by Ouida
Bébée, sweeping very noiselessly, listened, and her eyes grew wistful and wondering. She had heard the story a thousand times; always in different words, but always the same little tale, and she knew how old Annémie was deaf to all the bells that tolled the time, and blind to all the whiteness of her hair and all the wrinkles of her face, and only thought of her sea-slain lover as he had been in the days of her youth.
But this afternoon the familiar history had a new patheticalness for her, and as the old soul put aside with her palsied hand the square of canvas that screened the casement, and looked out, with her old dim sad eyes strained in the longing that God never answered, Bébée felt a strange chill at her own heart, and wondered to herself, —
“What can it be to care for another creature like that? It must be so terrible, and yet it must be beautiful too. Does every one suffer like that?”
She did not speak at all as she finished sweeping the bricks, and went down-stairs for a metal cruche full of water, and set over a little charcoal on the stove the old woman’s brass soup kettle with her supper of stewing cabbage.
Annémie did not hear or notice; she was still looking out of the hole in the wall on to the masts, and the sails, and the water.
It was twilight.
From the barges and brigs there came the smell of the sea. The sailors were shouting to each other. The craft were crowded close, and lost in the growing darkness. On the other side of the canal the belfries were ringing for vespers.
“Eleven voyages one and another, and he never forgot to tie the flax to the mast,” Annémie murmured, with her old wrinkled face leaning out into the gray air. “It used to fly there, — one could see it coming up half a mile off, — just a pale yellow flake on the wind, like a tress of my hair, he would say. No, no, I could not go away; he may come to-night, to-morrow, any time; he is not drowned, not my man; he was all I had, and God is good, they say.”
Bébée listened and looked; then kissed the old shaking hand and took up the lace patterns and went softly out of the room without speaking.
When old Annémie watched at the window it was useless to seek for any word or sign of her: people said that she had never been quite right in her brain since that fatal winter noon sixty years before, when the coaster had brought into port the broken beam of the good brig “Fleur d’Epine.”
Bébée did not know about that, nor heed whether her wits were right or not.
She had known the old creature in the lace-room where Annémie pricked out designs, and she had conceived a great regard and sorrow for her; and when Annémie had become too ailing and aged to go herself any longer to the lace-maker’s place, Bébée had begged leave for her to have the patterns at home, and had carried them to and fro for her for the last three or four years, doing many other little useful services for the lone old soul as well, — services which Annémie hardly perceived, she had grown so used to them, and her feeble intelligence was so sunk in the one absorbing idea that she must watch all the days through and all the years through for the coming of the dead man and the lost brig.
Bébée put the lace patterns in her basket, and trotted home, her sabots clattering on the stones.
“What it must be to care for any one like that!” she thought, and by some vague association of thought that she could not have pursued, she lifted the leaves and looked at the moss-rosebud.
It was quite dead.
CHAPTER VII.
As she got clear of the city and out on her country road, a shadow Fell across her in the evening light.
“Have you had a good day, little one?” asked a voice that made her stop with a curious vague expectancy and pleasure.
“It is you!” she said, with a little cry, as she saw her friend of the silk stockings leaning on a gate midway in the green and solitary road that leads to Laeken.
“Yes, it is I,” he answered, as he joined her. “Have you forgiven me,
Bébée?”
She looked at him with frank, appealing eyes, like those of a child in fault.
“Oh, I did not sleep all night!” she said, simply. “I thought I had been rude and ungrateful, and I could not be sure I had done right, though to have done otherwise would certainly have been wrong.”
He laughed.
“Well, that is a clearer deduction than is to be drawn from most moral uncertainties. Do not think twice about the matter, my dear. I have not, I assure you.”
“No!”
She was a little disappointed. It seemed such an immense thing to her; and she had lain awake all the night, turning it about in her little brain, and appealing vainly for help in it to the sixteen sleep-angels.
“No, indeed. And where are you going so fast, as if those wooden shoes of yours were sandals of Mercury?”
“Mercury — is that a shoemaker?”
“No, my dear. He did a terrible bit of cobbling once, when he made Woman. But he did not shoe her feet with swiftness that I know of; she only runs away to be run after, and if you do not pursue her, she comes back — always.”
Bébée did not understand at all.
“I thought God made women,” she said, a little awe-stricken.
“You call it God. People three thousand years ago called it Mercury or Hermes. Both mean the same thing, — mere words to designate an unknown quality. Where are you going? Does your home lie here?”
“Yes, onward, quite far onward,” said Bébée, wondering that he had forgotten all she had told him the day before about her hut, her garden, and her neighbors. “You did not come and finish your picture to-day: why was that? I had a rosebud for you, but it is dead now.”
“I went to Anvers. You looked for me a little, then?”
“Oh, all day long. For I was so afraid I had been ungrateful.”
“That is very pretty of you. Women are never grateful, my dear, except when they are very ill-treated. Mercury, whom we were talking of, gave them, among other gifts, a dog’s heart.”
Bébée felt bewildered; she did not reason about it, but the idle, shallow, cynical tone pained her by its levity and its unlikeness to the sweet, still, gray summer evening.
“Why are you in such a hurry?” he pursued. “The night is cool, and it is only seven o’clock. I will walk part of the way with you.”
“I am in a hurry because I have Annémie’s patterns to do,” said Bébée, glad that he spoke of a thing that she knew how to answer. “You see, Annémie’s hand shakes and her eyes are dim, and she pricks the pattern all awry and never perceives it; it would break her heart if one showed her so, but the Baës would not take them as they are; they are of no use at all. So I prick them out myself on fresh paper, and the Baës thinks it is all her doing, and pays her the same money, and she is quite content. And as I carry the patterns to and fro for her, because she cannot walk, it is easy to cheat her like that; and it is no harm to cheat so, you know.” He was silent.
“You are a good little girl, Bébée, I can see.” he said at last, with a graver sound in his voice. “And who is this Annémie for whom you do so much? an old woman, I suppose.”
“Oh, yes, quite old; incredibly old. Her man was drowned at sea sixty years ago, and she watches for his brig still, night and morning.”
“The dog’s heart. No doubt he beat her, and had a wife in fifty other ports.”
“Oh, no!” said Bébée, with a little cry, as though the word against the dead man hurt her. “She has told me so much of him. He was as good as good could be, and loved her so, and between the voyages they were so happy. Surely that must have been sixty years now, and she is so sorry still, and still will not believe that he was drowned.”
He looked down on her with a smile that had a certain pity in it.
“Well, yes; there are women like that, I believe. But be very sure, my dear, he beat her. Of the two, one always holds the whip and uses it, the other crouches.”
“I do not understand,” said Bébée.
“No; but you will.”
“I w
ill? — when?”
He smiled again.
“Oh — to-morrow, perhaps, or next year — or when Fate fancies.”
“Or rather, when I choose,” he thought to himself, and let his eyes rest with a certain pleasure on the little feet, that went beside him in the grass, and the pretty fair bosom that showed ever and again, as the frills of her linen bodice were blown back by the wind and her own quick motion.
Bébée looked also up at him; he was very handsome, and looked so to her, after the broad, blunt, characterless faces of the Walloon peasantry around her. He walked with an easy grace, he was clad in picture-like velvets, he had a beautiful poetic head, and eyes like deep brown waters, and a face like one of Jordaens’ or Rembrandt’s cavaliers in the galleries where she used to steal in of a Sunday, and look up at the paintings, and dream of what that world could be in which those people had lived.
“You are of the people of Rubes’ country, are you not?” she asked him.
“Of what country, my dear?”
“Of the people that live in the gold frames,” said Bébée, quite seriously. “In the galleries, you know. I know a charwoman that scrubs the floors of the Arenberg Palace, and she lets me in sometimes to look; and you are just like those great gentlemen in the gold frames, only you have not a hawk and a sword, and they always have. I used to wonder where they came from, for they are not like any of us one bit, and the charwoman — she is Lisa Dredel, and lives in the street of the Pot d’Etain — always said. ‘Dear heart, they all belong to Rubes’ land: we never see their like nowadays.’ But you must come out of Rubes’ land; at least, I think so, do you not?”
He caught her meaning; he knew that Rubes was the homely abbreviation of Rubens that all the Netherlanders used, and he guessed the idea that was reality to this little lonely fanciful mind.
“Perhaps I do,” he answered her with a smile, for it was not worth his while to disabuse her thoughts of any imagination that glorified him to her. “Do you not want to see Rubes’ world, little one? To see the gold and the grandeur, and the glitter of it all? — never to toil or get tired? — always to move in a pageant? — always to live like the hawks in the paintings you talk of, with silver bells hung round you, and a hood all sewn with pearls?”
“No,” said Bébée, simply. “I should like to see it, just to see it, as one looks through a grating into the king’s grape-houses here. But I should not like to live in it. I love my hut, and the starling, and the chickens, and what would the garden do without me? and the children, and the old Annémie? I could not anyhow, anywhere, be any happier than I am. There is only one thing I wish.”
“And what is that?”
“To know something; not to be so ignorant. Just look — I can read a Little, it is true: my Hours, and the letters, and when Krebs brings in a newspaper I can read a little of it, not much. I know French well, because Antoine was French himself, and never did talk Flemish to me; and they being Netherlanders, cannot, of course, read the newspapers at all, and so think it very wonderful indeed in me. But what I want is to know things, to know all about what was before ever I was living. St. Gudule now — they say it was built hundreds of years before; and Rubes again — they say he was a painter king in Antwerpen before the oldest, oldest woman like Annémie ever began to count time. I am sure books tell you all those things, because I see the students coming and going with them; and when I saw once the millions of books in the Rue du Musée, I asked the keeper what use they were for, and he said, ‘To make men wise, my dear.’ But Gringoire Bac, the cobbler, who was with me, — it was a fête day, — Bac, he said, ‘Do not you believe that, Bébée; they only muddle folks’ brains; for one book tells them one thing, and another book another, and so on, till they are dazed with all the contrary lying; and if you see a bookish man, be sure you see a very poor creature who could not hoe a patch, or kill a pig, or stitch an upper-leather, were it ever so.’ But I do not believe that Bac said right. Did he?”
“I am not sure. On the whole, I think it is the truest remark on literature I have ever heard, and one that shows great judgment in Bac. Well?”
“Well, sometimes, you know,” said Bébée, not understanding his answer, but pursuing her thoughts confidentially,— “sometimes I talk like this to the neighbors, and they laugh at me. Because Mère Krebs says that when one knows how to spin and sweep and make bread and say one’s prayers and milk a goat or a cow, it is all a woman wants to know this side of heaven. But for me, I cannot help it, when I look at those windows in the cathedral, or at those beautiful twisted little spires that are all over our Hôtel de Ville, I want to know who the men were that made them, — what they did and thought, — how they looked and spoke, — how they learned to shape stone into leaves and grasses like that, — how they could imagine all those angel faces on the glass. When I go alone in the quite early morning or at night when it is still — sometimes in winter I have to stay till it is dark over the lace — I hear their feet come after me, and they whisper to me close, ‘Look what beautiful things we have done, Bébée, and you all forget us quite. We did what never will die, but our names are as dead as the stones.’ And then I am so sorry for them and ashamed. And I want to know more. Can you tell me?”
He looked at her earnestly; her eyes were shining, her cheeks were warm, her little mouth was tremulous with eagerness.
“Did any one ever speak to you in that way?” he asked her.
“No,” she answered him. “It comes into my head of itself. Sometimes I think the cathedral angels put it there. For the angels must be tired, you know; always pointing to God and always seeing men turn away, I used to tell Antoine sometimes. But he used to shake his head and say that it was no use thinking; most likely St. Gudule and St. Michael had set the church down in the night all ready made, why not? God made the trees, and they were more wonderful, he thought, for his part. And so perhaps they are, but that is no answer. And I do want to know. I want some one who will tell me; and if you come out of Rubes’ country as I think, no doubt you know everything, or remember it?”
He smiled.
“The free pass to Rubes’ country lies in books, pretty one. Shall I give you some? — nay, lend them, I mean, since giving you are too wilful to hear of without offence. You can read, you said?”
Bébée’s eyes glowed as they lifted themselves to his.
“I can read — not very fast, but that would come with doing it more and more, I think, just as spinning does; one knots the thread and breaks it a million times before one learns to spin as fine as cobwebs. I have read the stories of St. Anne, and of St. Catherine, and of St. Luven fifty times, but they are all the books that Father Francis has; and no one else has any among us.”
“Very well. You shall have books of mine. Easy ones first, and then those that are more serious. But what time will you have? You do so much; you are like a little golden bee.”
Bébée laughed happily.
“Oh! give me the books and I will find the time. It is light so early now. That gives one so many hours. In winter one has so few one must lie in bed, because to buy a candle you know one cannot afford except, of course, a taper now and then, as one’s duty is, for our Lady or for the dead. And will you really, really, lend me books?”
“Really, I will. Yes. I will bring you one to the Grande Place to-morrow, or meet you on your road there with it. Do you know what poetry is, Bébée?”
“No.”
“But your flowers talk to you?”
“Ah! always. But then no one else hears them ever but me; and so no one else ever believes.”
“Well, poets are folks who hear the flowers talk as you do, and the trees, and the seas, and the beasts, and even the stones; but no one else ever hears these things, and so, when the poets write them out, the rest of the world say, ‘That is very fine, no doubt, but only good for dreamers; it will bake no bread.’ I will give you some poetry; for I think you care more about dreams than about bread.”
“I do not know,�
�� said Bébée; and she did not know, for her dreams, like her youth, and her innocence, and her simplicity, and her strength, were all unconscious of themselves, as such things must be to be pure and true at all.
Bébée had grown up straight, and clean, and fragrant, and joyous as one of her own carnations; but she knew herself no more than the carnation knows its color and its root,
“No. you do not know,” said he, with a sort of pity; and thought within himself, was it worth while to let her know?
If she did not know, these vague aspirations and imaginations would drop off from her with the years of her early youth, as the lime-flowers drop downwards with the summer heats. She would forget them. They would linger a little in her head, and, perhaps, always wake at some sunset hour or some angelus chime, but not to trouble her. Only to make her cradle song a little sadder and softer than most women’s was. Unfed, they would sink away and bear no blossom.
She would grow into a simple, hardy, hardworking, God-fearing Flemish woman like the rest. She would marry, no doubt, some time, and rear her children honestly and well; and sit in the market stall every day, and spin and sew, and dig and wash, and sweep, and brave bad weather, and be content with poor food to the end of her harmless and laborious days — poor little Bébée!
He saw her so clearly as she would be — if he let her alone.
A little taller, a little broader, a little browner, less sweet of voice, less soft of skin, less flower-like in face; having learned to think only as her neighbors thought, of price of wood and cost of bread; laboring cheerily but hardly from daybreak to nightfall to fill hungry mouths: forgetting all things except the little curly-heads clustered round her soup-pot, and the year-old lips sucking at her breasts.