Bebee Part 15

For Bebee, 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 Bebee--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 b.u.t.terfly that he seeks to kill, and which one single movement, a thought too quick, may scare away to safety.

Bebee knew where he lived in the street of Mary of Burgundy: in an old palace that belonged to a great Flemish n.o.ble, 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 Bebee 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 Bebee he was sacred, unapproachable, unquestionable; he was a wonderful, perfect happiness that had fallen into her life; he was a gift of G.o.d, 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. Bebee 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 Bebee was in the quiet evening shadows, as she went up with her empty basket through the deserted country roads.

Bebee 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 Montagne 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-a-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," Bebee had answered when urged fifty times by this girl to go to fairs, and b.a.l.l.s at the wine shops. "That does just as well. And I have seen Kermesse once at Malines--it was beautiful. I went with Mere 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 Bebee 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, Bebee 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 Bebee, 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 Bebee 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 Bebee'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 peac.o.c.k'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 Bebee, forced to studied att.i.tudes 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 Bebee 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 Mere 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 Bebee'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, Bebee?" they used to ask, with the shrewd Flemish thought after the main chance.

"Nothing," Bebee 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."

Bebee 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 Annemie; 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 hards.h.i.+ps 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 he, you sly one!"

Bebee flushed red, in a sort of instinct of offence; not sure what her fault was, but vaguely stung by the brutal words.

Bebee walked homeward by him, with her empty baskets: looked at him with grave wondering eyes.