Bebee Part 25

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 s.h.i.+ps came and went under the empty garret window, and Bebee 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 quant.i.ty 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sion. Bebee'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 Bebee'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 Bebee 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 Bebee 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.

Bebee 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 Bebee 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 pa.s.s 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. Bebee 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 G.o.d came in the midst of the people when the silver bell rang and the Host was borne by on high.

Bebee 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 Annemie 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 ingrat.i.tude, 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 Bebee'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-abas.e.m.e.nt, 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 G.o.d!--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,--

"Bebee, 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 Bebee, do you hear?

and I will pray G.o.d and speak fair the neighbors for you. Go!"

Bebee 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 Bebee, 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 pa.s.sed the stall under its yellow awning that was flapping sullenly in the evening wind.

"Oh he, little fool," the mocking voice cried, "the rind of the fine pine is full of p.r.i.c.kles, 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.

Bebee 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.