Bébée | Page 3

house for you."
"Nay, better come and live with me, Bébée," said the second. "I will
give you bit and drop, and clothing, too, for the right to your plot of
ground."
"That is to cheat her," said the third. "Hark, here, Bébée: my sister, who
is a lone woman, as you know well, shall come and bide with you, and
ask you nothing--nothing at all--only you shall just give her a crust,
perhaps, and a few flowers to sell sometimes."
"No, no," said the fourth; "that will not do. You let me have the garden
and the hut, Bébée, and my sons shall till the place for you; and I will
live with you myself, and leave the boys the cabin, so you will have all
the gain, do you not see, dear little one?"
"Pooh!" said the fifth, stouter and better clothed than the rest. "You are
all eager for your own good, not for hers. Now I--Father Francis says
we should all do as we would be done by--I will take Bébée to live with
me, all for nothing; and we will root the flowers up and plant it with
good cabbages and potatoes and salad plants. And I will stable my
cows in the hut to sweeten it after a dead man, and I will take my
chance of making money out of it, and no one can speak more fair than
that when one sees what weather is, and thinks what insects do; and all
the year round, winter and summer, Bébée here will want for nothing,
and have to take no care for herself whatever."
She who spoke, Mère Krebs, was the best-to-do woman in the little
lane, having two cows of her own and ear-rings of solid silver, and a

green cart, and a big dog that took the milk into Brussels. She was
heard, therefore, with respect, and a short silence followed her words.
But it was very short; and a hubbub of voices crossed each other after it
as the speakers grew hotter against one another and more eager to
convince each other of the disinterestedness and delicacy of their offers
of aid.
Through it all Bébée sat quite quiet on the edge of the little truckle-bed,
with her eyes fixed on the apple bough and the singing chaffinch.
She heard them all patiently.
They were all her good friends, friends old and true. This one had given
her cherries for many a summer. That other had bought her a little
waxen Jesus at the Kermesse. The old woman in the blue linen skirt
had taken her to her first communion. She who wanted her sister to
have the crust and the flowers, had brought her a beautiful painted book
of hours that had cost a whole franc. Another had given her the solitary
wonder, travel, and foreign feast of her whole life,--a day fifteen miles
away at the fair at Mechlin. The last speaker of all had danced her on
her knee a hundred times in babyhood, and told her legends, and let her
ride in the green cart behind big curly-coated Tambour.
Bébée did not doubt that these trusty old friends meant well by her, and
yet a certain heavy sense fell on her that in all these counsels there was
not the same whole-hearted and frank goodness that had prompted the
gifts to her of the waxen Jesus, and the Kermesse of Mechlin.
Bébée did not reason, because she was too little a thing and too trustful;
but she felt, in a vague, sorrowful fashion, that they were all of them
trying to make some benefit out of her poor little heritage, with small
regard for herself at the root of their speculations.
Bébée was a child, wholly a child; body and soul were both as fresh in
her as a golden crocus just born out of the snows. But she was not a
little fool, though people sometimes called her so because she would sit
in the moments of her leisure with her blue eyes on the far-away clouds

like a thing in a dream.
She heard them patiently till the cackle of shrill voices had exhausted
itself, and the six women stood on the sunny mud floor of the hut
eyeing each other with venomous glances; for though they were good
neighbors at all times, each, in this matter, was hungry for the
advantages to be got out of old Antoine's plot of ground. They were
very poor; they toiled in the scorched or frozen fields all weathers, or
spent from dawn to nightfall poring over their cobweb lace; and to save
a son or gain a cabbage was of moment to them only second to the
keeping of their souls secure of heaven by Lenten mass and