Then he took her to dine at one of the wooden cafés under the trees.
There was a little sheet of water in front of it and a gay garden around.
There was a balcony and a wooden stairway; there were long trellised
arbors, and little white tables, and great rosebushes like her own at
home. They had an arbor all to themselves; a cool sweet-smelling bower of
green, with a glimpse of scarlet from the flowers of some twisting beans.
They had a meal, the like of which she had never seen; such a huge melon
in the centre of it, and curious wines, and coffee or cream in silver
pots, or what looked like silver to her--"just like the altar-vases in
the church," she said to herself.
"If only the Varnhart children were here!" she cried; but he did not echo
the wish.
It was just sunset. There was a golden glow on the little bit of water.
On the other side of the garden some one was playing a guitar. Under a
lime-tree some girls were swinging, crying, Higher! higher! at each toss.
In a longer avenue of trellised green, at a long table, there was a noisy
party of students and girls of the city; their laughter was mellowed by
distance as it came over the breadth of the garden, and they sang, with
fresh shrill Flemish voices, songs from an opera bouffe of La Monnaie.
It was all pretty, and gay, and pleasant.
There was everywhere about an air of light-hearted enjoyment. Bébée sat
with a wondering look in her wide-opened eyes, and all the natural
instincts of her youth, that were like curled-up fruit buds in her,
unclosed softly to the light of joy.
"Is life always like this in your Rubes' land?" she asked him; that vague
far-away country of which she never asked him anything more definite, and
which yet was so clear before her fancy.
"Yes," he made answer to her. "Only--instead of those leaves, flowers and
pomegranates; and in lieu of that tinkling guitar, a voice whose notes
are esteemed like king's jewels; and in place of those little green
arbors, great white palaces, cool and still, with ilex woods and orange
groves and sapphire seas beyond them. Would you like to come there,
Bébée?--and wear laces such as you weave, and hear singing and laughter
all night long, and never work any more in the mould of the garden, or
spin any more at that tiresome wheel, or go any more out in the wind, and
the rain, and the winter mud to the market?"
Bébée listened, leaning her round elbows on the table, and her warm
cheeks on her hands, as a child gravely listens to a fairy story. But
the sumptuous picture, and the sensuous phrase he had chosen, passed by
her.
It is of no use to tempt the little chaffinch of the woods with a ruby
instead of a cherry. The bird is made to feed on the brown berries, on
the morning dews, on the scarlet hips of roses, and the blossoms of the
wind-tossed pear boughs; the gem, though it be a monarch's, will only
strike hard and tasteless on its beak.
"I would like to see it all," said Bébée, musingly trying to follow out
her thoughts. "But as for the garden work and the spinning--that I do not
want to leave, because I have done it all my life; and I do not think I
should care to wear lace--it would tear very soon; one would be afraid to
run; and do you see I know how it is made--all that lace. I know how
blind the eyes get over it, and how the hearts ache; I know how the old
women starve, and the little children cry; I know that there is not a
sprig of it that is not stitched with pain; the great ladies do not
think, I dare say, because they have never worked at it or watched the
others: but I have. And so, you see, I think if I wore it I should feel
sad, and if a nail caught on it I should feel as if it were tearing the
flesh of my friends. Perhaps I say it badly; but that is what I feel."
"You do not say it badly--you speak well, for you speak from the heart,"
he answered her, and felt a tinge of shame that he had tempted her with
the gold and purple of a baser world than any that she knew.
"And yet you want to see new lands?" he pursued. "What is it you want to
see there?"
"Ah, quite other things than these," cried Bébée, still leaning her
cheeks on her hands. "That dancing and singing is very pretty and merry,
but it is just as good when old Claude fiddles and the children skip.
This wine, you tell me, is something very great; but fresh milk is much
nicer, I think. It is not these kind of things I want--I want to know all
about the people who lived before us; I want to know what the stars are,
and what the wind is; I want to know where the lark goes when you lose
him out of sight against the sun; I want to know how the old artists got
to see God, that they could paint him and all his angels as they have
done; I want to know how the voices got into the bells, and how they can
make one's heart beat, hanging up there as they do, all alone among the
jackdaws; I want to know what it is when I walk in the fields in the
morning, and it is all gray and soft and still, and the corn-crake cries
in the wheat, and the little mice run home to their holes, that makes
me so glad and yet so sorrowful, as if I were so very near God, and yet
so all alone, and such a little thing; because you see the mouse she
has her hole, and the crake her own people, but I--"
Her voice faltered a little and stopped: she had never before thought out
into words her own loneliness; from the long green arbor the voices of
the girls and the students sang,--
"Ah! le doux son d'un baiser tendre!"
Flamen was silent. The poet in him--and in an artist there is always more
or less of the poet--kept him back from ridicule, nay, moved him to pity
and respect.
They were absurdly simple words no doubt, had little wisdom in them, and
were quite childish in their utterance, and yet they moved him curiously
as a man very base and callous may at times be moved by the look in a
dying deer's eyes, or by the sound of a song that some lost love once
sang.
He rose and drew her hands away, and took her small face between his own
hands instead.
"Poor little Bébée!" he said gently, looking down on her with a breath
that was almost a sigh. "Poor little Bébée!--to envy the corncrake and
the mouse!"
She was a little startled; her cheeks grew very warm under his touch, but
her eyes looked still into his without fear.
He stooped and touched her forehead with his lips, gently and
without passion, almost reverently; she grew rose-hued as the bright
bean-flowers, up to the light gold ripples of her hair; she trembled a
little and drew back, but she was not alarmed nor yet ashamed; she was
too simple of heart to feel the fear that is born of passion and of
consciousness.
It was as Jeannot kissed his sister Marie, who was fifteen years old and
sold milk for the Krebs people in the villages with a little green cart
and a yellow dog--no more.
And yet the sunny arbor leaves and the glimpse of the blue sky swam round
her indistinctly, and the sounds of the guitar grew dull upon her ear and
were lost as in a rushing hiss of water, because of the great sudden
unintelligible happiness that seemed to bear her little life away on it
as a sea wave bears a young child off its feet.
"You do not feel alone now, Bébée?" he whispered to her.
"No!" she answered him softly under her breath, and sat still, while all
her body quivered like a leaf.
No; how could she ever be alone now that this sweet, soft, unutterable
touch would always be in memory upon her; how could she wish ever again
now to be the corn-crake in the summer corn or the gray mouse in the
hedge of hawthorn?
At that moment a student went by past the entrance of the arbor; he had a
sash round his loins and a paper feather in his cap; he was playing a
fife and dancing; he glanced in as he went.
"It is time to go home, Bébée," said Flamen.