Bebee Part 16

"What did she mean? I do not understand. I must have done some wrong--or she thinks so. Do you know?"

Flamen laughed, and answered her evasively,--

"You have done her the wrong of a fair skin when hers is brown, and a little foot while hers is as big as a trooper's; there is no greater sin, Bebee, possible in woman to woman."

"Hold your peace, you shrill jade," he added, in anger to the fruiterer, flinging at her a crown piece, that the girl caught, and bit with her teeth with a chuckle. "Do not heed her, Bebee. She is a coa.r.s.e-tongued brute, and is jealous, no doubt."

"Jealous?--of what?"

The word had no meaning to Bebee.

"That I am not a student or a soldier, as her lovers are."

As her lovers were! Bebee felt her face burn again. Was he her lover then? The child's innocent body and soul thrilled with a hot, sweet delight and fear commingled.

Bebee was not quite satisfied until she had knelt down that night and asked the Master of all poor maidens to see if there were any wickedness in her heart, hidden there like a bee in a rose, and if there were to take it out and make her worthier of this wonderful new happiness in her life.

CHAPTER XIV.

The next day, waking with a radiant little soul as a bird in a forest wakes in summer Bebee 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, Liege way, which the bishop of the city had enjoined on all the faithful as a sacred duty.

Bebee doing her work, singing, thinking how good G.o.d 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 s.h.i.+ning hours, Bebee 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, Bebee. I go to Mayence, so I thought I would look at you one moment as I pa.s.s."

Bebee ran down through the wet gra.s.s in a tumult of joy. She had never seen him so early in the day--never so early as this, when n.o.body 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 cl.u.s.tering 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 Bebee, happy as a bird. She felt no shame for the smallness of her home; no confusion at the poverty of her little place; such embarra.s.sments are born of self-consciousness, and Bebee 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. Bebee was like her lavender, and now that this beautiful Purple Emperor b.u.t.terfly 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 Bebee, flus.h.i.+ng 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 embarra.s.sed 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. Bebee 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 c.o.c.ks 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 pa.s.sed 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 Bebee'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 G.o.d, 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. Mere 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, G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 grat.i.tude. 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 G.o.d 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 your s.e.x. 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 Liege. 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, Bebee? 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, Bebee 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.

Bebee'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.