Bébée 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, Bébée?" 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 Bébée, 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 shell.
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 glass of a hothouse."
Bébée 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 shirts 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 Bébée, 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 sunshiny sympathy.
"Not yet," said Reine, hanging her last shirt.
But Bébée 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 Mère 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.
Bébée 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 passed the café of the Trois Frères
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.
Bébée 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 Bébée 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 Assumption, 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 sex'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, Bébée," 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 Bébée; and then her face
grew warm. She did not know why. and she did not hear the rest of Father
Francis's admonitions.