Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  “Much better.” he answered her dreamily, and lay there in the grass, holding the little wooden shoes in his hands.

  He was not in love with her. He was in no haste. He preferred to play with her softly, slowly, as one separates the leaves of a rose, to see the deep rose of its heart.

  Her own ignorance of what she felt had a charm for him. He liked to lift the veil from her eyes by gentle degrees, watching each new pulse-beat, each fresh instinct tremble into life.

  It was an old, old story to him; he knew each chapter and verse to weariness, though there still was no other story that he still read as often. But to her it was so new.

  To him it was a long beaten track; he knew every turn of it; he recognized every wayside blossom; he had passed over a thousand times each tremulous bridge; he knew so well beforehand where each shadow would fall, and where each fresh bud would blossom, and where each harvest would be reaped.

  But to her it was so new.

  She followed him as a blind child a man that guides her through a garden and reads her a wonder tale.

  He was good to her, that was all she knew. When he touched her ever so lightly she felt a happiness so perfect, and yet so unintelligible, that she could have wished to die in it.

  And in her humility and her ignorance she wondered always how he — so great, so wise, so beautiful — could have thought it ever worth his while to leave the paradise of Rubes’ land to wait with her under her little rush-thatched roof, and bring her here to see the green leaves and the living things of the forest.

  As they went, a man was going under the trees with a load of wood upon his back. Bébée gave a little cry of recognition.

  “Oh, look, that is Jeannot! How he will wonder to see me here!”

  Flamen drew her a little downward, so that the forester passed onward without perceiving them.

  “Why do you do that?” said Bébée. “Shall I not speak to him?”

  “Why? To have all your neighbors chatter of your feast in the forest? It is not worth while.”

  “Ah, but I always tell them everything,” said Bébée. whose imagination had been already busy with the wonders that she would unfold to Mère Krebs and the Varnhart children.

  “Then you will see but little of me, my dear. Learn to be silent, Bébée.

  It is a woman’s first duty, though her hardest.”

  “Is it?”

  She did not speak for some time. She could not imagine a state of things in which she would not narrate the little daily miracles of her life to the good old garrulous women and the little open-mouthed romps. And yet — she lifted her eyes to his.

  “I am glad you have told me that,” she said. “Though indeed. I do not see why one should not say what one does, yet — somehow — I do not like to talk about you. It is like the pictures in the galleries, and the music in the cathedral, and the great still evenings, when the fields are all silent, and it is as if Christ walked abroad in them; I do not know how to talk of those things to the others — only to you — and I do not like to talk about you to them — do you not know?”

  “Yes, I know. But what affinity have I. Bébée, to your thoughts of your

  God walking in His cornfields?”

  Bébée’s eyes glanced down through the green aisle of the forests, with the musing seriousness in them that was like the child-angels of Botticelli’s dreams.

  “I cannot tell you very well. But when I am in the fields at evening and think of Christ. I feel so happy, and of such good will to all the rest, and I seem to see heaven quite plain through the beautiful gray air where the stars are — and so I feel when I am with you — that is all. Only—”

  “Only what?”

  “Only in those evenings, when I was all alone, heaven seemed up there, where the stars are, and I longed for wings; but now, it is here, and I would only shut my wings if I had them, and not stir.”

  He looked at her, and took, her hands and kissed them — but reverently — as a believer may kiss a shrine. In that moment to Flamen she was sacred; in that moment he could no more have hurt her with passion than he could have hurt her with a blow.

  It was an emotion with him, and did not endure. But whilst it lasted, it was true.

  CHAPTER XVII.

  Then he took her to dine at one of the wooden cafés under the trees. There was a little sheet of water in front of it and a gay garden around. There was a balcony and a wooden stairway; there were long trellised arbors, and little white tables, and great rosebushes like her own at home. They had an arbor all to themselves; a cool sweet-smelling bower of green, with a glimpse of scarlet from the flowers of some twisting beans.

  They had a meal, the like of which she had never seen; such a huge melon in the centre of it, and curious wines, and coffee or cream in silver pots, or what looked like silver to her— “just like the altar-vases in the church,” she said to herself.

  “If only the Varnhart children were here!” she cried; but he did not echo the wish.

  It was just sunset. There was a golden glow on the little bit of water. On the other side of the garden some one was playing a guitar. Under a lime-tree some girls were swinging, crying, Higher! higher! at each toss.

  In a longer avenue of trellised green, at a long table, there was a noisy party of students and girls of the city; their laughter was mellowed by distance as it came over the breadth of the garden, and they sang, with fresh shrill Flemish voices, songs from an opera bouffe of La Monnaie.

  It was all pretty, and gay, and pleasant.

  There was everywhere about an air of light-hearted enjoyment. Bébée sat with a wondering look in her wide-opened eyes, and all the natural instincts of her youth, that were like curled-up fruit buds in her, unclosed softly to the light of joy.

  “Is life always like this in your Rubes’ land?” she asked him; that vague far-away country of which she never asked him anything more definite, and which yet was so clear before her fancy.

  “Yes,” he made answer to her. “Only — instead of those leaves, flowers and pomegranates; and in lieu of that tinkling guitar, a voice whose notes are esteemed like king’s jewels; and in place of those little green arbors, great white palaces, cool and still, with ilex woods and orange groves and sapphire seas beyond them. Would you like to come there, Bébée? — and wear laces such as you weave, and hear singing and laughter all night long, and never work any more in the mould of the garden, or spin any more at that tiresome wheel, or go any more out in the wind, and the rain, and the winter mud to the market?”

  Bébée listened, leaning her round elbows on the table, and her warm cheeks on her hands, as a child gravely listens to a fairy story. But the sumptuous picture, and the sensuous phrase he had chosen, passed by her.

  It is of no use to tempt the little chaffinch of the woods with a ruby instead of a cherry. The bird is made to feed on the brown berries, on the morning dews, on the scarlet hips of roses, and the blossoms of the wind-tossed pear boughs; the gem, though it be a monarch’s, will only strike hard and tasteless on its beak.

  “I would like to see it all,” said Bébée, musingly trying to follow out her thoughts. “But as for the garden work and the spinning — that I do not want to leave, because I have done it all my life; and I do not think I should care to wear lace — it would tear very soon; one would be afraid to run; and do you see I know how it is made — all that lace. I know how blind the eyes get over it, and how the hearts ache; I know how the old women starve, and the little children cry; I know that there is not a sprig of it that is not stitched with pain; the great ladies do not think, I dare say, because they have never worked at it or watched the others: but I have. And so, you see, I think if I wore it I should feel sad, and if a nail caught on it I should feel as if it were tearing the flesh of my friends. Perhaps I say it badly; but that is what I feel.”

  “You do not say it badly — you speak well, for you speak from the heart,” he answered her, and felt a tinge of shame that he had tempted her with the
gold and purple of a baser world than any that she knew.

  “And yet you want to see new lands?” he pursued. “What is it you want to see there?”

  “Ah, quite other things than these,” cried Bébée, still leaning her cheeks on her hands. “That dancing and singing is very pretty and merry, but it is just as good when old Claude fiddles and the children skip. This wine, you tell me, is something very great; but fresh milk is much nicer, I think. It is not these kind of things I want — I want to know all about the people who lived before us; I want to know what the stars are, and what the wind is; I want to know where the lark goes when you lose him out of sight against the sun; I want to know how the old artists got to see God, that they could paint him and all his angels as they have done; I want to know how the voices got into the bells, and how they can make one’s heart beat, hanging up there as they do, all alone among the jackdaws; I want to know what it is when I walk in the fields in the morning, and it is all gray and soft and still, and the corn-crake cries in the wheat, and the little mice run home to their holes, that makes me so glad and yet so sorrowful, as if I were so very near God, and yet so all alone, and such a little thing; because you see the mouse she has her hole, and the crake her own people, but I—”

  Her voice faltered a little and stopped: she had never before thought out into words her own loneliness; from the long green arbor the voices of the girls and the students sang, —

  “Ah! le doux son d’un baiser tendre!”

  Flamen was silent. The poet in him — and in an artist there is always more or less of the poet — kept him back from ridicule, nay, moved him to pity and respect.

  They were absurdly simple words no doubt, had little wisdom in them, and were quite childish in their utterance, and yet they moved him curiously as a man very base and callous may at times be moved by the look in a dying deer’s eyes, or by the sound of a song that some lost love once sang.

  He rose and drew her hands away, and took her small face between his own hands instead.

  “Poor little Bébée!” he said gently, looking down on her with a breath that was almost a sigh. “Poor little Bébée! — to envy the corncrake and the mouse!”

  She was a little startled; her cheeks grew very warm under his touch, but her eyes looked still into his without fear.

  He stooped and touched her forehead with his lips, gently and without passion, almost reverently; she grew rose-hued as the bright bean-flowers, up to the light gold ripples of her hair; she trembled a little and drew back, but she was not alarmed nor yet ashamed; she was too simple of heart to feel the fear that is born of passion and of consciousness.

  It was as Jeannot kissed his sister Marie, who was fifteen years old and sold milk for the Krebs people in the villages with a little green cart and a yellow dog — no more.

  And yet the sunny arbor leaves and the glimpse of the blue sky swam round her indistinctly, and the sounds of the guitar grew dull upon her ear and were lost as in a rushing hiss of water, because of the great sudden unintelligible happiness that seemed to bear her little life away on it as a sea wave bears a young child off its feet.

  “You do not feel alone now, Bébée?” he whispered to her.

  “No!” she answered him softly under her breath, and sat still, while all her body quivered like a leaf.

  No; how could she ever be alone now that this sweet, soft, unutterable touch would always be in memory upon her; how could she wish ever again now to be the corn-crake in the summer corn or the gray mouse in the hedge of hawthorn?

  At that moment a student went by past the entrance of the arbor; he had a sash round his loins and a paper feather in his cap; he was playing a fife and dancing; he glanced in as he went.

  “It is time to go home, Bébée,” said Flamen.

  CHAPTER XVIII.

  So it came to pass that Bébée’s day in the big forest came and went as simply almost as any day that she had played away with the Varnhart children under the beech shadows of Cambre woods.

  And when he took her to her hut at sunset before the pilgrims had returned there was a great bewildered tumult of happiness in her heart, but there was no memory with her that prevented her from looking at the shrine in the wall as she passed it, and saying with a quick gesture of the cross on brow and bosom, —

  “Ah, dear Holy Mother, how good you have been! and I am back again, you see, and I will work harder than ever because of all this joy that you have given me.”

  And she took another moss-rose and changed it for that of the morning, which was faded, and said to Flamen. —

  “Look — she sends you this. Now do you know what I mean? One is more content when She is content.”

  He did not answer, but he held her hands against him a moment as they fastened in the rose bud.

  “Not a word to the pilgrims, Bébée — you remember?”

  “Yes, I will remember. I do not tell them every time I pray — it will be like being silent about that — it will be no more wrong than that.”

  But there was a touch of anxiety in the words; she was not quite certain; she wanted to be reassured. Instinct moved her not to speak of him; but habit made it seem wrong to her to have any secret from the people who had been about her from her birth.

  He did not reassure her; her anxiety was pretty to watch, and he left the trouble in her heart like a bee in the chalice of a lily. Besides, the little wicket gate was between them; he was musing whether he would push it open once more.

  Her fate was in the balance, though she did not dream it: he had dealt with her tenderly, honestly, sacredly all that day — almost as much so as stupid Jeannot could have done. He had been touched by her trust in him, and by the unconscious beauty of her fancies, into a mood that was unlike all his life and habits. But after all, he said to himself —

  After all! —

  Where he stood in the golden evening he saw the rosy curled mouth, the soft troubled eves, the little brown hands that still tried to fasten the rosebud, the young peach-like skin where the wind stirred the bodice; — she was only a little Flemish peasant, this poor little Bébée, a little thing of the fields and the streets, for all the dreams of God that abode with her. After all — soon or late — the end would be always the same. What matter!

  She would weep a little to-morrow, and she would not kneel any more at the shrine in the garden wall; and then — and then — she would stay here and marry the good boor Jeannot, just the same after a while; or drift away after him to Paris, and leave her two little wooden shoes, and her visions of Christ in the fields at evening, behind her forevermore, and do as all the others did, and take not only silken stockings but the Cinderella slipper that is called Gold, which brings all other good things in its train; — what matter!

  He had meant this from the first, because she was so pretty, and those little wooden sabots ran so lithely over the stones; though he was not in love with her, but only idly stretched his hand for her as a child by instinct stretches to a fruit that hangs in the sun a little rosier and a little nearer than the rest.

  What matter — he said to himself — she loved him, poor little soul, though she did not know it; and there would always be Jeannot glad enough of a handful of bright French gold.

  He pushed the gate gently against her; her hands fastened the rosebud and drew open the latch themselves.

  “Will you come in a little?” she said, with the happy light in her face. “You must not stay long, because the flowers must be watered, and then there are Annémie’s patterns — they must be done or she will have no money and so no food — but if you would come in for a little? And see, if you wait a minute I will show you the roses that I shall cut to-morrow the first thing, and take down to St. Guido to Our Lady’s altar in thank-offering for to-day. I should like you to choose them — you yourself — and if you would just touch them I should feel as if you gave them to her too. Will you?”

  She spoke with the pretty outspoken frankness of her habitual speech, just tempered
and broken with the happy, timid hesitation, the curious sense at once of closer nearness and of greater distance, that had come on her since he had kissed her among the bright beanflowers.

  He turned from her quickly.

  “No, dear, no. Gather your roses alone, Bébée; if I touch them their leaves will fall.”

  Then, with a hurriedly backward glance down the dusky lane to see that none were looking, he bent his head and kissed her again quickly and with a sort of shame, and swung the gate behind him and went away through the boughs and the shadows.

  CHAPTER XIX.

  Bébée looked after him wistfully till his figure was lost in the gloom.

  The village was very quiet; a dog barking afar off and a cow lowing in the meadow were the only living things that made their presence heard; the pilgrims had not returned.

  She leaned on the gate a few minutes in that indistinct, dreamy happiness which is the prerogative of innocent love.

  “How wonderful it is that he should give a thought to me!” she said again and again to herself. It was as if a king had stooped for a little knot of daisied grass to set it in his crown where the great diamonds should be.

  She did not reason. She did not question. She did not look beyond that hour — such is the privilege of youth.

  “How I will read! How I will learn! How wise I will try to be; and how good, if I can!” she thought, swaying the little gate lightly under her weight, and looking with glad eyes at the goats as they frisked with their young in the pasture on the other side of the big trees, whilst one by one the stars came out, and an owl hooted from the palace woods, and the frogs croaked good-nights in the rushes.

  Then, like a little day laborer as she was, with the habit of toil and the need of the poor upon her from her birth up, she shut down the latch of the gate, kissed it where his hand had rested, and went to the well to draw its nightly draught for the dry garden.

  “Oh, dear roses!” she said to them as she rained the silvery showers over their nodding heads. “Oh, dear roses! — tell me — was ever anybody so happy as I am? Oh, if you say ‘yes’ I shall tell you you lie; silly flowers that were only born yesterday!”