The winter went by, and the snow-drops and crocus and pale hepatica
smiled at her from the black clods. Every other springtime Bébée had run
with fleet feet under the budding trees down into the city, and had sold
sweet little wet bunches of violets and brier before all the snow was
melted from the eaves of the Broodhuis.
"The winter is gone," the townspeople used to say; "look, there is Bébée
with the flowers."
But this year they did not see the little figure itself like a rosy
crocus standing against the brown timbers of the Maison de Roi.
Bébée had not heart to pluck a single blossom of them all. She let them
all live, and tended them so that the little garden should look its best
and brightest to him when his hand should lift its latch.
Only he was so long coming--so very long; the violets died away, and the
first rosebuds came in their stead, and still Bébée looked every dawn and
every nightfall vainly down the empty road.
Nothing kills young creatures like the bitterness of waiting.
Pain they will bear, and privation they will pass through, fire and water
and storm will not appall them, nor wrath of heaven and earth, but
waiting--the long, tedious, sickly, friendless days, that drop one by one
in their eternal sameness into the weary past, these kill slowly
but surely, as the slow dropping of water frets away rock.
The summer came.
Nearly a year had gone by. Bébée worked early and late. The garden
bloomed like one big rose, and the neighbors shook their heads to see the
flowers blossom and fall without bringing in a single coin.
She herself spoke less seldom than ever; and now when old Jehan, who
never had understood the evil thoughts of his neighbors, asked her
what ailed her that she looked so pale and never stirred down to the
city, now her courage failed her, and the tears brimmed over her eyes,
and she could not call up a brave brief word to answer him. For the time
was so long, and she was so tired.
Still she never doubted that her lover would comeback: he had said he
would come: she was as sure that he would come as she was sure that God
came in the midst of the people when the silver bell rang and the Host
was borne by on high.
Bébée did not heed much, but she vaguely-felt the isolation she was left
in: as a child too young to reason feels cold and feels hunger.
"No one wants me here now that Annémie is gone," she thought to herself,
as the sweet green spring days unfolded themselves one by one like the
buds of the brier-rose hedges.
And now and then even the loyal little soul of her gave way, and sobbing
on her lonely bed in the long dark nights, she would cry out against him,
"Oh, why not have left me alone? I was so happy--so happy!"
And then she would reproach herself with treason to him and ingratitude,
and hate herself and feel guilty in her own sight to have thus sinned
against him in thought for one single instant.
For there are natures in which the generosity of love is so strong that
it feels its own just pain to be disloyalty; and Bébée's was one of them.
And if he had killed her she would have died hoping only that no moan had
escaped her under the blow that ever could accuse him.
These natures, utterly innocent by force of self-accusation and
self-abasement, suffer at once the torment of the victim and the
criminal.