One day in the May weather she sat within doors with a great book upon
her table, but no sight for it in her aching eyes. The starling hopped to
and fro on the sunny floor; the bees boomed in the porch; the tinkle of
sheep's bells came in on the stillness. All was peaceful and happy except
the little weary, breaking, desolate heart that beat in her like a caged
bird's.
"He will come; I am sure he will come," she said to herself; but she was
so tired, and it was so long--oh, dear God!--so very long.
A hand tapped at the lattice. The shrill voice of Reine, the
sabot-maker's wife, broken with anguish, called through the hanging
ivy,--
"Bébée, you are a wicked one, they say, but the only one there is at home
in the village this day. Get you to town for the love of Heaven, and send
Doctor Max hither, for my pet, my flower, my child lies dying, and not a
soul near, and she black as a coal with choking--go, go, go!--and Mary
will forgive you your sins. Save the little one, dear Bébée, do you hear?
and I will pray God and speak fair the neighbors for you. Go!"
Bébée rose up, startled by the now unfamiliar sound of a human voice, and
looked at the breathless mother with eyes of pitying wonder.
"Surely I will go," she said, gently; "but there is no need to bribe me.
I have not sinned greatly--that I know."
Then she went out quickly and ran through the lanes and into the city for
the sick child, and found the wise man, and sent him, and did the errand
rather in a sort of sorrowful sympathetic instinct than in any reasoning
consciousness of doing good.
When she was moving through the once familiar and happy ways as the sun
was setting on the golden fronts of the old houses, and the chimes were
ringing from the many towers, a strange sense of unreality, of
non-existence, fell upon her.
Could it be she?--she indeed--who had gone there the year before the
gladdest thing that the earth bore, with no care except to shelter her
flowers from the wind, and keep the freshest blossoms for the
burgomaster's housewife?
She did not think thus to herself; but a vague doubt that she could ever
have been the little gay, laborious, happy Bébée, with troops of friends
and endless joys for every day that dawned, came over her as she went by
the black front of the Broodhuis.
The strong voice of Lisa, the fruit girl, jarred on her as she passed the
stall under its yellow awning that was flapping sullenly in the evening
wind.
"Oh hé, little fool," the mocking voice cried, "the rind of the fine pine
is full of prickles, and stings the lips when the taste is gone?--to be
sure--crack common nuts like me and you are never wanting--hazels grow
free in every copse. Prut, tut! your grand lover lies a-dying; so the
students read out of this just now; and you such a simpleton as not to
get a roll of napoleons out of him before he went to rot in Paris. I dare
say he was poor as sparrows, if one knew the truth. He was only a
painter after all."
Lisa tossed her as she spoke a torn sheet, in which she was wrapping
gentians: it was a piece of newspaper some three weeks old, and in it
there was a single line or so which said that the artist Flamen, whose
Gretchen was the wonder of the Salon of the year, lay sick unto death in
his rooms in Paris.
Bébée stood and read; the strong ruddy western light upon the type, the
taunting laughter of the fruit girl on her ear.
A bitter shriek rang from her that made even the cruelty of Lisa's mirth
stop in a sudden terror.
She stood staring like a thing changed to stone down on the one name that
to her rilled all the universe.
"Ill--he is ill--do you hear?" she echoed piteously, looking at Lisa;
"and you say he is poor?"
"Poor? for sure! is he not a painter?" said the fruit girl, roughly. She
judged by her own penniless student lads; and she was angered with
herself for feeling sorrow for this little silly thing that she had loved
to torture.
"You have been bad and base to me; but now--I bless you, I love you, I
will pray for you," said Bébée, in a swift broken breath, and with a look
upon her face that startled into pain her callous enemy.
Then without another word, she thrust the paper in her bosom, and ran out
of the square breathless with haste and with a great resolve.
He was ill--and he was poor! The brave little soul of her leaped at once
to action. He was sick, and far away; and poor they said. All danger and
all difficulty faded to nothing before the vision of his need.
Bébée was only a little foundling who ran about in wooden shoes; but she
had the "dog's soul" in her--the soul that will follow faithfully though
to receive a curse, that will defend loyally though to meet a blow, and
that will die mutely loving to the last.
She went home, how she never knew; and without the delay of a moment
packed up a change of linen, and fed the fowls and took the key of the
hut down to old Jehan's cabin. The old man was only half-witted by reason
of his affliction for his dead daughter, but he was shrewd enough to
understand what she wanted of him, and honest enough to do it.
"I am going into the city," she said to him: "and if I am not back
to-night, will you feed the starling and the hens, and water the flowers
for me?"
Old Jehan put his head out of his lattice: it was seven in the evening,
and he was going to bed.
"What are you after, little one?" he asked: going to show the fine
buckles at a students' ball? Nay, fie; that is not like you."
"I am going to--pray--dear Jehan," she answered, with a sob in her throat
and the first falsehood she ever had told. "Do what I ask you--do for
your dead daughter's sake--or the birds and the flowers will die of
hunger and thirst. Take the key and promise me."
He took the key, and promised.
"Do not let them see those buckles shine; they will rob you," he added.
Bébée ran from him fast; every moment that was lost was so precious and
so terrible. To pause a second for fear's sake never occurred to her. She
went forth as fearlessly as a young swallow, born in northern April days,
flies forth on instinct to new lands and over unknown seas when autumn
falls.
Necessity and action breathed new life into her. The hardy and brave
peasant ways of her were awoke once more. She had been strong to wait
silently with the young life in her dying out drop by drop in the
heart-sickness of long delay. She was strong now to throw herself into
strange countries and dim perils and immeasurable miseries, on the sole
chance that she might be of service to him.
A few human souls here and there can love like dogs. Bébée's was one.