Bébée looked after him wistfully till his figure was lost in the gloom.
The village was very quiet; a dog barking afar off and a cow lowing in
the meadow were the only living things that made their presence heard;
the pilgrims had not returned.
She leaned on the gate a few minutes in that indistinct, dreamy happiness
which is the prerogative of innocent love.
"How wonderful it is that he should give a thought to me!" she said again
and again to herself. It was as if a king had stooped for a little knot
of daisied grass to set it in his crown where the great diamonds should
be.
She did not reason. She did not question. She did not look beyond that
hour--such is the privilege of youth.
"How I will read! How I will learn! How wise I will try to be; and how
good, if I can!" she thought, swaying the little gate lightly under her
weight, and looking with glad eyes at the goats as they frisked with
their young in the pasture on the other side of the big trees, whilst one
by one the stars came out, and an owl hooted from the palace woods, and
the frogs croaked good-nights in the rushes.
Then, like a little day laborer as she was, with the habit of toil and
the need of the poor upon her from her birth up, she shut down the latch
of the gate, kissed it where his hand had rested, and went to the well to
draw its nightly draught for the dry garden.
"Oh, dear roses!" she said to them as she rained the silvery showers over
their nodding heads. "Oh, dear roses!--tell me--was ever anybody so happy
as I am? Oh, if you say 'yes' I shall tell you you lie; silly flowers
that were only born yesterday!"
But the roses shook the water off them in the wind, and said, as she
wished them to say,--
"No--no one--ever before, Bébée--no one ever before."
For roses, like everything else upon earth, only speak what our own heart
puts into them.
An old man went past up the lane; old Jehan, who was too ailing and aged
to make one of the pilgrimage. He looked at the little quick-moving form,
grayish white in the starlight, with the dark copper vessel balanced on
her head, going to and fro betwixt the well and the garden.
"You did not go to the pilgrimage, poor little one!" he said across the
sweetbrier hedge. "Nay, that was too bad; work, work, work--thy pretty
back should not be bent double yet. You want a holiday, Bébée; well,
the Fête Dieu is near. Jeannot shall take you, and maybe I can find a few
sous for gingerbread and merry-go-rounds. You sit dull in the market all
day; you want a feast."
Bébée colored behind the hedge, and ran in and brought three new-laid
eggs that she had left in the flour-bin in the early morning, and thrust
them on him through a break in the brier. It was the first time she had
ever done anything of which she might not speak: she was ashamed, and yet
the secret was so sweet to her.
"I am very happy, Jehan, thank God!" she murmured, with a tremulous
breath and a shine in her eyes that the old man's ears and sight were too
dull to discern.
"So was _she_" muttered Jehan, as he thrust the eggs into his old
patched blue blouse,--"so was she. And then a stumble--a blow in the lane
there--a horse's kick--and all was over. All over, my pretty one--for
ever and ever."