She sat quite still and upright in the wagon with the dark lands rushing
by her. She never spoke at all. She had a look that frightened him upon
her face. When he tried to touch her hand, she shivered away from him.
The charcoal-burner, hardy and strong among forest-reared men, cowered
like a child in a corner, and covered his eyes and wept.
So the night wore away.
She had no perception of anything that happened to her until she was led
through her own little garden in the early day, and her starling cried to
her, "Bonjour, Bonjour!" Even then she only looked about her in a
bewildered way, and never spoke.
Were the sixteen days a dream?
She did not know.
The women whom Jeannot summoned, his mother and sisters, and Mère Krebs,
and one or two others, weeping for what had been the hardness of their
hearts against her, undressed her, and laid her down on her little bed,
and opened the shutters to the radiance of the sun.
She let them do as they liked, only she seemed neither to hear nor speak,
and she never spoke.
All that Jeannot could tell was that he had found her in Paris, and had
saved her from the river.
The women were sorrowful, and reproached themselves. Perhaps she had done
wrong, but they had been harsh, and she was so young.
The two little sabots with the holes worn through the soles touched them;
and they blamed themselves for having shut their hearts and their doors
against her as they saw the fixed blue eyes, without any light in them,
and the pretty mouth closed close against either sob or smile.
After all she was Bébée--the little bright blithe thing that had danced
with their children, and sung to their singing, and brought them always
the first roses of the year. If she had been led astray, they should have
been gentler with her.
So they told themselves and each other.
What had she seen in that terrible Paris to change her like this?--they
could not tell She never spoke.
The cock crowed gayly to the sun. The lamb bleated in the meadow. The
bees boomed among the pear-tree blossoms. The gray lavender blew in the
open house door. The green leaves threw shifting shadows on the floor.
All things were just the same as they had been the year before, when she
had woke to the joy of being a girl of sixteen.
But Bébée now lay quite still and silent on her little bed; as quiet as
the waxen Gesù that they laid in the manger at the Nativity.
"If she would only speak!" the women and the children wailed, weeping
sorely.
But she never spoke; nor did she seem to know any one of them. Not even
the starling as he flew on her pillow and called her.
"Give her rest," they all said; and one by one moved away, being poor
folk and hard working, and unable to lose a whole day.
Mère Krebs stayed with her, and Jeannot sat in the porch where her little
spinning-wheel stood, and rocked himself to and fro; in vain agony,
powerless.
He had done all he could, and it was of no avail.
Then people who had loved her, hearing, came up the green lanes from the
city--the cobbler and the tinman, and the old woman who sold saints'
pictures by the Broodhuis. The Varnhart children hung about the garden
wicket, frightened and sobbing. Old Jehan beat his knees with his hands,
and said only over and over again, "Another dead--another dead!--the red
mill and I see them all dead!"
The long golden day drifted away, and the swans swayed to and fro, and
the willows grew silver in the sunshine.
Bébée, only, lay quite still and never spoke. The starling sat above her
head; his wings drooped, and he was silent too.
Towards sunset Bébée raised herself and called aloud: they ran to her.
"Get me a rosebud--one with the moss round it," she said to them.
They went out into the garden, and brought her one wet with dew.
She kissed it, and laid it in one of her little wooden shoes that stood
upon the bed.
"Send them to him," she said wearily; "tell him I walked all the way."
Then her head drooped; then momentary consciousness died out: the old
dull lifeless look crept over her face again like the shadow of death.
The starling spread his broad black wings above her head. She lay quite
still once more. The women left the rosebud in the wooden shoe, not
knowing what she meant.
Night fell. Mère Krebs watched beside her. Jeannot went down to the old
church to beseech heaven with all his simple, ignorant, tortured soul.
The villagers hovered about, talking in low sad voices, and wondering,
and dropping one by one into their homes. They were sorry, very sorry;
but what could they do?
It was quite night. The lights were put out in the lane. Jeannot, with
Father Francis, prayed before the shrine of the Seven Sorrows. Mère Krebs
slumbered in her rush-bottomed chair; she was old and worked hard. The
starling was awake.
Bébée rose in her bed, and looked around, as she had done when she had
asked for the moss-rosebud.
A sense of unutterable universal pain ached over all her body.
She did not see her little home, its four white walls, its lattice
shining in the moon, its wooden bowls and plates, its oaken shelf and
presses, its plain familiar things that once had been so dear,--she did
not see them; she only saw the brown woman with her arm about his throat.
She sat up in her bed and slipped her feet on to the floor; the pretty
little rosy feet that he had used to want to clothe in silken stockings.
Poor little feet! she felt a curious compassion for them; they had served
her so well, and they were so tired.
She sat up a moment with that curious dull agony, aching everywhere in
body and in brain. She kissed the rosebud once more and laid it gently
down in the wooden shoe. She did not see anything that was around her.
She felt a great dulness that closed in on her, a great weight that was
like iron on her head.
She thought she was in the strange, noisy, cruel city, with' the river
close to her, and all her dead dreams drifting down it like murdered
children, whilst that woman kissed him.
She slipped her feet on to the floor, and rose and stood upright. There
was a door open to the moonlight--the door where she had sat spinning and
singing in a thousand happy days; the lavender blew; the tall, unbudded
green lilies swayed in the wind; she looked at them, and knew none of
them.
The night air drifted through her linen dress, and played on her bare
arms, and lifted the curls of her hair; the same air that had played
with her so many times out of mind when she had been a little tottering
thing that measured its height by the red rosebush. But it brought her no
sense of where she was.
All she saw was the woman who kissed him.
There was the water beyond; the kindly calm water, all green with the
moss and the nests of the ouzels and the boughs of the hazels and
willows, where the swans were asleep in the reeds, and the broad lilies
spread wide and cool.
But she did not see any memory in it. She thought it was the cruel gray
river in the strange white city: and she cried to it; and went out
into the old familiar ways, and knew none of them; and ran feebly yet
fleetly through the bushes and flowers, looking up once at the stars with
a helpless broken blind look, like a thing that is dying.
"He does not want me!" she said to them; "he does not want me!--other
women kiss him there!"
Then with a low fluttering sound like a bird's when its wings are shot,
and yet it tries to rise, she hovered a moment over the water, and
stretched her arms out to it.
"He does not want me!" she murmured; "he does not want me--and I am so
tired. Dear God!"
Then she crept down, as a weary child creeps to its mother, and threw
herself forward, and let the green dark waters take her where they
had found her amidst the lilies, a little laughing yearling thing.
There she soon lay, quite quiet, with her face turned to the stars, and
the starling poised above to watch her as she slept.
She had been only Bébée: the ways of God and man had been too hard for
her.
When the messengers of Flamen came that day, they took him back a dead
moss-rose and a pair of little wooden shoes worn through with walking.
"One creature loved me once," he says to women who wonder why the wooden
shoes are there.