The two years had not been all playtime any more than they had been all
summer.
When one has not father, or mother, or brother, and all one's friends
have barely bread enough for themselves, life cannot be very easy, nor
its crusts very many at any time.
Bébée had a cherub's mouth, and a dreamer's eyes, and a poet's thoughts
sometimes in her own untaught and unconscious fashion.
But all the same she was a little hard-working Brabant peasant girl;
up whilst the birds twittered in the dark; to bed when the red sun
sank beyond the far blue line of the plains; she hoed, and dug, and
watered, and planted her little plot; she kept her cabin as clean as
a fresh-blossomed primrose; she milked her goat and swept her floor; she
sat, all the warm days, in the town, selling her flowers, and in the
winter time, when her garden yielded her nothing, she strained her sight
over lace-making in the city to get the small bit of food that stood
between her and that hunger which to the poor means death.
A hard life; very hard when hail and snow made the streets of Brussels
like slopes of ice; a little hard even in the gay summer time when she
sat under the awning fronting the Maison du Roi; but all the time the
child throve on it, and was happy, and dreamed of many graceful and
gracious things whilst she was weeding among her lilies, or tracing the
threads to and fro on her lace pillow.
Now--when she woke to the full sense of her wonderful sixteen
years--Bébée, standing barefoot on the mud floor, was as pretty a sight
as was to be seen betwixt Scheldt and Rhine.
The sun had only left a soft warmth like an apricot's on her white skin.
Her limbs, though strong as a mountain pony's, were slender and well
shaped. Her hair curled in shiny crumpled masses, and tumbled about her
shoulders. Her pretty round plump little breast was white as the lilies
in the grass without, and in this blooming time of her little life,
Bébée, in her way, was beautiful as a peach-bloom is beautiful, and her
innocent, courageous, happy eyes had dreams in them underneath their
laughter, dreams that went farther than the green woods of Laeken,
farther even than the white clouds of summer.
She could not move among them idly as poets and girls love to do; she had
to be active amidst them, else drought and rain, and worm and snail, and
blight and frost, would have made havoc of their fairest hopes.
The loveliest love is that which dreams high above all storms, unsoiled
by all burdens; but perhaps the strongest love is that which, whilst it
adores, drags its feet through mire, and burns its brow in heat, for the
thing beloved.
So Bébée dreamed in her garden; but all the time for sake of it hoed and
dug, and hurt her hands, and tired her limbs, and bowed her shoulders
under the great metal pails from the well.
This wondrous morning, with the bright burden of her sixteen years upon
her, she dressed herself quickly and fed her fowls, and, happy as a bird,
went to sit on her little wooden stool in the doorway.
There had been fresh rain in the night: the garden was radiant; the smell
of the wet earth was sweeter than all perfumes that are burned in
palaces.
The dripping rosebuds nodded against her hair as she went out; the
starling called to her, "Bébée, Bébée--bonjour, bonjour." These were all
the words it knew. It said the same words a thousand times a week. But
to Bébée it seemed that the starling most certainly knew that she was
sixteen years old that day.
Breaking her bread into the milk, she sat in the dawn and thought,
without knowing that she thought it, "How good it is to live when one
is young!"
Old people say the same thing often, but they sigh when they say it.
Bébée smiled.
Mère Krebs opened her door in the next cottage, and nodded over the wall.
"What a fine thing to be sixteen!--a merry year, Bébée."
Marthe, the carpenter's wife, came out from her gate, broom in hand.
"The Holy Saints keep you, Bébée; why, you are quite a woman now!"
The little children of Varnhart, the charcoal-burner, who were as poor as
any mouse in the old churches, rushed out of their little home up the
lane, bringing with them a cake stuck full of sugar and seeds, and tied
round with a blue ribbon, that their mother had made that very week, all
in her honor.
"Only see, Bébée! Such a grand cake!" they shouted, dancing down the
lane. "Jules picked the plums, and Jeanne washed the almonds, and
Christine took the ribbon off her own communion cap, all for you--all for
you; but you will let us come and eat it too?"
Old Gran'mère Bishot, who was the oldest woman about Laeken, hobbled
through the grass on her crutches and nodded her white shaking head, and
smiled at Bébée.
"I have nothing to give you, little one, except my blessing, if you care
for that."
Bébée ran out, breaking from the children, and knelt down in the wet
grass, and bent her pretty sunny head to the benediction.
Trine, the miller's wife, the richest woman of them all, called to the
child from the steps of the mill,--'
"A merry year, and the blessing of Heaven, Bébée! Come up, and here is my
first dish of cherries for you; not tasted one myself; they will make you
a feast with Varnhart's cake, though she should have known better, so
poor as she is. Charity begins at home, and these children's stomachs are
empty."
Bébée ran up and then down again gleefully, with her lapful of big black
cherries; Tambour, the old white dog, who had used to drag her about in
his milk cart, leaping on her in sympathy and congratulation.
"What a supper we will have!" she cried to the charcoal-burner's
children, who were turning somersaults in the dock leaves, while the
swans stared and hissed.
When one is sixteen, cherries and a cake have a flavor of Paradise still,
especially when they are tasted twice, or thrice at most, in all the
year.
An old man called to her as she went by his door. All these little cabins
lie close together, with only their apple-trees, or their tall beans, or
their hedges of thorn between them; you may ride by and never notice them
if you do not look for them under the leaves closely, as you would for
thrushes' nests.
He, too, was very old; a lifelong neighbor and gossip of Antoine's; he
had been a day laborer in these same fields all his years, and had never
travelled farther than where the red mill-sails turned among the colza
and the corn.
"Come in, my pretty one, for a second," he whispered, with an air of
mystery that made Bébée's heart quicken with expectancy. "Come in; I have
something for you. They were my dead daughter's--you have heard me talk
of her--Lisette, who died forty year or more ago, they say; for me I
think it was yesterday. Mère Krebs--she is a hard woman--heard me talking
of my girl. She burst out laughing, 'Lord's sake, fool, why, your girl
would be sixty now an she had lived.' Well, so it may be; you see, the
new mill was put up the week she died, and you call the new mill old;
but, my girl, she is young to me. Always young. Come here, Bébée."
Bébée went after him a little awed, into the dusky interior, that smelt
of stored apples and of dried herbs that hung from the roof. There was a
walnut-wood press, such as the peasants of France and the low countries
keep their homespun linen in and their old lace that serves for the
nuptials and baptisms of half a score of generations.
The old man unlocked it with a trembling hand, and there came from it an
odor of dead lavender and of withered rose leaves.
On the shelves there were a girl's set of clothes, and a girl's sabots,
and a girl's communion veil and wreath.
"They are all hers," he whispered,--"all hers. And sometimes in the
evening time I see her coming along the lane for them--do you not know?
There is nothing changed; nothing changed; the grass, and the trees, and
the huts, and the pond are all here; why should she only be gone away?"
"Antoine is gone."
"Yes. But he was old; my girl is young."
He stood a moment, with the press door open, a perplexed trouble in his
dim eyes; the divine faith of love and the mule-like stupidity of
ignorance made him cling to this one thought without power of judgment in
it.
"They say she would be sixty," he said, with a little dreary smile. "But
that is absurd, you know. Why, she had cheeks like yours, and she would
run--no lapwing could fly faster over corn. These are her things, you
see; yes--all of them. That is the sprig of sweetbrier she wore in her
belt the day before the wagon knocked her down and killed her. I have
never touched the things. But look here, Bébée, you are a good child and
true, and like her just a little. I mean to give you her silver clasps.
They were her great-great-great-grandmother's before her. God knows how
old they are not. And a girl should have some little wealth of that sort;
and for Antoine's sake--"
The old man stayed behind, closing the press door upon the
lavender-scented clothes, and sitting down in the dull shadow of the hut
to think of his daughter, dead forty summers and more.
Bébée went out with the brave broad silver clasps about her waist, and
the tears wet on her cheeks for a grief not her own.
To be killed just when one was young, and was loved liked that, and
all the world was in its May-day flower! The silver felt cold to her
touch--as cold as though it were the dead girl's hands that held her.
The garlands that the children strung of daisies and hung about her had
never chilled her so.
But little Jeanne, the youngest of the charcoal-burner's little tribe,
running to meet her, screamed with glee, and danced in the gay morning.
"Oh, Bébée! how you glitter! Did the Virgin send you that off her own
altar? Let me see--let me touch! Is it made of the stars or of the sun?"
And Bébée danced with the child, and the silver gleamed and sparkled, and
all the people came running out to see, and the milk carts were half an
hour later for town, and the hens cackled loud unfed, and the men even
stopped on their way to the fields and paused, with their scythes on
their shoulders, to stare at the splendid gift.
"There is not such another set of clasps in Brabant; old work you could
make a fortune of in the curiosity shops in the Montagne," said Trine
Krebs, going up the steps of her mill house. "But, all the same, you
know, Bébée, things off a dead body bring mischance sometimes."
But Bébée danced with the child, and did not hear.
Whose fête day had ever begun like this one of hers?
She was a little poet at heart, and should not have cared for such
vanities; but when one is only sixteen, and has only a little rough
woollen frock, and sits in the market place or the lace-room, with other
girls around, how should one be altogether indifferent to a broad,
embossed, beautiful shield of silver that sparkled with each step one
took?
A quarter of an hour idle thus was all, however, that Bébée or her
friends could spare at five o'clock on a summer morning, when the city
was waiting for its eggs, its honey, its flowers, its cream, and its
butter, and Tambour was shaking his leather harness in impatience to be
off with his milk-cans.
So Bébée, all holiday though it was, and heroine though she felt herself,
ran indoors, put up her cakes and cherries, cut her two basketfuls out of
the garden, locked her hut, and went on her quick and happy little feet
along the grassy paths toward the city.
The sorting and tying up of the flowers she always left until she was
sitting under the awning in front of the Broodhuis; the same awning,
tawny as an autumn pear and weather-blown as an old sail, which had
served to shelter Antoine Mäes from heat and rain through all the years
of his life.
"Go to the Madeleine; you will make money there, with your pretty blue
eyes, Bébée," people had said to her of late; but Bébée had shaken her
head.
Where she had sat in her babyhood at Antoine's feet, she would sit so
long as she sold flowers in Brussels,--here, underneath the shadow of the
Gothic towers that saw Egmont die.
Old Antoine had never gone into the grand market that is fashioned after
the Madeleine of Paris, and where in the cool, wet, sweet-smelling halls,
all the flowers of Brabant are spread in bouquets fit for the bridal of
Una, and large as the shield of the Red-Cross Knight.
Antoine could not compete with all those treasures of greenhouse and
stove. He had always had his little stall among those which spread their
tawny awnings and their merry hardy blossoms under the shadow of the
Hôtel de Ville, in the midst of the buyings and sellings, the games and
the quarrels, the auctions and the Cheap Johns, the mountebank and the
marriage parties, that daily and hourly throng the Grande Place.
Here Bébée, from three years old, had been used to sit beside him. By
nature she was as gay as a lark. The people always heard her singing as
they passed the garden. The children never found their games so merry as
when she danced their rounds with them; and though she dreamed so much
out there in the air among the carnations and the roses, or in the long,
low workroom in the town, high against the crocketed pinnacles of the
cathedral, yet her dreams, if vaguely wistful, were all bright of hue and
sunny in their fantasies. Still, Bébée had one sad unsatisfied desire:
she wanted to know so much, and she knew nothing.
She did not care for the grand gay people.
When the band played, and the park filled, and the bright little cafés
were thronged with pleasure seekers, and the crowds flocked hither and
thither to the woods, to the theatres, to the galleries, to the
guinguettes, Bébée, going gravely along with her emptied baskets
homeward, envied none of these.
When at Noël the little children hugged their loads of puppets and
sugar-plums; when at the Fête Dieu the whole people flocked out
be-ribboned and vari-colored like any bed of spring anemones; when in the
merry midsummer the chars-a-bancs trundled away into the forest with
laughing loads of students and maidens; when in the rough winters the
carriages left furred and jewelled women at the doors of the operas or
the palaces,--Bébée, going and coming through the city to her flower
stall or lace work, looked at them all, and never thought of envy or
desire.
She had her little hut: she could get her bread; she lived with the
flowers; the neighbors were good to her, and now and then, on a saint's
day, she too got her day in the woods; it never occurred to her that her
lot could be better.
But sometimes sitting, looking at the dark old beauty of the Broodhuis,
or at the wondrous carven fronts of other Spanish houses, or at the
painted stories of the cathedral windows, or at the quaint colors of the
shipping on the quay, or at the long dark aisles of trees that went away
through the forest, where her steps had never wandered,--sometimes Bébée
would get pondering on all this unknown world that lay before and behind
and around her, and a sense of her own utter ignorance would steal on
her; and she would say to herself, "If only I knew a little--just a very
little!"
But it is not easy to know even a very little when you have to work for
your bread from sunrise to nightfall, and when none of your friends know
how to read or write, and even your old priest is one of a family of
peasants, and can just teach you the alphabet, and that is all. For
Father Francis could do no more than this; and all his spare time was
taken up in digging his cabbage plot and seeing to his beehives; and the
only books that Bébée ever beheld were a few tattered lives of saints
that lay moth-eaten on a shelf of his cottage.
But Brussels has stones that are sermons, or rather that are quaint,
touching, illuminated legends of the Middle Ages, which those who run may
read.
Brussels is a gay little city that lies as bright within its girdle of
woodland as any butterfly that rests upon moss.
The city has its ways and wiles of Paris. It decks itself with white and
gold. It has music under its trees and soldiers in its streets, and
troops marching and countermarching along its sunny avenues. It has blue
and pink, and yellow and green, on its awnings and on its house fronts.
It has a merry open-air life on its pavements at little marble tables
before little gay-colored cafés. It has gilded balconies, and tossing
flags, and comic operas, and leisurely pleasure seekers, and tries always
to believe and make the world believe that it is Paris in very truth.
But this is only the Brussels of the noblesse and the foreigners.
There is a Brussels that is better than this--a Brussels that belongs
to the old burgher life, to the artists and the craftsmen, to the
master-masons of the Moyen-âge, to the same spirit and soul that once
filled the free men of Ghent and the citizens of Bruges and the besieged
of Leyden, and the blood of Egmont and of Horn.
Down there by the water-side, where the old quaint walls lean over the
yellow sluggish stream, and the green barrels of the Antwerp barges swing
against the dusky piles of the crumbling bridges.
In the gray square desolate courts of the old palaces, where in cobwebbed
galleries and silent chambers the Flemish tapestries drop to pieces.
In the great populous square, where, above the clamorous and rushing
crowds, the majestic front of the Maison du Roi frowns against the sun,
and the spires and pinnacles of the burgomaster's gathering-halls tower
into the sky in all the fantastic luxuriance of Gothic fancy.
Under the vast shadowy wings of angels in the stillness of the cathedral,
across whose sunny aisles some little child goes slowly all alone, laden
with lilies for the Feast of the Assumption, till their white glory hides
its curly head.
In all strange quaint old-world niches withdrawn from men in silent
grass-grown corners, where a twelfth-century corbel holds a pot of roses,
or a Gothic arch yawns beneath a wool warehouse, or a waterspout with a
grinning faun's head laughs in the grim humor of the Moyen-âge above the
bent head of a young lace-worker.
In all these, Brussels, though more worldly than her sisters of Ghent and
Bruges, and far more worldly yet than her Teuton cousins of Freiburg and
Nürnberg, is still in her own way like as a monkish story mixed up with
the Romaunt of the Rose; or rather like some gay French vaudeville, all
fashion and jest, illustrated in old Missal manner with helm and hauberk,
cope and cowl, praying knights and fighting priests, winged griffins and
nimbused saints, flame-breathing dragons and enamoured princes, all
mingled together in the illuminated colors and the heroical grotesque
romance of the Middle Ages.
And it was this side of the city that Bébée knew; and she loved it well,
and would not leave it for the market of the Madeleine.
She had no one to tell her anything, and all Antoine had ever been able
to say to her concerning the Broodhuis was that it had been there in his
father's time; and regarding St. Gudule, that his mother had burned many
a candle before its altars for a dead brother who had been drowned off
the dunes.
But the child's mind, unled, but not misled, had pondered on these
things, and her heart had grown to love them; and perhaps no student of
Spanish architecture, no antiquary of Moyen-âge relics, loved St. Gudule
and the Broodhuis as little ignorant Bébée did.
There had been a time when great dark, fierce men had builded these
things, and made the place beautiful. So much she knew; and the little
wistful, untaught brain tried to project itself into those unknown times,
and failed, and yet found pleasure in the effort. And Bébée would say to
herself as she walked the streets, "Perhaps some one will come some day
who will tell me all those things."
Meanwhile, there were the flowers, and she was quite content.
Besides, she knew all the people: the old cobbler, who sat next her, and
chattered all day long like a magpie; the tinker, who had come up many a
summer night to drink a-glass with Antoine; the Cheap John, who cheated
everybody else, but who had always given her a toy or a trinket at every
Fête Dieu all the summers she had known; the little old woman, sour as a
crab, who sold rosaries and pictures of saints, and little waxen Christs
upon a tray; the big dogs who pulled the carts in, and lay panting all
day under the rush-bottomed chairs on which the egg-wives and the fruit
sellers sat, and knitted, and chaffered; nay, even the gorgeous huissier
and the frowning gendarme, who marshalled the folks into order as they
went up for municipal registries, or for town misdemeanors,--she knew
them all; had known them all ever since she had first trotted in like
a little dog at Antoine's heels.
So Bébée stayed there.
It is, perhaps, the most beautiful square in all Northern Europe, with
its black timbers, and gilded carvings, and blazoned windows, and
majestic scutcheons, and fantastic pinnacles. That Bébée did not know,
but she loved it, and she sat resolutely in front of the Broodhuis,
selling her flowers, smiling, chatting, helping the old woman, counting
her little gains, eating her bit of bread at noonday like any other
market girl, but at times glancing up to the stately towers and the blue
sky, with a look on her face that made the old tinker and cobbler whisper
together, "What does she see there?--the dead people or the angels?"
The truth was that even Bébée herself did not know very surely what she
saw--something that was still nearer to her than even this kindly crowd
that loved her. That was all she could have said had anybody asked her.
But none did.
No one wanted to hear what the dead said; and for the angels, the tinker
and the cobbler were of opinion that one had only too much of them
sculptured about everywhere, and shining on all the casements--in
reverence be it spoken, of course.