by Ouida
CHAPTER XIX.
Bebee looked after him wistfully till his figure was lost in the gloom.
The village was very quiet; a dog barking afar off and a cow lowing inthe meadow were the only living things that made their presence heard;the pilgrims had not returned.
She leaned on the gate a few minutes in that indistinct, dreamy happinesswhich is the prerogative of innocent love.
"How wonderful it is that he should give a thought to me!" she said againand again to herself. It was as if a king had stooped for a little knotof daisied grass to set it in his crown where the great diamonds shouldbe.
She did not reason. She did not question. She did not look beyond thathour--such is the privilege of youth.
"How I will read! How I will learn! How wise I will try to be; and howgood, if I can!" she thought, swaying the little gate lightly under herweight, and looking with glad eyes at the goats as they frisked withtheir young in the pasture on the other side of the big trees, whilst oneby one the stars came out, and an owl hooted from the palace woods, andthe frogs croaked good-nights in the rushes.
Then, like a little day laborer as she was, with the habit of toil andthe need of the poor upon her from her birth up, she shut down the latchof the gate, kissed it where his hand had rested, and went to the well todraw its nightly draught for the dry garden.
"Oh, dear roses!" she said to them as she rained the silvery showers overtheir nodding heads. "Oh, dear roses!--tell me--was ever anybody so happyas I am? Oh, if you say 'yes' I shall tell you you lie; silly flowersthat were only born yesterday!"
But the roses shook the water off them in the wind, and said, as shewished them to say,--
"No--no one--ever before, Bebee--no one ever before."
For roses, like everything else upon earth, only speak what our own heartputs into them.
An old man went past up the lane; old Jehan, who was too ailing and agedto make one of the pilgrimage. He looked at the little quick-moving form,grayish white in the starlight, with the dark copper vessel balanced onher head, going to and fro betwixt the well and the garden.
"You did not go to the pilgrimage, poor little one!" he said across thesweetbrier hedge. "Nay, that was too bad; work, work, work--thy prettyback should not be bent double yet. You want a holiday, Bebee; well,the Fete Dieu is near. Jeannot shall take you, and maybe I can find a fewsous for gingerbread and merry-go-rounds. You sit dull in the market allday; you want a feast."
Bebee colored behind the hedge, and ran in and brought three new-laideggs that she had left in the flour-bin in the early morning, and thrustthem on him through a break in the brier. It was the first time she hadever done anything of which she might not speak: she was ashamed, and yetthe secret was so sweet to her.
"I am very happy, Jehan, thank God!" she murmured, with a tremulousbreath and a shine in her eyes that the old man's ears and sight were toodull to discern.
"So was _she_" muttered Jehan, as he thrust the eggs into his oldpatched blue blouse,--"so was she. And then a stumble--a blow in the lanethere--a horse's kick--and all was over. All over, my pretty one--forever and ever."