Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  CHAPTER XIV.

  The next day, waking with a radiant little soul as a bird in a forest wakes in summer Bébée was all alone in the lane by the swans’ water. In the gray of the dawn all the good folk except herself and lame old Jehan had tramped off to a pilgrimage, Liége way, which the bishop of the city had enjoined on all the faithful as a sacred duty.

  Bébée doing her work, singing, thinking how good God was, and dreaming over a thousand fancies of the wonderful stories he had told her, and of the exquisite delight that would lie for her in watching for him all through the shining hours, Bébée felt her little heart leap like a squirrel as the voice that was the music of heaven to her called through the stillness,— “Good day, pretty one! you are as early as the lark, Bébée. I go to Mayence, so I thought I would look at you one moment as I pass.”

  Bébée ran down through the wet grass in a tumult of joy. She had never seen him so early in the day — never so early as this, when nobody was up and stirring except birds and beasts and peasant folk.

  She did not know how pretty she looked herself; like a rain-washed wild rose; her feet gleaming with dew, her cheeks warm with health and joy; her sunny clustering hair free from the white cap and tumbling a little about her throat, because she had been stooping over the carnations.

  Flamen loosed the wicket latch, and thought there might be better ways of spending the day than in the gray shadows of old Mechlin.

  “Will you give me a draught of water?” he asked her as he crossed the garden.

  “I will give you breakfast,” said Bébée, happy as a bird. She felt no shame for the smallness of her home; no confusion at the poverty of her little place; such embarrassments are born of self-consciousness, and Bébée had no more self-consciousness than her own sweet, gray lavender-bush blowing against the door.

  The lavender-bush has no splendor like the roses, has no colors like the hollyhocks; it is a simple, plain, gray thing that the bees love and that the cottagers cherish, and that keeps the moth from the homespun linen, and that goes with the dead to their graves.

  It has many virtues and infinite sweetness, but it does not know it or think of it; and if the village girls ever tell it so, it fancies they only praise it out of kindness as they put its slender fragrant spears away in their warm bosoms. Bébée was like her lavender, and now that this beautiful Purple Emperor butterfly came from the golden sunbeams to find pleasure for a second in her freshness, she was only very grateful, as the lavender-bush was to the village girls.

  “I will give you your breakfast,” said Bébée, flushing rosily with pleasure, and putting away the ivy coils that he might enter.

  “I have very little, you know,” she added, wistfully. “Only goat’s milk and bread; but if that will do — and there is some honey — and if you would eat a salad, I would cut one fresh.”

  He did enter, and glanced round him with a curious pity and wonder both in one.

  It was such a little, small, square place; and its floor was of beaten clay; and its unceiled roof he could have touched; and its absolute poverty was so plain, — and yet the child looked so happy in it, and was so like a flower, and was so dainty and fresh, and even so full of grace.

  She stood and looked at him with frank and grateful eyes; she could hardly believe that he was here; he, the stranger of Rubes’ land, in her own little rush-covered home.

  But she was not embarrassed by it; she was glad and proud.

  There is a dignity of peasants as well as of kings, — the dignity that comes from all absence of effort, all freedom from pretence. Bébée had this, and she had more still than this: she had the absolute simplicity of childhood with her still.

  Some women have it still when they are four-score.

  She could have looked at him forever, she was so happy; she cared nothing now for those dazzling dahlias — he had left them; he was actually here — here in her own, little dear home, with the cocks looking in at the threshold, and the sweet-peas nodding at the lattice, and the starling crying, “Bonjour! Bonjour!”

  “You are tired, I am sure you must be tired,” she said, pulling her little bed forward for him to sit on, for there were only two wooden stools in the hut, and no chair at all.

  Then she took his sketching-easel and brushes from his hand, and would have kneeled and taken the dust off his boots if he would have let her; and went hither and thither gladly and lightly, bringing him a wooden bowl of milk and the rest of the slender fare, and cutting as quick as thought fresh cresses and lettuce from her garden, and bringing him, as the crown of all, Father Francis’s honey-comb on vine-leaves, with some pretty sprays of box and mignonette scattered about it — doing all this with a swift, sweet grace that robbed the labor of all look of servitude, and looking at him ever and again with a smile that said as clearly as any words, “I cannot do much, but what I do, I do with all my heart.”

  There was something in the sight of her going and coming in those simple household errands, across the sunlit floor, that moved him as some mountain air sung on an alp by a girl driving her cows to pasture may move a listener who indifferent has heard the swell of the organ of La Hague, or the recitative of a great singer in San Carlo.

  The gray lavender blowing at the house door has its charm for those who are tired of the camellias that float in the porcelain bowls of midnight suppers.

  This man was not good. He was idle and vain, and amorous and cold, and had been spoiled by the world in which he had passed his days; but he had the temper of an artist: he had something, too, of a poet’s fancy; he was vaguely touched and won by this simple soul that looked at him out of Bébée’s eyes with some look that in all its simplicity had a divine gleam in it that made him half ashamed.

  He had known women by the thousand, good women and bad; women whom he had dealt ill with and women who had dealt ill with him; but this he had not known — this frank, fearless, tender, gay, grave, innocent, industrious little life, helping itself, feeding itself, defending itself, working for itself and for others, and vaguely seeking all the while some unseen light, some unknown god, with a blind faith so infinitely ignorant and yet so infinitely pathetic.

  “All the people are gone on a pilgrimage,” she explained to him when he asked her why her village was so silent this bright morning. “They are gone to pray for a fine harvest, and that she wants herself as well — it costs seven francs apiece. They take their food with them; they go and laugh and eat in the fields. I think it is nonsense. One can say one’s prayers just as well here. Mère Krebs thinks so too, but then she says, ‘If I do not go, it will look ill; people will say I am irreligious; and as we make so much by flour, God would think it odd for me to be absent; and, besides, it is only seven francs there and back; and if it does please Heaven, that is cheap, you know. One will get it over and over again in Paradise.’ That is what Mere Krebs says. But, for me, I think it is nonsense. It cannot please God to go by train and eat galette and waste a whole day in getting dusty.

  “When I give the Virgin my cactus flower, I do give up a thing I love, and I let it wither on her altar instead of pleasing me in bloom here all the week, and then, of course, she sees that I have done it out of gratitude. But that is different: that I am sorry to do, and yet I am glad to do it out of love. Do you not know?”

  “Yes, I know very well. But is the Virgin all that you love like this?”

  “No; there is the garden, and there is Antoine — he is dead, I know. But I think that we should love the dead all the better, not the less, because they cannot speak or say that they are angry; and perhaps one pains them very much when one neglects them, and if they are ever so sad, they cannot rise and rebuke one — that is why I would rather forget the flowers for the Church than I would the flowers for his grave, because God can punish me, of course, if he like, but Antoine never can — any more — now.”

  “You are logical in your sentiment, my dear,” said Flamen, who was more moved than he cared to feel. “The union is a rare one in yo
ur sex. Who taught you to reason?”

  “No one. And I do not know what to be logical means. Is it that you laugh at me?”

  “No. I do not laugh. And your pilgrims — they are gone for all day?”

  “Yes. They are gone to the Sacred Heart at St. Marie en Bois. It is on the way to Liége. They will come back at nightfall. And some of them will be sure to have drunk too much, and the children will get so cross. Prosper Bar, who is a Calvinist, always says, ‘Do not mix up prayer and play; you would not cut a gherkin in your honey’; but I do not know why he called prayer a gherkin, because it is sweet enough — sweeter than anything, I think. When I pray to the Virgin to let me see you next day, I go to bed quite happy, because she will do it, I know, if it will be good for me.”

  “But if it were not good for you, Bébée? Would you cease to wish it then?”

  He rose as he spoke, and went across the floor and drew away her hand that was parting the flax, and took it in his own and stroked it, indulgently and carelessly, as a man may stroke the soft fur of a young cat.

  Leaning against the little lattice and looking down on her with musing eyes, half smiling, half serious, half amorous, half sad, Bébée looked up with a sudden and delicious terror that ran through her as the charm of the snake’s gaze runs through the bewildered bird.

  “Would you cease to wish it if it were not good?” he asked again.

  Bébée’s face grew pale and troubled. She left her hand in his because she did not think any shame of his taking it. But the question suddenly flung the perplexity and darkness of doubt into the clearness of her pure child’s conscience. All her ways had been straight and sunlit before her.

  She had never had a divided duty.

  The religion and the pleasure of her simple little life had always gone hand-in-hand, greeting one another, and never for an instant in conflict. In any hesitation of her own she had always gone to Father Francis, and he had disentangled the web for her and made all plain.

  But here was a difficulty in which she could never go to Father Francis.

  Right and wrong, duty and desire, were for the first time arrayed before her in their ghastly and unending warfare.

  It frightened her with a certain breathless sense of peril — the peril of a time when in lieu of that gentle Mother of Roses whom she kneeled to among the flowers, she would only see a dusky shadow looming between her and the beauty of life and the light of the sun.

  What he said was quite vague to her. She attached no definite danger to his words. She only thought — to see him was so great a joy — if Mary forbade it, would she not take it if she could notwithstanding, always, always, always?

  He kept her hand in his, and watched with contentment the changing play of the shade and sorrow, the fear and fascination, on her face.

  “You do not know, Bébée?” he said at length, knowing well himself; so much better than ever she knew. “Well, dear, that is not flattering to me. But it is natural. The good Virgin of course gives you all you have, food, and clothes, and your garden, and your pretty plump chickens; and I am only a stranger. You could not offend her for me; that is not likely.”

  The child was cut to the heart by the sadness and humility of words of whose studied artifice she had no suspicion.

  She thought that she seemed to him ungrateful and selfish, and yet all the mooring-ropes that held her little boat of life to the harbor of its simple religion seemed cut away, and she seemed drifting helpless and rudderless upon an unknown sea.

  “I never did do wrong — that I know,” she said, timidly, and lifted her eyes to his with an unconscious appeal in them.

  “But — I do not see why it should be wrong to speak with you. You are good, and you lend me beautiful things out of other men’s minds that will make me less ignorant: Our Lady could not be angry with that — she must like it.”

  “Our Lady? — oh, poor little simpleton! — where will her reign be when Ignorance has once been cut down root and branch?” he thought to himself: but he only answered, —

  “But whether she like it or not, Bébée? — you beg the question, my dear; you are — you are not so frank as usual — think, and tell me honestly?”

  He knew quite well, but it amused him to see the perplexed trouble that this, the first divided duty of her short years, brought with it.

  Bébée looked at him, and loosened her hand from his, and sat quite still.

  Her lips had a little quiver in them.

  “I think.” she said at last, “I think — if it be wrong, still I will wish it — yes. Only I will not tell myself it is right. I will just say to Our Lady, ‘I am wicked, perhaps, but I cannot help it’ So, I will not deceive her at all; and perhaps in time she may forgive. But I think you only say it to try me. It cannot, I am sure, be wrong — any more than it is to talk to Jeannot or to Bac.”

  He had driven her into the subtleties of doubt, but the honest little soul in her found a way out, as a flower in a cellar finds its way through the stones to light.

  He plucked the ivy leaves and threw them at the chickens on the bricks without, with a certain impatience in the action. The simplicity and the directness of the answer disarmed him; he was almost ashamed to use against her the weapons of his habitual warfare. It was like a maître d’armes fencing with bare steel against a little naked child armed with a blest palm-sheaf.

  When she had thus brought him all she had, and he to please her had sat down to the simple food, she gathered a spray of roses and set it in a pot beside him, then left him and went and stood at a little distance, waiting, with her hands lightly crossed on her chest, to see if there were anything that he might want.

  He ate and drank well to please her, looking at her often as he did so.

  “I break your bread, Bébée,” he said, with a tone that seemed strange to her,— “I break your bread. I must keep Arab faith with you.”

  “What is that?”

  “I mean — I must never betray you.”

  “Betray me How could you?”

  “Well — hurt you in any way.”

  “Ah, I am sure you would never do that.”

  He was silent, and looked at the spray of roses.

  “Sit down and spin,” he said impatiently. “I am ashamed to see you stand there, and a woman never looks so well as when she spins. Sit down, and I will eat the good things you have brought me. But I cannot if you stand and look.”

  “I beg your pardon. I did not know,” she said, ashamed lest she should have seemed rude to him; and she drew out her wheel under the light of the lattice, and sat down to it, and began to disentangle the threads.

  It was a pretty picture — the low, square casement; the frame of ivy, the pink and white of the climbing sweet-peas: the girl’s head; the cool, wet leaves: the old wooden spinning-wheel, that purred like a sleepy cat.

  “I want to paint you as Gretchen, only it will be a shame.” he said.

  “Who is Gretchen?”

  “You shall read of her by-and-by. And you live here all by yourself?”

  “Since Antoine died — yes.”

  “And are never dull?”

  “I have no time, and I do not think I would be if I had time — there is so much to think of, and one never can understand.”

  “But you must be very brave and laborious to do all your work yourself. Is it possible a child like you can spin, and wash, and bake, and garden, and do everything?”

  “Oh, many do more than I. Babette’s eldest daughter is only twelve, and she does much more, because she has all the children to look after; and they are very, very poor; they often have nothing but a stew of nettles and perhaps a few snails, days together.”

  “That is lean, bare, ugly, gruesome poverty; there is plenty of that everywhere. But you, Bébée — you are an idyll.”

  Bébée looked across the hut and smiled, and broke her thread. She did not know what he meant, but if she were anything that pleased him, it was well.

  “Who were those beaut
iful women?” she said suddenly, the color mounting into her cheeks.

  “What women, my dear?”

  “Those I saw at the window with you, the other night — they had jewels.”

  “Oh! — women, tiresome enough. If I had seen you, I would have dropped you some fruit. Poor little Bébée! Did you go by, and I never knew?”

  “You were laughing—”

  “Was I?”

  “Yes, and they were beautiful.”

  “In their own eyes; not in mine.”

  “No?”

  She stopped her spinning and gazed at him with wistful, wondering eyes. Could it be that they were not beautiful to him? those deep red, glowing, sun-basked dahlia flowers?

  “Do you know,” she said very softly, with a flush of penitence that came and went, “when I saw them, I hated them; I confessed it to Father Francis next day. You seemed so content with, them, and they looked so gay and glad there — and then the jewels! Somehow, I seemed to myself such a little thing, and so ugly and mean. And yet, do you know—”

  “And yet — well?”

  “They did not look to me good — those women,” said Bébée, thoughtfully, looking across at him in deprecation of his possible anger. “They were great people, I suppose, and they appeared very happy; but though I seemed nothing to myself after them, still I think I would not change.”

  “You are wise without books, Bébée.”

  “Oh, no, I am not wise at all. I only feel. And give me books; oh, pray, give me books! You do not know; I will learn so fast; and I will not neglect anything, that I promise. The neighbors and Jeannot say that I shall let the flowers die, and the hut get dirty, and never spin or prick Annémie’s patterns; but that is untrue. I will do all, just as I have done, and more too, if only you will give me things to read, for I do think when one is happy, one ought to work more — not less.”

  “But will these books make you happy? If you ask me the truth, I must tell you — no. You are happy as you are, because you know nothing else than your own little life; for ignorance is happiness, Bébée, let sages, ancient and modern, say what they will. But when you know a little, you will want to know more: and when you know much, you will want to see much also, and then — and then — the thing will grow — you will be no longer content. That is, you will be unhappy.”