemed so content with, them, and they looked so gay and glad there—and then the jewels! Somehow, I seemed to myself such a little thing, and so ugly and mean. And yet, do you know—"
"And yet—well?"
"They did not look to me good—those women," said Bébée, thoughtfully, looking across at him in deprecation of his possible anger. "They were great people, I suppose, and they appeared very happy; but though I seemed nothing to myself after them, still I think I would not change."
"You are wise without books, Bébée."
"Oh, no, I am not wise at all. I only feel. And give me books; oh, pray, give me books! You do not know; I will learn so fast; and I will not neglect anything, that I promise. The neighbors and Jeannot say that I shall let the flowers die, and the hut get dirty, and never spin or prick Annémie's patterns; but that is untrue. I will do all, just as I have done, and more too, if only you will give me things to read, for I do think when one is happy, one ought to work more—not less."
"But will these books make you happy? If you ask me the truth, I must tell you—no. You are happy as you are, because you know nothing else than your own little life; for ignorance is happiness, Bébée, let sages, ancient and modern, say what they will. But when you know a little, you will want to know more: and when you know much, you will want to see much also, and then—and then—the thing will grow—you will be no longer content. That is, you will be unhappy."
Bébée watched him with wistful eyes.
"Perhaps that is true. No doubt it is true, if you say it. But you know all the world seems full of voices that I hear, but that I cannot understand; it is with me as I should think it is with people who go to foreign countries and do not know the tongue that is spoken when they land; and it makes me unhappy, because I cannot comprehend, and so the books will not make me more so, but less. And as for being content—when I thought you were gone away out of the city, last night, I thought I would never be able to pray any more, because I hated myself, and I almost hated the angels, and I told Mary that she was cruel, and she turned her face from me—as it seemed, forever."
She spoke quite quietly and simply, spinning as she spoke, and looking across at him with earnest eyes, that begged him to believe her. She was saying the pure truth, but she did not know the force or the meaning of that truth.
He listened with a smile; it was not new to him; he knew her heart much better than she knew it herself, but there was an unconsciousness, and yet a strength, in the words that touched him though.
He threw the leaves away, irritably, and told her to leave off her spinning.
"Some day I shall paint you with that wheel as I painted the Broodhuis.
Will you let me, Bébée?"
"Yes."
She answered him as she would have answered if he had told her to go on pilgrimage from one end of the Low Countries to the other.
"What were you going to do to-day?"
"I am going into the market with the flowers; I go every day."
"How much will you make?"
"Two or three francs, if I am lucky."
"And do you never have a holiday?"
"Oh, yes; but not often, you know, because it is on the fete days that the people want the most flowers."
"But in the winter?"
"Then I work at the lace."
"Do you never go into the woods?"
"I have been once or twice; but it loses a whole day."
"You are afraid of not earning?"
"Yes. Because I am afraid of owing people anything."
"Well, give up this one day, and we will make holiday. The people are out; they will not know. Come into the forest, and we will dine at a café in the woods; and we will be as poetic as you like, and I will tell you a tale of one called Rosalind, who pranked herself in boy's attire, all for love, in the Ardennes country yonder. Come, it is the very day for the forest; it will make me a lad again at Meudon, when the lilacs were in bloom. Poor Paris! Come."
"Do you mean it?"
The color was bright in her face, her heart was dancing, her little feet felt themselves already on the fresh green turf.
She had no thought that there could be any harm in it. She would have gone with Jeannot or old Bac.
"Of course I mean it. Come. I was going to Mayence to see the Magi and Van Dyck's Christ. We will go to Soignies instead, and study green leaves. I will paint your face by sunlight. It is the best way to paint you. You belong to the open air. So should Gretchen; or how else should she have the blue sky in her eyes?"
"But I have only wooden shoes!"
Her face was scarlet as she glanced at her feet; he who had wanted to give her the silk stockings—how would he like to be seen walking abroad with those two clumsy, clattering, work-a-day, little sabots?
"Never mind. My dear, in my time I have had enough of satin shoes and of silver gilt heels; they click-clack as loud as yours, and cost much more to those who walk with them, not to mention that they will seldom deign to walk at all. Your wooden shoes are picturesque. Paganini made a violin out of a wooden shoe. Who knows what music may lurk in yours, only you have never heard it. Perhaps I have. It was Bac who gave you the red shoes that was the barbarian, not I. Come."
"You really mean it?"
"Come."
"But they will miss me at market."
"They will think you are gone on the pilgrimage: you need never tell them you have not."
"But if they ask me?"
"Does it never happen that you say any other thing than the truth?"
"Any other thing than the truth! Of course not. People take for granted that one tells truth; it would be very base to cheat them. Do you really mean that I may come?—in the forest!—and you will tell me stories like those you give me to read?"
"I will tell you a better story. Lock your hut, Bébée, and come."
"And to think you are not ashamed!"
"Ashamed?"
"Yes, because of my wooden shoes."
Was it possible? Bébée thought, as she ran out into the garden and locked the door behind her, and pushed the key under the waterbutt as usual, being quite content with that prudent precaution against robbers which had served Antoine all his days. Was it possible, this wonderful joy?—her cheeks were like her roses, her eyes had a brilliance like the sun; the natural grace and mirth of the child blossomed in a thousand ways and gestures.
As she went by the shrine in the wall, she bent her knee a moment and made the sign of the cross; then she gathered a little moss-rose that nodded close under the border of the palisade, and turned and gave it to him.
"Look, she sends you this. She is not angry, you see, and it is much more pleasure when she is pleased—do you not know?"
He shrank a little as her fingers touched him.
"What a pity you had no mother, Bébée!" he said, on an impulse of emotion, of which in Paris he would have been more ashamed than of any guilt.
CHAPTER XV.
In the deserted lane by the swans' water, under the willows, the horses waited to take him to Mechlin; little, quick, rough horses, with round brass bells, in the Flemish fashion, and gay harness, and a low char-à-banc, in which a wolf-skin and red rugs, and all a painter's many necessities, were tossed together.
He lifted her in, and the little horses flew fast through the green country, ringing chimes at each step, till they plunged into the deep glades of the woods of Cambre and Soignies.
Bébée sat breathless with delight.
She had never gone behind horses in all her life, except once or twice in a wagon when the tired teamsters had dragged a load of corn across the plains, or when the miller's old gray mare had hobbled wearily before a cart-load of noisy, happy, mischievous children going home from the masses and fairs, and flags, and flowers, and church banners, and puppet-shows, and lighted altars, and whirling merry-go-rounds of the Fête Dieu.
She had never known what it was to sail as on the wings of the wind along broad roads, with yellow wheat-lands, and green hedges, and wayside trees, and little villages, and reedy canal water, all flying by her to the sing-song of the joyous bells.
"Oh, how good it is to live!" she cried, clapping her hands in a very ecstasy, as the clear morning broadened into gold and the west wind rose and blew from the sands by the sea.
"Yes—it is good—if one did not tire so soon," said he, watching her with a listless pleasure.
But she did not hear; she was beyond the reach of any power to sadden her; she was watching the white oxen that stood on the purple brow of the just reapen lands, and the rosy clouds that blew like a shower of apple-blossoms across the sky to the south.
There was a sad darkling Calvary on the edge of the harvest-field that looked black against the blue sky; its shadow fell across the road, but she did not see it: she was looking at the sun.
There is not much change in the great Soignies woods. They are aisles on aisles of beautiful green trees, crossing and recrossing; tunnels of dark foliage that look endless; long avenues of beech, of oak, of elm, or of fir, with the bracken and the brushwood growing dense between; a delicious forest growth everywhere, shady even at noon, and by a little past midday dusky as evening; with the forest fragrance, sweet and dewy, all about, and under the fern the stirring of wild game, and the white gleam of little rabbits, and the sound of the wings of birds.
Soignies is not legend-haunted like the Black Forest, nor king-haunted like Fontainebleau, nor sovereign of two historic streams like the brave woods of Heidelberg; nor wild and romantic, arid broken with black rocks, and poetized by the shade of Jaques, and swept through by a perfect river, like its neighbors of Ardennes; nor throned aloft on mighty mountains like the majestic oak glades of the Swabian hills of the ivory carvers.
Soignies is only a Flemish forest in a plain, throwing its shadows over corn-fields and cattle pastures, with no panorama beyond it and no wonders in its depth. But it is a fresh, bold, beautiful forest for all that.
It has only green leaves to give,—green leaves always, league after league; but there is about it that vague mystery which all forests have, and this universe of leaves seems boundless, and Pan might dwell in it, and St. Hubert, and John Keats.
Bébée, in her rare holidays with the Bac children or with Jeannot's sisters, had never penetrated farther than the glades of the Cambre, and had never entered the heart of the true forest, which is much still what it must have been in the old days when the burghers of Brabant cut their yew bows and their pike staves from it to use against the hosts of Spain.
To Bébée it was as an enchanted land, and every play of light and shade, every hare speeding across the paths, every thrush singing in the leaves, every little dog-rose or harebell that blossomed in the thickets, was to her a treasure, a picture, a poem, a delight.
He had seen girls thus in the woods of Vincennes and of Versailles in the student days of his youth: little work-girls fresh from châlets of the Jura or from vine-hung huts of the Loire, who had brought their poor little charms to perish in Paris; and who dwelt under the hot tiles and amidst the gilded shop signs till they were as pale and thin as their own starved balsams; and who, when they saw the green woods, laughed and cried a little, and thought of the broad sun-swept fields, and wished that they were back again behind their drove of cows, or weeding among the green grapes.
But those little work-girls had been mere homely daisies, and daisies already with the dust of the pavement and of the dancing-gardens upon them.
Bébée was as pure and fresh as these dew-wet dog-roses that she found in the thickets of thorn.
He had meant to treat her as he had used to do those work-girls—a little wine, a little wooing, a little folly and passion, idle as a butterfly and brief as a rainbow—one midsummer day and night—then a handful of gold, a caress, a good-morrow, and forgetfulness ever afterwards—that was what he had meant when he had brought her out to the forest of Soignies.
But—she was different, this child.
He made the great sketch of her for his Gretchen, sitting on a moss-grown trunk, with marguerites in her hand; he sent for their breakfast far into the woods, and saw her set her pearly teeth into early peaches and costly sweetmeats; he wandered with her hither and thither, and told her tales out of the poets and talked to her in the dreamy, cynical, poetical manner that was characteristic of him, being half artificial and half sorrowful, as his temper was.
But Bébée, all unconscious, intoxicated with happiness, and yet touched by it into that vague sadness which the summer sun brings with it even to young things, if they have soul in them,—Bébée said to him what the work-girls of Paris never had done.
Beautiful things: things fantastic, ignorant, absurd, very simple, very unreasonable oftentimes, but things beautiful always, and sometimes even very wise by a wisdom not of the world; by a certain light divine that does shine now and then as through an alabaster lamp, through minds that have no grossness to obscure them.
Her words were not equal to the burden of her thoughts at times, but he knew how to take the pearl of the thought from the broken shell and tangled sea-weed of her simple, untutored speech.
"If there be a God anywhere," he thought to himself, "this little Fleming is very near him."
She was so near that, although he had no belief in any God, he could not deal with her as he had used to do with the work-girls in the primrose paths of old Vincennes.
CHAPTER XVI.
"To be Gretchen, you must count the leaves of your daisies," he said to her, as he painted,—painted her just as she was, with her two little white feet in the wooden shoes, and the thick green leaves behind; the simplest picture possible, the dress of gray—only cool dark gray—with white linen bodice, and no color anywhere except in the green of the foliage; but where he meant the wonder and the charm of it to lie was in the upraised, serious, child-like face, and the gaze of the grave, smiling eyes.
It was Gretchen, spinning, out in the open air among the flowers. Gretchen, with the tall dog-daisies growing up about her feet, among the thyme and the roses, before she had had need to gather, one to ask her future of its parted leaves.
The Gretchen of Scheffer tells no tale; she is a fair-haired, hard-working, simple-minded peasant, with whom neither angels nor devils have anything to do, and whose eyes never can open to either hell or heaven. But the Gretchen of Flamen said much more than this: looking at it, men would sigh from shame, and women weep from sorrow.
"Count the daisies?" echoed Bébée. "Oh, I know what you mean. A little—much—passionately—until death—not at all. What the girls say when they want to see if any one loves them? Is that it?"
She looked at him without any consciousness, except as she loved the flowers.
"Do you think the daisies know?" she went on, seriously, parting their petals with her fingers. "Flowers do know many things—that is certain."
"Ask them for yourself."
"Ask them what?"
"How much—any one—loves you?"
"Oh, but every one loves me; there is no one that is bad. Antoine used to say to me. 'Never think of yourself, Bébée; always think of other people, so every one will love you.' And I always try to do that, and every one does."
"But that is not the love the daisy tells of to your sex."
"No?"
"No; the girls that you see count the flowers—they are thinking, not of all the village, but of some one unlike all the rest, whose shadow falls across theirs in the moonlight! You know that?"
"Ah, yes—and they marry afterwards—yes."
She said it softly, musingly, with no embarrassment; it was an unreal, remote thing to her, and yet it stirred her heart a little with a vague trouble that was infinitely sweet.
There is little talk of love in the lives of the poor; they have no space for it; love to them means more mouths to feed, more wooden shoes to buy, more hands to dive into the meagre bag of coppers. Now and then a girl of the commune had been married, and had ploughing in the fields or to her lace-weaving in the city. Bébée had thought little of it.
"They marry or they do not marry. That is as it may be," said Flamen, with a smile. "Bébée, I must paint you as Gretchen before she made a love-dial of the daisies. What is the story? Oh, I have told you stories enough. Gretchen's you would not understand, just yet."
"But what did the daisies say to her?"
"My dear, the daisies always say the same thing, because daisies always tell the truth and know men. The daisies always say 'a little'; it is the girl's ear that tricks her, and makes her hear 'till death,'—a folly and falsehood of which the daisy is not guilty."
"But who says it if the daisy does not?"
"Ah, the devil perhaps—who knows? He has so much to do in these things."
But Bébée did not smile; she had a look of horror in her blue eyes; she belonged to a peasantry who believed in exorcising the fiend by the aid of the cross, and who not so very many generations before had driven him out of human bodies by rack and flame.
She looked with a little wistful fear on the white, golden-eyed marguerites that lay on her lap.
"Do you think the fiend is in these?" she whispered, with awe in her voice.
Flamen smiled. "When you count them he will be there, no doubt."
Bébée threw them with a shudder on the grass.
"Have I spoilt your holiday, dear?" he said, with a certain self-reproach.
She was silent a minute, then she gathered up the daisies again, and stroked them and put them to her lips.
"It is not they that do wrong. You say the girls' ears deceive them. It is the girls who want a lie and will not believe a truth because it humbles them; it is the girls that are to blame, not the daisies. As for me, I will not ask the daisies anything ever, so the fiend will not enter into them."
"Nor into you. Poor little Bébée!"
"Why, you pity me for that?"
"Yes. Because, if women never see the serpent's face, neither do they ever scent the smell of the paradise roses; and it will be hard for you to die without a single rose d'amour in your pretty breast, poor little Bébée?"
"I do not understand. But you frighten me a little."
He rose and left his easel and threw himself at her feet on the grass; he took the little wooden shoes in his hands as reverently as he would have taken the broidered shoes of a duchess; he looked up at her with tender, smiling eyes.
"Poor little Bébée!" he said again. "Did I frighten you indeed? Nay, that was very base of me. We will not spoil our summer holiday. There is no such thing as a fiend, my dear. There are only men—such as I am. Say the daisy spell over for me, Bébée. See if I do not love you a little, just as you love your flowers."
She smiled, and the happy laughter came again over her face.
"Oh, I am sure you care for me a little," she said, softly, "or you would not be so good and get me books and give me pleasure; and I do not want the daisies to tell me that, because you say it yourself, which is better."
"Much better." he answered her dreamily, and lay there in the grass, holding the little wooden shoes in his hands.
He was not in love with her. He was in no haste. He preferred to play with her softly, slowly, as one separates the leaves of a rose, to see the deep rose of its heart.
Her own ignorance of what she felt had a charm for him. He liked to lift the veil from her eyes by gentle degrees, watching each new pulse-beat, each fresh instinct tremble into life.
It was an old, old story to him; he knew each chapter and verse to weariness, though there still was no other story that he still read as often. But to her it was so new.
To him it was a long beaten track; he knew every turn of it; he recognized every wayside blossom; he had passed over a thousand times each tremulous bridge; he knew so well beforehand where each shadow would fall, and where each fresh bud would blossom, and where each harvest would be reaped.
But to her it was so new.
She followed him as a blind child a man that guides her through a garden and reads her a wonder tale.
He was good to her, that was all she knew. When he touched her ever so lightly she felt a happiness so perfect, and yet so unintelligible, that she could have wished to die in it.
And in her humility and her ignorance she wondered always how he—so great, so wise, so beautiful—could have thought it ever worth his while to leave the paradise of Rubes' land to wait with her under her little rush-thatched roof, and bring her here to see the green leaves and the living things of the forest.
As they went, a man was going under the trees with a load of wood upon his back. Bébée gave a little cry of recognition.
"Oh, look, that is Jeannot! How he will wonder to see me here!"
Flamen drew her a little downward, so that the forester passed onward without perceiving them.
"Why do you do that?" said Bébée. "Shall I not speak to him?"
"Why? To have all your neighbors chatter of your feast in the forest? It is not worth while."
"Ah, but I always tell them everything," said Bébée. whose imagination had been already busy with the wonders that she would unfold to Mère Krebs and the Varnhart children.
"Then you will see but little of me, my dear. Learn to be silent, Bébée.
It is a woman's first duty, though her hardest."
"Is it?"
She did not speak for some time. She could not imagine a state of things in which she would not narrate the little daily miracles of her life to the good old garrulous women and the little open-mouthed romps. And yet—she lifted her eyes to his.
"I am glad you have told me that," she said. "Though indeed. I do not see why one should not say what one does, yet—somehow—I do not like to talk about you. It is like the pictures in the galleries, and the music in the cathedral, and the great still evenings, when the fields are all silent, and it is as if Christ walked abroad in them; I do not know how to talk of those things to the others—only to you—and I do not like to talk about you to them—do you not know?"
"Yes, I know. But what affinity have I. Bébée, to your thoughts of your
God walking in His cornfields?"
Bébée's eyes glanced down through the green aisle of the forests, with the musing seriousness in them that was like the child-angels of Botticelli's dreams.
"I cannot tell you very well. But when I am in the fields at evening and think of Christ. I feel so happy, and of such good will to all the rest, and I seem to see heaven quite plain through the beautiful gray air where the stars are—and so I feel when I am with you—that is all. Only—"
"Only what?"
"Only in those evenings, when I was all alone, heaven seemed up there, where the stars are, and I longed for wings; but now, it is here, and I would only shut my wings if I had them, and not stir."
He looked at her, and took, her hands and kissed them—but reverently—as a believer may kiss a shrine. In that moment to Flamen she was sacred; in that moment he could no more have hurt her with passion than he could have hurt her with a blow.
It was an emotion with him, and did not endure. But whilst it lasted, it was true.
CHAPTER XVII.
Then he took her to dine at one of the wooden cafés under the trees. There was a little sheet of water in front of it and a gay garden around. There was a balcony and a wooden stairway; there were long trellised arbors, and little white tables, and great rosebushes like her own at home. They had an arbor all to themselves; a cool sweet-smelling bower of green, with a glimpse of scarlet from the flowers of some twisting beans.
They had a meal, the like of which she had never seen; such a huge melon in the centre of it, and curious wines, and coffee or cream in silver pots, or what looked like silver to her—"just like the altar-vases in the church," she said to herself.
"If only the Varnhart children were here!" she cried; but he did not echo the wish.
It was just sunset. There was a golden glow on the little bit of water. On the other side of the garden some one was playing a guitar. Under a lime-tree some girls were swinging, crying, Higher! higher! at each toss.
In a longer avenue of trellised green, at a long table, there was a noisy party of students and girls of the city; their laughter was mellowed by distance as it came over the breadth of the garden, and they sang, with fresh shrill Flemish voices, songs from an opera bouffe of La Monnaie.
It was all pretty, and gay, and pleasant.
There was everywhere about an air of light-hearted enjoyment. Bébée sat with a wondering look in her wide-opened eyes, and all the natural instincts of her youth, that were like curled-up fruit buds in her, unclosed softly to the light of joy.
"Is life always like this in your Rubes' land?" she asked him; that vague far-away country of which she never asked him anything more definite, and which yet was so clear before her fancy.
"Yes," he made answer to her. "Only—instead of those leaves, flowers and pomegranates; and in lieu of that tinkling guitar, a voice whose notes are esteemed like king's jewels; and in place of those little green arbors, great white palaces, cool and still, with ilex woods and orange groves and sapphire seas beyond them. Would you like to come there, Bébée?—and wear laces such as you weave, and hear singing and laughter all night long, and never work any more in the mould of the garden, or spin any more at that tiresome wheel, or go any more out in the wind, and the rain, and the winter mud to the market?"
Bébée listened, leaning her round elbows on the table, and her warm cheeks on her hands, as a child gravely listens to a fairy story. But the sumptuous picture, and the sensuous phrase he had chosen, passed by her.
It is of no use to tempt the little chaffinch of the woods with a ruby instead of a cherry. The bird is made to feed on the brown berries, on the morning dews, on the scarlet hips of roses, and the blossoms of the wind-tossed pear boughs; the gem, though it be a monarch's, will only strike hard and tasteless on its beak.
"I would like to see it all," said Bébée, musingly trying to follow out her thoughts. "But as for the garden work and the spinning—that I do not want to leave, because I have done it all my life; and I do not think I should care to wear lace—it would tear very soon; one would be afraid to run; and do you see I know how it is made—all that lace. I know how blind the eyes get over it, and how the hearts ache; I know how the old women starve, and the little children cry; I know that there is not a sprig of it that is not stitched with pain; the great ladies do not think, I dare say, because they have never worked at it or watched the others: but I have. And so, you see, I think if I wore it I should feel sad, and if a nail caught on it I should feel as if it were tearing the flesh of my friends. Perhaps I say it badly; but that is what I feel."
"You do not say it badly—you speak well, for you speak from the heart," he answered her, and felt a tinge of shame that he had tempted her with the gold and purple of a baser world than any that she knew.
"And yet you want to see new lands?" he pursued. "What is it you want to see there?"
"Ah, quite other things than these," cried Bébée, still leaning her cheeks on her hands. "That dancing and singing is very pretty and merry, but it is just as good when old Claude fiddles and the children skip. This wine, you tell me, is something very great; but fresh milk is much nicer, I think. It is not these kind of things I want—I want to know all about the people who lived before us; I want to know what the stars are, and what the wind is; I want to know where the lark goes when you lose him out of sight against the sun; I want to know how the old artists got to see God, that they could paint him and all his angels as they have done; I want to know how the voices got into the bells, and how they can make one's heart beat, hanging up there as they do, all alone among the jackdaws; I want to know what it is when I walk in the fields in the morning, and it is all gray and soft and still, and the corn-crake cries in the wheat, and the little mice run home to their holes, that makes me so glad and yet so sorrowful, as if I were so very near God, and yet so all alone, and such a little thing; because you see the mouse she has her hole, and the crake her own people, but I—"
Her voice faltered a little and stopped: she had never before thought out into words her own loneliness; from the long green arbor the voices of the girls and the students sang,—
"Ah! le doux son d'un baiser tendre!"
Flamen was silent. The poet in him—and in an artist there is always more or less of the poet—kept him back from ridicule, nay, moved him to pity and respect.
They were absurdly simple words no doubt, had little wisdom in them, and were quite childish in their utterance, and yet they moved him curiously as a man very base and callous may at times be moved by the look in a dying deer's eyes, or by the sound of a song that some lost love once sang.
He rose and drew her hands away, and took her small face between his own hands instead.
"Poor little Bébée!" he said gently, looking down on her with a breath that was almost a sigh. "Poor little Bébée!—to envy the corncrake and the mouse!"
She was a little startled; her cheeks grew very warm under his touch, but her eyes looked still into his without fear.
He stooped and touched her forehead with his lips, gently and without passion, almost reverently; she grew rose-hued as the bright bean-flowers, up to the light gold ripples of her hair; she trembled a little and drew back, but she was not alarmed nor yet ashamed; she was too simple of heart to feel the fear that is born of passion and of consciousness.
It was as Jeannot kissed his sister Marie, who was fifteen years old and sold milk for the Krebs people in the villages with a little green cart and a yellow dog—no more.
And yet the sunny arbor leaves and the glimpse of the blue sky swam round her indistinctly, and the sounds of the guitar grew dull upon her ear and were lost as in a rushing hiss of water, because of the great sudden unintelligible happiness that seemed to bear her little life away on it as a sea wave bears a young child off its feet.
"You do not feel alone now, Bébée?" he whispered to her.
"No!" she answered him softly under her breath, and sat still, while all her body quivered like a leaf.
No; how could she ever be alone now that this sweet, soft, unutterable touch would always be in memory upon her; how could she wish ever again now to be the corn-crake in the summer corn or the gray mouse in the hedge of hawthorn?
At that moment a student went by past the entrance of the arbor; he had a sash round his loins and a paper feather in his cap; he was playing a fife and dancing; he glanced in as he went.
"It is time to go home, Bébée," said Flamen.
CHAPTER XVIII.
So it came to pass that Bébée's day in the big forest came and went as simply almost as any day that she had played away with the Varnhart children under the beech shadows of Cambre woods.
And when he took her to her hut at sunset before the pilgrims had returned there was a great bewildered tumult of happiness in her heart, but there was no memory with her that prevented her from looking at the shrine in the wall as she passed it, and saying with a quick gesture of the cross on brow and bosom,—
"Ah, dear Holy Mother, how good you have been! and I am back again, you see, and I will work harder than ever because of all this joy that you have given me."
And she took another moss-rose and changed it for that of the morning, which was faded, and said to Flamen.—
"Look—she sends you this. Now do you know what I mean? One is more content when She is content."
He did not answer, but he held her hands against him a moment as they fastened in the rose bud.
"Not a word to the pilgrims, Bébée—you remember?"
"Yes, I will remember. I do not tell them every time I pray—it will be like being silent about that—it will be no more wrong than that."
But there was a touch of anxiety in the words; she was not quite certain; she wanted to be reassured. Instinct moved her not to speak of him; but habit made it seem wrong to her to have any secret from the people who had been about her from her birth.
He did not reassure her; her anxiety was pretty to watch, and he left the trouble in her heart like a bee in the chalice of a lily. Besides, the little wicket gate was between them; he was musing whether he would push it open once more.
Her fate was in the balance, though she did not dream it: he had dealt with her tenderly, honestly, sacredly all that day—almost as much so as stupid Jeannot could have done. He had been touched by her trust in him, and by the unconscious beauty of her fancies, into a mood that was unlike all his life and habits. But after all, he said to himself—
After all!—
Where he stood in the golden evening he saw the rosy curled mouth, the soft troubled eves, the little brown hands that still tried to fasten the rosebud, the young peach-like skin where the wind stirred the bodice;—she was only a little Flemish peasant, this poor little Bébée, a little thing of the fields and the streets, for all the dreams of God that abode with her. After all—soon or late—the end would be always the same. What matter!
She would weep a little to-morrow, and she would not kneel any more at the shrine in the garden wall; and then—and then—she would stay here and marry the good boor Jeannot, just the same after a while; or drift away after him to Paris, and leave her two little wooden shoes, and her visions of Christ in the fields at evening, behind her forevermore, and do as all the others did, and take not only silken stockings but the Cinderella slipper that is called Gold, which brings all other good things in its train;—what matter!
He had meant this from the first, because she was so pretty, and those little wooden sabots ran so lithely over the stones; though he was not in love with her, but only idly stretched his hand for her as a child by instinct stretches to a fruit that hangs in the sun a little rosier and a little nearer than the rest.
What matter—he said to himself—she loved him, poor little soul, though she did not know it; and there would always be Jeannot glad enough of a handful of bright French gold.
He pushed the gate gently against her; her hands fastened the rosebud and drew open the latch themselves.
"Will you come in a little?" she said, with the happy light in her face. "You must not stay long, because the flowers must be watered, and then there are Annémie's patterns—they must be done or she will have no money and so no food—but if you would come in for a little? And see, if you wait a minute I will show you the roses that I shall cut to-morrow the first thing, and take down to St. Guido to Our Lady's altar in thank-offering for to-day. I should like you to choose them—you yourself—and if you would just touch them I should feel as if you gave them to her too. Will you?"
She spoke with the pretty outspoken frankness of her habitual speech, just tempered and broken with the happy, timid hesitation, the curious sense at once of closer nearness and of greater distance, that had come on her since he had kissed her among the bright beanflowers.
He turned from her quickly.
"No, dear, no. Gather your roses alone, Bébée; if I touch them their leaves will fall."
Then, with a hurriedly backward glance down the dusky lane to see that none were looking, he bent his head and kissed her again quickly and with a sort of shame, and swung the gate behind him and went away through the boughs and the shadows.
CHAPTER XIX.
Bébée looked after him wistfully till his figure was lost in the gloom.
The village was very quiet; a dog barking afar off and a cow lowing in the meadow were the only living things that made their presence heard; the pilgrims had not returned.
She leaned on the gate a few minutes in that indistinct, dreamy happiness which is the prerogative of innocent love.
"How wonderful it is that he should give a thought to me!" she said again and again to herself. It was as if a king had stooped for a little knot of daisied grass to set it in his crown where the great diamonds should be.
She did not reason. She did not question. She did not look beyond that hour—such is the privilege of youth.
"How I will read! How I will learn! How wise I will try to be; and how good, if I can!" she thought, swaying the little gate lightly under her weight, and looking with glad eyes at the goats as they frisked with their young in the pasture on the other side of the big trees, whilst one by one the stars came out, and an owl hooted from the palace woods, and the frogs croaked good-nights in the rushes.
Then, like a little day laborer as she was, with the habit of toil and the need of the poor upon her from her birth up, she shut down the latch of the gate, kissed it where his hand had rested, and went to the well to draw its nightly draught for the dry garden.
"Oh, dear roses!" she said to them as she rained the silvery showers over their nodding heads. "Oh, dear roses!—tell me—was ever anybody so happy as I am? Oh, if you say 'yes' I shall tell you you lie; silly flowers that were only born yesterday!"
But the roses shook the water off them in the wind, and said, as she wished them to say,—
"No—no one—ever before, Bébée—no one ever before."
For roses, like everything else upon earth, only speak what our own heart puts into them.
An old man went past up the lane; old Jehan, who was too ailing and aged to make one of the pilgrimage. He looked at the little quick-moving form, grayish white in the starlight, with the dark copper vessel balanced on her head, going to and fro betwixt the well and the garden.
"You did not go to the pilgrimage, poor little one!" he said across the sweetbrier hedge. "Nay, that was too bad; work, work, work—thy pretty back should not be bent double yet. You want a holiday, Bébée; well, the Fête Dieu is near. Jeannot shall take you, and maybe I can find a few sous for gingerbread and merry-go-rounds. You sit dull in the market all day; you want a feast."
Bébée colored behind the hedge, and ran in and brought three new-laid eggs that she had left in the flour-bin in the early morning, and thrust them on him through a break in the brier. It was the first time she had ever done anything of which she might not speak: she was ashamed, and yet the secret was so sweet to her.
"I am very happy, Jehan, thank God!" she murmured, with a tremulous breath and a shine in her eyes that the old man's ears and sight were too dull to discern.
"So was she" muttered Jehan, as he thrust the eggs into his old patched blue blouse,—"so was she. And then a stumble—a blow in the lane there—a horse's kick—and all was over. All over, my pretty one—for ever and ever."
CHAPTER XX.
On a sudden impulse Flamen, going through the woodland shadows to the city, paused and turned back; all his impulses were quick and swayed him now hither, now thither, in many contrary ways.
He knew that the hour was come—that he must leave her and spare her, as to himself he phrased it, or teach her the love words that the daisies whisper to women.
And why not?—anyway she would marry Jeannot.
He, half-way to the town, walked back again and paused a moment at the gate; an emotion half pitiful, half cynical, stirred in him.
Anyway he would leave her in a few days: Paris had again opened her arms to him; his old life awaited him; women who claimed him by imperious, amorous demands reproached him; and after all this day he had got the Gretchen of his ideal, a great picture for the future of his fame.
As he would leave her anyway so soon, he would leave her unscathed—poor little field flower—he could never take it with him to blossom or wither in Paris.
His world would laugh too utterly if he made for himself a mistress out of a little Fleming in two wooden shoes. Besides—
Besides, something that was half weak and half noble moved him not to lead this child, in her trust and her ignorance, into ways that when she awakened from her trance would seem to her shameful and full of sorrow. For he knew that Bébée was not as others are.
He turned back and knocked at the hut door and opened it.
Bébée was just beginning to undress herself; she had taken off her white kerchief and her wooden shoes; her pretty shoulders and her little neck shone white in the moon; her feet were bare on the mud floor.
She started with a cry and threw the handkerchief again on her shoulders, but there was no fear of him; only the unconscious instinct of her girlhood.
He thought for a moment that he would not go away until the morrow—
"Did you want me?" said Bébée softly, with happy eyes of surprise and yet a little startled, fearing some evil might have happened to him that he should have returned thus.
"No; I do not want you, dear," he said gently; no—he did not want her, poor little soul; she wanted him, but he—there were so many of these things in his life, and he liked her too well to love her.
"No, dear, I did not want you," said Flamen, drawing her arms about him, and feeling her flutter like a little bird, while the moonlight came in through the green leaves and fell in fanciful patterns on the floor. "But I came to say—you have had one happy day. Wholly happy, have you not, poor little Bébée?"
"Ah, yes!" she sighed rather than said the answer in her wondrous gladness; drawn there close to him, with the softness of his lips upon her. Could he have come back only to ask that?
"Well, that is something. You will remember it always, Bébée?" he murmured in his unconscious cruelty. "I did not wish to spoil your cloudless pleasure, dear—for you care for me a little, do you not?—so I came back to tell you only now, that I go away for a little while to-morrow."
"Go away!"
She trembled in his arms and turned cold as ice; a great terror and darkness fell upon her; she had never thought that he would ever go away. He caressed her, and played with her as a boy may with a bird before he wrings its neck.
"You will come back?"
He kissed her: "Surely."
"To-morrow?"
"Nay—not so soon."
"In a week?"
"Hardly."
"In a month, then?"
"Perhaps."
"Before winter, anyway?"
He looked aside from the beseeching, tearful, candid eyes, and kissed her hair and her throat, and said, "Yes, dear—beyond a doubt."
She clung to him, crying silently; he wished that women would not weep.
"Come, Bébée, listen," he said coaxingly, thinking to break the bitterness to her. "This is not wise, and it gives me pain. There is so much for you to do. You know so little. There is so much to learn. I will leave you many books, and you must grow quite learned in my absence. The Virgin is all very well in her way, but she cannot teach us much, poor lady. For her kingdom is called Ignorance. You must teach yourself. I leave you that to do. The days will go by quickly if you are laborious and patient. Do you love me, little one?"
For an answer she kissed his hand.
"You are a busy little Bébée always," he said, with his lips caressing her soft brown arms that were round his neck. "But you must be busier than ever whilst I am gone. So you will forget. No, no, I do not mean that:—I mean so the time will pass quickest. And I shall finish your picture, Bébée, and all Paris will see you, and the great ladies will envy the little girl with her two wooden shoes. Ah! that does not please you?—you care for none of these vanities. No. Poor little Bébée, why did God make you, or Chance breathe life into you? You are so far away from us all. It was cruel. What harm has your poor little soul ever done that, pure as a flower, it should have been sent to the hell of this world?"
She clung to him, sobbing without sound. "You will come back? You will come back?" she moaned, clasping him closer and closer.
Flamen's own eyes grew dim. But he lied to her: "I will—I promise."
It was so much easier to say so, and it would break her sorrow. So he thought.
For the moment again he was tempted to take her with him—but, he resisted it—he would tire, and she would cling to him forever.
There was a long silence. The bleating of the little kid in the shed without was the only sound; the gray lavender blew to and fro.
Her arms were close about his throat; he kissed them again, and kissed her eyes, her cheek, her mouth; then put her from him quickly and went out.
She ran to him, and threw herself on the damp ground and held him there, and leaned her forehead on his feet. But though he looked at her with wet eyes, he did not yield, and he still said,—
"I will come back soon—very soon; be quiet, dear, let me go."
Then he kissed her once more many times, and put her gently within the door and closed it.
A low, sharp, sudden cry reached him, went to his heart, but he did not turn; he went on through the wet, green little garden, and the curling leaves, where he had found peace and had left desolation.
CHAPTER XXI.
"I will let her alone, and she will marry Jeannot," thought Flamen; and he believed himself a good man for once in his life, and pitied himself for having become a sentimentalist.
She would marry Jeannot, and bear many children, as those people always did; and ruddy little peasants would cling about these pretty, soft, little breasts of hers; and she would love them after the manner of such women, and be very content clattering over the stones in her wooden shoes; and growing brown and stout, and more careful after money, and ceasing to dream of unknown things, and not seeing God at all in the fields, but looking low and beholding only the ears of the gleaning wheat and the feet of the tottering children; and so gaining her bread, and losing her soul, and stooping nearer and nearer to earth till she dropped into it like one of her own wind-blown wall-flowers when the bee has sucked out all its sweetness and the heats have scorched up all its bloom:—yes, of course, she would marry Jeannot and end so!
Meanwhile he had his Gretchen, and that was the one great matter.
So he left the street of Mary of Burgundy, and went on his way out of the chiming city as its matin bells were rung, and took with him a certain regret, and the only innocent affection that had ever awakened in him; and thought of his self-negation with half admiration and half derision; and so drifted away into the whirlpool of his amorous, cynical, changeful, passionate, callous, many-colored life, and said to himself as he saw the last line of the low green plains shine against the sun, "She will marry Jeannot—of course, she will marry Jeannot. And my Gretchen is greater than Scheffer's."
What else mattered very much, after all, except what they would say in
Paris of Gretchen?
CHAPTER XXII.
People saw that Bébée had grown very quiet. But that was all they saw.
Her little face was pale as she sat among her glowing autumn blossoms, by the side of the cobbler's stall; and when the Varnhart children cried at the gate to her to come and play, she would answer gently that she was too busy to have play-time now.
The fruit girl of the Montagne de la Cour hooted after her, "Gone so soon?—oh hé! what did I say?—a fine pine is sugar in the teeth a second only, but the brown nuts you may crack all the seasons round. Well, did you make good harvest while it lasted? has Jeannot a fat bridal portion promised?"
And old Jehan, who was the tenderest soul of them all in the lane by the swans' water, would come and look at her wistfully as she worked among the flowers, and would say to her,—
"Dear little one, there is some trouble: does it come of that painted picture? You never laugh now, Bébée, and that is bad. A girl's laugh is pretty to hear; my girl laughed like little bells ringing—and then it stopped, all at once; they said she was dead. But you are not dead, Bébée. And yet you are so silent; one would say you were."
But to the mocking of the fruit girl, as to the tenderness of old Jehan, Bébée answered nothing; the lines of her pretty curled mouth grew grave and sad, and in her eyes there was a wistful, bewildered, pathetic appeal like the look in the eyes of a beaten dog, which, while it aches with pain, does not cease to love its master.
One resolve upheld and made her feet firm on the stones of the streets and her lips mute under all they said to her. She would learn all she could, and be good, and patient, and wise, if trying could make her wise, and so do his will in all things—until he should come back.
"You are not gay, Bébée," said Annémie, who grew so blind that she could scarce see the flags at the mastheads, and who still thought that she pricked the lace patterns and earned her bread. "You are not gay, dear. Has any lad gone to sea that your heart goes away with, and do you watch for his ship coming in with the coasters? It is weary work waiting; but it is all the men think us fit for, child. They may set sail as they like; every new port has new faces for them; but we are to sit still and to pray if we like, and never murmur, be the voyage ever so long, but be ready with a smile and a kiss, a fresh pipe of tobacco, and a dry pair of socks;—that is a man. We may have cried our hearts out; we must have ready the pipe and the socks, or, 'Is that what you call love?' they grumble. You want mortal patience if you love a man,—it is like a fretful child that thumps you when your breast is bare to it. Still, be you patient, dear, just as I am, just as I am."
And Bébée would shudder as she swept the cobwebs from the garret walls,—patient as she was, she who had sat here fifty years watching for a dead man and for a wrecked ship.
CHAPTER XXIII.
The wheat was reapen in the fields, and the brown earth turned afresh. The white and purple chrysanthemums bloomed against the flowerless rose-bushes, and the little gray Michaelmas daisy flourished where the dead carnations had spread their glories. Leaves began to fall and chilly winds to sigh among the willows; the squirrels began to store away their nuts, and the poor to pick up the broken bare boughs.
"He said he would come before winter," thought Bébée, every day when she rose and felt each morning cooler and grayer than the one before it; winter was near.
Her little feet already were cold in their wooden shoes; and the robin already sang in the twigs of the sear sweetbrier; but she had the brave sweet faith which nothing kills, and she did not doubt—oh! no, she did not doubt, she was only tired.
Tired of the strange, sleepless, feverish nights; tired of the long, dull, empty days: tired of watching down the barren, leafless lane: tired of hearkening breathless to each step on the rustling dead leaves; tired of looking always, always, always, into the ruddy autumn evenings and the cold autumn starlight, and never hearing what she listened for, never seeing what she sought; tired as a child may be lost in a wood, and wearily wearing its small strength and breaking its young heart in search of the track forever missed, of the home forever beyond the horizon.
Still she did her work and kept her courage.
She took her way into the town with her basket full of the ruby and amber of the dusky autumn blossoms, and when those failed, and the garden was quite desolate, except for a promise of haws and of holly, she went, as she had always done, to the lace-room, and gained her bread and the chickens' corn each day by winding the thread round the bobbins; and at nightfall when she had plodded home through the darksome roads and over the sodden turf, and had lit her rushlight and sat down to her books, with her hand buried in her hair, and her eyes smarting from the strain of the lace-work and her heart aching with that new and deadly pain which never left her now, she would read—read—read—read, and try and store her brain with knowledge, and try and grasp these vast new meanings of life that the books opened to her, and try and grow less ignorant against he should return.
There was much she could not understand, bait there was also much she could.
Her mind was delicate and quick, her intelligence swift and strong; she bought old books at bookstalls with pence that she saved by going without her dinner. The keeper of the stall, a shrewd old soul, explained some hard points to her, and chose good volumes for her, and lent others to this solitary little student in her wooden shoes and with her pale child's face.
So she toiled hard and learned much, and grew taller and very thin, and got a look in her eyes like a lost dog's, and yet never lost heart or wandered in the task that he had set her, or in her faith in his return.
"Burn the books, Bébée," whispered the children again and again, clinging to her skirts. "Burn the wicked, silent things. Since you have had them you never sing, or romp, or laugh, and you look so white—so white."
Bébée kissed them, but kept to her books.
Jeannot going by from the forest night after night saw the light twinkling in the hut window, and sometimes crept softly up and looked through the chinks of the wooden shutter, and saw her leaning over some big old volume with her pretty brows drawn together, and her mouth shut close in earnest effort, and he would curse the man who had changed her so and go away with rage in his breast and tears in his eyes, not daring to say anything, but knowing that never would Bébée's little brown hand lie in love within his own.
Nor even in friendship, for he had rashly spoken rough words against the stranger from Rubes' land, and Bébée ever since then had passed him by with a grave, simple greeting, and when he had brought her in timid gifts a barrow-load of fagots, had thanked him, but had bidden him take the wood home to his mother.
"You think evil things of me, Bébée?" good Jeannot had pleaded, with a sob in his voice; and she had answered gently,—
"No; but do not speak to me, that is all."
Then he had cursed her absent lover, and Bébée gone within and closed her door.
She had no idea that the people thought ill of her. They were cold to her, and such coldness made her heart ache a little more. But the one great love in her possessed her so strongly that all other things were half unreal.
She did her daily housework from sheer habit, and she studied because he had told her to do it, and because with the sweet, stubborn, credulous faith of her youth, she never doubted that he would return.
Otherwise there was no perception of real life in her; she dreamed and prayed, and prayed and dreamed, and never ceased to do either one or the other, even when she was scattering potato-peels to the fowls, or shaking carrots loose of the soil, or sweeping the snow from her hut door, or going out in the raw dark dawn as the single little sad bell of St. Guido tolled through the stillness for the first mass.
For though even Father Francis looked angered at her because he thought she was stubborn, and hid some truth and some shame from him at confession, yet she went resolutely and oftener than ever to kneel in the dusty, dusky, crumbling old church, for it was all she could do for him who was absent—so she thought—and she did not feel quite so far away from him when she was beseeching Christ to have care of his soul and of his body.
All her pretty dreams were dead.
She never heard any story in the robin's song, or saw any promise in the sunset clouds, or fancied that angels came about her in the night—never now.
The fields were gray and sad; the birds were little brown things; the stars were cold and far off; the people she had used to care for were like mere shadows that went by her meaningless and without interest, and all she thought of was the one step that never came: all she wanted was the one touch she never felt.
"You have done wrong, Bébée, and you will not own it," said the few neighbors who ever spoke to her.
Bébée looked at them with wistful, uncomprehending eyes.
"I have done no wrong," she said gently, but no one believed her.
A girl did not shut herself up and wane pale and thin for nothing, so they reasoned. She might have sinned as she had liked if she had been sensible after it, and married Jeannot.
But to fret mutely, and shut her lips, and seem as though she had done nothing,—that was guilt indeed.
For her village, in its small way, thought as the big world thinks.