Bébée; Or, Two Little Wooden Shoes

by Ouida

  CHAPTER XII.

  Bebee was a dreamer in her way, and aspired to be a scholar too. But allthe same, she was not a little fool.

  She had been reared in hardy, simple, honest ways of living, and wouldhave thought it as shameful as a theft to have owed her bread to otherfolk.

  So, though she had a wakeful, restless night, full of strange fantasies,none the less was she out in her garden by daybreak; none the less didshe sweep out her floor and make her mash for the fowls, and wash out herbit of linen and hang it to dry on a line among the tall, flauntinghollyhocks that were so proud of themselves because they reached to theroof.

  "What do you want with books, Bebee?" said Reine, the sabot-maker's wife,across the privet hedge, as she also hung out her linen. "Franz told meyou were reading last night. It is the silver buckles have done that: onemischief always begets another."

  "Where is the mischief, good Reine?" said Bebee, who was always prettilybehaved with her elders, though, when pushed to it, she could hold herown.

  "The mischief will be in discontent," said the sabot-maker's wife."People live on their own little patch, and think it is the world; thatis as it should be--everybody within his own, like a nut in its shell.But when you get reading, you hear of a swarm of things you never saw,and you fret because you cannot see them, and you dream, and dream, and ahole is burnt in your soup-pot, and your dough is as heavy as lead. Youare like bees that leave their own clover fields to buzz themselves deadagainst the glass of a hothouse."

  Bebee smiled, reaching to spread out her linen. But she said nothing.

  "What good is it talking to them?" she thought; "they do not know."

  Already the neighbors and friends of her infancy seemed so far, far away;creatures of a distant world, that she had long left; it was no usetalking, they never would understand.

  "Antoine should never have taught you your letters," said Reine, groaningunder the great blue shirts she was hanging on high among the leaves. "Itold him so at the time. I said, 'The child is a good child, and spins,and sews, and sweeps, rare and fine for her age; why go and spoil her?'But he was always headstrong. Not a child of mine knows a letter, thesaints be praised! nor a word of any tongue but our own good Flemish. Youshould have been brought up the same. You would have come to no troublethen."

  "I am in no trouble, dear Reine," said Bebee, scattering the potato-peelsto the clacking poultry, and she smiled into the faces of the goldenoxlips that nodded to her back again in sunshiny sympathy.

  "Not yet," said Reine, hanging her last shirt.

  But Bebee was not hearing; she was calling the chickens, and telling theoxlips how pretty they looked in the borders; and in her heart she wascounting the minutes till the old Dutch cuckoo-clock at Mere Krebs's--theonly clock in the lane--should crow out the hour at which she went downto the city.

  She loved the hut, the birds, the flowers; but they were little to hernow compared with the dark golden picturesque square, the changingcrowds, the frowning roofs, the gray stones, and colors and shadows ofthe throngs for one face and for one smile.

  "He is sure to be there," she thought, and started half an hour earlierthan was her wont. She wanted to tell him all her rapture in the book; noone else could understand.

  But all the day through he never came.

  Bebee sat with a sick heart and a parched little throat, selling herflowers and straining her eyes through the tumult of the square.

  The whole day went by, and there was no sign of him.

  The flowers had sold well: it was a feast day; her pouch was full ofpence--what was that to her?

  She went and prayed in the cathedral, but it seemed cold, and desolate,and empty; even the storied windows seemed dark.

  "Perhaps he is gore out of the city," she thought; and a terror fell onher that frightened her, it was so unlike any fear that she had everknown--even the fear when she had seen death on old Antoine's face hadbeen nothing like this.

  Going home through the streets, she passed the cafe of the Trois Freresthat looks out on the trees of the park, and that has flowers in itsbalconies, and pleasant windows that stand open to let the sounds of thesoldiers' music enter. She saw him in one of the windows. There wereamber and scarlet and black; silks and satins and velvets. There was afan painted and jewelled. There were women's faces. There was a heap ofpurple fruit and glittering sweetmeats. He laughed there. His beautifulMurillo head was dark against the white and gold within.

  Bebee looked up,--paused a second,--then went onward, with a thorn in herheart.

  He Had not seen her.

  "It is natural, of course--he has his world--he does not think often ofme--there is no reason why he should be as good as he is," she said toherself as she went slowly over the stones.

  She had the dog's soul--only she did not know it.

  But the tears Fell down her cheeks, as she walked.

  It looked so bright in there, so gay, with the sound of the music comingin through the trees, and those women,--she had seen such women before;sometimes in the winter nights, going home from the lacework, she hadstopped at the doors of the palaces, or of the opera house, when thecarriages were setting down their brilliant burdens; and sometimes on thegreat feast days she had seen the people of the court going out to somegala at the theatre, or some great review of troops, or some ceremonialof foreign sovereigns; but she had never thought about them before; shehad never wondered whether velvet was better to wear than woollen serge,or-diamonds lighter on the head than a little cap of linen.

  But now--

  Those women seemed to her so dazzling, so wondrously, so superhumanlybeautiful; they seemed like some of those new dahlia flowers, rose andpurple and gold, that outblazed the sun on the south border of her littlegarden, and blanched all the soft color out of the homely roses, andpimpernels, and sweet-williams, and double-stocks, that had bloomedthere ever since the days of Waterloo.

  But the dahlias had no scent; and Bebee wondered if these women had anyheart in them,--they looked all laughter, and glitter, and vanity. To thechild, whose dreams of womanhood were evolved from the face of the Maryof the Assumption, of the Susannah of Mieris, and of that Angel in theblue coif whose face has a light as of the sun,--to her who had dreamedher way into vague perceptions of her own sex's maidenhood and maternityby help of those great pictures which had been before her sight frominfancy, there was some taint, some artifice, some want, some harshnessin these jewelled women; she could not have reasoned about it, but shefelt it, as she felt that the grand dahlias missed a flower's divinity,being scentless.

  She was a little bit of wild thyme herself; hardy, fragrant, clean,tender, flowering by the wayside, full of honey, though only nourishedon the turf and the stones, these gaudy, brilliant, ruby-bright,scarlet-mantled dahlias hurt her with a dim sense of pain and shame.

  Fasting, next day at sunrise she confessed to Father Francis:--

  "I saw beautiful rich women, and I envied them; and I could not pray toMary last night for thinking of them, for I hated them so much."

  But she did not say,--

  "I hated them because they were with him."

  Out of the purest little soul, Love entering drives forth Candor.

  "That is not like you at all, Bebee," said the good old man, as she kneltat his feet on the bricks of his little bare study, where all the bookshe ever spelt out were treatises on the art of bee-keeping.

  "My dear, you never were covetous at all, nor did you ever seem to carefor the things of the world. I wish Jehan had not given you those silverbuckles; I think they have set your little soul on vanities."

  "It is not the buckles; I am not covetous," said Bebee; and then her facegrew warm. She did not know why. and she did not hear the rest of FatherFrancis's admonitions.