by Ouida
All her pretty dreams were dead.
She never heard any story in the robin’s song, or saw any promise in the sunset clouds, or fancied that angels came about her in the night — never now.
The fields were gray and sad; the birds were little brown things; the stars were cold and far off; the people she had used to care for were like mere shadows that went by her meaningless and without interest, and all she thought of was the one step that never came: all she wanted was the one touch she never felt.
“You have done wrong, Bébée, and you will not own it,” said the few neighbors who ever spoke to her.
Bébée looked at them with wistful, uncomprehending eyes.
“I have done no wrong,” she said gently, but no one believed her.
A girl did not shut herself up and wane pale and thin for nothing, so they reasoned. She might have sinned as she had liked if she had been sensible after it, and married Jeannot.
But to fret mutely, and shut her lips, and seem as though she had done nothing, — that was guilt indeed.
For her village, in its small way, thought as the big world thinks.
CHAPTER XXIV.
Full winter came.
The snow was deep, and the winds drove the people with whips of ice along the dreary country roads and the steep streets of the city. The bells of the dogs and the mules sounded sadly through the white misty silence of the Flemish plains, and the weary horses slipped and fell on the frozen ruts and on the jagged stones in the little frost-shut Flemish towns. Still the Flemish folk were gay enough in many places.
There were fairs and kermesses; there were puppet plays and church feasts; there were sledges on the plains and skates on the canals; there were warm woollen hoods and ruddy wood fires; there were tales of demons and saints, and bowls of hot onion soup; sugar images for the little children, and blessed beads for the maidens clasped on rosy throats with lovers’ kisses; and in the city itself there was the high tide of the winter pomp and mirth, with festal scenes in the churches, and balls at the palaces, and all manner of gay things in toys and jewels, and music playing cheerily under the leafless trees, and flashes of scarlet cloth, and shining furs, and happy faces, and golden curls, in the carriages that climbed the Montagne de la Cour, and filled the big place around the statue of stout Godfrey.
In the little village above St. Guido, Bébée’s neighbors were merry too, in their simple way.
The women worked away wearily at their lace in the dim winter light, and made a wretched living by it, but all the same they got penny playthings for their babies, and a bit of cake for their Sunday-hearth. They drew together in homely and cordial friendship, and of an afternoon when dusk fell wove their lace in company in Mère Krebs’s mill-house kitchen with the children and the dogs at their feet on the bricks, so that one big fire might serve for all, and all be lighted with one big rush candle, and all be beguiled by chit-chat and songs, stories of spirits, and whispers of ghosts, and now and then when the wind howled at its worst, a paternoster or two said in common for the men toiling in the barges or drifting up the Scheldt.
In these gatherings Bébée’s face was missed, and the blithe soft sound of her voice, like a young thrush singing, was never heard.
The people looked in, and saw her sitting over a great open book; often her hearth had no fire.
Then the children grew tired of asking her to play; and their elders began to shake their heads; she was so pale and so quiet, there must be some evil in it — so they began to think.
Little by little people dropped away from her. Who knew, the gossips said, what shame or sin the child might not have on her sick little soul?
True, Bébée worked hard just the same, and just the same was seen trudging to and fro in the dusk of dawns and afternoons in her two little wooden shoes. She was gentle and laborious, and gave the children her goat’s milk, and the old women the brambles of her garden.
But they grew afraid of her — afraid of that sad, changeless, far-away look in her eves, and of the mute weariness that was on her — and, being perplexed, were sure, like all ignorant creatures, that what was secret must be also vile.
So they hung aloof, and let her alone, and by and by scarcely nodded as they passed her but said to Jeannot, —
“You were spared a bad thing, lad: the child was that grand painter’s light-o’-love, that is plain to see. The mischief all comes of the stuff old Antoine filled her head with — a stray little by-blow of chickweed that he cockered up like a rare carnation. Oh! do not fly in a rage, Jeannot; the child is no good, and would have made an honest man rue. Take heart of grace, and praise the saints, and marry Katto’s Lisa.”
But Jeannot would never listen to the slanderers, and would never look at Lisa, even though the door of the little hut was always closed against him; and whenever he met Bébée on the highway she never seemed to see him more than she saw the snow that her sabots were treading.
One night in the midwinter-time old Annémie died.
Bébée found her in the twilight with her head against the garret window, and her left side all shrivelled and useless. She had a little sense left, and a few fleeting breaths to draw.
“Look for the brig,” she muttered. “You will not see the flag at the masthead for the fog to-night; but his socks are dry and his pipe is ready. Keep looking — keep looking — she will be in port to-night.”
But her dead sailor never came into port; she went to him. The poor, weakened, faithful old body of her was laid in the graveyard of the poor, and the ships came and went under the empty garret window, and Bébée was all alone.
She had no more anything to work for, or any bond with the lives of others. She could live on the roots of her garden and the sale of her hens’ eggs, and she could change the turnips and carrots that grew in a little strip of her ground for the quantity of bread that she needed.
So she gave herself up to the books, and drew herself more and more within from the outer world. She did not know that the neighbors thought very evil of her; she had only one idea in her mind — to be more worthy of him against he should return.
The winter passed away somehow, she did not know how.
It was a long, cold, white blank of frozen silence: that was all. She studied hard, and had got a quaint, strange, deep, scattered knowledge out of her old books; her face had lost all its roundness and color, but, instead, the forehead had gained breadth and the eyes had the dim fire of a student’s.
Every night when she shut her volumes she thought, —
“I am a little nearer him. I know a little more.”
Just so every morning, when she bathed her hands in the chilly water, she thought to herself, “I will make my skin as soft as I can for him, that it may be like the ladies’ he has loved.”
Love to be perfect must be a religion, as well as a passion. Bébée’s was so. Like George Herbert’s serving-maiden, she swept no specks of dirt away from a floor without doing it to the service of her lord.
Only Bébée’s lord was a king of earth, made of earth’s dust and vanities.
But what did she know of that?
CHAPTER XXV.
The winter went by, and the snow-drops and crocus and pale hepatica smiled at her from the black clods. Every other springtime Bébée had run with fleet feet under the budding trees down into the city, and had sold sweet little wet bunches of violets and brier before all the snow was melted from the eaves of the Broodhuis.
“The winter is gone,” the townspeople used to say; “look, there is Bébée with the flowers.”
But this year they did not see the little figure itself like a rosy crocus standing against the brown timbers of the Maison de Roi.
Bébée had not heart to pluck a single blossom of them all. She let them all live, and tended them so that the little garden should look its best and brightest to him when his hand should lift its latch.
Only he was so long coming — so very long; the violets died away, and the first rosebuds
came in their stead, and still Bébée looked every dawn and every nightfall vainly down the empty road.
Nothing kills young creatures like the bitterness of waiting.
Pain they will bear, and privation they will pass through, fire and water and storm will not appall them, nor wrath of heaven and earth, but waiting — the long, tedious, sickly, friendless days, that drop one by one in their eternal sameness into the weary past, these kill slowly but surely, as the slow dropping of water frets away rock.
The summer came.
Nearly a year had gone by. Bébée worked early and late. The garden bloomed like one big rose, and the neighbors shook their heads to see the flowers blossom and fall without bringing in a single coin.
She herself spoke less seldom than ever; and now when old Jehan, who never had understood the evil thoughts of his neighbors, asked her what ailed her that she looked so pale and never stirred down to the city, now her courage failed her, and the tears brimmed over her eyes, and she could not call up a brave brief word to answer him. For the time was so long, and she was so tired.
Still she never doubted that her lover would comeback: he had said he would come: she was as sure that he would come as she was sure that God came in the midst of the people when the silver bell rang and the Host was borne by on high.
Bébée did not heed much, but she vaguely-felt the isolation she was left in: as a child too young to reason feels cold and feels hunger.
“No one wants me here now that Annémie is gone,” she thought to herself, as the sweet green spring days unfolded themselves one by one like the buds of the brier-rose hedges.
And now and then even the loyal little soul of her gave way, and sobbing on her lonely bed in the long dark nights, she would cry out against him, “Oh, why not have left me alone? I was so happy — so happy!”
And then she would reproach herself with treason to him and ingratitude, and hate herself and feel guilty in her own sight to have thus sinned against him in thought for one single instant.
For there are natures in which the generosity of love is so strong that it feels its own just pain to be disloyalty; and Bébée’s was one of them. And if he had killed her she would have died hoping only that no moan had escaped her under the blow that ever could accuse him.
These natures, utterly innocent by force of self-accusation and self-abasement, suffer at once the torment of the victim and the criminal.
CHAPTER XXVI.
One day in the May weather she sat within doors with a great book upon her table, but no sight for it in her aching eyes. The starling hopped to and fro on the sunny floor; the bees boomed in the porch; the tinkle of sheep’s bells came in on the stillness. All was peaceful and happy except the little weary, breaking, desolate heart that beat in her like a caged bird’s.
“He will come; I am sure he will come,” she said to herself; but she was so tired, and it was so long — oh, dear God! — so very long.
A hand tapped at the lattice. The shrill voice of Reine, the sabot-maker’s wife, broken with anguish, called through the hanging ivy, —
“Bébée, you are a wicked one, they say, but the only one there is at home in the village this day. Get you to town for the love of Heaven, and send Doctor Max hither, for my pet, my flower, my child lies dying, and not a soul near, and she black as a coal with choking — go, go, go! — and Mary will forgive you your sins. Save the little one, dear Bébée, do you hear? and I will pray God and speak fair the neighbors for you. Go!”
Bébée rose up, startled by the now unfamiliar sound of a human voice, and looked at the breathless mother with eyes of pitying wonder.
“Surely I will go,” she said, gently; “but there is no need to bribe me.
I have not sinned greatly — that I know.”
Then she went out quickly and ran through the lanes and into the city for the sick child, and found the wise man, and sent him, and did the errand rather in a sort of sorrowful sympathetic instinct than in any reasoning consciousness of doing good.
When she was moving through the once familiar and happy ways as the sun was setting on the golden fronts of the old houses, and the chimes were ringing from the many towers, a strange sense of unreality, of non-existence, fell upon her.
Could it be she? — she indeed — who had gone there the year before the gladdest thing that the earth bore, with no care except to shelter her flowers from the wind, and keep the freshest blossoms for the burgomaster’s housewife?
She did not think thus to herself; but a vague doubt that she could ever have been the little gay, laborious, happy Bébée, with troops of friends and endless joys for every day that dawned, came over her as she went by the black front of the Broodhuis.
The strong voice of Lisa, the fruit girl, jarred on her as she passed the stall under its yellow awning that was flapping sullenly in the evening wind.
“Oh hé, little fool,” the mocking voice cried, “the rind of the fine pine is full of prickles, and stings the lips when the taste is gone? — to be sure — crack common nuts like me and you are never wanting — hazels grow free in every copse. Prut, tut! your grand lover lies a-dying; so the students read out of this just now; and you such a simpleton as not to get a roll of napoleons out of him before he went to rot in Paris. I dare say he was poor as sparrows, if one knew the truth. He was only a painter after all.”
Lisa tossed her as she spoke a torn sheet, in which she was wrapping gentians: it was a piece of newspaper some three weeks old, and in it there was a single line or so which said that the artist Flamen, whose Gretchen was the wonder of the Salon of the year, lay sick unto death in his rooms in Paris.
Bébée stood and read; the strong ruddy western light upon the type, the taunting laughter of the fruit girl on her ear.
A bitter shriek rang from her that made even the cruelty of Lisa’s mirth stop in a sudden terror.
She stood staring like a thing changed to stone down on the one name that to her rilled all the universe.
“Ill — he is ill — do you hear?” she echoed piteously, looking at Lisa; “and you say he is poor?”
“Poor? for sure! is he not a painter?” said the fruit girl, roughly. She judged by her own penniless student lads; and she was angered with herself for feeling sorrow for this little silly thing that she had loved to torture.
“You have been bad and base to me; but now — I bless you, I love you, I will pray for you,” said Bébée, in a swift broken breath, and with a look upon her face that startled into pain her callous enemy.
Then without another word, she thrust the paper in her bosom, and ran out of the square breathless with haste and with a great resolve.
He was ill — and he was poor! The brave little soul of her leaped at once to action. He was sick, and far away; and poor they said. All danger and all difficulty faded to nothing before the vision of his need.
Bébée was only a little foundling who ran about in wooden shoes; but she had the “dog’s soul” in her — the soul that will follow faithfully though to receive a curse, that will defend loyally though to meet a blow, and that will die mutely loving to the last.
She went home, how she never knew; and without the delay of a moment packed up a change of linen, and fed the fowls and took the key of the hut down to old Jehan’s cabin. The old man was only half-witted by reason of his affliction for his dead daughter, but he was shrewd enough to understand what she wanted of him, and honest enough to do it.
“I am going into the city,” she said to him: “and if I am not back to-night, will you feed the starling and the hens, and water the flowers for me?”
Old Jehan put his head out of his lattice: it was seven in the evening, and he was going to bed.
“What are you after, little one?” he asked: going to show the fine buckles at a students’ ball? Nay, fie; that is not like you.”
“I am going to — pray — dear Jehan,” she answered, with a sob in her throat and the first falsehood she ever had told. “Do what I ask you —
do for your dead daughter’s sake — or the birds and the flowers will die of hunger and thirst. Take the key and promise me.”
He took the key, and promised.
“Do not let them see those buckles shine; they will rob you,” he added.
Bébée ran from him fast; every moment that was lost was so precious and so terrible. To pause a second for fear’s sake never occurred to her. She went forth as fearlessly as a young swallow, born in northern April days, flies forth on instinct to new lands and over unknown seas when autumn falls.
Necessity and action breathed new life into her. The hardy and brave peasant ways of her were awoke once more. She had been strong to wait silently with the young life in her dying out drop by drop in the heart-sickness of long delay. She was strong now to throw herself into strange countries and dim perils and immeasurable miseries, on the sole chance that she might be of service to him.
A few human souls here and there can love like dogs. Bébée’s was one.
CHAPTER XXVII.
It was dark. The May days are short in the north lands of the Scheldt.
She had her little winter cloak of frieze and her wooden shoes and her little white cap with the sunny curls rippling out of it in their pretty rebellion. She had her little lantern too; and her bundle, and she had put a few fresh eggs in her basket, with some sweet herbs and the palm-sheaf that Father Francis had blessed last Easter; for who could tell, she thought, how ill he might not be, or how poor?
She hardly gave a look to the hut as she ran by its garden gate; all her heart was on in front, in the vague far-off country where he lay sick unto death.
She ran fast through the familiar lanes into the city. She was not very sure where Paris was, but she had the name clear and firm, and she knew that people were always coming and going thence and thither, so that she had no fear she should not find it.