Stories of Childhood | Page 8

die on one spot in
contented humility was the fairest fate he could desire for his darling.
But Nello said nothing.
The same leaven was working in him that in other times begat Rubens
and Jordaens and the Van Eycks, and all their wondrous tribe, and in
times more recent begat in the green country of the Ardennes, where
the Meuse washes the old walls of Dijon, the great artist of the
Patroclus, whose genius is too near us for us aright to measure its
divinity.
Nello dreamed of other things in the future than of tilling the little rood
of earth, and living under the wattle roof, and being called Baas by
neighbors a little poorer or a little less poor than himself. The cathedral
spire, where it rose beyond the fields in the ruddy evening skies or in
the dim, gray, misty mornings, said other things to him than this. But
these he told only to Patrasche, whispering, childlike, his fancies in the
dog's ear when they went together at their work through the fogs of the
daybreak, or lay together at their rest amongst the rustling rushes by the
water's side.
For such dreams are not easily shaped into speech to awake the slow
sympathies of human auditors; and they would only have sorely
perplexed and troubled the poor old man bedridden in his corner, who,
for his part, whenever he had trodden the streets of Antwerp, had
thought the daub of blue and red that they called a Madonna, on the
walls of the wine-shop where he drank his sou's worth of black beer,
quite as good as any of the famous altar-pieces for which the stranger
folk travelled far and wide into Flanders from every land on which the
good sun shone.
There was only one other beside Patrasche to whom Nello could talk at
all of his daring fantasies. This other was little Alois, who lived at the
old red mill on the grassy mound, and whose father, the miller, was the
best-to-do husbandman in all the village. Little Alois was only a pretty
baby with soft round, rosy features, made lovely by those sweet, dark
eyes that the Spanish rule has left in so many a Flemish face, in

testimony of the Alvan dominion, as Spanish art has left broadsown
throughout the country majestic palaces and stately courts, gilded
house-fronts and sculptured lintels,--histories in blazonry and poems in
stone.
Little Alois was often with Nello and Patrasche. They played in the
fields, they ran in the snow, they gathered the daisies and bilberries,
they went up to the old gray church together, and they often sat
together by the broad wood-fire in the mill-house. Little Alois, indeed,
was the richest child in the hamlet. She had neither brother nor sister;
her blue serge dress had never a hole in it; at Kermesse she had as
many gilded nuts and Agni Dei in sugar as her hands could hold; and
when she went up for her first communion her flaxen curls were
covered with a cap of richest Mechlin lace, which had been her
mother's and her grandmother's before it came to her. Men spoke
already, though she had but twelve years, of the good wife she would
be for their sons to woo and win; but she herself was a little gay, simple
child, in no wise conscious of her heritage, and she loved no
playfellows so well as Jehan Daas's grandson and his dog.
One day her father, Baas Cogez, a good man, but somewhat stern, came
on a pretty group in the long meadow behind the mill, where the
aftermath had that day been cut. It was his little daughter sitting amidst
the hay, with the great tawny head of Patrasche on her lap, and many
wreaths of poppies and blue cornflowers round them both: on a clean
smooth slab of pine wood the boy Nello drew their likeness with a stick
of charcoal.
The miller stood and looked at the portrait with tears in his eyes, it was
so strangely like, and he loved his only child closely and well. Then he
roughly chid the little girl for idling there whilst her mother needed her
within, and sent her indoors crying and afraid; then, turning, he
snatched the wood from Nello's hands. "Dost do much of such folly?"
he asked, but there was a tremble in his voice.
Nello colored and hung his head. "I draw everything I see," he
murmured.
The miller was silent; then he stretched his hand out with a franc in it.
"It is folly, as I say, and evil waste of time; nevertheless, it is like Alois,
and will please the house-mother. Take this silver bit for it and leave it
for me."

The color died out