In the deserted lane by the swans' water, under the willows, the
horses waited to take him to Mechlin; little, quick, rough horses, with
round brass bells, in the Flemish fashion, and gay harness, and a low
char-à-banc, in which a wolf-skin and red rugs, and all a painter's many
necessities, were tossed together.
He lifted her in, and the little horses flew fast through the green
country, ringing chimes at each step, till they plunged into the deep
glades of the woods of Cambre and Soignies.
Bébée sat breathless with delight.
She had never gone behind horses in all her life, except once or twice
in a wagon when the tired teamsters had dragged a load of corn across
the plains, or when the miller's old gray mare had hobbled wearily before
a cart-load of noisy, happy, mischievous children going home from the
masses and fairs, and flags, and flowers, and church banners, and
puppet-shows, and lighted altars, and whirling merry-go-rounds of the
Fête Dieu.
She had never known what it was to sail as on the wings of the wind along
broad roads, with yellow wheat-lands, and green hedges, and wayside
trees, and little villages, and reedy canal water, all flying by her to
the sing-song of the joyous bells.
"Oh, how good it is to live!" she cried, clapping her hands in a very
ecstasy, as the clear morning broadened into gold and the west wind rose
and blew from the sands by the sea.
"Yes--it is good--if one did not tire so soon," said he, watching her
with a listless pleasure.
But she did not hear; she was beyond the reach of any power to sadden
her; she was watching the white oxen that stood on the purple brow of
the just reapen lands, and the rosy clouds that blew like a shower of
apple-blossoms across the sky to the south.
There was a sad darkling Calvary on the edge of the harvest-field that
looked black against the blue sky; its shadow fell across the road, but
she did not see it: she was looking at the sun.
There is not much change in the great Soignies woods. They are aisles on
aisles of beautiful green trees, crossing and recrossing; tunnels of dark
foliage that look endless; long avenues of beech, of oak, of elm, or of
fir, with the bracken and the brushwood growing dense between; a
delicious forest growth everywhere, shady even at noon, and by a little
past midday dusky as evening; with the forest fragrance, sweet and dewy,
all about, and under the fern the stirring of wild game, and the white
gleam of little rabbits, and the sound of the wings of birds.
Soignies is not legend-haunted like the Black Forest, nor king-haunted
like Fontainebleau, nor sovereign of two historic streams like the brave
woods of Heidelberg; nor wild and romantic, arid broken with black rocks,
and poetized by the shade of Jaques, and swept through by a perfect
river, like its neighbors of Ardennes; nor throned aloft on mighty
mountains like the majestic oak glades of the Swabian hills of the ivory
carvers.
Soignies is only a Flemish forest in a plain, throwing its shadows over
corn-fields and cattle pastures, with no panorama beyond it and no
wonders in its depth. But it is a fresh, bold, beautiful forest for all
that.
It has only green leaves to give,--green leaves always, league after
league; but there is about it that vague mystery which all forests have,
and this universe of leaves seems boundless, and Pan might dwell in it,
and St. Hubert, and John Keats.
Bébée, in her rare holidays with the Bac children or with Jeannot's
sisters, had never penetrated farther than the glades of the Cambre,
and had never entered the heart of the true forest, which is much still
what it must have been in the old days when the burghers of Brabant cut
their yew bows and their pike staves from it to use against the hosts of
Spain.
To Bébée it was as an enchanted land, and every play of light and shade,
every hare speeding across the paths, every thrush singing in the leaves,
every little dog-rose or harebell that blossomed in the thickets, was to
her a treasure, a picture, a poem, a delight.
He had seen girls thus in the woods of Vincennes and of Versailles in the
student days of his youth: little work-girls fresh from châlets of the
Jura or from vine-hung huts of the Loire, who had brought their poor
little charms to perish in Paris; and who dwelt under the hot tiles and
amidst the gilded shop signs till they were as pale and thin as their own
starved balsams; and who, when they saw the green woods, laughed and
cried a little, and thought of the broad sun-swept fields, and wished
that they were back again behind their drove of cows, or weeding among
the green grapes.
But those little work-girls had been mere homely daisies, and daisies
already with the dust of the pavement and of the dancing-gardens upon
them.
Bébée was as pure and fresh as these dew-wet dog-roses that she found in
the thickets of thorn.
He had meant to treat her as he had used to do those work-girls--a little
wine, a little wooing, a little folly and passion, idle as a butterfly
and brief as a rainbow--one midsummer day and night--then a handful of
gold, a caress, a good-morrow, and forgetfulness ever afterwards--that
was what he had meant when he had brought her out to the forest of
Soignies.
But--she was different, this child.
He made the great sketch of her for his Gretchen, sitting on a moss-grown
trunk, with marguerites in her hand; he sent for their breakfast far into
the woods, and saw her set her pearly teeth into early peaches and costly
sweetmeats; he wandered with her hither and thither, and told her tales
out of the poets and talked to her in the dreamy, cynical, poetical
manner that was characteristic of him, being half artificial and half
sorrowful, as his temper was.
But Bébée, all unconscious, intoxicated with happiness, and yet touched
by it into that vague sadness which the summer sun brings with it even to
young things, if they have soul in them,--Bébée said to him what the
work-girls of Paris never had done.
Beautiful things: things fantastic, ignorant, absurd, very simple, very
unreasonable oftentimes, but things beautiful always, and sometimes even
very wise by a wisdom not of the world; by a certain light divine that
does shine now and then as through an alabaster lamp, through minds that
have no grossness to obscure them.
Her words were not equal to the burden of her thoughts at times, but he
knew how to take the pearl of the thought from the broken shell and
tangled sea-weed of her simple, untutored speech.
"If there be a God anywhere," he thought to himself, "this little Fleming
is very near him."
She was so near that, although he had no belief in any God, he could not
deal with her as he had used to do with the work-girls in the primrose
paths of old Vincennes.