CHAPTER XI.
The next day she had her promised book hidden under the vine-leaves of her empty basket as she went homeward, and though she had not seen him very long or spoken to him very much, she was happy.
The golden gates of knowledge had just opened to her; she saw a faint, far-off glimpse of the Hesperides gardens within; of the dragon she had never heard, and had no fear.
"Might I know your name?" she had asked him wistfully, as she had given him the rosebud, and taken the volume in return that day.
"They call me Flamen."
"It is your name?"
"Yes, for the world. You must call me Victor, as other women do. Why do you want my name?"
"Jeannot asked it of me."
"Oh, Jeannot asked it, did he?"
"Yes; besides," said Bébée, with her eyes very soft and very serious, and her happy voice hushed,—"besides, I want to pray for you of course, every day; and if I do not know your name, how can I make Our Lady rightly understand? The flowers know you without a name, but she might not, because so very many are always beseeching her, and you see she has all the world to look after."
He had looked at her with a curious look, and had bade her farewell, and let her go home alone that night.
Her work was quickly done, and by the light of the moon she spread her book on her lap in the porch of the hut and began her new delight.
The children had come and pulled at her skirts and begged her to play.
But Bébée had shaken her head.
"I am going to learn to be very wise, dear," she told them; "I shall not have time to dance or to play."
"But people are not merry when they are wise, Bébée," said Franz, the biggest boy.
"Perhaps not," said Bébée: "but one cannot be everything, you know, Franz."
"But surely, you would rather be merry than anything else?"
"I think there is something better, Franz. I am not sure; I want to find out; I will tell you when I know."
"Who has put that into your head, Bébée?"
"The angels in the cathedral," she told them; and the children were awed and left her, and went away to play blind-man's-buff by themselves, on the grass by the swan's water.
"But for all that the angels have said it," said Franz to his sisters, "I cannot see what good it will be to her to be wise, if she will not care any longer afterwards for almond gingerbread and currant cake."
It was the little tale of "Paul and Virginia" that he had given her to begin her studies with: but it was a grand copy, full of beautiful drawings nearly at every page.
It was hard work for her to read at first, but the drawings enticed and helped her, and she soon sank breathlessly into the charm of the story. Many words she did not know; many passages were beyond her comprehension; she was absolutely ignorant, and had nothing but the force of her own fancy to aid her.
But though stumbling at every step, as a lame child through a flowery hillside in summer, she was happy as the child would be, because of the sweet, strange air that was blowing about her, and the blossoms that she could gather into her hand, so rare, so wonderful, and yet withal so familiar, because they were blossoms.
With her fingers buried in her curls, with her book on her knee, with the moon rays white and strong on the page, Bébée sat entranced as the hours went by; the children's play shouts died away; the babble of the gossip at the house doors ceased; people went by and called good night to her; the little huts shut up one by one, like the white and purple convolvulus cups in the hedges.
Bébée did not stir, nor did she hear them; she was deaf even to the singing of the nightingales in the willows, where she sat in her little thatch above, and the wet garden-ways beyond her.
A heavy step came tramping down the lane. A voice called to her,—
"What are you doing, Bébée, there, this time of the night? It is on the strike of twelve."
She started as if she were doing some evil thing, and stretched her arms out, and looked around with blinded, wondering eyes, as if she had been rudely wakened from her sleep.
"What are you doing up so late?" asked Jeannot; he was coming from the forest in the dead of night to bring food for his family; he lost his sleep thus often, but he never thought that he did anything except his duty in those long, dark, tiring tramps to and fro between Soignies and Laeken.
Bébée shut her book and smiled with dreaming eyes, that saw him not at all.
"I was reading—and, Jeannot, his name is Flamen for the world, but I may call him Victor."
"What do I care for his name?"
"You asked it this morning."
"More fool I. Why do you read? Reading is not for poor folk like you and me."
Bébée smiled up at the white clear moon that sailed above the woods.
She was not awake out of her dream. She only dimly heard the words he spoke.
"You are a little peasant," said Jeannot roughly, as he paused at the gate. "It is all you can do to get your bread. You have no one to stand between you and hunger. How will it be with you when the slug gets your roses, and the snail your carnations, and your hens die of damp, and your lace is all wove awry, because your head runs on reading and folly, and you are spoilt for all simple pleasures and for all honest work?"
She smiled, still looking up at the moon, with the dropping ivy touching her hair.
"You are cross, dear Jeannot. Good night."
A moment afterwards the little rickety door was shut, and the rusty bolt drawn within it; Jeannot stood in the cool summer night all alone, and knew how stupid he had been in his wrath.
He leaned on the gate a minute; then crossed the garden as softly as his wooden shoes would let him. He tapped gently on the shutter of the lattice.
"Bébée—Bébée—just listen. I spoke roughly, dear—I know I have no right. I am sorry. Will you be friends with me again?—do be friends again."
She opened the shutter a little way, so that he could see her pretty mouth speaking, "we are friends—we will always be friends, of course—only you do not know. Good night."
He went away with a heavy heart and a long-drawn step. He would have preferred that she should have been angry with him.
Bébée, left alone, let the clothes drop off her pretty round shoulders and her rosy limbs, and shook out her coils of hair, and kissed the book, and laid it under her head, and went to sleep with a smile on her face.
Only, as she slept, her ringers moved as if she were counting her beads, and her lips murmured,—
"Oh, dear Holy Mother, you have so much to think of—yes. I know—all the poor, and all the little children. But take care of him; he is called Flamen, and he lives in the street of Mary of Burgundy; you cannot miss him; and if you will look for him always, and have a heed that the angels never leave him, I will give you my great cactus glower—my only one—on your Feast of Roses this very year. Oh, dear Mother, you will not forget!"
CHAPTER XII.
Bébée was a dreamer in her way, and aspired to be a scholar too. But all the same, she was not a little fool.
She had been reared in hardy, simple, honest ways of living, and would have thought it as shameful as a theft to have owed her bread to other folk.
So, though she had a wakeful, restless night, full of strange fantasies, none the less was she out in her garden by daybreak; none the less did she sweep out her floor and make her mash for the fowls, and wash out her bit of linen and hang it to dry on a line among the tall, flaunting hollyhocks that were so proud of themselves because they reached to the roof.
"What do you want with books, Bébée?" said Reine, the sabot-maker's wife, across the privet hedge, as she also hung out her linen. "Franz told me you were reading last night. It is the silver buckles have done that: one mischief always begets another."
"Where is the mischief, good Reine?" said Bébée, who was always prettily behaved with her elders, though, when pushed to it, she could hold her own.
"The mischief will be in discontent," said the sabot-maker's wife. "People live on their own little patch, and think it is the world; that is as it should be—everybody within his own, like a nut in its shell. But when you get reading, you hear of a swarm of things you never saw, and you fret because you cannot see them, and you dream, and dream, and a hole is burnt in your soup-pot, and your dough is as heavy as lead. You are like bees that leave their own clover fields to buzz themselves dead against the glass of a hothouse."
Bébée smiled, reaching to spread out her linen. But she said nothing.
"What good is it talking to them?" she thought; "they do not know."
Already the neighbors and friends of her infancy seemed so far, far away; creatures of a distant world, that she had long left; it was no use talking, they never would understand.
"Antoine should never have taught you your letters," said Reine, groaning under the great blue shirts she was hanging on high among the leaves. "I told him so at the time. I said, 'The child is a good child, and spins, and sews, and sweeps, rare and fine for her age; why go and spoil her?' But he was always headstrong. Not a child of mine knows a letter, the saints be praised! nor a word of any tongue but our own good Flemish. You should have been brought up the same. You would have come to no trouble then."
"I am in no trouble, dear Reine," said Bébée, scattering the potato-peels to the clacking poultry, and she smiled into the faces of the golden oxlips that nodded to her back again in sunshiny sympathy.
"Not yet," said Reine, hanging her last shirt.
But Bébée was not hearing; she was calling the chickens, and telling the oxlips how pretty they looked in the borders; and in her heart she was counting the minutes till the old Dutch cuckoo-clock at Mère Krebs's—the only clock in the lane—should crow out the hour at which she went down to the city.
She loved the hut, the birds, the flowers; but they were little to her now compared with the dark golden picturesque square, the changing crowds, the frowning roofs, the gray stones, and colors and shadows of the throngs for one face and for one smile.
"He is sure to be there," she thought, and started half an hour earlier than was her wont. She wanted to tell him all her rapture in the book; no one else could understand.
But all the day through he never came.
Bébée sat with a sick heart and a parched little throat, selling her flowers and straining her eyes through the tumult of the square.
The whole day went by, and there was no sign of him.
The flowers had sold well: it was a feast day; her pouch was full of pence—what was that to her?
She went and prayed in the cathedral, but it seemed cold, and desolate, and empty; even the storied windows seemed dark.
"Perhaps he is gore out of the city," she thought; and a terror fell on her that frightened her, it was so unlike any fear that she had ever known—even the fear when she had seen death on old Antoine's face had been nothing like this.
Going home through the streets, she passed the café of the Trois Frères that looks out on the trees of the park, and that has flowers in its balconies, and pleasant windows that stand open to let the sounds of the soldiers' music enter. She saw him in one of the windows. There were amber and scarlet and black; silks and satins and velvets. There was a fan painted and jewelled. There were women's faces. There was a heap of purple fruit and glittering sweetmeats. He laughed there. His beautiful Murillo head was dark against the white and gold within.
Bébée looked up,—paused a second,—then went onward, with a thorn in her heart.
He Had not seen her.
"It is natural, of course—he has his world—he does not think often of me—there is no reason why he should be as good as he is," she said to herself as she went slowly over the stones.
She had the dog's soul—only she did not know it.
But the tears Fell down her cheeks, as she walked.
It looked so bright in there, so gay, with the sound of the music coming in through the trees, and those women,—she had seen such women before; sometimes in the winter nights, going home from the lacework, she had stopped at the doors of the palaces, or of the opera house, when the carriages were setting down their brilliant burdens; and sometimes on the great feast days she had seen the people of the court going out to some gala at the theatre, or some great review of troops, or some ceremonial of foreign sovereigns; but she had never thought about them before; she had never wondered whether velvet was better to wear than woollen serge, or-diamonds lighter on the head than a little cap of linen.
But now—
Those women seemed to her so dazzling, so wondrously, so superhumanly beautiful; they seemed like some of those new dahlia flowers, rose and purple and gold, that outblazed the sun on the south border of her little garden, and blanched all the soft color out of the homely roses, and pimpernels, and sweet-williams, and double-stocks, that had bloomed there ever since the days of Waterloo.
But the dahlias had no scent; and Bébée wondered if these women had any heart in them,—they looked all laughter, and glitter, and vanity. To the child, whose dreams of womanhood were evolved from the face of the Mary of the Assumption, of the Susannah of Mieris, and of that Angel in the blue coif whose face has a light as of the sun,—to her who had dreamed her way into vague perceptions of her own sex's maidenhood and maternity by help of those great pictures which had been before her sight from infancy, there was some taint, some artifice, some want, some harshness in these jewelled women; she could not have reasoned about it, but she felt it, as she felt that the grand dahlias missed a flower's divinity, being scentless.
She was a little bit of wild thyme herself; hardy, fragrant, clean, tender, flowering by the wayside, full of honey, though only nourished on the turf and the stones, these gaudy, brilliant, ruby-bright, scarlet-mantled dahlias hurt her with a dim sense of pain and shame.
Fasting, next day at sunrise she confessed to Father Francis:—
"I saw beautiful rich women, and I envied them; and I could not pray to
Mary last night for thinking of them, for I hated them so much."
But she did not say,—
"I hated them because they were with him."
Out of the purest little soul, Love entering drives forth Candor.
"That is not like you at all, Bébée," said the good old man, as she knelt at his feet on the bricks of his little bare study, where all the books he ever spelt out were treatises on the art of bee-keeping.
"My dear, you never were covetous at all, nor did you ever seem to care for the things of the world. I wish Jehan had not given you those silver buckles; I think they have set your little soul on vanities."
"It is not the buckles; I am not covetous," said Bébée; and then her face grew warm. She did not know why. and she did not hear the rest of Father Francis's admonitions.
CHAPTER XIII.
But the next noon-time brought him to the market stall, and the next also, and so the summer days slipped away, and Bébée was quite happy if she saw him in the morning time, to give him a fresh rose, or at evening by the gates, or under the beech-trees, when he brought her a new book, and sauntered awhile up the green lane beside her.
An innocent, unconscious love like Bébée's wants so little food to make it all content. Such mere trifles are beautiful and sweet to it. Such slender stray gleams of light suffice to make a broad, bright golden noon of perfect joy around it.
All the delirium, and fever, and desire, and despair, that are in maturer passion, are far away from it: far as is the flash of the meteor across sultry skies from the blue forget-me-not down in the brown meadow brook.
It was very wonderful to Bébée that he, this stranger from Rubes' fairyland, could come at all to keep pace with her little clattering wooden shoes over the dust and the grass in the dim twilight time. The days went by in a trance of sweet amaze, and she kept count of the hours no more by the cuckoo-clock of the mill-house, or the deep chimes of the Brussels belfries; but only by such moments as brought her a word from his lips, or even a glimpse of him from afar, across the crowded square.
She sat up half the nights reading the books he gave her, studying the long cruel polysyllables, and spelling slowly through the phrases that seemed to her so cramped and tangled, and which yet were a pleasure to unravel forsake of the thought they held.
For Bébée, ignorant little simple soul that she was, had a mind in her that was eager, observant, quick to acquire, skilful to retain; and it would happen in certain times that Flamen, speaking to her of the things which he gave to her to read, would think to himself that this child had more wisdom than was often to be found in schools.
Meanwhile he pondered various studies in various stages of a Gretchen, and made love to Bébée—made love at least by his eyes and by his voice, not hurrying his pleasant task, but hovering about her softly, and mindful not to scare her, as a man will gently lower his hand over a poised butterfly that he seeks to kill, and which one single movement, a thought too quick, may scare away to safety.
Bébée knew where he lived in the street of Mary of Burgundy: in an old palace that belonged to a great Flemish noble, who never dwelt there himself; but to ask anything about him—why he was there? what his rank was? why he stayed in the city at all?—was a sort of treason that never entered her thoughts.
Psyche, if she had been as simple and loyal as Bébée was, would never have lighted her own candle; but even Psyche would not have borrowed any one else's lamp to lighten the love darkness.
To Bébée he was sacred, unapproachable, unquestionable; he was a wonderful, perfect happiness that had fallen into her life; he was a gift of God, as the sun was.
She took his going and coming as she took that of the sun, never dreaming of reproaching his absence, never dreaming of asking if in the empty night he shone on any other worlds than hers.
It was hardly so much a faith with her as an instinct; faith must reason ere it know itself to be faith. Bébée never reasoned any more than her roses did.
The good folks in the market place watched her a little anxiously; they thought ill of that little moss-rose that every day found its way to one wearer only; but after all they did not see much, and the neighbors nothing at all. For he never went home to her, nor with her, and most of the time that he spent with Bébée was in the quiet evening shadows, as she went up with her empty basket through the deserted country roads.
Bébée was all day long in the city, indeed, as other girls were, but with her it had always been different. Antoine had always been with her up to the day of his death; and after his death she had sat in the same place, surrounded by the people she had known from infancy, and an insult to her would have been answered by a stroke from the cobbler's strap or from the tinker's hammer. There was one girl only who ever tried to do her any harm—a good-looking stout wench, who stood at the corner of the Montagne de la Cour with a stall of fruit in the summer time, and in winter time drove a milk cart over the snow. This girl would get at her sometimes, and talk of the students, and tell her how good it was to get out of the town on a holiday, and go to any one of the villages where there was Kermesse and dance, and drink the little blue wine, and have trinkets bought for one, and come home in the moonlight in a char-à-banc, with the horns sounding, and the lads singing, and the ribbons flying from the old horse's ears.
"She is such a little close sly thing!" thought the fruit girl, sulkily.
To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.
"We dance almost every evening, the children and I," Bébée had answered when urged fifty times by this girl to go to fairs, and balls at the wine shops. "That does just as well. And I have seen Kermesse once at Malines—it was beautiful. I went with Mère Dax, but it cost a great deal I know, though she did not let me pay."
"You little fool!" the fruit girl would say, and grin, and eat a pear.
But the good honest old women who sat about in the Grande Place, hearing, had always taken the fruit girl to task, when they got her by herself.
"Leave the child alone, you mischievous one," said they. "Be content with being base yourself. Look you, Lisette; she is not one like you to make eyes at the law students, and pester the painter lads for a day's outing. Let her be, or we will tell your mother how you leave the fruit for the gutter children to pick and thieve, while you are stealing up the stairs into that young French fellow's chamber. Oh, oh! a fine beating you will get when she knows!"
Lisette's mother was a fierce and strong old Brabantoise who exacted heavy reckoning with her daughter for every single plum and peach that she sent out of her dark sweet-smelling fruit shop to be sunned in the streets, and under the students' love-glances.
So the girl took heed, and left Bébée alone.
"What should I want her to come with us for?" she reasoned with herself. "She is twice as pretty as I am; Jules might take to her instead—who knows?"
So that she was at once savage and yet triumphant when she saw, as she thought, Bébée drifting down the high flood of temptation.
"Oh, oh, you dainty one!" she cried one day to her. "So you would not take the nuts and mulberries that do for us common folk, because you had a mind for a fine pine out of the hothouses! That was all, was it? Eh, well; I do not begrudge you. Only take care; remember, the nuts and mulberries last through summer and autumn, and there are heaps of them on every fair-stall and street corner; but the pine, that is eaten in a day, one springtime, and its like does not grow in the hedges. You will have your mouth full of sugar an hour,—and then, eh!—you will go famished all the year."
"I do not understand," said Bébée, looking up, with her thoughts far away, and scarcely hearing the words spoken to her.
"Oh, pretty little fool! you understand well enough," said Lisette, grinning, as she rubbed up a melon. "Does he give you fine things? You might let me see."
"No one gives me anything."
"Chut! you want me to believe that. Why Jules is only a lad, and his father is a silk mercer, and only gives him a hundred francs a month, but Jules buys me all I want—somehow—or do you think I would take the trouble to set my cap straight when he goes by? He gave me these ear-rings, look. I wish you would let me see what you get."
But Bébée had gone away—unheeding—dreaming of Juliet and of Jeanne d'Arc, of whom he had told her tales.
He made sketches of her sometimes, but seldom pleased himself.
It was not so easy as he had imagined that it would prove to portray this little flower-like face, with the clear eyes and the child's open brow. He who had painted Phryne so long and faithfully had got a taint on his brush—he could not paint this pure, bright, rosy dawn—he who had always painted the glare of midnight gas on rouge or rags. Yet he felt that if he could transfer to canvas the light that was on Bébée's face he would get what Scheffer had missed. For a time it eluded him. You shall paint a gold and glistening brocade, or a fan of peacock's feathers, to perfection, and yet, perhaps, the dewy whiteness of the humble little field daisy shall baffle and escape you.
He felt, too, that he must catch her expression flying as he would do the flash of a swallow's wing across a blue sky; he knew that Bébée, forced to studied attitudes in an atelier, would be no longer the ideal that he wanted.
More than once he came and filled in more fully his various designs in the little hut garden, among the sweet gray lavender and the golden disks of the sunflowers; and more than once Bébée was missed from her place in the front of the Broodhuis.
The Varnhart children would gather now and then open-mouthed at the wicket, and Mère Krebs would shake her head as she went by on her sheepskin saddle, and mutter that the child's head would be turned by vanity; and old Jehan would lean on his stick and peer through the sweetbrier, and wonder stupidly if this strange man who could make Bébée's face beam over again upon that panel of wood could not give him back his dead daughter who had been pushed away under the black earth so long, long before, when the red mill had been brave and new, the red mill that the boys and girls called old.
But except these, no one noticed much.
Painters were no rare sights in Brabant.
The people were used to see them coming and going, making pictures of mud and stones, and ducks and sheep, and of all common and silly things.
"What does he pay you, Bébée?" they used to ask, with the shrewd Flemish thought after the main chance.
"Nothing," Bébée would answer, with a quick color in her face; and they would reply in contemptuous reproof, "Careless little fool; you should make enough to buy you wood all winter. When the man from Ghent painted Trine and her cow, he gave her a whole gold bit for standing still so long in the clover. The Krebs would be sure to lend you her cow, if it be the cow that makes the difference."
Bébée was silent, weeding her carnation bed;—what could she tell them that they would understand?
She seemed so far away from them all—those good friends of her childhood—now that this wonderful new world of his giving had opened to her sight.
She lived in a dream.
Whether she sat in the market place taking copper coins, or in the moonlight with a book on her knees, it was all the same. Her feet ran, her tongue spoke, her hands worked; she did not neglect her goat or her garden, she did not forsake her house labor or her good deeds to old Annémie; but all the while she only heard one voice, she only felt one touch, she only saw one face.
Here and there—one in a million—there is a female thing that can love like this, once and forever.
Such an one is dedicated, birth upwards, to the Mater Dolorosa.
He had something nearer akin to affection for her than he had ever had in his life for anything, but he was never in love with her—no more in love with her than with the moss-rosebuds that she fastened in his breast. Yet he played with her, because she was such a little, soft, tempting female thing; and because, to see her face flush, and her heart heave, to feel her fresh feelings stir into life, and to watch her changes from shyness to confidence, and from frankness again into fear, was a natural pastime in the lazy golden weather.
That he spared her as far as he did,—when after all she would have married Jeannot anyhow,—and that he sketched her face in the open air, and never entered her hut and never beguiled her to his own old palace in the city, was a new virtue in himself for which he hardly knew whether to feel respect or ridicule; anyway, it seemed virtue to him.
So long as he did not seduce the body, it seemed to him that it could never matter how he slew the soul,—the little, honest, happy, pure, frank soul, that amidst its poverty and hardships was like a robin's song to the winter sun.
"Hoot, toot, pretty innocent, so you are no better than the rest of us," hissed her enemy, Lisette, the fruit girl, against her as she went by the stall one evening as the sun set. "Prut! so it was no such purity after all that made you never look at the student lads and the soldiers, eh? You were so dainty of taste, you must needs pick and choose, and, Lord's sake, after all your coyness, to drop at a beckoning finger as one may say—pong!—in a minute, like an apple over-ripe! Oh hé, you sly one!"
Bébée flushed red, in a sort of instinct of offence; not sure what her fault was, but vaguely stung by the brutal words.
Bébée walked homeward by him, with her empty baskets: looked at him with grave wondering eyes.
"What did she mean? I do not understand. I must have done some wrong—or she thinks so. Do you know?"
Flamen laughed, and answered her evasively,—
"You have done her the wrong of a fair skin when hers is brown, and a little foot while hers is as big as a trooper's; there is no greater sin, Bébée, possible in woman to woman."
"Hold your peace, you shrill jade," he added, in anger to the fruiterer, flinging at her a crown piece, that the girl caught, and bit with her teeth with a chuckle. "Do not heed her, Bébée. She is a coarse-tongued brute, and is jealous, no doubt."
"Jealous?—of what?"
The word had no meaning to Bébée.
"That I am not a student or a soldier, as her lovers are."
As her lovers were! Bébée felt her face burn again. Was he her lover then? The child's innocent body and soul thrilled with a hot, sweet delight and fear commingled.
Bébée was not quite satisfied until she had knelt down that night and asked the Master of all poor maidens to see if there were any wickedness in her heart, hidden there like a bee in a rose, and if there were to take it out and make her worthier of this wonderful new happiness in her life.
