In the Border Country | Page 6

eyes are blue and have drowned my heart,
because after I have done my work, which I cannot explain to you, I lie
in your arms and cease to think. Give me a son with your eyes, for I
shall never understand you."
She crushed the paper in her hand and flung it out of the door of the
hut.
"Then he lied to me!" she said bitterly, "fool that I am!"
"If you had been a fool he would not have needed to lie to you," said

the Bee-woman. "But you are one of those for whom no price is too
great."
"Oh, oh!" she wept, "I am deceived! God and the world have deceived
me! But I will not be beaten. I will show him--and you--that I am not
the weak thing you think me. This very moment, if only I had the
colours, I could paint as never before. I feel it. The very pain will help
me. If only I had the colours!"
"There are always colours," said the Bee-woman, "if not of one kind,
then of another. But you cannot get them for nothing."
"I will pay any price," she said.
"Will you take the crimson from the blood of your cheeks?" said the
Bee-woman. "Will you take the fresh blue from your eyes, the ivory
white from your teeth, the ruddy gold from your hair, and the thick
softness of it for brushes? Will you?"
She shuddered.
"I know what you mean," she said, "but oh, it is hard! I--I cannot."
"Then you are a fool," said the Bee-woman quietly. "There is no man
living who would not give all that and give it with a smile, for his work.
You are not a great artist."
She wrung her hands.
"You are right, you are right," she moaned, "and I am not worthy. If
colours are my weapons to win fame, how should I grudge them? I will
give them up."
"Then indeed you are a fool," said the Bee-woman sternly, "for you
throw away your most powerful weapon before the fight begins. You
are not a great woman."
She fell with her face to the earthen floor and lay quiet, while the bees
hummed outside the hut like the turning of a great wheel or the rocking

of an old cradle.
"Then all that I have learned," she muttered at last, "is useless? All that
I have worked and anguished for? All that I have saved even my
suffering for, prizing it and never grudging, because it would help my
work? No man could do more."
"You think so?" said the Bee-woman. "Get up, my child, and look out
of the latticed window at the back of my cottage. Do not think what
you see there is close before you, for the glass of that window has
strange properties and the part of the wood which it shows you is far,
far from here."
She raised herself and walked to the casement, shading her eyes with
her hand, for a red glow struck the single pane and blinded her.
"Before you look," said the Bee-woman, "tell me if you remember that
picture of yours which you think the best?"
"Do I remember it?" she repeated, "can I ever forget it? A year of my
life has gone into it. The year that I was married."
[Illustration: The glass of that window has strange properties.]
"Do you think it worth that year?" said the Bee-woman.
"It could not have been done with less," she said.
"Now look," said the Bee-woman, "and tell me what you see."
She went to the casement, and it seemed as if the aged trees formed a
long, long aisle out from it, narrow and bright, and at the end was a
sunny glade.
"I see a young man," she said, "laughing and singing to himself in the
sun."
"Has he suffered?" asked the Bee-woman.

"No, he is hardly more than a boy. His hair curls like a boy's. His face
has never known a care."
"What is he doing?" asked the Bee-woman.
"He is eating fruit and painting a picture on a white cottage wall. The
children and the old men are watching him."
"Do you watch him, too," said the Bee-woman, folding her hands in her
lap.
Soon she gave a little cry.
"What! what!" she murmured, "how can he do that--he is but a boy!"
"Is he weeping?" asked the Bee-woman. "Has he shut out the world?"
"He is smiling," she answered, "and as he works he talks. Oh! he is
painting my picture, mine! Who is he? Mother, who is he?"
"Does he paint well?" asked the Bee-woman.
She did not answer.
"It is nearly done," she whispered, "and he smiles as he works. What
blue, what glistening white!