Bébée | Page 5

a human mother who would have taken care of her now that old Antoine was dead, instead of those beautiful, gleaming, cold water-lilies which went to sleep on their green velvet beds, and did not certainly care when the thorns ran into her fingers, or the pebbles got in her wooden shoes.
In some vague way, disgrace and envy--the twin Discords of the world--touched her innocent cheek with their hot breath, and as the evening fell, Bébée felt very lonely and a little wistful.
She had been always used to run out in the pleasant twilight-time among the flowers and water them, Antoine filling the can from the well; and the neighbors would come and lean against the little low wall, knitting and gossiping; and the big dogs, released from harness, would poke their heads through the wicket for a crust; and the children would dance and play Colin Maillard on the green by the water; and she, when the flowers were no longer thirsted, would join them, and romp and dance and sing the gayest of them all.
But now the buckets hung at the bottom of the well, and the flowers hungered in vain, and the neighbors held aloof, and she shut to the hut door and listened to the rain which began to fall, and cried herself to sleep all alone in her tiny kingdom.
When the dawn came the sun rose red and warm; the grass and boughs sparkled; a lark sang; Bébée awoke sad in heart, indeed, for her lost old friend, but brighter and braver.
"Each of them wants to get something out of me," thought the child. "Well, I will live alone, then, and do my duty, just as he said. The flowers will never let any real harm come, though they do look so indifferent and smiling sometimes, and though not one of them hung their heads when his coffin was carried through them yesterday."
That want of sympathy in the flower troubled her.
The old man had loved them so well; and they had all looked as glad as ever, and had laughed saucily in the sun, and not even a rosebud turned the paler as the poor still stiffened limbs went by in the wooden shell.
"I suppose God cares; but I wish they did." said Bébée, to whom the garden was more intelligible than Providence.
"Why do you not care?" she asked the pinks, shaking the raindrops off their curled rosy petals.
The pinks leaned lazily against their sticks, and seemed to say, "Why should we care for anything, unless a slug be eating us?--that is real woe, if you like."
Bébée, without her sabots on, wandered thoughtfully among the sweet wet sunlightened labyrinths of blossom, her pretty bare feet treading the narrow grassy paths with pleasure in their coolness.
"He was so good to you!" she said reproachfully to the great gaudy gillyflowers and the painted sweet-peas. "He never let you know heat or cold, he never let the worm gnaw or the snail harm you; he would get up in the dark to see after your wants; and when the ice froze over you, he was there to loosen your chains. Why do you not care, anyone of you?"
"How silly you are!" said the flowers. "You must be a butterfly or a poet, Bébée, to be as foolish as that. Some one will do all he did. We are of market value, you know. Care, indeed! when the sun is so warm, and there is not an earwig in the place to trouble us."
The flowers were not always so selfish as this; and perhaps the sorrow in Bébée's heart made their callousness seem harder than it really was.
When we suffer very much ourselves, anything that smiles in the sun seems cruel--a child, a bird, a dragon-fly--nay, even a fluttering ribbon, or a spear-grass that waves in the wind.
There was a little shrine at the corner of the garden, set into the wall; a niche with a bit of glass and a picture of the Virgin, so battered that no one could trace any feature of it.
It had been there for centuries, and was held in great veneration; and old Antoine had always cut the choicest buds of his roses and set them in a delf pot in front of it, every other morning all the summer long. Bébée, whose religion was the sweetest, vaguest mingling of Pagan and Christian myths, and whose faith in fairies and in saints was exactly equal in strength and in ignorance,--Bébée filled the delf pot anew carefully, then knelt down on the turf in that little green corner, and prayed in devout hopeful childish good faith to the awful unknown Powers who were to her only as gentle guides and kindly playmates.
Was she too familiar with the Holy Mother?
She was almost fearful that she