by Ouida
CHAPTER II.
The two years had not been all playtime any more than they had been allsummer.
When one has not father, or mother, or brother, and all one's friendshave barely bread enough for themselves, life cannot be very easy, norits crusts very many at any time.
Bebee had a cherub's mouth, and a dreamer's eyes, and a poet's thoughtssometimes in her own untaught and unconscious fashion.
But all the same she was a little hard-working Brabant peasant girl;up whilst the birds twittered in the dark; to bed when the red sunsank beyond the far blue line of the plains; she hoed, and dug, andwatered, and planted her little plot; she kept her cabin as clean asa fresh-blossomed primrose; she milked her goat and swept her floor; shesat, all the warm days, in the town, selling her flowers, and in thewinter time, when her garden yielded her nothing, she strained her sightover lace-making in the city to get the small bit of food that stoodbetween her and that hunger which to the poor means death.
A hard life; very hard when hail and snow made the streets of Brusselslike slopes of ice; a little hard even in the gay summer time when shesat under the awning fronting the Maison du Roi; but all the time thechild throve on it, and was happy, and dreamed of many graceful andgracious things whilst she was weeding among her lilies, or tracing thethreads to and fro on her lace pillow.
Now--when she woke to the full sense of her wonderful sixteenyears--Bebee, standing barefoot on the mud floor, was as pretty a sightas was to be seen betwixt Scheldt and Rhine.
The sun had only left a soft warmth like an apricot's on her white skin.Her limbs, though strong as a mountain pony's, were slender and wellshaped. Her hair curled in shiny crumpled masses, and tumbled about hershoulders. Her pretty round plump little breast was white as the liliesin the grass without, and in this blooming time of her little life,Bebee, in her way, was beautiful as a peach-bloom is beautiful, and herinnocent, courageous, happy eyes had dreams in them underneath theirlaughter, dreams that went farther than the green woods of Laeken,farther even than the white clouds of summer.
She could not move among them idly as poets and girls love to do; she hadto be active amidst them, else drought and rain, and worm and snail, andblight and frost, would have made havoc of their fairest hopes.
The loveliest love is that which dreams high above all storms, unsoiledby all burdens; but perhaps the strongest love is that which, whilst itadores, drags its feet through mire, and burns its brow in heat, for thething beloved.
So Bebee dreamed in her garden; but all the time for sake of it hoed anddug, and hurt her hands, and tired her limbs, and bowed her shouldersunder the great metal pails from the well.
This wondrous morning, with the bright burden of her sixteen years uponher, she dressed herself quickly and fed her fowls, and, happy as a bird,went to sit on her little wooden stool in the doorway.
There had been fresh rain in the night: the garden was radiant; the smellof the wet earth was sweeter than all perfumes that are burned inpalaces.
The dripping rosebuds nodded against her hair as she went out; thestarling called to her, "Bebee, Bebee--bonjour, bonjour." These were allthe words it knew. It said the same words a thousand times a week. Butto Bebee it seemed that the starling most certainly knew that she wassixteen years old that day.
Breaking her bread into the milk, she sat in the dawn and thought,without knowing that she thought it, "How good it is to live when oneis young!"
Old people say the same thing often, but they sigh when they say it.Bebee smiled.
Mere Krebs opened her door in the next cottage, and nodded over the wall.
"What a fine thing to be sixteen!--a merry year, Bebee."
Marthe, the carpenter's wife, came out from her gate, broom in hand.
"The Holy Saints keep you, Bebee; why, you are quite a woman now!"
The little children of Varnhart, the charcoal-burner, who were as poor asany mouse in the old churches, rushed out of their little home up thelane, bringing with them a cake stuck full of sugar and seeds, and tiedround with a blue ribbon, that their mother had made that very week, allin her honor.
"Only see, Bebee! Such a grand cake!" they shouted, dancing down thelane. "Jules picked the plums, and Jeanne washed the almonds, andChristine took the ribbon off her own communion cap, all for you--all foryou; but you will let us come and eat it too?"
Old Gran'mere Bishot, who was the oldest woman about Laeken, hobbledthrough the grass on her crutches and nodded her white shaking head, andsmiled at Bebee.
"I have nothing to give you, little one, except my blessing, if you carefor that."
Bebee ran out, breaking from the children, and knelt down in the wetgrass, and bent her pretty sunny head to the benediction.
Trine, the miller's wife, the richest woman of them all, called to thechild from the steps of the mill,--'
"A merry year, and the blessing of Heaven, Bebee! Come up, and here is myfirst dish of cherries for you; not tasted one myself; they will make youa feast with Varnhart's cake, though she should have known better, sopoor as she is. Charity begins at home, and these children's stomachs areempty."
Bebee ran up and then down again gleefully, with her lapful of big blackcherries; Tambour, the old white dog, who had used to drag her about inhis milk cart, leaping on her in sympathy and congratulation.
"What a supper we will have!" she cried to the charcoal-burner'schildren, who were turning somersaults in the dock leaves, while theswans stared and hissed.
When one is sixteen, cherries and a cake have a flavor of Paradise still,especially when they are tasted twice, or thrice at most, in all theyear.
An old man called to her as she went by his door. All these little cabinslie close together, with only their apple-trees, or their tall beans, ortheir hedges of thorn between them; you may ride by and never notice themif you do not look for them under the leaves closely, as you would forthrushes' nests.
He, too, was very old; a lifelong neighbor and gossip of Antoine's; hehad been a day laborer in these same fields all his years, and had nevertravelled farther than where the red mill-sails turned among the colzaand the corn.
"Come in, my pretty one, for a second," he whispered, with an air ofmystery that made Bebee's heart quicken with expectancy. "Come in; I havesomething for you. They were my dead daughter's--you have heard me talkof her--Lisette, who died forty year or more ago, they say; for me Ithink it was yesterday. Mere Krebs--she is a hard woman--heard me talkingof my girl. She burst out laughing, 'Lord's sake, fool, why, your girlwould be sixty now an she had lived.' Well, so it may be; you see, thenew mill was put up the week she died, and you call the new mill old;but, my girl, she is young to me. Always young. Come here, Bebee."
Bebee went after him a little awed, into the dusky interior, that smeltof stored apples and of dried herbs that hung from the roof. There was awalnut-wood press, such as the peasants of France and the low countrieskeep their homespun linen in and their old lace that serves for thenuptials and baptisms of half a score of generations.
The old man unlocked it with a trembling hand, and there came from it anodor of dead lavender and of withered rose leaves.
On the shelves there were a girl's set of clothes, and a girl's sabots,and a girl's communion veil and wreath.
"They are all hers," he whispered,--"all hers. And sometimes in theevening time I see her coming along the lane for them--do you not know?There is nothing changed; nothing changed; the grass, and the trees, andthe huts, and the pond are all here; why should she only be gone away?"
"Antoine is gone."
"Yes. But he was old; my girl is young."
He stood a moment, with the press door open, a perplexed trouble in hisdim eyes; the divine faith of love and the mule-like stupidity ofignorance made him cling to this one thought without power of judgment init.
"They say she would be sixty," he said, with a little dreary smile. "Butthat is absurd, you know. Why, she had cheeks like yours, and she wouldrun--no lapwing could fly faster o
ver corn. These are her things, yousee; yes--all of them. That is the sprig of sweetbrier she wore in herbelt the day before the wagon knocked her down and killed her. I havenever touched the things. But look here, Bebee, you are a good child andtrue, and like her just a little. I mean to give you her silver clasps.They were her great-great-great-grandmother's before her. God knows howold they are not. And a girl should have some little wealth of that sort;and for Antoine's sake--"
The old man stayed behind, closing the press door upon thelavender-scented clothes, and sitting down in the dull shadow of the hutto think of his daughter, dead forty summers and more.
Bebee went out with the brave broad silver clasps about her waist, andthe tears wet on her cheeks for a grief not her own.
To be killed just when one was young, and was loved liked that, andall the world was in its May-day flower! The silver felt cold to hertouch--as cold as though it were the dead girl's hands that held her.
The garlands that the children strung of daisies and hung about her hadnever chilled her so.
But little Jeanne, the youngest of the charcoal-burner's little tribe,running to meet her, screamed with glee, and danced in the gay morning.
"Oh, Bebee! how you glitter! Did the Virgin send you that off her ownaltar? Let me see--let me touch! Is it made of the stars or of the sun?"
And Bebee danced with the child, and the silver gleamed and sparkled, andall the people came running out to see, and the milk carts were half anhour later for town, and the hens cackled loud unfed, and the men evenstopped on their way to the fields and paused, with their scythes ontheir shoulders, to stare at the splendid gift.
"There is not such another set of clasps in Brabant; old work you couldmake a fortune of in the curiosity shops in the Montagne," said TrineKrebs, going up the steps of her mill house. "But, all the same, youknow, Bebee, things off a dead body bring mischance sometimes."
But Bebee danced with the child, and did not hear.
Whose fete day had ever begun like this one of hers?
She was a little poet at heart, and should not have cared for suchvanities; but when one is only sixteen, and has only a little roughwoollen frock, and sits in the market place or the lace-room, with othergirls around, how should one be altogether indifferent to a broad,embossed, beautiful shield of silver that sparkled with each step onetook?
A quarter of an hour idle thus was all, however, that Bebee or herfriends could spare at five o'clock on a summer morning, when the citywas waiting for its eggs, its honey, its flowers, its cream, and itsbutter, and Tambour was shaking his leather harness in impatience to beoff with his milk-cans.
So Bebee, all holiday though it was, and heroine though she felt herself,ran indoors, put up her cakes and cherries, cut her two basketfuls out ofthe garden, locked her hut, and went on her quick and happy little feetalong the grassy paths toward the city.
The sorting and tying up of the flowers she always left until she wassitting under the awning in front of the Broodhuis; the same awning,tawny as an autumn pear and weather-blown as an old sail, which hadserved to shelter Antoine Maees from heat and rain through all the yearsof his life.
"Go to the Madeleine; you will make money there, with your pretty blueeyes, Bebee," people had said to her of late; but Bebee had shaken herhead.
Where she had sat in her babyhood at Antoine's feet, she would sit solong as she sold flowers in Brussels,--here, underneath the shadow of theGothic towers that saw Egmont die.
Old Antoine had never gone into the grand market that is fashioned afterthe Madeleine of Paris, and where in the cool, wet, sweet-smelling halls,all the flowers of Brabant are spread in bouquets fit for the bridal ofUna, and large as the shield of the Red-Cross Knight.
Antoine could not compete with all those treasures of greenhouse andstove. He had always had his little stall among those which spread theirtawny awnings and their merry hardy blossoms under the shadow of theHotel de Ville, in the midst of the buyings and sellings, the games andthe quarrels, the auctions and the Cheap Johns, the mountebank and themarriage parties, that daily and hourly throng the Grande Place.
Here Bebee, from three years old, had been used to sit beside him. Bynature she was as gay as a lark. The people always heard her singing asthey passed the garden. The children never found their games so merry aswhen she danced their rounds with them; and though she dreamed so muchout there in the air among the carnations and the roses, or in the long,low workroom in the town, high against the crocketed pinnacles of thecathedral, yet her dreams, if vaguely wistful, were all bright of hue andsunny in their fantasies. Still, Bebee had one sad unsatisfied desire:she wanted to know so much, and she knew nothing.
She did not care for the grand gay people.
When the band played, and the park filled, and the bright little cafeswere thronged with pleasure seekers, and the crowds flocked hither andthither to the woods, to the theatres, to the galleries, to theguinguettes, Bebee, going gravely along with her emptied basketshomeward, envied none of these.
When at Noel the little children hugged their loads of puppets andsugar-plums; when at the Fete Dieu the whole people flocked outbe-ribboned and vari-colored like any bed of spring anemones; when in themerry midsummer the chars-a-bancs trundled away into the forest withlaughing loads of students and maidens; when in the rough winters thecarriages left furred and jewelled women at the doors of the operas orthe palaces,--Bebee, going and coming through the city to her flowerstall or lace work, looked at them all, and never thought of envy ordesire.
She had her little hut: she could get her bread; she lived with theflowers; the neighbors were good to her, and now and then, on a saint'sday, she too got her day in the woods; it never occurred to her that herlot could be better.
But sometimes sitting, looking at the dark old beauty of the Broodhuis,or at the wondrous carven fronts of other Spanish houses, or at thepainted stories of the cathedral windows, or at the quaint colors of theshipping on the quay, or at the long dark aisles of trees that went awaythrough the forest, where her steps had never wandered,--sometimes Bebeewould get pondering on all this unknown world that lay before and behindand around her, and a sense of her own utter ignorance would steal onher; and she would say to herself, "If only I knew a little--just a verylittle!"
But it is not easy to know even a very little when you have to work foryour bread from sunrise to nightfall, and when none of your friends knowhow to read or write, and even your old priest is one of a family ofpeasants, and can just teach you the alphabet, and that is all. ForFather Francis could do no more than this; and all his spare time wastaken up in digging his cabbage plot and seeing to his beehives; and theonly books that Bebee ever beheld were a few tattered lives of saintsthat lay moth-eaten on a shelf of his cottage.
But Brussels has stones that are sermons, or rather that are quaint,touching, illuminated legends of the Middle Ages, which those who run mayread.
Brussels is a gay little city that lies as bright within its girdle ofwoodland as any butterfly that rests upon moss.
The city has its ways and wiles of Paris. It decks itself with white andgold. It has music under its trees and soldiers in its streets, andtroops marching and countermarching along its sunny avenues. It has blueand pink, and yellow and green, on its awnings and on its house fronts.It has a merry open-air life on its pavements at little marble tablesbefore little gay-colored cafes. It has gilded balconies, and tossingflags, and comic operas, and leisurely pleasure seekers, and tries alwaysto believe and make the world believe that it is Paris in very truth.
But this is only the Brussels of the noblesse and the foreigners.
There is a Brussels that is better than this--a Brussels that belongsto the old burgher life, to the artists and the craftsmen, to themaster-masons of the Moyen-age, to the same spirit and soul that oncefilled the free men of Ghent and the citizens of Bruges and the besiegedof Leyden, and the blood of Egmont and of Horn.
Down there by the water-side, where the old quaint walls le
an over theyellow sluggish stream, and the green barrels of the Antwerp barges swingagainst the dusky piles of the crumbling bridges.
In the gray square desolate courts of the old palaces, where in cobwebbedgalleries and silent chambers the Flemish tapestries drop to pieces.
In the great populous square, where, above the clamorous and rushingcrowds, the majestic front of the Maison du Roi frowns against the sun,and the spires and pinnacles of the burgomaster's gathering-halls towerinto the sky in all the fantastic luxuriance of Gothic fancy.
Under the vast shadowy wings of angels in the stillness of the cathedral,across whose sunny aisles some little child goes slowly all alone, ladenwith lilies for the Feast of the Assumption, till their white glory hidesits curly head.
In all strange quaint old-world niches withdrawn from men in silentgrass-grown corners, where a twelfth-century corbel holds a pot of roses,or a Gothic arch yawns beneath a wool warehouse, or a waterspout with agrinning faun's head laughs in the grim humor of the Moyen-age above thebent head of a young lace-worker.
In all these, Brussels, though more worldly than her sisters of Ghent andBruges, and far more worldly yet than her Teuton cousins of Freiburg andNuernberg, is still in her own way like as a monkish story mixed up withthe Romaunt of the Rose; or rather like some gay French vaudeville, allfashion and jest, illustrated in old Missal manner with helm and hauberk,cope and cowl, praying knights and fighting priests, winged griffins andnimbused saints, flame-breathing dragons and enamoured princes, allmingled together in the illuminated colors and the heroical grotesqueromance of the Middle Ages.
And it was this side of the city that Bebee knew; and she loved it well,and would not leave it for the market of the Madeleine.
She had no one to tell her anything, and all Antoine had ever been ableto say to her concerning the Broodhuis was that it had been there in hisfather's time; and regarding St. Gudule, that his mother had burned manya candle before its altars for a dead brother who had been drowned offthe dunes.
But the child's mind, unled, but not misled, had pondered on thesethings, and her heart had grown to love them; and perhaps no student ofSpanish architecture, no antiquary of Moyen-age relics, loved St. Guduleand the Broodhuis as little ignorant Bebee did.
There had been a time when great dark, fierce men had builded thesethings, and made the place beautiful. So much she knew; and the littlewistful, untaught brain tried to project itself into those unknown times,and failed, and yet found pleasure in the effort. And Bebee would say toherself as she walked the streets, "Perhaps some one will come some daywho will tell me all those things."
Meanwhile, there were the flowers, and she was quite content.
Besides, she knew all the people: the old cobbler, who sat next her, andchattered all day long like a magpie; the tinker, who had come up many asummer night to drink a-glass with Antoine; the Cheap John, who cheatedeverybody else, but who had always given her a toy or a trinket at everyFete Dieu all the summers she had known; the little old woman, sour as acrab, who sold rosaries and pictures of saints, and little waxen Christsupon a tray; the big dogs who pulled the carts in, and lay panting allday under the rush-bottomed chairs on which the egg-wives and the fruitsellers sat, and knitted, and chaffered; nay, even the gorgeous huissierand the frowning gendarme, who marshalled the folks into order as theywent up for municipal registries, or for town misdemeanors,--she knewthem all; had known them all ever since she had first trotted in likea little dog at Antoine's heels.
So Bebee stayed there.
It is, perhaps, the most beautiful square in all Northern Europe, withits black timbers, and gilded carvings, and blazoned windows, andmajestic scutcheons, and fantastic pinnacles. That Bebee did not know,but she loved it, and she sat resolutely in front of the Broodhuis,selling her flowers, smiling, chatting, helping the old woman, countingher little gains, eating her bit of bread at noonday like any othermarket girl, but at times glancing up to the stately towers and the bluesky, with a look on her face that made the old tinker and cobbler whispertogether, "What does she see there?--the dead people or the angels?"
The truth was that even Bebee herself did not know very surely what shesaw--something that was still nearer to her than even this kindly crowdthat loved her. That was all she could have said had anybody asked her.
But none did.
No one wanted to hear what the dead said; and for the angels, the tinkerand the cobbler were of opinion that one had only too much of themsculptured about everywhere, and shining on all the casements--inreverence be it spoken, of course.