All the next day she sat under the yellow awning, but she sat alone.
It was market day; there were many strangers. Flowers were in demand. The
copper pieces were ringing against one another all the hours through in
her leathern bag. The cobbler was in such good humor that he forgot to
quarrel with his wife. The fruit was in such plenty that they gave her a
leaf-full of white and red currants for her noonday dinner. And the
people split their sides at the Cheap John's jokes; he was so droll. No
one saw the leaks in his kettles or the hole in his bellows, or the leg
that was lacking to his milking stool.
Everybody was gay and merry that day. But Bébée's eyes looked wistfully
over the throng, and did not find what they sought. Somehow the day
seemed dull, and the square empty.
The stones and the timbers around seemed more than ever full of a
thousand stories that they would not tell her because she knew nothing,
and was only Bébée.
She had never known a dull hour before. She, a little bright,
industrious, gay thing, whose hands were always full of work, and whose
head was always full of fancies, even in the grimmest winter time, when
she wove the lace in the gray, chilly workroom, with the frost on the
casements, and the mice running out in their hunger over the bare brick
floor.
That bare room was a sad enough place sometimes, when the old women would
bewail how they starved on the pittance they gained, and the young women
sighed for their aching heads and their failing eyesight, and the
children dropped great tears on the bobbins, because they had come out
without a crust to break their fast.
She had been sad there often for others, but she had never been dull--not
with this unfamiliar, desolate, dreary dulness, that seemed to take all
the mirth out of the busy life around her, and all the color out of the
blue sky above. Why, she had no idea herself. She wondered if she were
going to be ill; she had never been ill in her life, being strong as a
little bird that has never known cage or captivity.
When the day was done, Bébée gave a quick sigh as she looked across the
square. She had so wanted to tell him that she was not ungrateful; and
she had a little moss-rose ready, with a sprig of sweetbrier, and a tiny
spray of maidenhair fern that grew under the willows, which she had kept
covered up with a leaf of sycamore all the day long.
No one would have it now.
The child went out of the place sadly as the carillon rang. There was
only the moss-rose in her basket, and the red and white currants that had
been given her for her dinner.
She went along the twisting, many-colored, quaintly fashioned streets,
till she came to the water-side.
It is very ancient there still, there are all manner of old buildings,
black and brown and gray, peaked roofs, gabled windows, arched doors,
crumbling bridges, twisted galleries leaning to touch the dark surface of
the canal, dusky wharves crowded with barrels, and bales, and cattle, and
timber, and all the various freightage that the good ships come and go
with all the year round, to and from the ZuyderZee, and the Baltic water,
and the wild Northumbrian shores, and the iron-bound Scottish headlands,
and the pretty gray Norman seaports, and the white sandy dunes of
Holland, with the toy towns and the straight poplar-trees.
Bébée was fond of watching the brigs and barges, that looked so big to
her, with their national flags flying, and their tall masts standing
thick as grass, and their tawny sails flapping in the wind, and about
them the sweet, strong smell of that strange, unknown thing, the sea.
Sometimes the sailors would talk with her; sometimes some old salt,
sitting astride of a cask, would tell her a mariner's tale of far-away
lands and mysteries of the deep; sometimes some curly-headed cabin-boy
would give her a shell or a plume of seaweed, and try and make her
understand what the wonderful wild water was like, which was not quiet
and sluggish and dusky as this canal was, but was forever changing and
moving, and curling and leaping, and making itself now blue as her eyes,
now black as that thunder-cloud, now white as the snow that the winter
wind tossed, now pearl hued and opaline as the convolvulus that blew in
her own garden.
And Bébée would listen, with the shell in her lap, and try to
understand, and gaze at the ships and then at the sky beyond them, and
try to figure to herself those strange countries to which these ships
were always going, and saw in fancy all the blossoming orchard province
of green France, and all the fir-clothed hills and rushing rivers of the
snow-locked Swedish shore, and saw too, doubtless, many lands that had no
place at all except in dreamland, and were more beautiful even than the
beauty of the earth, as poets' countries are, to their own sorrow,
oftentimes.
But this dull day Bébée did not go down upon the wharf; she did not want
the sailors' tales; she saw the masts and the bits of bunting that
streamed from them, and they made her restless, which they had never done
before.
Instead she went in at a dark old door and climbed up a steep staircase
that went up and up, as though she were mounting St. Gudule's belfry
towers; and at the top of it entered a little chamber in the roof, where
one square unglazed hole that served for light looked out upon the canal,
with all its crowded craft, from the dainty schooner yacht, fresh as
gilding and holystone could make her, that was running for pleasure to
the Scheldt, to the rude, clumsy coal barge, black as night, that bore
the rough diamonds of Belgium to the snow-buried roofs of Christiania and
Stromstad.
In the little dark attic there was a very old woman in a red petticoat
and a high cap, who sat against the window, and pricked out lace patterns
with a pin on thick paper. She was eighty-five years old, and could
hardly keep body and soul together.
Bébée, running to her, kissed her. "Oh, mother Annémie, look here!
Beautiful red and white currants, and a roll; I saved them for you. They
are the first currants we have seen this year. Me? oh, for me, I have
eaten more than are good! You know I pick fruit like a sparrow, always.
Dear mother Annémie, are you better? Are you quite sure you are better
to-day?"
The little old withered woman, brown as a walnut and meagre as a rush,
took the currants, and smiled with a childish glee, and began to eat
them, blessing the child with each crumb she broke off the bread.
"Why had you not a grandmother of your own, my little one?" she mumbled.
"How good you would have been to her, Bébée!"
"Yes," said Bébée seriously, but her mind could not grasp the idea. It
was easier for her to believe the fanciful lily parentage of Antoine's
stories. "How much work have you done, Annémie? Oh, all that? all that?
But there is enough for a week. You work too early and too late, you dear
Annémie."
"Nay, Bébée, when one has to get one's bread that cannot be. But I am
afraid my eyes are failing. That rose now, is it well done?"
"Beautifully done. Would the Baës take them if they were not? You know he
is one that cuts every centime in four pieces."
"Ah! sharp enough, sharp enough, that is true. But I am always afraid of
my eyes. I do not see the flags out there so well as I used to do."
"Because the sun is so bright, Annémie; that is all. I myself, when I
have been sitting all day in the place in the light, the flowers look
pale to me. And you know it is not age with _me_, Annémie?"
The old woman and the young girl laughed together at that droll idea.
"You have a merry heart, dear little one," said old Annémie. "The saints
keep it to you always."
"May I tidy the room a little?"
"To be sure, dear, and thank you too. I have not much time, you see; and
somehow my back aches badly when I stoop."
"And it is so damp here for you, over all that water!" said Bébée as she
swept and dusted and set to rights the tiny place, and put in a little
broken pot a few sprays of honeysuckle and rosemary that she had brought
with her. "It is so damp here. You should have come and lived in my hut
with me, Annémie, and sat out under the vine all day, and looked after
the chickens for me when I was in the town. They are such mischievous
little souls; as soon as my back is turned one or other is sure to push
through the roof, and get out among the flower-beds. Will you never
change your mind, and live with me, Annémie? I am sure you would be
happy, and the starling says your name quite plain, and he is such a
funny bird to talk to; you never would tire of him. Will you never come?
It is so bright there, and green and sweet smelling; and to think you
never even have seen it!--and the swans and all,--it is a shame."
"No, dear," said old Annémie, eating her last bunch of currants.
"You have said so so often, and you are good and mean it, that I
know. But I could not leave the water. It would kill me. Out of this
window you know I saw my Jeannot's brig go away--away--away--till the
masts were lost in the mists. Going with iron to Norway; the 'Fleur
d'Epine' of this town, a good ship, and a sure, and her mate; and as
proud as might be, and with a little blest Mary in lead round his throat.
She was to be back in port in eight months, bringing timber. Eight
months--that brought Easter time. But she never came. Never, never,
never, you know. I sat here watching them come and go, and my child
sickened and died, and the summer passed, and the autumn, and all the
while I looked--looked--looked; for the brigs are all much alike; and
only her I always saw as soon as she hove in sight (because he tied a
hank of flax to her mizzen-mast); and when he was home safe and
sound I spun the hank into hose for him; that was a fancy of his, and for
eleven voyages, one on another, he had never missed to tie the flax
nor I to spin the hose. But the hank of flax I never saw this time; nor
the brave brig; nor my good man with his sunny blue eyes. Only one day in
winter, when the great blocks of ice were smashing hither and thither, a
coaster came in and brought tidings of how off in the Danish waters they
had come on a water-logged brig, and had boarded her, and had found her
empty, and her hull riven in two, and her crew all drowned and dead
beyond any manner of doubt. And on her stern there was her name painted
white, the 'Fleur d'Epine,' of Brussels, as plain as name could be; and
that was all we ever knew: what evil had struck her, or how they had
perished, nobody ever told. Only the coaster brought that bit of beam
away, with the 'Fleur d'Epine' writ clear upon it. But you see I never
_know_ my man is dead. Any day--who can say?--any one of those ships may
bring him aboard of her, and he may leap out on the wharf there, and come
running up the stairs as he used to do, and cry, in his merry voice,
'Annémie, Annémie, here is more flax to spin, here is more hose to
weave!' For that was always his homeward word; no matter whether he had
had fair weather or foul, he always knotted the flax to his masthead. So
you see, dear, I could not leave here. For what if he came and found me
away? He would say it was an odd fashion of mourning for him. And I could
not do without the window, you know. I can watch all the brigs come in;
and I can smell the shipping smell that I have loved all the days of my
life; and I can see the lads heaving, and climbing, and furling, and
mending their bits of canvas, and hauling their flags up and down. And
then who can say?--the sea never took him, I think--I think I shall hear
his voice before I die. For they do say that God is good."
Bébée, sweeping very noiselessly, listened, and her eyes grew wistful and
wondering. She had heard the story a thousand times; always in different
words, but always the same little tale, and she knew how old Annémie was
deaf to all the bells that tolled the time, and blind to all the
whiteness of her hair and all the wrinkles of her face, and only thought
of her sea-slain lover as he had been in the days of her youth.
But this afternoon the familiar history had a new patheticalness for her,
and as the old soul put aside with her palsied hand the square of canvas
that screened the casement, and looked out, with her old dim sad eyes
strained in the longing that God never answered, Bébée felt a strange
chill at her own heart, and wondered to herself,--
"What can it be to care for another creature like that? It must be so
terrible, and yet it must be beautiful too. Does every one suffer like
that?"
She did not speak at all as she finished sweeping the bricks, and went
down-stairs for a metal cruche full of water, and set over a little
charcoal on the stove the old woman's brass soup kettle with her supper
of stewing cabbage.
Annémie did not hear or notice; she was still looking out of the hole in
the wall on to the masts, and the sails, and the water.
It was twilight.
From the barges and brigs there came the smell of the sea. The sailors
were shouting to each other. The craft were crowded close, and lost in
the growing darkness. On the other side of the canal the belfries were
ringing for vespers.
"Eleven voyages one and another, and he never forgot to tie the flax
to the mast," Annémie murmured, with her old wrinkled face leaning out
into the gray air. "It used to fly there,--one could see it coming up
half a mile off,--just a pale yellow flake on the wind, like a tress of
my hair, he would say. No, no, I could not go away; he may come to-night,
to-morrow, any time; he is not drowned, not my man; he was all I had, and
God is good, they say."
Bébée listened and looked; then kissed the old shaking hand and took up
the lace patterns and went softly out of the room without speaking.
When old Annémie watched at the window it was useless to seek for any
word or sign of her: people said that she had never been quite right in
her brain since that fatal winter noon sixty years before, when the
coaster had brought into port the broken beam of the good brig "Fleur
d'Epine."
Bébée did not know about that, nor heed whether her wits were right or
not.
She had known the old creature in the lace-room where Annémie pricked out
designs, and she had conceived a great regard and sorrow for her; and
when Annémie had become too ailing and aged to go herself any longer to
the lace-maker's place, Bébée had begged leave for her to have the
patterns at home, and had carried them to and fro for her for the last
three or four years, doing many other little useful services for the lone
old soul as well,--services which Annémie hardly perceived, she had
grown so used to them, and her feeble intelligence was so sunk in the one
absorbing idea that she must watch all the days through and all the years
through for the coming of the dead man and the lost brig.
Bébée put the lace patterns in her basket, and trotted home, her sabots
clattering on the stones.
"What it must be to care for any one like that!" she thought, and by some
vague association of thought that she could not have pursued, she lifted
the leaves and looked at the moss-rosebud.
It was quite dead.