But the next noon-time brought him to the market stall, and the next
also, and so the summer days slipped away, and Bébée 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 Bébée'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
passion, 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 Bébée 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 grass 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.
For Bébée, ignorant little simple soul that she was, had a mind in her
that was eager, observant, quick to acquire, skilful to retain; and it
would happen in certain times that Flamen, speaking to her of the things
which he gave to her to read, would think to himself that this child had
more wisdom than was often to be found in schools.
Meanwhile he pondered various studies in various stages of a Gretchen,
and made love to Bébée--made love at least by his eyes and by his voice,
not hurrying his pleasant task, but hovering about her softly, and
mindful not to scare her, as a man will gently lower his hand over a
poised butterfly that he seeks to kill, and which one single movement, a
thought too quick, may scare away to safety.
Bébée knew where he lived in the street of Mary of Burgundy: in an old
palace that belonged to a great Flemish noble, who never dwelt there
himself; but to ask anything about him--why he was there? what his rank
was? why he stayed in the city at all?--was a sort of treason that never
entered her thoughts.
Psyche, if she had been as simple and loyal as Bébée was, would never
have lighted her own candle; but even Psyche would not have borrowed any
one else's lamp to lighten the love darkness.
To Bébée he was sacred, unapproachable, unquestionable; he was a
wonderful, perfect happiness that had fallen into her life; he was a
gift of God, as the sun was.
She took his going and coming as she took that of the sun, never dreaming
of reproaching his absence, never dreaming of asking if in the empty
night he shone on any other worlds than hers.
It was hardly so much a faith with her as an instinct; faith must reason
ere it know itself to be faith. Bébée never reasoned any more than her
roses did.
The good folks in the market place watched her a little anxiously; they
thought ill of that little moss-rose that every day found its way to one
wearer only; but after all they did not see much, and the neighbors
nothing at all. For he never went home to her, nor with her, and most of
the time that he spent with Bébée was in the quiet evening shadows, as
she went up with her empty basket through the deserted country roads.
Bébée was all day long in the city, indeed, as other girls were, but with
her it had always been different. Antoine had always been with her up to
the day of his death; and after his death she had sat in the same place,
surrounded by the people she had known from infancy, and an insult to her
would have been answered by a stroke from the cobbler's strap or from the
tinker's hammer. There was one girl only who ever tried to do her any
harm--a good-looking stout wench, who stood at the corner of the Montagne
de la Cour with a stall of fruit in the summer time, and in winter time
drove a milk cart over the snow. This girl would get at her sometimes,
and talk of the students, and tell her how good it was to get out of the
town on a holiday, and go to any one of the villages where there was
Kermesse and dance, and drink the little blue wine, and have trinkets
bought for one, and come home in the moonlight in a char-à-banc, with the
horns sounding, and the lads singing, and the ribbons flying from the
old horse's ears.
"She is such a little close sly thing!" thought the fruit girl, sulkily.
To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.
"We dance almost every evening, the children and I," Bébée had
answered when urged fifty times by this girl to go to fairs, and balls at
the wine shops. "That does just as well. And I have seen Kermesse once at
Malines--it was beautiful. I went with Mère Dax, but it cost a great deal
I know, though she did not let me pay."
"You little fool!" the fruit girl would say, and grin, and eat a pear.
But the good honest old women who sat about in the Grande Place, hearing,
had always taken the fruit girl to task, when they got her by herself.
"Leave the child alone, you mischievous one," said they. "Be content with
being base yourself. Look you, Lisette; she is not one like you to make
eyes at the law students, and pester the painter lads for a day's outing.
Let her be, or we will tell your mother how you leave the fruit for the
gutter children to pick and thieve, while you are stealing up the stairs
into that young French fellow's chamber. Oh, oh! a fine beating you will
get when she knows!"
Lisette's mother was a fierce and strong old Brabantoise who exacted
heavy reckoning with her daughter for every single plum and peach
that she sent out of her dark sweet-smelling fruit shop to be sunned in
the streets, and under the students' love-glances.
So the girl took heed, and left Bébée alone.
"What should I want her to come with us for?" she reasoned with herself.
"She is twice as pretty as I am; Jules might take to her instead--who
knows?"
So that she was at once savage and yet triumphant when she saw, as she
thought, Bébée drifting down the high flood of temptation.
"Oh, oh, you dainty one!" she cried one day to her. "So you would not
take the nuts and mulberries that do for us common folk, because you
had a mind for a fine pine out of the hothouses! That was all, was it?
Eh, well; I do not begrudge you. Only take care; remember, the nuts and
mulberries last through summer and autumn, and there are heaps of them on
every fair-stall and street corner; but the pine, that is eaten in a day,
one springtime, and its like does not grow in the hedges. You will have
your mouth full of sugar an hour,--and then, eh!--you will go famished
all the year."
"I do not understand," said Bébée, looking up, with her thoughts far
away, and scarcely hearing the words spoken to her.
"Oh, pretty little fool! you understand well enough," said Lisette,
grinning, as she rubbed up a melon. "Does he give you fine things? You
might let me see."
"No one gives me anything."
"Chut! you want me to believe that. Why Jules is only a lad, and his
father is a silk mercer, and only gives him a hundred francs a month,
but Jules buys me all I want--somehow--or do you think I would take
the trouble to set my cap straight when he goes by? He gave me these
ear-rings, look. I wish you would let me see what you get."
But Bébée had gone away--unheeding--dreaming of Juliet and of Jeanne
d'Arc, of whom he had told her tales.
He made sketches of her sometimes, but seldom pleased himself.
It was not so easy as he had imagined that it would prove to portray this
little flower-like face, with the clear eyes and the child's open brow.
He who had painted Phryne so long and faithfully had got a taint on his
brush--he could not paint this pure, bright, rosy dawn--he who had always
painted the glare of midnight gas on rouge or rags. Yet he felt that if
he could transfer to canvas the light that was on Bébée's face he would
get what Scheffer had missed. For a time it eluded him. You shall paint a
gold and glistening brocade, or a fan of peacock's feathers, to
perfection, and yet, perhaps, the dewy whiteness of the humble little
field daisy shall baffle and escape you.
He felt, too, that he must catch her expression flying as he would do the
flash of a swallow's wing across a blue sky; he knew that Bébée, forced
to studied attitudes in an atelier, would be no longer the ideal that he
wanted.
More than once he came and filled in more fully his various designs in
the little hut garden, among the sweet gray lavender and the golden disks
of the sunflowers; and more than once Bébée was missed from her place in
the front of the Broodhuis.
The Varnhart children would gather now and then open-mouthed at the
wicket, and Mère Krebs would shake her head as she went by on her
sheepskin saddle, and mutter that the child's head would be turned by
vanity; and old Jehan would lean on his stick and peer through the
sweetbrier, and wonder stupidly if this strange man who could make
Bébée's face beam over again upon that panel of wood could not give him
back his dead daughter who had been pushed away under the black earth so
long, long before, when the red mill had been brave and new, the red mill
that the boys and girls called old.
But except these, no one noticed much.
Painters were no rare sights in Brabant.
The people were used to see them coming and going, making pictures of mud
and stones, and ducks and sheep, and of all common and silly things.
"What does he pay you, Bébée?" they used to ask, with the shrewd Flemish
thought after the main chance.
"Nothing," Bébée would answer, with a quick color in her face; and they
would reply in contemptuous reproof, "Careless little fool; you should
make enough to buy you wood all winter. When the man from Ghent painted
Trine and her cow, he gave her a whole gold bit for standing still so
long in the clover. The Krebs would be sure to lend you her cow, if it
be the cow that makes the difference."
Bébée was silent, weeding her carnation bed;--what could she tell them
that they would understand?
She seemed so far away from them all--those good friends of her
childhood--now that this wonderful new world of his giving had opened to
her sight.
She lived in a dream.
Whether she sat in the market place taking copper coins, or in the
moonlight with a book on her knees, it was all the same. Her feet ran,
her tongue spoke, her hands worked; she did not neglect her goat or her
garden, she did not forsake her house labor or her good deeds to old
Annémie; but all the while she only heard one voice, she only felt one
touch, she only saw one face.
Here and there--one in a million--there is a female thing that can love
like this, once and forever.
Such an one is dedicated, birth upwards, to the Mater Dolorosa.
He had something nearer akin to affection for her than he had ever had in
his life for anything, but he was never in love with her--no more in
love with her than with the moss-rosebuds that she fastened in his
breast. Yet he played with her, because she was such a little, soft,
tempting female thing; and because, to see her face flush, and her heart
heave, to feel her fresh feelings stir into life, and to watch her
changes from shyness to confidence, and from frankness again into fear,
was a natural pastime in the lazy golden weather.
That he spared her as far as he did,--when after all she would have
married Jeannot anyhow,--and that he sketched her face in the open air,
and never entered her hut and never beguiled her to his own old palace in
the city, was a new virtue in himself for which he hardly knew whether to
feel respect or ridicule; anyway, it seemed virtue to him.
So long as he did not seduce the body, it seemed to him that it could
never matter how he slew the soul,--the little, honest, happy, pure,
frank soul, that amidst its poverty and hardships was like a robin's song
to the winter sun.
"Hoot, toot, pretty innocent, so you are no better than the rest of us,"
hissed her enemy, Lisette, the fruit girl, against her as she went by the
stall one evening as the sun set. "Prut! so it was no such purity after
all that made you never look at the student lads and the soldiers, eh?
You were so dainty of taste, you must needs pick and choose, and, Lord's
sake, after all your coyness, to drop at a beckoning finger as one may
say--pong!--in a minute, like an apple over-ripe! Oh hé, you sly one!"
Bébée flushed red, in a sort of instinct of offence; not sure what her
fault was, but vaguely stung by the brutal words.
Bébée walked homeward by him, with her empty baskets: looked at him with
grave wondering eyes.
"What did she mean? I do not understand. I must have done some wrong--or
she thinks so. Do you know?"
Flamen laughed, and answered her evasively,--
"You have done her the wrong of a fair skin when hers is brown, and a
little foot while hers is as big as a trooper's; there is no greater sin,
Bébée, possible in woman to woman."
"Hold your peace, you shrill jade," he added, in anger to the fruiterer,
flinging at her a crown piece, that the girl caught, and bit with her
teeth with a chuckle. "Do not heed her, Bébée. She is a coarse-tongued
brute, and is jealous, no doubt."
"Jealous?--of what?"
The word had no meaning to Bébée.
"That I am not a student or a soldier, as her lovers are."
As her lovers were! Bébée felt her face burn again. Was he her lover
then? The child's innocent body and soul thrilled with a hot, sweet
delight and fear commingled.
Bébée was not quite satisfied until she had knelt down that night and
asked the Master of all poor maidens to see if there were any wickedness
in her heart, hidden there like a bee in a rose, and if there were to
take it out and make her worthier of this wonderful new happiness in her
life.