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Her little muslin cap blew back like the wings of a white butterfly. Her sunny hair caught the last sun-rays. Her feet were fair in the brown wooden shoes. Under the short woollen skirts the grace of her pretty limbs moved freely. Her broad silver clasps shone like a shield, and she was utterly unconscious that any one looked; she was simply and gravely intent on reaching St. Gudule to say her one prayer and not keep the children waiting.
Some one leaning idly over a balcony in the street that is named after Mary of Burgundy saw her going thus. He left the balcony and went down his stairs and followed her.
The sun-dazzle on the silver had first caught his sight; and then he had looked downward at the pretty feet.
These are the chances women call Fate.
Bébée entered the cathedral. It was quite empty. Far away at the west end there was an old custodian asleep on a bench, and a woman kneeling. That was all.
Bébée made her salutations to the high altar, and stole on into the chapel of the Saint Sacrament; it was the one that she loved best.
She said her prayer and thanked the saints for all their gifts and goodness, her clasped hand against her silver shield, her basket on the pavement by her, abovehead the sunset rays streaming purple and crimson and golden through the painted windows that are the wonder of the world.
When her prayer was done she still kneeled there; her head thrown back to watch the light, her hands clasped still, and on her upturned face the look that made the people say, "What does she see?—the angels or the dead?"
She forgot everything. She forgot the cherries at home, and the children even. She was looking upward at the stories of the painted panes; she was listening to the message of the dying sun-rays; she was feeling vaguely, wistfully, unutterably the tender beauty of the sacred place and the awful wonder of the world in which she with her sixteen years was all alone, like a little blue corn-flower among the wheat that goes for grist and the barley that makes men drunk.
For she was alone, though she had so many friends. Quite alone sometimes; for God had been cruel to her, and had made her a lark without song.
When the sun faded and the beautiful casements lost all glow and meaning, Bébée rose with a startled look—had she been dreaming?—was it night?—would the children be sorry, and go supperless to bed?
"Have you a rosebud left to sell to me?" a man's voice said not far off; it was low and sweet, as became the Sacrament Chapel.
Bébée looked up; she did not quite know what she saw: only dark eyes smiling into hers.
By the instinct of habit she sought in her basket and found three moss-roses. She held them out to him.
"I do not sell flowers here, but I will give them to you," she said, in her pretty grave childish fashion.
"I often want flowers," said the stranger, as he took the buds. "Where do you sell yours?—in the market?"
"In the Grande Place."
"Will you tell me your name, pretty one?"
"I am Bébée."
There were people coming into the church. The bells were booming abovehead for vespers. There was a shuffle of chairs and a stir of feet. Boys in white went to and fro, lighting the candles. Great clouds of shadow drifted up into the roof and hid the angels.
She nodded her little head to him.
"Good night; I cannot stay. I have a cake at home to-night, and the children are waiting."
"Ah! that is important, no doubt, indeed. Will you buy some more cakes for the children from me?"
He slid a gold piece in her hand. She looked at it in amaze. In the green lanes by Laeken no one ever saw gold. Then she gave it him back.
"I will not take money in church, nor anywhere, except what the flowers are worth. Good night."
He followed her, and held back the heavy oak door for her, and went out into the air with her.
It was dark already, but in the square there was still the cool bright primrose-colored evening light.
Bébée's wooden shoes went pattering down the sloping and uneven stones. Her little gray figure ran quickly through the deep shade cast from the towers and walls. Her dreams had drifted away. She was thinking of the children and the cake.
"You are in such a hurry because of the cake?" said her new customer, as he followed her.
Bébée looked back at him with a smile in her blue eyes.
"Yes, they will be waiting, you know, and there are cherries too."
"It is a grand day with you, then?"
"It is my fête day: I am sixteen."
She was proud of this. She told it to the very dogs in the street.
"Ah, you feel old, I dare say?"
"Oh, quite old! They cannot call me a child any more."
"Of course not, it would be ridiculous. Are those presents in your basket?"
"Yes, every one of them." She paused a moment to lift the dead vine-leaves, and show him the beautiful shining red shoes. "Look! old Gringoire gave me these. I shall wear them at mass next Sunday. I never had a pair of shoes in my life."
"But how will you wear shoes without stockings?"
It was a snake cast into her Eden.
She had never thought of it.
"Perhaps I can save money and buy some," she answered after a sad little pause. "But that I could not do till next year. They would cost several francs, I suppose."
"Unless a good fairy gives them to you?"
Bébée smiled; fairies were real things to her—relations indeed. She did not imagine that he spoke in jest.
"Sometimes I pray very much and things come," she said softly. "When the Gloire de Dijon was cut back too soon one summer, and never blossomed, and we all thought it was dead, I prayed all day long for it, and never thought of anything else; and by autumn it was all in new leaf, and now its flowers are finer than ever."
"But you watered it whilst you prayed, I suppose?"
The sarcasm escaped her.
She was wondering to herself whether it would be vain and wicked to pray for a pair of stockings: she thought she would go and ask Father Francis.
By this time they were in the Rue Royale, and half-way down it. The lamps were lighted. A regiment was marching up it with a band playing. The windows were open, and people were laughing and singing in some of them. The light caught the white and gilded fronts of the houses. The pleasure-seeking crowds loitered along in the warmth of the evening.
Bébée, suddenly roused from her thoughts by the loud challenge of the military music, looked round on the stranger, and motioned him back.
"Sir,—I do not know you,—why should you come with me? Do not do it, please. You make me talk, and that makes me late."
And she pushed her basket farther on her arm, and nodded to him and ran off—as fleetly as a hare through fern—among the press of the people.
"To-morrow, little one," he answered her with a careless smile, and let her go unpursued. Above, from the open casement of a café, some young men and some painted women leaned out, and threw sweetmeats at him, as in carnival time.
"A new model,—that pretty peasant?" they asked him.
He laughed in answer, and went up the steps to join them; he dropped the moss-roses as he went, and trod on them, and did not wait.
CHAPTER IV
Bébée ran home as fast as her feet would take her.
The children were all gathered about her gate in the dusky dewy evening; they met her with shouts of welcome and reproach intermingled; they had been watching for her since first the sun had grown low and red, and now the moon was risen.
But they forgave her when they saw the splendor of her presents, and she showered out among them Père Melchior's horn of comfits.
They dashed into the hut; they dragged the one little table out among the flowers; the cherries and cake were spread on it; and the miller's wife had given a big jug of milk, and Father Francis himself had sent some honeycomb.
The early roses were full of scent in the dew; the great gillyflowers breathed\out fragrance in the dusk; the goat came and nibbled the sweetbrier unrebuked; the children repeated the Flemish bread-grace, with clasped hands and reverent eyes, "Oh, dear little Jesus, come and sup with us, and bring your beautiful Mother, too; we will not forget you are God." Then, that said, they ate, and drank, and laughed, and picked cherries from each other's mouths like little blackbirds; the big white dog gnawed a crust at their feet; old Krebs who had a fiddle, and could play it, came out and trilled them rude and ready Flemish tunes, such as Teniers or Mieris might have jumped to before an alehouse at the Kermesse; Bébée and the children joined hands, and danced round together in the broad white moonlight, on the grass by the water-side; the idlers came and sat about, the women netting or spinning, and the men smoking a pipe before bedtime; the rough hearty Flemish bubbled like a brook in gossip, or rung like a horn over a jest; Bébée and the children, tired of their play, grew quiet, and chanted together the "Ave Maria Stella Virginis"; a nightingale among the willows sang to the sleeping swans.
All was happy, quiet, homely; lovely also in its simple way.
They went early to their beds, as people must do who rise at dawn.
Bébée leaned out a moment from her own little casement ere she too went to rest.
Through an open lattice there sounded the murmur of some little child's prayer; the wind sighed among the willows; the nightingales sang on in the dark—all was still.
Hard work awaited her on the morrow, and on all the other days of the year.
She was only a little peasant—she must sweep, and spin, and dig, and delve, to get daily her bit of black bread,—but that night she was as happy as a little princess in a fairy tale; happy in her playmates, in her flowers, in her sixteen years, in her red shoes, in her silver buckles, because she was half a woman; happy in the dewy leaves, in the singing birds, in the hush of the night, in the sense of rest, in the fragrance of flowers, in the drifting changes of moon and cloud; happy because she was half a woman, because she was half a poet, because she was wholly a poet.
"Oh, dear swans, how good it is to be sixteen!—how good it is to live at all!—do you not tell the willows so?" said Bébée to the gleam of silver under the dark leaves by the water's side, which showed her where her friends were sleeping, with their snowy wings closed over their stately heads, and the veiled gold and ruby of their eyes.
The swans did not awake to answer.
Only the nightingale answered from the willows, with Desdemona's song.
But Bébée had never heard of Desdemona, and the willows had no sigh for her.
"Good night!" she said, softly, to all the green dewy sleeping world, and then she lay down and slept herself.—The nightingale sang on, and the willows trembled.
CHAPTER V
"If I could save a centime a day, I could buy a pair of stockings this time next year," thought Bébée, locking her shoes with her other treasures in her drawer the next morning, and taking her broom and pail to wash down her little palace.
But a centime a day is a great deal in Brabant, when one has not always enough for bare bread, and when, in the long chill winter, one must weave thread lace all through the short daylight for next to nothing at all; for there are so many women in Brabant, and every one of them, young or old, can make lace, and if one do not like the pitiful wage, one may leave it and go and die, for what the master lacemakers care or know; there will always be enough, many more than enough, to twist the thread round the bobbins, and weave the bridal veils, and the trains for the courts.
"And besides, if I can save a centime, the Varnhart children ought to have it," thought Bébée, as she swept the dust together. It was so selfish of her to be dreaming about a pair of stockings, when those little things often went for days on a stew of nettles.
So she looked at her own pretty feet,—pretty and slender, and arched, rosy, and fair, and uncramped by the pressure of leather,—and resigned her day-dream with a brave heart, as she put up her broom and went out to weed, and hoe, and trim, and prune the garden that had been for once neglected the night before.
"One could not move half so easily in stockings," she thought with true philosophy as she worked among the black, fresh, sweet-smelling mould, and kissed a rose now and then as she passed one.
When she got into the city that day, her rush-bottomed chair, which was always left upside down in case rain should fall in the night, was set ready for her, and on its seat was a gay, gilded box, such as rich people give away full of bonbons.
Bébée stood and looked from the box to the Broodhuis, from the Broodhuis to the box; she glanced around, but no one had come there so early as she, except the tinker, who was busy quarrelling with his wife and letting his smelting fire burn a hole in his breeches.
"The box was certainly for her, since it was set upon her chair?"—Bébée pondered a moment; then little by little opened the lid.
Within, on a nest of rose-satin, were two pair of silk stockings!—real silk!—with the prettiest clocks worked up their sides in color!
Bébée gave a little scream, and stood still, the blood hot in her cheeks; no one heard her, the tinker's wife, who alone was near, having just wished Heaven to send a judgment on her husband, was busy putting out his smoking smallclothes. It is a way that women and wives have, and they never see the bathos of it.
The place filled gradually.
The customary crowds gathered. The business of the day began underneath the multitudinous tones of the chiming bells. Bébée's business began too; she put the box behind her with a beating heart, and tied up her flowers.
It was the fairies, of course! but they had never set a rush-bottomed chair on its legs before, and this action of theirs frightened her.
It was rather an empty morning. She sold little, and there was the more time to think.
About an hour after noon a voice addressed her,—
"Have you more moss-roses for me?"
Bébée looked up with a smile, and found some. It was her companion of the cathedral. She had thought much of the red shoes and the silver clasps, but she had thought nothing at all of him.
"You are not too proud to be paid to-day?" he said, giving her a silver franc; he would not alarm her with any more gold; she thanked him, and slipped it in her little leathern pouch, and went on sorting some clove-pinks.
"You do not seem to remember me?" he said, with a little sadness.
"Oh, I remember you," said Bébée, lifting her frank eyes. "But you know I speak to so many people, and they are all nothing to me."
"Who is anything to you?" It was softly and insidiously spoken, but it awoke no echo.
"Varnhart's children," she answered him, instantly. "And old Annémie by the wharfside—and Tambour—and Antoine's grave—and the starling—and, of course, above all, the flowers."
"And the fairies, I suppose?—though they do nothing for you."
She looked at him eagerly,—
"They have done something to-day. I have found a box, and some stockings—such beautiful stockings! Silk ones! Is it not very odd?"
"It is more odd they should have forgotten you so long. May I see them?"
"I cannot show them to you now. Those ladies are going to buy. But you can see them later—if you wait."
"I will wait and paint the Broodhuis."
"So many people do that; you are a painter then?"
"Yes—in a way."
He sat down on an edge of the stall, and spread his things there, and sketched, whilst the traffic went on around them. He was very many years older than she; handsome, with a dark, and changeful, and listless face; he wore brown velvet, and had a red ribbon at his throat; he looked a little as Egmont might have done when wooing Claire.
Bébée, as she sold the flowers and took the change fifty times in the hour, glanced at him now and then, and watched the movements of his hands, she could not have told why.
Always among men and women, always in the crowds of the streets, people were nothing to her; she went through them as through a field of standing corn,—only in the field she would have tarried for poppies, and in the town she tarried for no one.
She dealt with men as with women, simply, truthfully, frankly, with the innocent fearlessness of a child. When they told her she was pretty, she smiled; it was just as they said that her flowers were sweet.
But this man's hands moved so swiftly; and as she saw her Broodhuis growing into color and form beneath them, she could not choose but look now and then, and twice she gave her change wrong.
He spoke to her rarely, and sketched on and on in rapid bold strokes the quaint graces and massive richness of the Maison du Roi.
There is no crowd so busy in Brabant that it will not find leisure to stare. The Fleming or the Walloon has nothing of the Frenchman's courtesy; he is rough and rude; he remains a peasant even when town bred, and the surly insolence of the "Gueux" is in him still. He is kindly to his fellows, though not to beasts; he is shrewd, patient, thrifty, industrious, and good in very many ways, but civil never.
A good score of them left off their occupations and clustered round the painter, staring, chattering, pushing, pointing, as though a brush had never been seen in all the land of Rubens.
Bébée, ashamed of her people, got up from her chair and rebuked them.
"Oh, men of Brussels; fie then for shame!" she called to them as clearly as a robin sings. "Did never you see a drawing before? and are there not saints and martyrs enough to look at in the galleries? and have you never some better thing to do than to gape wide-mouthed at a stranger? What laziness—ah! Just worthy of a people who sleep and smoke while their dogs work for them! Go away, all of you; look, there comes the gendarme—it will be the worse for you. Sir, sit under my stall; they will not dare trouble you then."
He moved under the awning, thanking her with a smile; and the people, laughing, shuffled unwillingly aside and let him paint on in peace. It was only little Bébée, but they had spoilt the child from her infancy, and were used to obey her.
The painter took a long time. He set about it with the bold ease of one used to all the intricacies of form and color, and he had the skill of a master. But he spent more than half the time looking idly at the humors of the populace or watching how the treasures of Bébée's garden went away one by one in the hands of strangers.
Meanwhile, ever and again, sitting on the edge of her stall, with his colors and brushes tossed out on the board, he talked to her, and, with the soft imperceptible skill of long practice in those arts, he drew out the details of her little simple life.
There were not always people to buy, and whilst she rested and sheltered the flowers from the sun, she answered him willingly, and in one of her longer rests showed him the wonderful stockings.
"Do you think it could be the fairies?" she asked him a little doubtfully.
It was easy to make her believe any fantastical nonsense; but her fairies were ethereal divinities. She could scarcely believe that they had laid that box on her chair.
"Impossible to doubt it!" he replied, unhesitatingly. "Given a belief in fairies at all, why should there be any limit to what they can do? It is the same with the saints, is it not?"
"Yes," said Bébée, thoughtfully.
The saints were mixed up in her imagination with the fairies in an intricacy that would have defied the best reasonings of Father Francis.
"Well, then, you will wear the stockings, will you not? Only, believe me, your feet are far prettier without them."
Bébée laughed happily, and took another peep in the cosy rose-satin nest.
But her little face had a certain perplexity. Suddenly she turned on him.
"Did not you put them there?"
"I?—never!"
"Are you quite sure?"
"Quite; but why ask?"
"Because," said Bébée, shutting the box resolutely and pushing it a little away,—"because I would not take it if you did. You are a stranger, and a present is a debt, so Antoine always said."
"Why take a present then from the Varnhart children, or your old friend who gave you the clasps?"
"Ah, that is very different. When people are very, very poor, equally poor, the one with the other, little presents that they save for and make with such a difficulty are just things that are a pleasure; sacrifices; like your sitting up with a sick person at night, and then she sits up with you another year when you want it. Do you not know?"
"I know you talk very prettily. But why should you not take any one else's present, though he may not be poor?"
"Because I could not return it."
"Could you not?"
The smile in his eyes dazzled her a little; it was so strange, and yet had so much light in it; but she did not understand him one whit.
"No; how could I?" she said earnestly. "If I were to save for two years, I could not get francs enough to buy anything worth giving back; and I should be so unhappy, thinking of the debt of it always. Do tell me if you put those stockings there?"
"No"; he looked at her, and the trivial lie faltered and died away; the eyes, clear as crystal, questioned him so innocently. "Well, if I did?" he said, frankly; "you wished for them; what harm was there? Will you be so cruel as to refuse them from me?"
The tears sprang into Bébée's eyes. She was sorry to lose the beautiful box, but more sorry he had lied to her.
"It was very kind and good," she said, regretfully. "But I cannot think why you should have done it, as you had never known me at all. And, indeed, I could not take them, because Antoine would not let me if he were alive; and if I gave you a flower every day all the year round I should not pay you the worth of them, it would be quite impossible; and why should you tell me falsehoods about such a thing? A falsehood is never a thing for a man."
She shut the box and pushed it towards him, and turned to the selling of her bouquets. Her voice shook a little as she tied up a bunch of mignonette and told the price of it.
Those beautiful stockings! why had she ever seen them, and why had he told her a lie?
It made her heart heavy. For the first time in her brief life the Broodhuis seemed to frown between her and the sun.
Undisturbed, he painted on and did not look at her.
The day was nearly done. The people began to scatter. The shadows grew very long. He painted, not glancing once elsewhere than at his study. Bébée's baskets were quite empty.
She rose, and lingered, and regarded him wistfully: he was angered; perhaps she had been rude? Her little heart failed her.
If he would only look up!
But he did not look up; he kept his handsome dark face studiously over the canvas of the Broodhuis. She would have seen a smile in his eyes if he had lifted them; but he never raised his lids.
Bébée hesitated: take the stockings she would not; but perhaps she had refused them too roughly. She wished so that he would look up and save her speaking first; but he knew what he was about too warily and well to help her thus.
She waited awhile, then took one little red moss-rosebud that she had saved all day in a corner of her basket, and held it out to him frankly, shyly, as a peace offering.
"Was I rude? I did not mean to be. But I cannot take the stockings; and why did you tell me that falsehood?"
He took the rosebud and rose too, and smiled; but he did not meet her eyes.
"Let us forget the whole matter; it is not worth a sou. If you do not take the box, leave it; it is of no use to me."
"I cannot take it."
She knew she was doing right. How was it that he could make her feel as though she were acting wrongly?
"Leave it then, I say. You are not the first woman, my dear, who has quarrelled with a wish fulfilled. It is a way your sex has of rewarding gods and men.—Here, you old witch, here is a treasure-trove for you. You can sell it for ten francs in the town anywhere."
As he spoke he tossed the casket and the stockings in it to an old decrepit woman, who was passing by with a baker's cart drawn by a dog; and, not staying to heed her astonishment, gathered his colors and easel together.
The tears swam in Bébée's eyes as she saw the box whirled through the air.