But Bébée, who only saw in the sun the sign of daily work, the brightness
of the face of the world, the friend of the flowers, the harvest-man of
the poor, the playmate of the birds and butterflies, the kindly light
that the waking birds and the ringing carillon welcomed,--Bébée, who was
not at all afraid of him, smiled at his rays and saw in them only fairest
promise of a cloudless midsummer day as she gave her last crumb to the
swallows, dropped down off the thatch, and busied herself in making bread
that Mère Krebs would bake for her, until it was time to cut her flowers
and go down into the town.
When her loaves were made and she had run over with them to the
mill-house and back again, she attired herself with more heed than
usual, and ran to look at her own face in the mirror of the deep
well-water--other glass she had none.
She was used to hear herself called pretty; bat she had never thought
about it at all till now. The people loved her; she had always believed
that they had only said it as a sort of kindness, as they said, "God keep
you." But now--
"He told me I was like a flower," she thought to herself, and hung over
the well to see. She did not know very well what he had meant; but the
sentence stirred in her heart as a little bird under tremulous leaves.
She waited ten minutes full, leaning and looking down, while her eyes,
that were like the blue iris, smiled back to her from the brown depths
below. Then she went and kneeled down before the old shrine in the wall
of the garden.
"Dear and holy Mother of Jesus, I do thank you that you made me a little
good to look at," she said, softly. "Keep me as you keep the flowers, and
let my face be always fair, because it is a pleasure to _be_ a pleasure.
Ah, dear Mother, I say it so badly, and it sounds so vain, I know. But I
do not think you will be angry, will you? And I am going to try to be
wise."
Then she murmured an ave or two, to be in form as it were, and then rose
and ran along the lanes with her baskets, and brushed the dew lightly
over her bare feet, and sang a little Flemish song for very joyousness,
as the birds sing in the apple bough.
She got the money for Annémie and took it to her with fresh patterns to
prick, and the new-laid eggs.
"I wonder what he meant by a dog's heart?" she thought to herself, as she
left the old woman sitting by the hole in the roof pricking out the
parchment in all faith that she earned her money, and looking every now
and then through the forests of masts for the brig with the hank of flax
flying,--the brig that had foundered fifty long years before in the
northern seas, and in the days of her youth.
"What is the dog's heart?" thought Bébée; she had seen a dog she knew--a
dog which all his life long had dragged heavy loads under brutal stripes
along the streets of Brussels--stretch himself on the grave of his
taskmaster and refuse to eat, and persist in lying there until he died,
though he had no memory except of stripes, and no tie to the dead except
pain and sorrow. Was it a heart like this that he meant?
"Was her sailor, indeed, so good to her?" she asked an old gossip of
Annémie's, as she went down the stairs.
The old soul stopped to think with difficulty of such a far-off time, and
resting her brass flagon of milk on the steep step.
"Eh, no; not that I ever saw," she answered at length. "He was fond of
her--very fond; but he was a wilful one, and he beat her sometimes when
he got tired of being on land. But women must not mind that, you know, my
dear, if only a man's heart is right. Things fret them, and then they
belabor what they love best; it is a way they have."
"But she speaks of him as of an angel nearly!" said Bébée, bewildered.
The old woman took up her flagon, with a smile flitting across her wintry
face.
"Ay, dear; when the frost kills your brave rose-bush, root and bud,
do you think of the thorns that pricked you, or only of the fair,
sweet-smelling things that flowered all your summer?"
Bébée went away thoughtfully out of the old crazy water-washed house by
the quay; life seemed growing very strange and intricate and knotted
about her, like the threads of lace that a bad fairy has entangled in the
night.