Bébée | Page 7

the strongest love is that which, whilst it
adores, drags its feet through mire, and burns its brow in heat, for the
thing beloved.
So Bébée dreamed in her garden; but all the time for sake of it hoed and
dug, and hurt her hands, and tired her limbs, and bowed her shoulders
under the great metal pails from the well.
This wondrous morning, with the bright burden of her sixteen years
upon her, she dressed herself quickly and fed her fowls, and, happy as a
bird, went to sit on her little wooden stool in the doorway.
There had been fresh rain in the night: the garden was radiant; the smell
of the wet earth was sweeter than all perfumes that are burned in
palaces.
The dripping rosebuds nodded against her hair as she went out; the
starling called to her, "Bébée, Bébée--bonjour, bonjour." These were all
the words it knew. It said the same words a thousand times a week. But
to Bébée it seemed that the starling most certainly knew that she was
sixteen years old that day.
Breaking her bread into the milk, she sat in the dawn and thought,
without knowing that she thought it, "How good it is to live when one
is young!"
Old people say the same thing often, but they sigh when they say it.
Bébée smiled.
Mère Krebs opened her door in the next cottage, and nodded over the
wall.
"What a fine thing to be sixteen!--a merry year, Bébée."
Marthe, the carpenter's wife, came out from her gate, broom in hand.
"The Holy Saints keep you, Bébée; why, you are quite a woman now!"
The little children of Varnhart, the charcoal-burner, who were as poor

as any mouse in the old churches, rushed out of their little home up the
lane, bringing with them a cake stuck full of sugar and seeds, and tied
round with a blue ribbon, that their mother had made that very week,
all in her honor.
"Only see, Bébée! Such a grand cake!" they shouted, dancing down the
lane. "Jules picked the plums, and Jeanne washed the almonds, and
Christine took the ribbon off her own communion cap, all for you--all
for you; but you will let us come and eat it too?"
Old Gran'mère Bishot, who was the oldest woman about Laeken,
hobbled through the grass on her crutches and nodded her white
shaking head, and smiled at Bébée.
"I have nothing to give you, little one, except my blessing, if you care
for that."
Bébée ran out, breaking from the children, and knelt down in the wet
grass, and bent her pretty sunny head to the benediction.
Trine, the miller's wife, the richest woman of them all, called to the
child from the steps of the mill,--'
"A merry year, and the blessing of Heaven, Bébée! Come up, and here
is my first dish of cherries for you; not tasted one myself; they will
make you a feast with Varnhart's cake, though she should have known
better, so poor as she is. Charity begins at home, and these children's
stomachs are empty."
Bébée ran up and then down again gleefully, with her lapful of big
black cherries; Tambour, the old white dog, who had used to drag her
about in his milk cart, leaping on her in sympathy and congratulation.
"What a supper we will have!" she cried to the charcoal-burner's
children, who were turning somersaults in the dock leaves, while the
swans stared and hissed.
When one is sixteen, cherries and a cake have a flavor of Paradise still,

especially when they are tasted twice, or thrice at most, in all the year.
An old man called to her as she went by his door. All these little cabins
lie close together, with only their apple-trees, or their tall beans, or their
hedges of thorn between them; you may ride by and never notice them
if you do not look for them under the leaves closely, as you would for
thrushes' nests.
He, too, was very old; a lifelong neighbor and gossip of Antoine's; he
had been a day laborer in these same fields all his years, and had never
travelled farther than where the red mill-sails turned among the colza
and the corn.
"Come in, my pretty one, for a second," he whispered, with an air of
mystery that made Bébée's heart quicken with expectancy. "Come in; I
have something for you. They were my dead daughter's--you have
heard me talk of her--Lisette, who died forty year or more ago, they say;
for me I think it was yesterday. Mère Krebs--she is a hard
woman--heard me talking of my girl. She burst out laughing, 'Lord's
sake, fool, why, your girl would be sixty now an she had lived.' Well,
so it may