Bébée | Page 2

long, and the silvery willows dip and sway with the wind.
Turn aside from the highway, and there it lies to-day, and all the place
brims over with grass, and boughs, and blossoms, and flowering beans,
and wild dog-roses; and there are a few cottages and cabins there near
the pretty water, and farther there is an old church, sacred to St. Guido;
and beyond go the green level country and the endless wheat-fields,
and the old mills with their red sails against the sun; and beyond all
these the pale blue, sea-like horizon of the plains of Flanders.
It was a pretty little hut, pink all over like a sea-shell, in the fashion that
the Netherlanders love; and its two little square lattices were dark with
creeping plants and big rose-bushes, and its roof, so low that you could
touch it, was golden and green with all the lichens and stoneworts that
are known on earth.
Here Bébée grew from year to year; and soon learned to be big enough
and hardy enough to tie up bunches of stocks and pinks for the market,
and then to carry a basket for herself, trotting by Antoine's side along
the green roadway and into the white, wide streets; and in the market
the buyers--most often of all when they were young mothers--would
seek out the little golden head and the beautiful frank blue eyes, and
buy Bébée's lilies and carnations whether they wanted them or not. So
that old Mäes used to cross himself and say that, thanks to Our Lady,
trade was thrice as stirring since the little one had stretched out her rosy
fingers with the flowers.
All the same, however stirring trade might be in summer, when the
long winters came and the Montagne de la Cour was a sharp slope of
ice, and the pinnacles of St. Gudule were all frosted white with snow,
and the hot-house flowers alone could fill the market, and the country

gardens were bitter black wind-swept desolations where the chilly roots
huddled themselves together underground like homeless children in a
cellar,--then the money gained in the time of leaf and blossom was all
needed to buy a black loaf and fagot of wood; and many a day in the
little pink hut Bébée rolled herself up in her bed like a dormouse, to
forget in sleep that she was supperless and as cold as a frozen robin.
So that when Antoine Mäes grew sick and died, more from age and
weakness than any real disease, there were only a few silver crowns in
the brown jug hidden in the thatch; and the hut itself, with its patch of
ground, was all that he could leave to Bébée.
"Live in it, little one, and take nobody in it to worry you, and be good
to the bird and the goat, and be sure to keep the flowers blowing," said
the old man with his last breath; and sobbing her heart out by his
bedside, Bébée vowed to do his bidding.
She was not quite fourteen then, and when she had laid her old friend to
rest in the rough green graveyard about St. Guido, she was very
sorrowful and lonely, poor little, bright Bébée, who had never hardly
known a worse woe than to run the thorns of the roses into her fingers,
or to cry because a thrush was found starved to death in the snow.
Bébée went home, and sat down in a corner and thought.
The hut was her own, and her own the little green triangle just then
crowded with its Mayday blossom in all the colors of the rainbow. She
was to live in it, and never let the flowers die, so he had said; good,
rough old ugly Antoine Mäes, who had been to her as father, mother,
country, king, and law.
The sun was shining.
Through the little square of the lattice she could see the great tulips
opening in the grass and a bough of the apple-tree swaying in the wind.
A chaffinch clung to the bough, and swung to and fro singing. The door
stood open, with the broad, bright day beaming through; and Bébée's
little world came streaming in with it,--the world which dwelt in the

half-dozen cottages that fringed this green lane of hers like beavers'
nests pushed out under the leaves on to the water's edge.
They came in, six or eight of them, all women; trim, clean, plain
Brabant peasants, hard-working, kindly of nature, and shrewd in their
own simple matters; people who labored in the fields all the day long,
or worked themselves blind over the lace pillows in the city.
"You are too young to live alone, Bébée," said the first of them. "My
old mother shall come and keep