Bébée | Page 9

she felt herself,
ran indoors, put up her cakes and cherries, cut her two basketfuls out of
the garden, locked her hut, and went on her quick and happy little feet

along the grassy paths toward the city.
The sorting and tying up of the flowers she always left until she was
sitting under the awning in front of the Broodhuis; the same awning,
tawny as an autumn pear and weather-blown as an old sail, which had
served to shelter Antoine Mäes from heat and rain through all the years
of his life.
"Go to the Madeleine; you will make money there, with your pretty
blue eyes, Bébée," people had said to her of late; but Bébée had shaken
her head.
Where she had sat in her babyhood at Antoine's feet, she would sit so
long as she sold flowers in Brussels,--here, underneath the shadow of
the Gothic towers that saw Egmont die.
Old Antoine had never gone into the grand market that is fashioned
after the Madeleine of Paris, and where in the cool, wet, sweet-smelling
halls, all the flowers of Brabant are spread in bouquets fit for the bridal
of Una, and large as the shield of the Red-Cross Knight.
Antoine could not compete with all those treasures of greenhouse and
stove. He had always had his little stall among those which spread their
tawny awnings and their merry hardy blossoms under the shadow of
the Hôtel de Ville, in the midst of the buyings and sellings, the games
and the quarrels, the auctions and the Cheap Johns, the mountebank
and the marriage parties, that daily and hourly throng the Grande Place.
Here Bébée, from three years old, had been used to sit beside him. By
nature she was as gay as a lark. The people always heard her singing as
they passed the garden. The children never found their games so merry
as when she danced their rounds with them; and though she dreamed so
much out there in the air among the carnations and the roses, or in the
long, low workroom in the town, high against the crocketed pinnacles
of the cathedral, yet her dreams, if vaguely wistful, were all bright of
hue and sunny in their fantasies. Still, Bébée had one sad unsatisfied
desire: she wanted to know so much, and she knew nothing.

She did not care for the grand gay people.
When the band played, and the park filled, and the bright little cafés
were thronged with pleasure seekers, and the crowds flocked hither and
thither to the woods, to the theatres, to the galleries, to the guinguettes,
Bébée, going gravely along with her emptied baskets homeward,
envied none of these.
When at Noël the little children hugged their loads of puppets and
sugar-plums; when at the Fête Dieu the whole people flocked out
be-ribboned and vari-colored like any bed of spring anemones; when in
the merry midsummer the chars-a-bancs trundled away into the forest
with laughing loads of students and maidens; when in the rough winters
the carriages left furred and jewelled women at the doors of the operas
or the palaces,--Bébée, going and coming through the city to her flower
stall or lace work, looked at them all, and never thought of envy or
desire.
She had her little hut: she could get her bread; she lived with the
flowers; the neighbors were good to her, and now and then, on a saint's
day, she too got her day in the woods; it never occurred to her that her
lot could be better.
But sometimes sitting, looking at the dark old beauty of the Broodhuis,
or at the wondrous carven fronts of other Spanish houses, or at the
painted stories of the cathedral windows, or at the quaint colors of the
shipping on the quay, or at the long dark aisles of trees that went away
through the forest, where her steps had never wandered,--sometimes
Bébée would get pondering on all this unknown world that lay before
and behind and around her, and a sense of her own utter ignorance
would steal on her; and she would say to herself, "If only I knew a
little--just a very little!"
But it is not easy to know even a very little when you have to work for
your bread from sunrise to nightfall, and when none of your friends
know how to read or write, and even your old priest is one of a family
of peasants, and can just teach you the alphabet, and that is all. For
Father Francis could do no more than this; and all his spare time was

taken up in digging his cabbage plot and seeing to his beehives; and the
only books that Bébée ever beheld were a few tattered lives of saints
that lay moth-eaten on