by Ouida
“Was her sailor, indeed, so good to her?” she asked an old gossip of
Annémie’s, as she went down the stairs.
The old soul stopped to think with difficulty of such a far-off time, and resting her brass flagon of milk on the steep step.
“Eh, no; not that I ever saw,” she answered at length. “He was fond of her — very fond; but he was a wilful one, and he beat her sometimes when he got tired of being on land. But women must not mind that, you know, my dear, if only a man’s heart is right. Things fret them, and then they belabor what they love best; it is a way they have.”
“But she speaks of him as of an angel nearly!” said Bébée, bewildered.
The old woman took up her flagon, with a smile flitting across her wintry face.
“Ay, dear; when the frost kills your brave rose-bush, root and bud, do you think of the thorns that pricked you, or only of the fair, sweet-smelling things that flowered all your summer?”
Bébée went away thoughtfully out of the old crazy water-washed house by the quay; life seemed growing very strange and intricate and knotted about her, like the threads of lace that a bad fairy has entangled in the night.
CHAPTER X.
Her stranger from Rubes’ land was a great man in a certain world. He had become great when young, which is perhaps a misfortune. It indisposes men to be great at their maturity. He was famous at twenty, by a picture hectic in color, perfect in drawing, that made Paris at his feet. He became more famous by verses, by plays, by political follies, and by social successes. He was faithful, however, to his first love in art. He was a great painter, and year by year proved afresh the cunning of his hand. Purists said his pictures had no soul in them. It was not wonderful if they had none. He always painted soulless vice; indeed, he saw very little else.
One year he had some political trouble. He wrote a witty pamphlet that hurt where it was perilous to aim. He laughed and crossed the border, riding into the green Ardennes one sunny evening. He had a name of some power and sufficient wealth; he did not feel long exile. Meanwhile he told himself he would go and look at Scheffer’s Gretchen.
The King of Thule is better; but people talk most of the Gretchen. He had never seen either.
He went in leisurely, travelling up the bright Meuse River, and across the monotony of the plains, then green with wheat a foot high, and musical with the many bells of the Easter kermesses in the quaint old-world villages.
There was something so novel, so sleepy, so harmless, so mediaeval, in the Flemish life, that it soothed him. He had been swimming all his life in salt sea-fed rapids; this sluggish, dull, canal water, mirroring between its rushes a life that had scarcely changed for centuries, had a charm for him.
He stayed awhile in Antwerpen. The town is ugly and beautiful; it is like a dull quaint grés de Flandre jug, that has precious stones set inside its rim. It is a burgher ledger of bales and barrels, of sale and barter, of loss and gain; but in the heart of it there are illuminated leaves of missal vellum, all gold and color, and monkish story and heroic ballad, that could only have been executed in the days when Art was a religion.
He gazed himself into an homage of Rubens, whom before he had slighted, never having known (for, unless you have seen Antwerp, it is as absurd to say that you have seen Rubens, as it is to think that you have seen Murillo out of Seville, or Raffaelle out of Rome); and he studied the Gretchen carefully, delicately, sympathetically, for he loved Scheffer; but though he tried, he failed to care for her.
“She is only a peasant; she is not a poem,” he said to himself; “I will paint a Gretchen for the Salon of next year.”
But it was hard for him to portray a Gretchen. All his pictures were Phryne, — Phryne in triumph, in ruin, in a palace, in a poor-house, on a bed of roses, on a hospital mattress; Phryne laughing with a belt of jewels about her supple waist; Phryne lying with the stones of the dead-house under her naked limbs, — but always Phryne. Phryne, who living had death in her smile; Phryne, who lifeless had blank despair on her face; Phryne, a thing that lived furiously every second of her days, but Phryne a thing that once being dead was carrion that never could live again.
Phryne has many painters in this school, as many as Catherine and Cecilia had in the schools of the Renaissance, and he was chief amidst them.
How could he paint Gretchen if the pure Scheffer missed? Not even if, like the artist monks of old, he steeped his brushes all Lent through in holy water.
And in holy water he did not believe.
One evening, having left Antwerpen ringing its innumerable bells over the grave of its dead Art, he leaned out of the casement of an absent friend’s old palace in the Brabant street that is named after Mary of Burgundy; an old casement crusted with quaint carvings, and gilded round in Spanish fashion, with many gargoyles and griffins, and illegible scutcheons.
Leaning there, wondering with himself whether he would wait awhile and paint quietly in this dim street, haunted with the shades of Memling and Maes, and Otto Veneris and Philip de Champagne, or whether he would go into the East and seek new types, and lie under the red Egyptian heavens and create a true Cleopatra, which no man has ever done yet, — young Cleopatra, ankle-deep in roses and fresh from Cæsar’s kisses, — leaning there, he saw a little peasant go by below, with two little white feet in two wooden shoes, and a face that had the pure and simple radiance of a flower.
“There is my Gretchen,” he thought to himself, and went down and followed her into the cathedral. If he could get what was in her face, he would get what Scheffer could not.
A little later walking by her in the green lanes, he meditated, “It is the face of Gretchen, but not the soul — the Red Mouse has never passed this child’s lips. Nevertheless—”
“Nevertheless—” he said to himself, and smiled.
For he, the painter all his life long of Phryne living and of Phryne dead, believed that every daughter of Eve either vomits the Red Mouse or swallows it.
It makes so little difference which, — either way the Red Mouse has been there the evening towards this little rush-covered hut, he forgot the Red Mouse, and began vaguely to see that there are creatures of his mother’s sex from whom the beast of the Brocken slinks away.
But he still said to himself, “Nevertheless.” “Nevertheless,” — for he knew well that when the steel cuts the silk, when the hound hunts the fawn, when the snake wooes the bird, when the king covets the vineyard, there is only one end possible at any time. It is the strong against the weak, the fierce against the feeble, the subtle against the simple, the master against the slave; there is no equality in the contest and no justice — it is merely inevitable, and the issue of it is written.
CHAPTER XI.
The next day she had her promised book hidden under the vine-leaves of her empty basket as she went homeward, and though she had not seen him very long or spoken to him very much, she was happy.
The golden gates of knowledge had just opened to her; she saw a faint, far-off glimpse of the Hesperides gardens within; of the dragon she had never heard, and had no fear.
“Might I know your name?” she had asked him wistfully, as she had given him the rosebud, and taken the volume in return that day.
“They call me Flamen.”
“It is your name?”
“Yes, for the world. You must call me Victor, as other women do. Why do you want my name?”
“Jeannot asked it of me.”
“Oh, Jeannot asked it, did he?”
“Yes; besides,” said Bébée, with her eyes very soft and very serious, and her happy voice hushed,— “besides, I want to pray for you of course, every day; and if I do not know your name, how can I make Our Lady rightly understand? The flowers know you without a name, but she might not, because so very many are always beseeching her, and you see she has all the world to look after.”
He had looked at her with a curious look, and had bade her farewell, and let her go home alone that night.
Her w
ork was quickly done, and by the light of the moon she spread her book on her lap in the porch of the hut and began her new delight.
The children had come and pulled at her skirts and begged her to play.
But Bébée had shaken her head.
“I am going to learn to be very wise, dear,” she told them; “I shall not have time to dance or to play.”
“But people are not merry when they are wise, Bébée,” said Franz, the biggest boy.
“Perhaps not,” said Bébée: “but one cannot be everything, you know,
Franz.”
“But surely, you would rather be merry than anything else?”
“I think there is something better, Franz. I am not sure; I want to find out; I will tell you when I know.”
“Who has put that into your head, Bébée?”
“The angels in the cathedral,” she told them; and the children were awed and left her, and went away to play blind-man’s-buff by themselves, on the grass by the swan’s water.
“But for all that the angels have said it,” said Franz to his sisters, “I cannot see what good it will be to her to be wise, if she will not care any longer afterwards for almond gingerbread and currant cake.”
It was the little tale of “Paul and Virginia” that he had given her to begin her studies with: but it was a grand copy, full of beautiful drawings nearly at every page.
It was hard work for her to read at first, but the drawings enticed and helped her, and she soon sank breathlessly into the charm of the story. Many words she did not know; many passages were beyond her comprehension; she was absolutely ignorant, and had nothing but the force of her own fancy to aid her.
But though stumbling at every step, as a lame child through a flowery hillside in summer, she was happy as the child would be, because of the sweet, strange air that was blowing about her, and the blossoms that she could gather into her hand, so rare, so wonderful, and yet withal so familiar, because they were blossoms.
With her fingers buried in her curls, with her book on her knee, with the moon rays white and strong on the page, Bébée sat entranced as the hours went by; the children’s play shouts died away; the babble of the gossip at the house doors ceased; people went by and called good night to her; the little huts shut up one by one, like the white and purple convolvulus cups in the hedges.
Bébée did not stir, nor did she hear them; she was deaf even to the singing of the nightingales in the willows, where she sat in her little thatch above, and the wet garden-ways beyond her.
A heavy step came tramping down the lane. A voice called to her, —
“What are you doing, Bébée, there, this time of the night? It is on the strike of twelve.”
She started as if she were doing some evil thing, and stretched her arms out, and looked around with blinded, wondering eyes, as if she had been rudely wakened from her sleep.
“What are you doing up so late?” asked Jeannot; he was coming from the forest in the dead of night to bring food for his family; he lost his sleep thus often, but he never thought that he did anything except his duty in those long, dark, tiring tramps to and fro between Soignies and Laeken.
Bébée shut her book and smiled with dreaming eyes, that saw him not at all.
“I was reading — and, Jeannot, his name is Flamen for the world, but I may call him Victor.”
“What do I care for his name?”
“You asked it this morning.”
“More fool I. Why do you read? Reading is not for poor folk like you and me.”
Bébée smiled up at the white clear moon that sailed above the woods.
She was not awake out of her dream. She only dimly heard the words he spoke.
“You are a little peasant,” said Jeannot roughly, as he paused at the gate. “It is all you can do to get your bread. You have no one to stand between you and hunger. How will it be with you when the slug gets your roses, and the snail your carnations, and your hens die of damp, and your lace is all wove awry, because your head runs on reading and folly, and you are spoilt for all simple pleasures and for all honest work?”
She smiled, still looking up at the moon, with the dropping ivy touching her hair.
“You are cross, dear Jeannot. Good night.”
A moment afterwards the little rickety door was shut, and the rusty bolt drawn within it; Jeannot stood in the cool summer night all alone, and knew how stupid he had been in his wrath.
He leaned on the gate a minute; then crossed the garden as softly as his wooden shoes would let him. He tapped gently on the shutter of the lattice.
“Bébée — Bébée — just listen. I spoke roughly, dear — I know I have no right. I am sorry. Will you be friends with me again? — do be friends again.”
She opened the shutter a little way, so that he could see her pretty mouth speaking, “we are friends — we will always be friends, of course — only you do not know. Good night.”
He went away with a heavy heart and a long-drawn step. He would have preferred that she should have been angry with him.
Bébée, left alone, let the clothes drop off her pretty round shoulders and her rosy limbs, and shook out her coils of hair, and kissed the book, and laid it under her head, and went to sleep with a smile on her face.
Only, as she slept, her ringers moved as if she were counting her beads, and her lips murmured, —
“Oh, dear Holy Mother, you have so much to think of — yes. I know — all the poor, and all the little children. But take care of him; he is called Flamen, and he lives in the street of Mary of Burgundy; you cannot miss him; and if you will look for him always, and have a heed that the angels never leave him, I will give you my great cactus glower — my only one — on your Feast of Roses this very year. Oh, dear Mother, you will not forget!”
CHAPTER XII.
Bébée was a dreamer in her way, and aspired to be a scholar too. But all the same, she was not a little fool.
She had been reared in hardy, simple, honest ways of living, and would have thought it as shameful as a theft to have owed her bread to other folk.
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 did she sweep out her floor and make her mash for the fowls, and wash out her bit of linen and hang it to dry on a line among the tall, flaunting hollyhocks that were so proud of themselves because they reached to the roof.
“What do you want with books, Bébée?” said Reine, the sabot-maker’s wife, across the privet hedge, as she also hung out her linen. “Franz told me you were reading last night. It is the silver buckles have done that: one mischief always begets another.”
“Where is the mischief, good Reine?” said Bébée, who was always prettily behaved with her elders, though, when pushed to it, she could hold her own.
“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; that is 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 a hole is burnt in your soup-pot, and your dough is as heavy as lead. You are like bees that leave their own clover fields to buzz themselves dead against the glass of a hothouse.”
Bébée 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 use talking, they never would understand.
“Antoine should never have taught you your letters,” said Reine, groaning under the great blue shirts she was hanging on high among the leaves. “I told 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 min
e knows a letter, the saints be praised! nor a word of any tongue but our own good Flemish. You should have been brought up the same. You would have come to no trouble then.”
“I am in no trouble, dear Reine,” said Bébée, scattering the potato-peels to the clacking poultry, and she smiled into the faces of the golden oxlips that nodded to her back again in sunshiny sympathy.
“Not yet,” said Reine, hanging her last shirt.
But Bébée was not hearing; she was calling the chickens, and telling the oxlips how pretty they looked in the borders; and in her heart she was counting the minutes till the old Dutch cuckoo-clock at Mère Krebs’s — the only clock in the lane — should crow out the hour at which she went down to the city.
She loved the hut, the birds, the flowers; but they were little to her now compared with the dark golden picturesque square, the changing crowds, the frowning roofs, the gray stones, and colors and shadows of the throngs for one face and for one smile.
“He is sure to be there,” she thought, and started half an hour earlier than was her wont. She wanted to tell him all her rapture in the book; no one else could understand.
But all the day through he never came.
Bébée sat with a sick heart and a parched little throat, selling her flowers 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 of pence — 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 on her that frightened her, it was so unlike any fear that she had ever known — even the fear when she had seen death on old Antoine’s face had been nothing like this.