Bébée | Page 6

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 was; but then the Holy Mother loved

flowers so well, Bébée would not feel aloof from her, nor be afraid.
"When one cuts the best blossoms for her, and tries to be good, and
never tells a lie," thought Bébée, "I am quite sure, as she loves the lilies,
that she will never altogether forget me."
So she said to the Mother of Christ fearlessly, and nothing doubting;
and then rose for her daily work of cutting the flowers for the market in
Brussels.
By the time her baskets were full, her fowls fed, her goat foddered, her
starling's cage cleaned, her hut door locked, and her wooden shoes
clattering on the sunny road into the city, Bébée was almost content
again, though ever and again, as she trod the familiar ways, the tears
dimmed her eyes as she remembered that old Antoine would never
again hobble over the stones beside her.
"You are a little wilful one, and too young to live alone," said Father
Francis, meeting her in the lane.
But he did not scold her seriously, and she kept to her resolve; and the
women, who were good at heart, took her back into favor again; and so
Bébée had her own way, and the fairies, or the saints, or both together,
took care of her; and so it came to pass that all alone she heard the cock
crow whilst it was dark, and woke to the grand and amazing truth that
this warm, fragrant, dusky June morning found her full sixteen years
old.
CHAPTER II.
The two years had not been all playtime any more than they had been
all summer.
When one has not father, or mother, or brother, and all one's friends
have barely bread enough for themselves, life cannot be very easy, nor
its crusts very many at any time.
Bébée had a cherub's mouth, and a dreamer's eyes, and a poet's

thoughts sometimes in her own untaught and unconscious fashion.
But all the same she was a little hard-working Brabant peasant girl; up
whilst the birds twittered in the dark; to bed when the red sun sank
beyond the far blue line of the plains; she hoed, and dug, and watered,
and planted her little plot; she kept her cabin as clean as a
fresh-blossomed primrose; she milked her goat and swept her floor; she
sat, all the warm days, in the town, selling her flowers, and in the
winter time, when her garden yielded her nothing, she strained her sight
over lace-making in the city to get the small bit of food that stood
between her and that hunger which to the poor means death.
A hard life; very hard when hail and snow made the streets of Brussels
like slopes of ice; a little hard even in the gay summer time when she
sat under the awning fronting the Maison du Roi; but all the time the
child throve on it, and was happy, and dreamed of many graceful and
gracious things whilst she was weeding among her lilies, or tracing the
threads to and fro on her lace pillow.
Now--when she woke to the full sense of her wonderful sixteen
years--Bébée, standing barefoot on the mud floor, was as pretty a sight
as was to be seen betwixt Scheldt and Rhine.
The sun had only left a soft warmth like an apricot's on her white skin.
Her limbs, though strong as a mountain pony's, were slender and well
shaped. Her hair curled in shiny crumpled masses, and tumbled about
her shoulders. Her pretty round plump little breast was white as the
lilies in the grass without, and in this blooming time of her little life,
Bébée, in her way, was beautiful as a peach-bloom is beautiful, and her
innocent, courageous, happy eyes had dreams in them underneath their
laughter, dreams that went farther than the green woods of Laeken,
farther even than the white clouds of summer.
She could not move among them idly as poets and girls love to do; she
had to be active amidst them, else drought and rain, and worm and snail,
and blight and frost, would have made havoc of their fairest hopes.
The loveliest love is that which dreams high above all storms, unsoiled

by all burdens; but perhaps