Stories of Childhood | Page 9

of the face of the young Ardennois: he lifted his
head and put his hands behind his back. "Keep your money and the
portrait both, Baas Cogez," he said simply. "You have been often good
to me." Then he called Patrasche to him, and walked away across the
fields.
"I could have seen them with that franc," he murmured to Patrasche,
"but I could not sell her picture,--not even for them."
Baas Cogez went into his mill-house sore troubled in his mind. "That
lad must not be so much with Alois," he said to his wife that night.
"Trouble may come of it hereafter: he is fifteen now, and she is twelve;
and the boy is comely of face and form."
"And he is a good lad and a loyal," said the house-wife, feasting her
eyes on the piece of pine wood where it was throned above the chimney
with a cuckoo clock in oak and a Calvary in wax.
"Yea, I do not gainsay that," said the miller, draining his pewter flagon.
"Then if what you think of were ever to come to pass," said the wife,
hesitatingly, "would it matter so much? She will have enough for both
and one cannot be better than happy."
"You are a woman, and therefore a fool," said the miller, harshly,
striking his pipe on the table. "The lad is naught but a beggar, and, with
these painter's fancies, worse than a beggar. Have a care that they are
not together in the future, or I will send the child to the surer keeping of
the nuns of the Sacred Heart."
The poor mother was terrified, and promised humbly to do his will. Not
that she could bring herself altogether to separate the child from her
favorite playmate, nor did the miller even desire that extreme of cruelty
to a young lad who was guilty of nothing except poverty. But there
were many ways in which little Alois was kept away from her chosen
companion: and Nello, being a boy proud and quiet and sensitive, was
quickly wounded, and ceased to turn his own steps and those of
Patrasche, as he had been used to do with every moment of leisure, to
the old red mill upon the slope. What his offence was he did not know:
he supposed he had in some manner angered Baas Cogez by taking the
portrait of Alois in the meadow; and when the child who loved him
would run to him and nestle her hand in his, he would smile at her very
sadly and say with a tender concern for her before himself, "Nay, Alois,
do not anger your father. He thinks that I make you idle, dear, and he is

not pleased that you should be with me. He is a good man and loves
you well: we will not anger him, Alois."
But it was with a sad heart that he said it, and the earth did not look so
bright to him as it had used to do when he went out at sunrise under the
poplars down the straight roads with Patrasche. The old red mill had
been a landmark to him, and he had been used to pause by it, going and
coming, for a cheery greeting with its people as her little flaxen head
rose above the low mill-wicket, and her little rosy hands had held out a
bone or a crust to Patrasche. Now the dog looked wistfully at a closed
door, and the boy went on without pausing, with a pang at his heart,
and the child sat within with tears dropping slowly on the knitting to
which she was set on her little stool by the stove; and Baas Cogez,
working among his sacks and his mill-gear, would harden his will and
say to himself, "It is best so. The lad is all but a beggar, and full of idle,
dreaming fooleries. Who knows what mischief might not come of it in
the future?" So he was wise in his generation, and would not have the
door unbarred, except upon rare and formal occasions, which seemed to
have neither warmth nor mirth in them to the two children, who had
been accustomed so long to a daily gleeful, careless, happy interchange
of greeting, speech, and pastime, with no other watcher of their sports
or auditor of their fancies than Patrasche, sagely shaking the brazen
bells of his collar and responding with all a dog's swift sympathies to
their every change of mood.
All this while the little panel of pine wood remained over the chimney
in the mill-kitchen with the cuckoo clock and the waxen Calvary; and
sometimes it seemed to Nello a little hard that whilst his gift was
accepted he himself should be denied.
But