The wheat was reapen in the fields, and the brown earth turned afresh.
The white and purple chrysanthemums bloomed against the flowerless
rose-bushes, and the little gray Michaelmas daisy flourished where the
dead carnations had spread their glories. Leaves began to fall and chilly
winds to sigh among the willows; the squirrels began to store away their
nuts, and the poor to pick up the broken bare boughs.
"He said he would come before winter," thought Bébée, every day when she
rose and felt each morning cooler and grayer than the one before it;
winter was near.
Her little feet already were cold in their wooden shoes; and the robin
already sang in the twigs of the sear sweetbrier; but she had the brave
sweet faith which nothing kills, and she did not doubt--oh! no, she did
not doubt, she was only tired.
Tired of the strange, sleepless, feverish nights; tired of the long,
dull, empty days: tired of watching down the barren, leafless lane:
tired of hearkening breathless to each step on the rustling dead leaves;
tired of looking always, always, always, into the ruddy autumn evenings
and the cold autumn starlight, and never hearing what she listened for,
never seeing what she sought; tired as a child may be lost in a wood, and
wearily wearing its small strength and breaking its young heart in search
of the track forever missed, of the home forever beyond the horizon.
Still she did her work and kept her courage.
She took her way into the town with her basket full of the ruby and amber
of the dusky autumn blossoms, and when those failed, and the garden was
quite desolate, except for a promise of haws and of holly, she went, as
she had always done, to the lace-room, and gained her bread and the
chickens' corn each day by winding the thread round the bobbins; and at
nightfall when she had plodded home through the darksome roads and over
the sodden turf, and had lit her rushlight and sat down to her books,
with her hand buried in her hair, and her eyes smarting from the strain
of the lace-work and her heart aching with that new and deadly pain which
never left her now, she would read--read--read--read, and try and store
her brain with knowledge, and try and grasp these vast new meanings of
life that the books opened to her, and try and grow less ignorant against
he should return.
There was much she could not understand,
bait there was also much she could.
Her mind was delicate and quick, her intelligence swift and strong; she
bought old books at bookstalls with pence that she saved by going without
her dinner. The keeper of the stall, a shrewd old soul, explained some
hard points to her, and chose good volumes for her, and lent others to
this solitary little student in her wooden shoes and with her pale
child's face.
So she toiled hard and learned much, and grew taller and very thin, and
got a look in her eyes like a lost dog's, and yet never lost heart or
wandered in the task that he had set her, or in her faith in his return.
"Burn the books, Bébée," whispered the children again and again, clinging
to her skirts. "Burn the wicked, silent things. Since you have had them
you never sing, or romp, or laugh, and you look so white--so white."
Bébée kissed them, but kept to her books.
Jeannot going by from the forest night after night saw the light
twinkling in the hut window, and sometimes crept softly up and looked
through the chinks of the wooden shutter, and saw her leaning over some
big old volume with her pretty brows drawn together, and her mouth shut
close in earnest effort, and he would curse the man who had changed her
so and go away with rage in his breast and tears in his eyes, not daring
to say anything, but knowing that never would Bébée's little brown hand
lie in love within his own.
Nor even in friendship, for he had rashly spoken rough words against the
stranger from Rubes' land, and Bébée ever since then had passed him by
with a grave, simple greeting, and when he had brought her in timid gifts
a barrow-load of fagots, had thanked him, but had bidden him take the
wood home to his mother.
"You think evil things of me, Bébée?" good Jeannot had pleaded, with a
sob in his voice; and she had answered gently,--
"No; but do not speak to me, that is all."
Then he had cursed her absent lover, and Bébée gone within and closed her
door.
She had no idea that the people thought ill of her. They were cold to
her, and such coldness made her heart ache a little more. But the one
great love in her possessed her so strongly that all other things were
half unreal.
She did her daily housework from sheer habit, and she studied because he
had told her to do it, and because with the sweet, stubborn, credulous
faith of her youth, she never doubted that he would return.
Otherwise there was no perception of real life in her; she dreamed and
prayed, and prayed and dreamed, and never ceased to do either one or the
other, even when she was scattering potato-peels to the fowls, or shaking
carrots loose of the soil, or sweeping the snow from her hut door, or
going out in the raw dark dawn as the single little sad bell of St. Guido
tolled through the stillness for the first mass.
For though even Father Francis looked angered at her because he thought
she was stubborn, and hid some truth and some shame from him at
confession, yet she went resolutely and oftener than ever to kneel in the
dusty, dusky, crumbling old church, for it was all she could do for him
who was absent--so she thought--and she did not feel quite so far away
from him when she was beseeching Christ to have care of his soul and of
his body.
All her pretty dreams were dead.
She never heard any story in the robin's song, or saw any promise in the
sunset clouds, or fancied that angels came about her in the night--never
now.
The fields were gray and sad; the birds were little brown things; the
stars were cold and far off; the people she had used to care for were
like mere shadows that went by her meaningless and without interest, and
all she thought of was the one step that never came: all she wanted was
the one touch she never felt.
"You have done wrong, Bébée, and you will not own it," said the few
neighbors who ever spoke to her.
Bébée looked at them with wistful, uncomprehending eyes.
"I have done no wrong," she said gently, but no one believed her.
A girl did not shut herself up and wane pale and thin for nothing, so
they reasoned. She might have sinned as she had liked if she had been
sensible after it, and married Jeannot.
But to fret mutely, and shut her lips, and seem as though she had done
nothing,--that was guilt indeed.
For her village, in its small way, thought as the big world thinks.