The next day, waking with a radiant little soul as a bird in a forest
wakes in summer Bébée was all alone in the lane by the swans' water. In
the gray of the dawn all the good folk except herself and lame old Jehan
had tramped off to a pilgrimage, Liége way, which the bishop of the city
had enjoined on all the faithful as a sacred duty.
Bébée doing her work, singing, thinking how good God was, and dreaming
over a thousand fancies of the wonderful stories he had told her, and of
the exquisite delight that would lie for her in watching for him all
through the shining hours, Bébée felt her little heart leap like a
squirrel as the voice that was the music of heaven to her called through
the stillness,--"Good day, pretty one! you are as early as the lark,
Bébée. I go to Mayence, so I thought I would look at you one moment as I
pass."
Bébée ran down through the wet grass in a tumult of joy. She had never
seen him so early in the day--never so early as this, when nobody was up
and stirring except birds and beasts and peasant folk.
She did not know how pretty she looked herself; like a rain-washed wild
rose; her feet gleaming with dew, her cheeks warm with health and joy;
her sunny clustering hair free from the white cap and tumbling a little
about her throat, because she had been stooping over the carnations.
Flamen loosed the wicket latch, and thought there might be better ways of
spending the day than in the gray shadows of old Mechlin.
"Will you give me a draught of water?" he asked her as he crossed the
garden.
"I will give you breakfast," said Bébée, happy as a bird. She felt no
shame for the smallness of her home; no confusion at the poverty of
her little place; such embarrassments are born of self-consciousness,
and Bébée had no more self-consciousness than her own sweet, gray
lavender-bush blowing against the door.
The lavender-bush has no splendor like the roses, has no colors like the
hollyhocks; it is a simple, plain, gray thing that the bees love and that
the cottagers cherish, and that keeps the moth from the homespun linen,
and that goes with the dead to their graves.
It has many virtues and infinite sweetness, but it does not know it or
think of it; and if the village girls ever tell it so, it fancies they
only praise it out of kindness as they put its slender fragrant spears
away in their warm bosoms. Bébée was like her lavender, and now that this
beautiful Purple Emperor butterfly came from the golden sunbeams to find
pleasure for a second in her freshness, she was only very grateful, as
the lavender-bush was to the village girls.
"I will give you your breakfast," said Bébée, flushing rosily with
pleasure, and putting away the ivy coils that he might enter.
"I have very little, you know," she added, wistfully. "Only goat's milk
and bread; but if that will do--and there is some honey--and if you would
eat a salad, I would cut one fresh."
He did enter, and glanced round him with a curious pity and wonder both
in one.
It was such a little, small, square place; and its floor was of beaten
clay; and its unceiled roof he could have touched; and its absolute
poverty was so plain,--and yet the child looked so happy in it, and was
so like a flower, and was so dainty and fresh, and even so full of grace.
She stood and looked at him with frank and grateful eyes; she could
hardly believe that he was here; he, the stranger of Rubes' land, in her
own little rush-covered home.
But she was not embarrassed by it; she was glad and proud.
There is a dignity of peasants as well as of kings,--the dignity that
comes from all absence of effort, all freedom from pretence. Bébée had
this, and she had more still than this: she had the absolute simplicity
of childhood with her still.
Some women have it still when they are four-score.
She could have looked at him forever, she was so happy; she cared
nothing now for those dazzling dahlias--he had left them; he was actually
here--here in her own, little dear home, with the cocks looking in at the
threshold, and the sweet-peas nodding at the lattice, and the starling
crying, "Bonjour! Bonjour!"
"You are tired, I am sure you must be tired," she said, pulling her
little bed forward for him to sit on, for there were only two wooden
stools in the hut, and no chair at all.
Then she took his sketching-easel and brushes from his hand, and would
have kneeled and taken the dust off his boots if he would have let her;
and went hither and thither gladly and lightly, bringing him a wooden
bowl of milk and the rest of the slender fare, and cutting as quick as
thought fresh cresses and lettuce from her garden, and bringing him, as
the crown of all, Father Francis's honey-comb on vine-leaves, with some
pretty sprays of box and mignonette scattered about it--doing all this
with a swift, sweet grace that robbed the labor of all look of servitude,
and looking at him ever and again with a smile that said as clearly as
any words, "I cannot do much, but what I do, I do with all my heart."
There was something in the sight of her going and coming in those simple
household errands, across the sunlit floor, that moved him as some
mountain air sung on an alp by a girl driving her cows to pasture may
move a listener who indifferent has heard the swell of the organ of
La Hague, or the recitative of a great singer in San Carlo.
The gray lavender blowing at the house door has its charm for those who
are tired of the camellias that float in the porcelain bowls of midnight
suppers.
This man was not good. He was idle and vain, and amorous and cold, and
had been spoiled by the world in which he had passed his days; but he had
the temper of an artist: he had something, too, of a poet's fancy; he
was vaguely touched and won by this simple soul that looked at him out of
Bébée's eyes with some look that in all its simplicity had a divine gleam
in it that made him half ashamed.
He had known women by the thousand, good women and bad; women whom he had
dealt ill with and women who had dealt ill with him; but this he had not
known--this frank, fearless, tender, gay, grave, innocent, industrious
little life, helping itself, feeding itself, defending itself, working
for itself and for others, and vaguely seeking all the while some unseen
light, some unknown god, with a blind faith so infinitely ignorant and
yet so infinitely pathetic.
"All the people are gone on a pilgrimage," she explained to him when he
asked her why her village was so silent this bright morning. "They are
gone to pray for a fine harvest, and that she wants herself as well--it
costs seven francs apiece. They take their food with them; they go and
laugh and eat in the fields. I think it is nonsense. One can say one's
prayers just as well here. Mère Krebs thinks so too, but then she says,
'If I do not go, it will look ill; people will say I am irreligious; and
as we make so much by flour, God would think it odd for me to be absent;
and, besides, it is only seven francs there and back; and if it does
please Heaven, that is cheap, you know. One will get it over and over
again in Paradise.' That is what Mere Krebs says. But, for me, I
think it is nonsense. It cannot please God to go by train and eat galette
and waste a whole day in getting dusty.
"When I give the Virgin my cactus flower, I do give up a thing I love,
and I let it wither on her altar instead of pleasing me in bloom here
all the week, and then, of course, she sees that I have done it out of
gratitude. But that is different: that I am sorry to do, and yet I am
glad to do it out of love. Do you not know?"
"Yes, I know very well. But is the Virgin all that you love like this?"
"No; there is the garden, and there is Antoine--he is dead, I know. But I
think that we should love the dead all the better, not the less, because
they cannot speak or say that they are angry; and perhaps one pains them
very much when one neglects them, and if they are ever so sad, they
cannot rise and rebuke one--that is why I would rather forget the flowers
for the Church than I would the flowers for his grave, because God can
punish me, of course, if he like, but Antoine never can--any more--now."
"You are logical in your sentiment, my dear," said Flamen, who was more
moved than he cared to feel. "The union is a rare one in your sex. Who
taught you to reason?"
"No one. And I do not know what to be logical means. Is it that you laugh
at me?"
"No. I do not laugh. And your pilgrims--they are gone for all day?"
"Yes. They are gone to the Sacred Heart at St. Marie en Bois. It is on
the way to Liége. They will come back at nightfall. And some of them will
be sure to have drunk too much, and the children will get so cross.
Prosper Bar, who is a Calvinist, always says, 'Do not mix up prayer and
play; you would not cut a gherkin in your honey'; but I do not know why
he called prayer a gherkin, because it is sweet enough--sweeter than
anything, I think. When I pray to the Virgin to let me see you next day,
I go to bed quite happy, because she will do it, I know, if it will be
good for me."
"But if it were not good for you, Bébée? Would you cease to wish it
then?"
He rose as he spoke, and went across the floor and drew away her hand
that was parting the flax, and took it in his own and stroked it,
indulgently and carelessly, as a man may stroke the soft fur of a young
cat.
Leaning against the little lattice and looking down on her with musing
eyes, half smiling, half serious, half amorous, half sad, Bébée looked
up with a sudden and delicious terror that ran through her as the charm
of the snake's gaze runs through the bewildered bird.
"Would you cease to wish it if it were not good?" he asked again.
Bébée's face grew pale and troubled. She left her hand in his because she
did not think any shame of his taking it. But the question suddenly flung
the perplexity and darkness of doubt into the clearness of her pure
child's conscience. All her ways had been straight and sunlit before her.
She had never had a divided duty.
The religion and the pleasure of her simple little life had always gone
hand-in-hand, greeting one another, and never for an instant in conflict.
In any hesitation of her own she had always gone to Father Francis, and
he had disentangled the web for her and made all plain.
But here was a difficulty in which she could never go to Father Francis.
Right and wrong, duty and desire, were for the first time arrayed before
her in their ghastly and unending warfare.
It frightened her with a certain breathless sense of peril--the peril of
a time when in lieu of that gentle Mother of Roses whom she kneeled
to among the flowers, she would only see a dusky shadow looming between
her and the beauty of life and the light of the sun.
What he said was quite vague to her. She attached no definite danger to
his words. She only thought--to see him was so great a joy--if Mary
forbade it, would she not take it if she could notwithstanding, always,
always, always?
He kept her hand in his, and watched with contentment the changing play
of the shade and sorrow, the fear and fascination, on her face.
"You do not know, Bébée?" he said at length, knowing well himself; so
much better than ever she knew. "Well, dear, that is not flattering to
me. But it is natural. The good Virgin of course gives you all you have,
food, and clothes, and your garden, and your pretty plump chickens; and I
am only a stranger. You could not offend her for me; that is not likely."
The child was cut to the heart by the sadness and humility of words of
whose studied artifice she had no suspicion.
She thought that she seemed to him ungrateful and selfish, and yet all
the mooring-ropes that held her little boat of life to the harbor of
its simple religion seemed cut away, and she seemed drifting helpless and
rudderless upon an unknown sea.
"I never did do wrong--that I know," she said, timidly, and lifted her
eyes to his with an unconscious appeal in them.
"But--I do not see why it should be wrong to speak with you. You are
good, and you lend me beautiful things out of other men's minds that will
make me less ignorant: Our Lady could not be angry with that--she must
like it."
"Our Lady?--oh, poor little simpleton!--where will her reign be when
Ignorance has once been cut down root and branch?" he thought to himself:
but he only answered,--
"But whether she like it or not, Bébée?--you beg the question, my dear;
you are--you are not so frank as usual--think, and tell me honestly?"
He knew quite well, but it amused him to see the perplexed trouble that
this, the first divided duty of her short years, brought with it.
Bébée looked at him, and loosened her hand from his, and sat quite still.
Her lips had a little quiver in them.
"I think." she said at last, "I think--if it _be_ wrong, still I will
wish it--yes. Only I will not tell myself it is right. I will just say to
Our Lady, 'I am wicked, perhaps, but I cannot help it' So, I will not
deceive her at all; and perhaps in time she may forgive. But I think you
only say it to try me. It cannot, I am sure, be wrong--any more than it
is to talk to Jeannot or to Bac."
He had driven her into the subtleties of doubt, but the honest little
soul in her found a way out, as a flower in a cellar finds its way
through the stones to light.
He plucked the ivy leaves and threw them at the chickens on the bricks
without, with a certain impatience in the action. The simplicity and the
directness of the answer disarmed him; he was almost ashamed to use
against her the weapons of his habitual warfare. It was like a maître
d'armes fencing with bare steel against a little naked child armed with a
blest palm-sheaf.
When she had thus brought him all she had, and he to please her had sat
down to the simple food, she gathered a spray of roses and set it in a
pot beside him, then left him and went and stood at a little distance,
waiting, with her hands lightly crossed on her chest, to see if there
were anything that he might want.
He ate and drank well to please her, looking at her often as he did so.
"I break your bread, Bébée," he said, with a tone that seemed strange to
her,--"I break your bread. I must keep Arab faith with you."
"What is that?"
"I mean--I must never betray you."
"Betray me How could you?"
"Well--hurt you in any way."
"Ah, I am sure you would never do that."
He was silent, and looked at the spray of roses.
"Sit down and spin," he said impatiently. "I am ashamed to see you stand
there, and a woman never looks so well as when she spins. Sit down, and I
will eat the good things you have brought me. But I cannot if you stand
and look."
"I beg your pardon. I did not know," she said, ashamed lest she should
have seemed rude to him; and she drew out her wheel under the light of
the lattice, and sat down to it, and began to disentangle the threads.
It was a pretty picture--the low, square casement; the frame of ivy, the
pink and white of the climbing sweet-peas: the girl's head; the cool, wet
leaves: the old wooden spinning-wheel, that purred like a sleepy cat.
"I want to paint you as Gretchen, only it will be a shame." he said.
"Who is Gretchen?"
"You shall read of her by-and-by. And you live here all by yourself?"
"Since Antoine died--yes."
"And are never dull?"
"I have no time, and I do not think I would be if I had time--there is so
much to think of, and one never can understand."
"But you must be very brave and laborious to do all your work yourself.
Is it possible a child like you can spin, and wash, and bake, and garden,
and do everything?"
"Oh, many do more than I. Babette's eldest daughter is only twelve, and
she does much more, because she has all the children to look after; and
they are very, very poor; they often have nothing but a stew of nettles
and perhaps a few snails, days together."
"That is lean, bare, ugly, gruesome poverty; there is plenty of that
everywhere. But you, Bébée--you are an idyll."
Bébée looked across the hut and smiled, and broke her thread. She did not
know what he meant, but if she were anything that pleased him, it was
well.
"Who were those beautiful women?" she said suddenly, the color mounting
into her cheeks.
"What women, my dear?"
"Those I saw at the window with you, the other night--they had jewels."
"Oh!--women, tiresome enough. If I had seen you, I would have dropped you
some fruit. Poor little Bébée! Did you go by, and I never knew?"
"You were laughing--"
"Was I?"
"Yes, and they _were_ beautiful."
"In their own eyes; not in mine."
"No?"
She stopped her spinning and gazed at him with wistful, wondering eyes.
Could it be that they were not beautiful to him? those deep red, glowing,
sun-basked dahlia flowers?
"Do you know," she said very softly, with a flush of penitence that came
and went, "when I saw them, I hated them; I confessed it to Father
Francis next day. You seemed so content with, them, and they looked so
gay and glad there--and then the jewels! Somehow, I seemed to myself such
a little thing, and so ugly and mean. And yet, do you know--"
"And yet--well?"
"They did not look to me good--those women," said Bébée, thoughtfully,
looking across at him in deprecation of his possible anger. "They were
great people, I suppose, and they appeared very happy; but though I
seemed nothing to myself after them, still I think I would not change."
"You are wise without books, Bébée."
"Oh, no, I am not wise at all. I only feel. And give me books; oh, pray,
give me books! You do not know; I will learn so fast; and I will not
neglect anything, that I promise. The neighbors and Jeannot say that I
shall let the flowers die, and the hut get dirty, and never spin or prick
Annémie's patterns; but that is untrue. I will do all, just as I have
done, and more too, if only you will give me things to read, for I do
think when one is happy, one ought to work more--not less."
"But will these books make you happy? If you ask me the truth, I must
tell you--no. You are happy as you are, because you know nothing else
than your own little life; for ignorance _is_ happiness, Bébée, let
sages, ancient and modern, say what they will. But when you know a
little, you will want to know more: and when you know much, you will want
to see much also, and then--and then--the thing will grow--you will be no
longer content. That is, you will be unhappy."
Bébée watched him with wistful eyes.
"Perhaps that is true. No doubt it is true, if you say it. But you know
all the world seems full of voices that I hear, but that I cannot
understand; it is with me as I should think it is with people who go to
foreign countries and do not know the tongue that is spoken when they
land; and it makes me unhappy, because I cannot comprehend, and so the
books will not make me more so, but less. And as for being content--when
I thought you were gone away out of the city, last night, I thought
I would never be able to pray any more, because I hated myself, and I
almost hated the angels, and I told Mary that she was cruel, and she
turned her face from me--as it seemed, forever."
She spoke quite quietly and simply, spinning as she spoke, and looking
across at him with earnest eyes, that begged him to believe her. She was
saying the pure truth, but she did not know the force or the meaning of
that truth.
He listened with a smile; it was not new to him; he knew her heart much
better than she knew it herself, but there was an unconsciousness, and
yet a strength, in the words that touched him though.
He threw the leaves away, irritably, and told her to leave off her
spinning.
"Some day I shall paint you with that wheel as I painted the Broodhuis.
Will you let me, Bébée?"
"Yes."
She answered him as she would have answered if he had told her to go on
pilgrimage from one end of the Low Countries to the other.
"What were you going to do to-day?"
"I am going into the market with the flowers; I go every day."
"How much will you make?"
"Two or three francs, if I am lucky."
"And do you never have a holiday?"
"Oh, yes; but not often, you know, because it is on the fete days that
the people want the most flowers."
"But in the winter?"
"Then I work at the lace."
"Do you never go into the woods?"
"I have been once or twice; but it loses a whole day."
"You are afraid of not earning?"
"Yes. Because I am afraid of owing people anything."
"Well, give up this one day, and we will make holiday. The people are
out; they will not know. Come into the forest, and we will dine at a café
in the woods; and we will be as poetic as you like, and I will tell you a
tale of one called Rosalind, who pranked herself in boy's attire, all for
love, in the Ardennes country yonder. Come, it is the very day for the
forest; it will make me a lad again at Meudon, when the lilacs were in
bloom. Poor Paris! Come."
"Do you mean it?"
The color was bright in her face, her heart was dancing, her little feet
felt themselves already on the fresh green turf.
She had no thought that there could be any harm in it. She would have
gone with Jeannot or old Bac.
"Of course I mean it. Come. I was going to Mayence to see the Magi and
Van Dyck's Christ. We will go to Soignies instead, and study green
leaves. I will paint your face by sunlight. It is the best way to paint
you. You belong to the open air. So should Gretchen; or how else should
she have the blue sky in her eyes?"
"But I have only wooden shoes!"
Her face was scarlet as she glanced at her feet; he who had wanted to
give her the silk stockings--how would he like to be seen walking abroad
with those two clumsy, clattering, work-a-day, little sabots?
"Never mind. My dear, in my time I have had enough of satin shoes and of
silver gilt heels; they click-clack as loud as yours, and cost much more
to those who walk with them, not to mention that they will seldom deign
to walk at all. Your wooden shoes are picturesque. Paganini made a violin
out of a wooden shoe. Who knows what music may lurk in yours, only you
have never heard it. Perhaps I have. It was Bac who gave you the red
shoes that was the barbarian, not I. Come."
"You really mean it?"
"Come."
"But they will miss me at market."
"They will think you are gone on the pilgrimage: you need never tell them
you have not."
"But if they ask me?"
"Does it never happen that you say any other thing than the truth?"
"Any other thing than the truth! Of course not. People take for granted
that one tells truth; it would be very base to cheat them. Do you really
mean that I may come?--in the forest!--and you will tell me stories
like those you give me to read?"
"I will tell you a better story. Lock your hut, Bébée, and come."
"And to think you are not ashamed!"
"Ashamed?"
"Yes, because of my wooden shoes."
Was it possible? Bébée thought, as she ran out into the garden and
locked the door behind her, and pushed the key under the waterbutt as
usual, being quite content with that prudent precaution against robbers
which had served Antoine all his days. Was it possible, this wonderful
joy?--her cheeks were like her roses, her eyes had a brilliance like the
sun; the natural grace and mirth of the child blossomed in a thousand
ways and gestures.
As she went by the shrine in the wall, she bent her knee a moment and
made the sign of the cross; then she gathered a little moss-rose that
nodded close under the border of the palisade, and turned and gave it to
him.
"Look, she sends you this. She is not angry, you see, and it is much more
pleasure when she is pleased--do you not know?"
He shrank a little as her fingers touched him.
"What a pity you had no mother, Bébée!" he said, on an impulse of
emotion, of which in Paris he would have been more ashamed than
of any guilt.