Bébée; Or, Two Little Wooden Shoes

by Ouida

  CHAPTER XIII.

  But the next noon-time brought him to the market stall, and the nextalso, and so the summer days slipped away, and Bebee was quite happy ifshe saw him in the morning time, to give him a fresh rose, or at eveningby the gates, or under the beech-trees, when he brought her a new book,and sauntered awhile up the green lane beside her.

  An innocent, unconscious love like Bebee's wants so little food to makeit all content. Such mere trifles are beautiful and sweet to it. Suchslender stray gleams of light suffice to make a broad, bright golden noonof perfect joy around it.

  All the delirium, and fever, and desire, and despair, that are in maturerpassion, are far away from it: far as is the flash of the meteor acrosssultry skies from the blue forget-me-not down in the brown meadow brook.

  It was very wonderful to Bebee that he, this stranger from Rubes'fairyland, could come at all to keep pace with her little clatteringwooden shoes over the dust and the grass in the dim twilight time. Thedays went by in a trance of sweet amaze, and she kept count of the hoursno more by the cuckoo-clock of the mill-house, or the deep chimes of theBrussels belfries; but only by such moments as brought her a word fromhis lips, or even a glimpse of him from afar, across the crowded square.

  She sat up half the nights reading the books he gave her, studying thelong cruel polysyllables, and spelling slowly through the phrases thatseemed to her so cramped and tangled, and which yet were a pleasure tounravel forsake of the thought they held.

  For Bebee, ignorant little simple soul that she was, had a mind in herthat was eager, observant, quick to acquire, skilful to retain; and itwould happen in certain times that Flamen, speaking to her of the thingswhich he gave to her to read, would think to himself that this child hadmore wisdom than was often to be found in schools.

  Meanwhile he pondered various studies in various stages of a Gretchen,and made love to Bebee--made love at least by his eyes and by his voice,not hurrying his pleasant task, but hovering about her softly, andmindful not to scare her, as a man will gently lower his hand over apoised butterfly that he seeks to kill, and which one single movement, athought too quick, may scare away to safety.

  Bebee knew where he lived in the street of Mary of Burgundy: in an oldpalace that belonged to a great Flemish noble, who never dwelt therehimself; but to ask anything about him--why he was there? what his rankwas? why he stayed in the city at all?--was a sort of treason that neverentered her thoughts.

  Psyche, if she had been as simple and loyal as Bebee was, would neverhave lighted her own candle; but even Psyche would not have borrowed anyone else's lamp to lighten the love darkness.

  To Bebee he was sacred, unapproachable, unquestionable; he was awonderful, perfect happiness that had fallen into her life; he was agift of God, as the sun was.

  She took his going and coming as she took that of the sun, never dreamingof reproaching his absence, never dreaming of asking if in the emptynight he shone on any other worlds than hers.

  It was hardly so much a faith with her as an instinct; faith must reasonere it know itself to be faith. Bebee never reasoned any more than herroses did.

  The good folks in the market place watched her a little anxiously; theythought ill of that little moss-rose that every day found its way to onewearer only; but after all they did not see much, and the neighborsnothing at all. For he never went home to her, nor with her, and most ofthe time that he spent with Bebee was in the quiet evening shadows, asshe went up with her empty basket through the deserted country roads.

  Bebee was all day long in the city, indeed, as other girls were, but withher it had always been different. Antoine had always been with her up tothe day of his death; and after his death she had sat in the same place,surrounded by the people she had known from infancy, and an insult to herwould have been answered by a stroke from the cobbler's strap or from thetinker's hammer. There was one girl only who ever tried to do her anyharm--a good-looking stout wench, who stood at the corner of the Montagnede la Cour with a stall of fruit in the summer time, and in winter timedrove a milk cart over the snow. This girl would get at her sometimes,and talk of the students, and tell her how good it was to get out of thetown on a holiday, and go to any one of the villages where there wasKermesse and dance, and drink the little blue wine, and have trinketsbought for one, and come home in the moonlight in a char-a-banc, with thehorns sounding, and the lads singing, and the ribbons flying from theold horse's ears.

  "She is such a little close sly thing!" thought the fruit girl, sulkily.To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.

  "We dance almost every evening, the children and I," Bebee hadanswered when urged fifty times by this girl to go to fairs, and balls atthe wine shops. "That does just as well. And I have seen Kermesse once atMalines--it was beautiful. I went with Mere Dax, but it cost a great dealI know, though she did not let me pay."

  "You little fool!" the fruit girl would say, and grin, and eat a pear.

  But the good honest old women who sat about in the Grande Place, hearing,had always taken the fruit girl to task, when they got her by herself.

  "Leave the child alone, you mischievous one," said they. "Be content withbeing base yourself. Look you, Lisette; she is not one like you to makeeyes at the law students, and pester the painter lads for a day's outing.Let her be, or we will tell your mother how you leave the fruit for thegutter children to pick and thieve, while you are stealing up the stairsinto that young French fellow's chamber. Oh, oh! a fine beating you willget when she knows!"

  Lisette's mother was a fierce and strong old Brabantoise who exactedheavy reckoning with her daughter for every single plum and peachthat she sent out of her dark sweet-smelling fruit shop to be sunned inthe streets, and under the students' love-glances.

  So the girl took heed, and left Bebee alone.

  "What should I want her to come with us for?" she reasoned with herself."She is twice as pretty as I am; Jules might take to her instead--whoknows?"

  So that she was at once savage and yet triumphant when she saw, as shethought, Bebee drifting down the high flood of temptation.

  "Oh, oh, you dainty one!" she cried one day to her. "So you would nottake the nuts and mulberries that do for us common folk, because youhad a mind for a fine pine out of the hothouses! That was all, was it?Eh, well; I do not begrudge you. Only take care; remember, the nuts andmulberries last through summer and autumn, and there are heaps of them onevery fair-stall and street corner; but the pine, that is eaten in a day,one springtime, and its like does not grow in the hedges. You will haveyour mouth full of sugar an hour,--and then, eh!--you will go famishedall the year."

  "I do not understand," said Bebee, looking up, with her thoughts faraway, and scarcely hearing the words spoken to her.

  "Oh, pretty little fool! you understand well enough," said Lisette,grinning, as she rubbed up a melon. "Does he give you fine things? Youmight let me see."

  "No one gives me anything."

  "Chut! you want me to believe that. Why Jules is only a lad, and hisfather is a silk mercer, and only gives him a hundred francs a month,but Jules buys me all I want--somehow--or do you think I would takethe trouble to set my cap straight when he goes by? He gave me theseear-rings, look. I wish you would let me see what you get."

  But Bebee had gone away--unheeding--dreaming of Juliet and of Jeanned'Arc, of whom he had told her tales.

  He made sketches of her sometimes, but seldom pleased himself.

  It was not so easy as he had imagined that it would prove to portray thislittle flower-like face, with the clear eyes and the child's open brow.He who had painted Phryne so long and faithfully had got a taint on hisbrush--he could not paint this pure, bright, rosy dawn--he who had alwayspainted the glare of midnight gas on rouge or rags. Yet he felt that ifhe could transfer to canvas the light that was on Bebee's face he wouldget what Scheffer had missed. For a time it eluded him. You shall paint agold and glistening brocade, or a fan of peacock's feathers, toperfection, and yet, perhaps
, the dewy whiteness of the humble littlefield daisy shall baffle and escape you.

  He felt, too, that he must catch her expression flying as he would do theflash of a swallow's wing across a blue sky; he knew that Bebee, forcedto studied attitudes in an atelier, would be no longer the ideal that hewanted.

  More than once he came and filled in more fully his various designs inthe little hut garden, among the sweet gray lavender and the golden disksof the sunflowers; and more than once Bebee was missed from her place inthe front of the Broodhuis.

  The Varnhart children would gather now and then open-mouthed at thewicket, and Mere Krebs would shake her head as she went by on hersheepskin saddle, and mutter that the child's head would be turned byvanity; and old Jehan would lean on his stick and peer through thesweetbrier, and wonder stupidly if this strange man who could makeBebee's face beam over again upon that panel of wood could not give himback his dead daughter who had been pushed away under the black earth solong, long before, when the red mill had been brave and new, the red millthat the boys and girls called old.

  But except these, no one noticed much.

  Painters were no rare sights in Brabant.

  The people were used to see them coming and going, making pictures of mudand stones, and ducks and sheep, and of all common and silly things.

  "What does he pay you, Bebee?" they used to ask, with the shrewd Flemishthought after the main chance.

  "Nothing," Bebee would answer, with a quick color in her face; and theywould reply in contemptuous reproof, "Careless little fool; you shouldmake enough to buy you wood all winter. When the man from Ghent paintedTrine and her cow, he gave her a whole gold bit for standing still solong in the clover. The Krebs would be sure to lend you her cow, if itbe the cow that makes the difference."

  Bebee was silent, weeding her carnation bed;--what could she tell themthat they would understand?

  She seemed so far away from them all--those good friends of herchildhood--now that this wonderful new world of his giving had opened toher sight.

  She lived in a dream.

  Whether she sat in the market place taking copper coins, or in themoonlight with a book on her knees, it was all the same. Her feet ran,her tongue spoke, her hands worked; she did not neglect her goat or hergarden, she did not forsake her house labor or her good deeds to oldAnnemie; but all the while she only heard one voice, she only felt onetouch, she only saw one face.

  Here and there--one in a million--there is a female thing that can lovelike this, once and forever.

  Such an one is dedicated, birth upwards, to the Mater Dolorosa.

  He had something nearer akin to affection for her than he had ever had inhis life for anything, but he was never in love with her--no more inlove with her than with the moss-rosebuds that she fastened in hisbreast. Yet he played with her, because she was such a little, soft,tempting female thing; and because, to see her face flush, and her heartheave, to feel her fresh feelings stir into life, and to watch herchanges from shyness to confidence, and from frankness again into fear,was a natural pastime in the lazy golden weather.

  That he spared her as far as he did,--when after all she would havemarried Jeannot anyhow,--and that he sketched her face in the open air,and never entered her hut and never beguiled her to his own old palace inthe city, was a new virtue in himself for which he hardly knew whether tofeel respect or ridicule; anyway, it seemed virtue to him.

  So long as he did not seduce the body, it seemed to him that it couldnever matter how he slew the soul,--the little, honest, happy, pure,frank soul, that amidst its poverty and hardships was like a robin's songto the winter sun.

  "Hoot, toot, pretty innocent, so you are no better than the rest of us,"hissed her enemy, Lisette, the fruit girl, against her as she went by thestall one evening as the sun set. "Prut! so it was no such purity afterall that made you never look at the student lads and the soldiers, eh?You were so dainty of taste, you must needs pick and choose, and, Lord'ssake, after all your coyness, to drop at a beckoning finger as one maysay--pong!--in a minute, like an apple over-ripe! Oh he, you sly one!"

  Bebee flushed red, in a sort of instinct of offence; not sure what herfault was, but vaguely stung by the brutal words.

  Bebee walked homeward by him, with her empty baskets: looked at him withgrave wondering eyes.

  "What did she mean? I do not understand. I must have done some wrong--orshe thinks so. Do you know?"

  Flamen laughed, and answered her evasively,--

  "You have done her the wrong of a fair skin when hers is brown, and alittle foot while hers is as big as a trooper's; there is no greater sin,Bebee, possible in woman to woman."

  "Hold your peace, you shrill jade," he added, in anger to the fruiterer,flinging at her a crown piece, that the girl caught, and bit with herteeth with a chuckle. "Do not heed her, Bebee. She is a coarse-tonguedbrute, and is jealous, no doubt."

  "Jealous?--of what?"

  The word had no meaning to Bebee.

  "That I am not a student or a soldier, as her lovers are."

  As her lovers were! Bebee felt her face burn again. Was he her loverthen? The child's innocent body and soul thrilled with a hot, sweetdelight and fear commingled.

  Bebee was not quite satisfied until she had knelt down that night andasked the Master of all poor maidens to see if there were any wickednessin her heart, hidden there like a bee in a rose, and if there were totake it out and make her worthier of this wonderful new happiness in herlife.