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.
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