by Ouida
Going home through the streets, she passed the café of the Trois Frères that looks out on the trees of the park, and that has flowers in its balconies, and pleasant windows that stand open to let the sounds of the soldiers’ music enter. She saw him in one of the windows. There were amber and scarlet and black; silks and satins and velvets. There was a fan painted and jewelled. There were women’s faces. There was a heap of purple fruit and glittering sweetmeats. He laughed there. His beautiful Murillo head was dark against the white and gold within.
Bébée looked up, — paused a second, — then went onward, with a thorn in her heart.
He Had not seen her.
“It is natural, of course — he has his world — he does not think often of me — there is no reason why he should be as good as he is,” she said to herself as she went slowly over the stones.
She had the dog’s soul — only she did not know it.
But the tears Fell down her cheeks, as she walked.
It looked so bright in there, so gay, with the sound of the music coming in through the trees, and those women, — she had seen such women before; sometimes in the winter nights, going home from the lacework, she had stopped at the doors of the palaces, or of the opera house, when the carriages were setting down their brilliant burdens; and sometimes on the great feast days she had seen the people of the court going out to some gala at the theatre, or some great review of troops, or some ceremonial of foreign sovereigns; but she had never thought about them before; she had never wondered whether velvet was better to wear than woollen serge, or-diamonds lighter on the head than a little cap of linen.
But now —
Those women seemed to her so dazzling, so wondrously, so superhumanly beautiful; they seemed like some of those new dahlia flowers, rose and purple and gold, that outblazed the sun on the south border of her little garden, and blanched all the soft color out of the homely roses, and pimpernels, and sweet-williams, and double-stocks, that had bloomed there ever since the days of Waterloo.
But the dahlias had no scent; and Bébée wondered if these women had any heart in them, — they looked all laughter, and glitter, and vanity. To the child, whose dreams of womanhood were evolved from the face of the Mary of the Assumption, of the Susannah of Mieris, and of that Angel in the blue coif whose face has a light as of the sun, — to her who had dreamed her way into vague perceptions of her own sex’s maidenhood and maternity by help of those great pictures which had been before her sight from infancy, there was some taint, some artifice, some want, some harshness in these jewelled women; she could not have reasoned about it, but she felt it, as she felt that the grand dahlias missed a flower’s divinity, being scentless.
She was a little bit of wild thyme herself; hardy, fragrant, clean, tender, flowering by the wayside, full of honey, though only nourished on the turf and the stones, these gaudy, brilliant, ruby-bright, scarlet-mantled dahlias hurt her with a dim sense of pain and shame.
Fasting, next day at sunrise she confessed to Father Francis: —
“I saw beautiful rich women, and I envied them; and I could not pray to
Mary last night for thinking of them, for I hated them so much.”
But she did not say, —
“I hated them because they were with him.”
Out of the purest little soul, Love entering drives forth Candor.
“That is not like you at all, Bébée,” said the good old man, as she knelt at his feet on the bricks of his little bare study, where all the books he ever spelt out were treatises on the art of bee-keeping.
“My dear, you never were covetous at all, nor did you ever seem to care for the things of the world. I wish Jehan had not given you those silver buckles; I think they have set your little soul on vanities.”
“It is not the buckles; I am not covetous,” said Bébée; and then her face grew warm. She did not know why. and she did not hear the rest of Father Francis’s admonitions.
CHAPTER XIII.
But the next noon-time brought him to the market stall, and the next also, and so the summer days slipped away, and Bébée was quite happy if she saw him in the morning time, to give him a fresh rose, or at evening by 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 Bébée’s wants so little food to make it all content. Such mere trifles are beautiful and sweet to it. Such slender stray gleams of light suffice to make a broad, bright golden noon of perfect joy around it.
All the delirium, and fever, and desire, and despair, that are in maturer passion, are far away from it: far as is the flash of the meteor across sultry skies from the blue forget-me-not down in the brown meadow brook.
It was very wonderful to Bébée that he, this stranger from Rubes’ fairyland, could come at all to keep pace with her little clattering wooden shoes over the dust and the grass in the dim twilight time. The days went by in a trance of sweet amaze, and she kept count of the hours no more by the cuckoo-clock of the mill-house, or the deep chimes of the Brussels belfries; but only by such moments as brought her a word from his 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 the long cruel polysyllables, and spelling slowly through the phrases that seemed to her so cramped and tangled, and which yet were a pleasure to unravel forsake of the thought they held.
For Bébée, ignorant little simple soul that she was, had a mind in her that was eager, observant, quick to acquire, skilful to retain; and it would happen in certain times that Flamen, speaking to her of the things which he gave to her to read, would think to himself that this child had more wisdom than was often to be found in schools.
Meanwhile he pondered various studies in various stages of a Gretchen, and made love to Bébée — made love at least by his eyes and by his voice, not hurrying his pleasant task, but hovering about her softly, and mindful not to scare her, as a man will gently lower his hand over a poised butterfly that he seeks to kill, and which one single movement, a thought too quick, may scare away to safety.
Bébée knew where he lived in the street of Mary of Burgundy: in an old palace that belonged to a great Flemish noble, who never dwelt there himself; but to ask anything about him — why he was there? what his rank was? why he stayed in the city at all? — was a sort of treason that never entered her thoughts.
Psyche, if she had been as simple and loyal as Bébée was, would never have lighted her own candle; but even Psyche would not have borrowed any one else’s lamp to lighten the love darkness.
To Bébée he was sacred, unapproachable, unquestionable; he was a wonderful, perfect happiness that had fallen into her life; he was a gift of God, as the sun was.
She took his going and coming as she took that of the sun, never dreaming of reproaching his absence, never dreaming of asking if in the empty night he shone on any other worlds than hers.
It was hardly so much a faith with her as an instinct; faith must reason ere it know itself to be faith. Bébée never reasoned any more than her roses did.
The good folks in the market place watched her a little anxiously; they thought ill of that little moss-rose that every day found its way to one wearer only; but after all they did not see much, and the neighbors nothing at all. For he never went home to her, nor with her, and most of the time that he spent with Bébée was in the quiet evening shadows, as she went up with her empty basket through the deserted country roads.
Bébée was all day long in the city, indeed, as other girls were, but with her it had always been different. Antoine had always been with her up to the 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 her would have been answered by a stroke from the cobbler’s strap or from the tinker’s hammer. There was one girl only who ever tried to do her any harm — a good-looking stout wench, who stood at the corner of the M
ontagne de la Cour with a stall of fruit in the summer time, and in winter time drove 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 the town on a holiday, and go to any one of the villages where there was Kermesse and dance, and drink the little blue wine, and have trinkets bought for one, and come home in the moonlight in a char-à-banc, with the horns sounding, and the lads singing, and the ribbons flying from the old 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,” Bébée had answered when urged fifty times by this girl to go to fairs, and balls at the wine shops. “That does just as well. And I have seen Kermesse once at Malines — it was beautiful. I went with Mère Dax, but it cost a great deal I 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 with being base yourself. Look you, Lisette; she is not one like you to make eyes 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 the gutter children to pick and thieve, while you are stealing up the stairs into that young French fellow’s chamber. Oh, oh! a fine beating you will get when she knows!”
Lisette’s mother was a fierce and strong old Brabantoise who exacted heavy reckoning with her daughter for every single plum and peach that she sent out of her dark sweet-smelling fruit shop to be sunned in the streets, and under the students’ love-glances.
So the girl took heed, and left Bébée 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 — who knows?”
So that she was at once savage and yet triumphant when she saw, as she thought, Bébée drifting down the high flood of temptation.
“Oh, oh, you dainty one!” she cried one day to her. “So you would not take the nuts and mulberries that do for us common folk, because you had 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 and mulberries last through summer and autumn, and there are heaps of them on every 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 have your mouth full of sugar an hour, — and then, eh! — you will go famished all the year.”
“I do not understand,” said Bébée, looking up, with her thoughts far away, 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? You might let me see.”
“No one gives me anything.”
“Chut! you want me to believe that. Why Jules is only a lad, and his father 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 take the trouble to set my cap straight when he goes by? He gave me these ear-rings, look. I wish you would let me see what you get.”
But Bébée had gone away — unheeding — dreaming of Juliet and of Jeanne d’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 this little 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 his brush — he could not paint this pure, bright, rosy dawn — he who had always painted the glare of midnight gas on rouge or rags. Yet he felt that if he could transfer to canvas the light that was on Bébée’s face he would get what Scheffer had missed. For a time it eluded him. You shall paint a gold and glistening brocade, or a fan of peacock’s feathers, to perfection, and yet, perhaps, the dewy whiteness of the humble little field daisy shall baffle and escape you.
He felt, too, that he must catch her expression flying as he would do the flash of a swallow’s wing across a blue sky; he knew that Bébée, forced to studied attitudes in an atelier, would be no longer the ideal that he wanted.
More than once he came and filled in more fully his various designs in the little hut garden, among the sweet gray lavender and the golden disks of the sunflowers; and more than once Bébée was missed from her place in the front of the Broodhuis.
The Varnhart children would gather now and then open-mouthed at the wicket, and Mère Krebs would shake her head as she went by on her sheepskin saddle, and mutter that the child’s head would be turned by vanity; and old Jehan would lean on his stick and peer through the sweetbrier, and wonder stupidly if this strange man who could make Bébée’s face beam over again upon that panel of wood could not give him back his dead daughter who had been pushed away under the black earth so long, long before, when the red mill had been brave and new, the red mill that 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 mud and stones, and ducks and sheep, and of all common and silly things.
“What does he pay you, Bébée?” they used to ask, with the shrewd Flemish thought after the main chance.
“Nothing,” Bébée would answer, with a quick color in her face; and they would reply in contemptuous reproof, “Careless little fool; you should make enough to buy you wood all winter. When the man from Ghent painted Trine and her cow, he gave her a whole gold bit for standing still so long in the clover. The Krebs would be sure to lend you her cow, if it be the cow that makes the difference.”
Bébée was silent, weeding her carnation bed; — what could she tell them that they would understand?
She seemed so far away from them all — those good friends of her childhood — now that this wonderful new world of his giving had opened to her sight.
She lived in a dream.
Whether she sat in the market place taking copper coins, or in the moonlight 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 her garden, she did not forsake her house labor or her good deeds to old Annémie; but all the while she only heard one voice, she only felt one touch, she only saw one face.
Here and there — one in a million — there is a female thing that can love like 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 in his life for anything, but he was never in love with her — no more in love with her than with the moss-rosebuds that she fastened in his breast. Yet he played with her, because she was such a little, soft, tempting female thing; and because, to see her face flush, and her heart heave, to feel her fresh feelings stir into life, and to watch her changes 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 have married 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 in the city, was a new virtue in himself for which he hardly knew whether to feel respect or ridicule; anyway, it seemed virtue to him.
So long as he did not seduce the body, it seemed to him that it could never matter how he slew the soul, — the little, honest, happy, pure, frank soul, that amidst its poverty and hardships was like a robin’s song to 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 the stall one evening as the sun set. “Prut! so it was no such purity after all 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’s sake, after all your coyness, to drop at a beckoning finger as one may say — pong! — in a minute, like an apple over-ripe! Oh hé, you sly one!”
Bébée flushed red, in a sort of instinct of offence; not sure what her fault was, but vaguely stung by the brutal words.
Bébée walked homeward by him, with her empty baskets: looked at him with grave wondering eyes.
“What did she mean? I do not understand. I must have done some wrong — or she 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 a little foot while hers is as big as a trooper’s; there is no greater sin, Bébée, 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 her teeth with a chuckle. “Do not heed her, Bébée. She is a coarse-tongued brute, and is jealous, no doubt.”
“Jealous? — of what?”
The word had no meaning to Bébée.
“That I am not a student or a soldier, as her lovers are.”
As her lovers were! Bébée felt her face burn again. Was he her lover then? The child’s innocent body and soul thrilled with a hot, sweet delight and fear commingled.
Bébée was not quite satisfied until she had knelt down that night and asked the Master of all poor maidens to see if there were any wickedness in her heart, hidden there like a bee in a rose, and if there were to take it out and make her worthier of this wonderful new happiness in her life.