Bébée | Page 8

there were a girl's set of clothes, and a girl's sabots, and a girl's communion veil and wreath.
"They are all hers," he whispered,--"all hers. And sometimes in the evening time I see her coming along the lane for them--do you not know? There is nothing changed; nothing changed; the grass, and the trees, and the huts, and the pond are all here; why should she only be gone away?"
"Antoine is gone."
"Yes. But he was old; my girl is young."
He stood a moment, with the press door open, a perplexed trouble in his dim eyes; the divine faith of love and the mule-like stupidity of ignorance made him cling to this one thought without power of judgment in it.
"They say she would be sixty," he said, with a little dreary smile. "But that is absurd, you know. Why, she had cheeks like yours, and she would run--no lapwing could fly faster over corn. These are her things, you see; yes--all of them. That is the sprig of sweetbrier she wore in her belt the day before the wagon knocked her down and killed her. I have never touched the things. But look here, Bébée, you are a good child and true, and like her just a little. I mean to give you her silver clasps. They were her great-great-great-grandmother's before her. God knows how old they are not. And a girl should have some little wealth of that sort; and for Antoine's sake--"
The old man stayed behind, closing the press door upon the lavender-scented clothes, and sitting down in the dull shadow of the hut to think of his daughter, dead forty summers and more.
Bébée went out with the brave broad silver clasps about her waist, and the tears wet on her cheeks for a grief not her own.
To be killed just when one was young, and was loved liked that, and all the world was in its May-day flower! The silver felt cold to her touch--as cold as though it were the dead girl's hands that held her.
The garlands that the children strung of daisies and hung about her had never chilled her so.
But little Jeanne, the youngest of the charcoal-burner's little tribe, running to meet her, screamed with glee, and danced in the gay morning.
"Oh, Bébée! how you glitter! Did the Virgin send you that off her own altar? Let me see--let me touch! Is it made of the stars or of the sun?"
And Bébée danced with the child, and the silver gleamed and sparkled, and all the people came running out to see, and the milk carts were half an hour later for town, and the hens cackled loud unfed, and the men even stopped on their way to the fields and paused, with their scythes on their shoulders, to stare at the splendid gift.
"There is not such another set of clasps in Brabant; old work you could make a fortune of in the curiosity shops in the Montagne," said Trine Krebs, going up the steps of her mill house. "But, all the same, you know, Bébée, things off a dead body bring mischance sometimes."
But Bébée danced with the child, and did not hear.
Whose fête day had ever begun like this one of hers?
She was a little poet at heart, and should not have cared for such vanities; but when one is only sixteen, and has only a little rough woollen frock, and sits in the market place or the lace-room, with other girls around, how should one be altogether indifferent to a broad, embossed, beautiful shield of silver that sparkled with each step one took?
A quarter of an hour idle thus was all, however, that Bébée or her friends could spare at five o'clock on a summer morning, when the city was waiting for its eggs, its honey, its flowers, its cream, and its butter, and Tambour was shaking his leather harness in impatience to be off with his milk-cans.
So Bébée, all holiday though it was, and heroine though she felt herself, ran indoors, put up her cakes and cherries, cut her two basketfuls out of the garden, locked her hut, and went on her quick and happy little feet along the grassy paths toward the city.
The sorting and tying up of the flowers she always left until she was sitting under the awning in front of the Broodhuis; the same awning, tawny as an autumn pear and weather-blown as an old sail, which had served to shelter Antoine M?es from heat and rain through all the years of his life.
"Go to the Madeleine; you will make money there, with your pretty blue eyes, Bébée," people had said to her of late; but Bébée had shaken her head.
Where she had sat in her babyhood at Antoine's feet, she would sit so long as she sold flowers in