Bebee Part 14

Bebee 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, Bebee?" 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 Bebee, 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 sh.e.l.l.

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 gla.s.s of a hothouse."

Bebee 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 s.h.i.+rts 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 Bebee, 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 suns.h.i.+ny sympathy.

"Not yet," said Reine, hanging her last s.h.i.+rt.

But Bebee 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 Mere 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.

Bebee 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 pa.s.sed the cafe of the Trois Freres 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.

Bebee 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 Bebee 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 a.s.sumption, 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 s.e.x'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, Bebee," 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 Bebee; 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 Bebee 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 Bebee'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 pa.s.sion, 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 Bebee 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 gra.s.s 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.