by Ouida
Bébée had always thought it quite a fine thing to have been born of water-lilies, with the sun for her father, and when people in Brussels had asked her of her parentage, seeing her stand in the market with a certain look on her that was not like other children, had always gravely answered in the purest good faith, —
“My mother was a flower.”
“You are a flower, at any rate,” they would say in return; and Bébée had been always quite content.
But now she was doubtful; she was rather perplexed than sorrowful.
These good friends of hers seemed to see some new sin about her. Perhaps, after all, thought Bébée, it might have been better to have had a human mother who would have taken care of her now that old Antoine was dead, instead of those beautiful, gleaming, cold water-lilies which went to sleep on their green velvet beds, and did not certainly care when the thorns ran into her fingers, or the pebbles got in her wooden shoes.
In some vague way, disgrace and envy — the twin Discords of the world — touched her innocent cheek with their hot breath, and as the evening fell, Bébée felt very lonely and a little wistful.
She had been always used to run out in the pleasant twilight-time among the flowers and water them, Antoine filling the can from the well; and the neighbors would come and lean against the little low wall, knitting and gossiping; and the big dogs, released from harness, would poke their heads through the wicket for a crust; and the children would dance and play Colin Maillard on the green by the water; and she, when the flowers were no longer thirsted, would join them, and romp and dance and sing the gayest of them all.
But now the buckets hung at the bottom of the well, and the flowers hungered in vain, and the neighbors held aloof, and she shut to the hut door and listened to the rain which began to fall, and cried herself to sleep all alone in her tiny kingdom.
When the dawn came the sun rose red and warm; the grass and boughs sparkled; a lark sang; Bébée awoke sad in heart, indeed, for her lost old friend, but brighter and braver.
“Each of them wants to get something out of me,” thought the child. “Well, I will live alone, then, and do my duty, just as he said. The flowers will never let any real harm come, though they do look so indifferent and smiling sometimes, and though not one of them hung their heads when his coffin was carried through them yesterday.”
That want of sympathy in the flower troubled her.
The old man had loved them so well; and they had all looked as glad as ever, and had laughed saucily in the sun, and not even a rosebud turned the paler as the poor still stiffened limbs went by in the wooden shell.
“I suppose God cares; but I wish they did.” said Bébée, to whom the garden was more intelligible than Providence.
“Why do you not care?” she asked the pinks, shaking the raindrops off their curled rosy petals.
The pinks leaned lazily against their sticks, and seemed to say, “Why should we care for anything, unless a slug be eating us? — that is real woe, if you like.”
Bébée, without her sabots on, wandered thoughtfully among the sweet wet sunlightened labyrinths of blossom, her pretty bare feet treading the narrow grassy paths with pleasure in their coolness.
“He was so good to you!” she said reproachfully to the great gaudy gillyflowers and the painted sweet-peas. “He never let you know heat or cold, he never let the worm gnaw or the snail harm you; he would get up in the dark to see after your wants; and when the ice froze over you, he was there to loosen your chains. Why do you not care, anyone of you?”
“How silly you are!” said the flowers. “You must be a butterfly or a poet, Bébée, to be as foolish as that. Some one will do all he did. We are of market value, you know. Care, indeed! when the sun is so warm, and there is not an earwig in the place to trouble us.”
The flowers were not always so selfish as this; and perhaps the sorrow in
Bébée’s heart made their callousness seem harder than it really was.
When we suffer very much ourselves, anything that smiles in the sun seems cruel — a child, a bird, a dragon-fly — nay, even a fluttering ribbon, or a spear-grass that waves in the wind.
There was a little shrine at the corner of the garden, set into the wall; a niche with a bit of glass and a picture of the Virgin, so battered that no one could trace any feature of it.
It had been there for centuries, and was held in great veneration; and old Antoine had always cut the choicest buds of his roses and set them in a delf pot in front of it, every other morning all the summer long. Bébée, whose religion was the sweetest, vaguest mingling of Pagan and Christian myths, and whose faith in fairies and in saints was exactly equal in strength and in ignorance, — Bébée filled the delf pot anew carefully, then knelt down on the turf in that little green corner, and prayed in devout hopeful childish good faith to the awful unknown Powers who were to her only as gentle guides and kindly playmates.
Was she too familiar with the Holy Mother?
She was almost fearful that she was; but then the Holy Mother loved flowers so well, Bébée would not feel aloof from her, nor be afraid.
“When one cuts the best blossoms for her, and tries to be good, and never tells a lie,” thought Bébée, “I am quite sure, as she loves the lilies, that she will never altogether forget me.”
So she said to the Mother of Christ fearlessly, and nothing doubting; and then rose for her daily work of cutting the flowers for the market in Brussels.
By the time her baskets were full, her fowls fed, her goat foddered, her starling’s cage cleaned, her hut door locked, and her wooden shoes clattering on the sunny road into the city, Bébée was almost content again, though ever and again, as she trod the familiar ways, the tears dimmed her eyes as she remembered that old Antoine would never again hobble over the stones beside her.
“You are a little wilful one, and too young to live alone,” said Father
Francis, meeting her in the lane.
But he did not scold her seriously, and she kept to her resolve; and the women, who were good at heart, took her back into favor again; and so Bébée had her own way, and the fairies, or the saints, or both together, took care of her; and so it came to pass that all alone she heard the cock crow whilst it was dark, and woke to the grand and amazing truth that this warm, fragrant, dusky June morning found her full sixteen years old.
CHAPTER II.
The two years had not been all playtime any more than they had been all summer.
When one has not father, or mother, or brother, and all one’s friends have barely bread enough for themselves, life cannot be very easy, nor its crusts very many at any time.
Bébée had a cherub’s mouth, and a dreamer’s eyes, and a poet’s thoughts sometimes 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 sun sank beyond the far blue line of the plains; she hoed, and dug, and watered, and planted her little plot; she kept her cabin as clean as a fresh-blossomed primrose; she milked her goat and swept her floor; she sat, all the warm days, in the town, selling her flowers, and in the winter time, when her garden yielded her nothing, she strained her sight over lace-making in the city to get the small bit of food that stood between her and that hunger which to the poor means death.
A hard life; very hard when hail and snow made the streets of Brussels like slopes of ice; a little hard even in the gay summer time when she sat under the awning fronting the Maison du Roi; but all the time the child throve on it, and was happy, and dreamed of many graceful and gracious things whilst she was weeding among her lilies, or tracing the threads to and fro on her lace pillow.
Now — when she woke to the full sense of her wonderful sixteen years — Bébée, standing barefoot on the mud floor, was as pretty a sight as 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 well shaped. Her hair curled in shiny crumpled masses, and tumbled about her shoulders. Her pretty round plump little breast was white as the lilies in the grass without, and in this blooming time of her little life, Bébée, in her way, was beautiful as a peach-bloom is beautiful, and her innocent, courageous, happy eyes had dreams in them underneath their laughter, 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 had to be active amidst them, else drought and rain, and worm and snail, and blight and frost, would have made havoc of their fairest hopes.
The loveliest love is that which dreams high above all storms, unsoiled by all burdens; but perhaps the strongest love is that which, whilst it adores, drags its feet through mire, and burns its brow in heat, for the thing beloved.
So Bébée dreamed in her garden; but all the time for sake of it hoed and dug, and hurt her hands, and tired her limbs, and bowed her shoulders under the great metal pails from the well.
This wondrous morning, with the bright burden of her sixteen years upon her, 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 smell of the wet earth was sweeter than all perfumes that are burned in palaces.
The dripping rosebuds nodded against her hair as she went out; the starling called to her, “Bébée, Bébée — bonjour, bonjour.” These were all the words it knew. It said the same words a thousand times a week. But to Bébée it seemed that the starling most certainly knew that she was sixteen 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 one is young!”
Old people say the same thing often, but they sigh when they say it.
Bébée smiled.
Mère Krebs opened her door in the next cottage, and nodded over the wall.
“What a fine thing to be sixteen! — a merry year, Bébée.”
Marthe, the carpenter’s wife, came out from her gate, broom in hand.
“The Holy Saints keep you, Bébée; why, you are quite a woman now!”
The little children of Varnhart, the charcoal-burner, who were as poor as any mouse in the old churches, rushed out of their little home up the lane, bringing with them a cake stuck full of sugar and seeds, and tied round with a blue ribbon, that their mother had made that very week, all in her honor.
“Only see, Bébée! Such a grand cake!” they shouted, dancing down the lane. “Jules picked the plums, and Jeanne washed the almonds, and Christine took the ribbon off her own communion cap, all for you — all for you; but you will let us come and eat it too?”
Old Gran’mère Bishot, who was the oldest woman about Laeken, hobbled through the grass on her crutches and nodded her white shaking head, and smiled at Bébée.
“I have nothing to give you, little one, except my blessing, if you care for that.”
Bébée ran out, breaking from the children, and knelt down in the wet grass, and bent her pretty sunny head to the benediction.
Trine, the miller’s wife, the richest woman of them all, called to the child from the steps of the mill,—’
“A merry year, and the blessing of Heaven, Bébée! Come up, and here is my first dish of cherries for you; not tasted one myself; they will make you a feast with Varnhart’s cake, though she should have known better, so poor as she is. Charity begins at home, and these children’s stomachs are empty.”
Bébée ran up and then down again gleefully, with her lapful of big black cherries; Tambour, the old white dog, who had used to drag her about in his milk cart, leaping on her in sympathy and congratulation.
“What a supper we will have!” she cried to the charcoal-burner’s children, who were turning somersaults in the dock leaves, while the swans 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 the year.
An old man called to her as she went by his door. All these little cabins lie close together, with only their apple-trees, or their tall beans, or their hedges of thorn between them; you may ride by and never notice them if you do not look for them under the leaves closely, as you would for thrushes’ nests.
He, too, was very old; a lifelong neighbor and gossip of Antoine’s; he had been a day laborer in these same fields all his years, and had never travelled farther than where the red mill-sails turned among the colza and the corn.
“Come in, my pretty one, for a second,” he whispered, with an air of mystery that made Bébée’s heart quicken with expectancy. “Come in; I have something for you. They were my dead daughter’s — you have heard me talk of her — Lisette, who died forty year or more ago, they say; for me I think it was yesterday. Mère Krebs — she is a hard woman — heard me talking of my girl. She burst out laughing, ‘Lord’s sake, fool, why, your girl would be sixty now an she had lived.’ Well, so it may be; you see, the new 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, Bébée.”
Bébée went after him a little awed, into the dusky interior, that smelt of stored apples and of dried herbs that hung from the roof. There was a walnut-wood press, such as the peasants of France and the low countries keep their homespun linen in and their old lace that serves for the nuptials and baptisms of half a score of generations.
The old man unlocked it with a trembling hand, and there came from it an odor 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 the evening 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, and the 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 his dim eyes; the divine faith of love and the mule-like stupidity of ignorance made him cling to this one thought without power of judgment in it.
“They say she would be sixty,” he said, with a little dreary smile. “But that is absurd, you know. Why, she had cheeks like yours, and she would run — no lapwing could fly faster over corn. These are her things, you see; yes — all of them. That is the sprig of sweetbrier she wore in her belt the day before the wagon knocked her down and killed her. I have never touched the things. But look here, Bébée, you are a good child and true, 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 how old 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 the lavender-scented clothes, and sitting down in the dull shadow of the hut to think of his daughter, dead forty summers and more.
Bébée went out with the brave broad silver clasps about her waist, and the tears wet on her cheeks for a grief not her own.
To be killed just when one was young, and was loved liked that, and all the world was in its May-day flower! The silver felt cold to her touch — 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 had never 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, Bébée! how you glitter! Did the Virgin send you that off her own altar? Let me see — let me touch! Is it made of the stars or of the sun?”
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nbsp; And Bébée danced with the child, and the silver gleamed and sparkled, and all the people came running out to see, and the milk carts were half an hour later for town, and the hens cackled loud unfed, and the men even stopped on their way to the fields and paused, with their scythes on their shoulders, to stare at the splendid gift.
“There is not such another set of clasps in Brabant; old work you could make a fortune of in the curiosity shops in the Montagne,” said Trine Krebs, going up the steps of her mill house. “But, all the same, you know, Bébée, things off a dead body bring mischance sometimes.”
But Bébée danced with the child, and did not hear.
Whose fête day had ever begun like this one of hers?
She was a little poet at heart, and should not have cared for such vanities; but when one is only sixteen, and has only a little rough woollen frock, and sits in the market place or the lace-room, with other girls around, how should one be altogether indifferent to a broad, embossed, beautiful shield of silver that sparkled with each step one took?
A quarter of an hour idle thus was all, however, that Bébée or her friends could spare at five o’clock on a summer morning, when the city was waiting for its eggs, its honey, its flowers, its cream, and its butter, and Tambour was shaking his leather harness in impatience to be off with his milk-cans.
So Bébée, all holiday though it was, and heroine though she felt herself, ran indoors, put up her cakes and cherries, cut her two basketfuls out of the garden, locked her hut, and went on her quick and happy little feet along the grassy paths toward the city.
The sorting and tying up of the flowers she always left until she was sitting under the awning in front of the Broodhuis; the same awning, tawny as an autumn pear and weather-blown as an old sail, which had served to shelter Antoine Mäes from heat and rain through all the years of his life.
“Go to the Madeleine; you will make money there, with your pretty blue eyes, Bébée,” people had said to her of late; but Bébée had shaken her head.