Bébée

Bebee, by Ouida

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Title: Bebee
Author: Ouida
Release Date: November 1, 2004 [eBook #13912]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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BÉBÉE
Or, Two Little Wooden Shoes
by

LOUISA DE LA RAMÉE ("OUIDA")
1896
CHAPTER I.
Bébée sprang out of bed at daybreak. She was sixteen.
It seemed a very wonderful thing to be as much as that--sixteen--a
woman quite.
A cock was crowing under her lattice. He said how old you are!--how
old you are! every time that he sounded his clarion.
She opened the lattice and wished him good day, with a laugh. It was
so pleasant to be woke by him, and to think that no one in all the world
could ever call one a child any more.
There was a kid bleating in the shed. There was a thrush singing in the
dusk of the sycamore leaves. There was a calf lowing to its mother
away there beyond the fence. There were dreamy muffled bells ringing
in the distance from many steeples and belfries where the city was; they
all said one thing, "How good it is to be so old as that--how good, how
very good!"
Bébée was very pretty.
No one in all Brabant ever denied that. To look at her it seemed as if
she had so lived among the flowers that she had grown like them, and
only looked a bigger blossom--that was all.
She wore two little wooden shoes and a little cotton cap, and a gray
kirtle--linen in summer, serge in winter; but the little feet in the shoes
were like rose leaves, and the cap was as white as a lily, and the gray
kirtle was like the bark of the bough that the apple-blossom parts, and
peeps out of, to blush in the sun.
The flowers had been the only godmothers that she had ever had, and

fairy godmothers too.
The marigolds and the sunflowers had given her their ripe, rich gold to
tint her hair; the lupins and irises had lent their azure to her eyes; the
moss-rosebuds had made her pretty mouth; the arum lilies had uncurled
their softness for her skin; and the lime-blossoms had given her their
frank, fresh, innocent fragrance.
The winds had blown, and the rains had rained, and the sun had shone
on her, indeed, and had warmed the whiteness of her limbs, but they
had only given to her body and her soul a hardy, breeze-blown
freshness like that of a field cowslip.
She had never been called anything but Bébée.
One summer day Antoine Mäes--a French subject, but a Belgian by
adoption and habit, an old man who got his meagre living by tilling the
garden plot about his hut and selling flowers in the city
squares--Antoine, going into Brussels for his day's trade, had seen a
gray bundle floating among the water-lilies in the bit of water near his
hut and had hooked it out to land, and found a year-old child in it, left
to drown, no doubt, but saved by the lilies, and laughing gleefully at
fate.
Some lace-worker, blind with the pain of toil, or some peasant woman
harder of heart than the oxen in her yoke, had left it there to drift away
to death, not reckoning for the inward ripple of the current or the
toughness of the lily leaves and stems.
Old Antoine took it to his wife, and the wife, a childless and aged soul,
begged leave to keep it; and the two poor lonely, simple folks grew to
care for the homeless, motherless thing, and they and the people about
all called it Bébée--only Bébée.
The church got at it and added to it a saint's name; but for all its little
world it remained Bébée--Bébée when it trotted no higher than the red
carnation heads;--Bébée when its yellow curls touched as high as the
lavender-bush;--Bébée on this proud day when the thrush's song and

the cock's crow found her sixteen years old.
Old Antoine's hut stood in a little patch of garden ground with a brier
hedge all round it, in that byway which lies between Laeken and
Brussels, in the heart of flat, green Brabant, where there are beautiful
meadows and tall, flowering hedges, and forest trees, and fern-filled
ditches, and a little piece of water, deep and cool, where the swans sail
all day