Bebee Part 12

But the Sun shone on and held his peace. He sees all things ripen and fall. He can wait. He knows the end. It is always the same.

He brings the fruit out of the peach-flower, and rounds it and touches it into ruddiest rose and softest gold: but the sun knows well that the peach must drop--whether into the basket to be eaten by kings, or on to the turf to be eaten by ants. What matter which very much after all?

The Sun is not a cynic; he is only wise because he is Life and he is Death, the creator and the corrupter of all things.

CHAPTER IX.

But Bebee, who only saw in the sun the sign of daily work, the brightness of the face of the world, the friend of the flowers, the harvest-man of the poor, the playmate of the birds and b.u.t.terflies, the kindly light that the waking birds and the ringing carillon welcomed,--Bebee, who was not at all afraid of him, smiled at his rays and saw in them only fairest promise of a cloudless midsummer day as she gave her last crumb to the swallows, dropped down off the thatch, and busied herself in making bread that Mere Krebs would bake for her, until it was time to cut her flowers and go down into the town.

When her loaves were made and she had run over with them to the mill-house and back again, she attired herself with more heed than usual, and ran to look at her own face in the mirror of the deep well-water--other gla.s.s she had none.

She was used to hear herself called pretty; bat she had never thought about it at all till now. The people loved her; she had always believed that they had only said it as a sort of kindness, as they said, "G.o.d keep you." But now--

"He told me I was like a flower," she thought to herself, and hung over the well to see. She did not know very well what he had meant; but the sentence stirred in her heart as a little bird under tremulous leaves.

She waited ten minutes full, leaning and looking down, while her eyes, that were like the blue iris, smiled back to her from the brown depths below. Then she went and kneeled down before the old shrine in the wall of the garden.

"Dear and holy Mother of Jesus, I do thank you that you made me a little good to look at," she said, softly. "Keep me as you keep the flowers, and let my face be always fair, because it is a pleasure to _be_ a pleasure.

Ah, dear Mother, I say it so badly, and it sounds so vain, I know. But I do not think you will be angry, will you? And I am going to try to be wise."

Then she murmured an ave or two, to be in form as it were, and then rose and ran along the lanes with her baskets, and brushed the dew lightly over her bare feet, and sang a little Flemish song for very joyousness, as the birds sing in the apple bough.

She got the money for Annemie and took it to her with fresh patterns to p.r.i.c.k, and the new-laid eggs.

"I wonder what he meant by a dog's heart?" she thought to herself, as she left the old woman sitting by the hole in the roof p.r.i.c.king out the parchment in all faith that she earned her money, and looking every now and then through the forests of masts for the brig with the hank of flax flying,--the brig that had foundered fifty long years before in the northern seas, and in the days of her youth.

"What is the dog's heart?" thought Bebee; she had seen a dog she knew--a dog which all his life long had dragged heavy loads under brutal stripes along the streets of Brussels--stretch himself on the grave of his taskmaster and refuse to eat, and persist in lying there until he died, though he had no memory except of stripes, and no tie to the dead except pain and sorrow. Was it a heart like this that he meant?

"Was her sailor, indeed, so good to her?" she asked an old gossip of Annemie's, as she went down the stairs.

The old soul stopped to think with difficulty of such a far-off time, and resting her bra.s.s flagon of milk on the steep step.

"Eh, no; not that I ever saw," she answered at length. "He was fond of her--very fond; but he was a wilful one, and he beat her sometimes when he got tired of being on land. But women must not mind that, you know, my dear, if only a man's heart is right. Things fret them, and then they belabor what they love best; it is a way they have."

"But she speaks of him as of an angel nearly!" said Bebee, bewildered.

The old woman took up her flagon, with a smile flitting across her wintry face.

"Ay, dear; when the frost kills your brave rose-bush, root and bud, do you think of the thorns that p.r.i.c.ked you, or only of the fair, sweet-smelling things that flowered all your summer?"

Bebee went away thoughtfully out of the old crazy water-washed house by the quay; life seemed growing very strange and intricate and knotted about her, like the threads of lace that a bad fairy has entangled in the night.

CHAPTER X.

Her stranger from Rubes' land was a great man in a certain world. He had become great when young, which is perhaps a misfortune. It indisposes men to be great at their maturity. He was famous at twenty, by a picture hectic in color, perfect in drawing, that made Paris at his feet. He became more famous by verses, by plays, by political follies, and by social successes. He was faithful, however, to his first love in art. He was a great painter, and year by year proved afresh the cunning of his hand. Purists said his pictures had no soul in them. It was not wonderful if they had none. He always painted soulless vice; indeed, he saw very little else.

One year he had some political trouble. He wrote a witty pamphlet that hurt where it was perilous to aim. He laughed and crossed the border, riding into the green Ardennes one sunny evening. He had a name of some power and sufficient wealth; he did not feel long exile. Meanwhile he told himself he would go and look at Scheffer's Gretchen.

The King of Thule is better; but people talk most of the Gretchen. He had never seen either.

He went in leisurely, travelling up the bright Meuse River, and across the monotony of the plains, then green with wheat a foot high, and musical with the many bells of the Easter kermesses in the quaint old-world villages.

There was something so novel, so sleepy, so harmless, so mediaeval, in the Flemish life, that it soothed him. He had been swimming all his life in salt sea-fed rapids; this sluggish, dull, ca.n.a.l water, mirroring between its rushes a life that had scarcely changed for centuries, had a charm for him.

He stayed awhile in Antwerpen. The town is ugly and beautiful; it is like a dull quaint gres de Flandre jug, that has precious stones set inside its rim. It is a burgher ledger of bales and barrels, of sale and barter, of loss and gain; but in the heart of it there are illuminated leaves of missal vellum, all gold and color, and monkish story and heroic ballad, that could only have been executed in the days when Art was a religion.

He gazed himself into an homage of Rubens, whom before he had slighted, never having known (for, unless you have seen Antwerp, it is as absurd to say that you have seen Rubens, as it is to think that you have seen Murillo out of Seville, or Raffaelle out of Rome); and he studied the Gretchen carefully, delicately, sympathetically, for he loved Scheffer; but though he tried, he failed to care for her.

"She is only a peasant; she is not a poem," he said to himself; "I will paint a Gretchen for the Salon of next year."

But it was hard for him to portray a Gretchen. All his pictures were Phryne,--Phryne in triumph, in ruin, in a palace, in a poor-house, on a bed of roses, on a hospital mattress; Phryne laughing with a belt of jewels about her supple waist; Phryne lying with the stones of the dead-house under her naked limbs,--but always Phryne. Phryne, who living had death in her smile; Phryne, who lifeless had blank despair on her face; Phryne, a thing that lived furiously every second of her days, but Phryne a thing that once being dead was carrion that never could live again.

Phryne has many painters in this school, as many as Catherine and Cecilia had in the schools of the Renaissance, and he was chief amidst them.

How could he paint Gretchen if the pure Scheffer missed? Not even if, like the artist monks of old, he steeped his brushes all Lent through in holy water.

And in holy water he did not believe.

One evening, having left Antwerpen ringing its innumerable bells over the grave of its dead Art, he leaned out of the cas.e.m.e.nt of an absent friend's old palace in the Brabant street that is named after Mary of Burgundy; an old cas.e.m.e.nt crusted with quaint carvings, and gilded round in Spanish fashion, with many gargoyles and griffins, and illegible scutcheons.

Leaning there, wondering with himself whether he would wait awhile and paint quietly in this dim street, haunted with the shades of Memling and Maes, and Otto Veneris and Philip de Champagne, or whether he would go into the East and seek new types, and lie under the red Egyptian heavens and create a true Cleopatra, which no man has ever done yet,--young Cleopatra, ankle-deep in roses and fresh from Caesar's kisses,--leaning there, he saw a little peasant go by below, with two little white feet in two wooden shoes, and a face that had the pure and simple radiance of a flower.

"There is my Gretchen," he thought to himself, and went down and followed her into the cathedral. If he could get what was in her face, he would get what Scheffer could not.

A little later walking by her in the green lanes, he meditated, "It is the face of Gretchen, but not the soul--the Red Mouse has never pa.s.sed this child's lips. Nevertheless--"

"Nevertheless--" he said to himself, and smiled.

For he, the painter all his life long of Phryne living and of Phryne dead, believed that every daughter of Eve either vomits the Red Mouse or swallows it.

It makes so little difference which,--either way the Red Mouse has been there the evening towards this little rush-covered hut, he forgot the Red Mouse, and began vaguely to see that there are creatures of his mother's s.e.x from whom the beast of the Brocken slinks away.

But he still said to himself, "Nevertheless." "Nevertheless,"--for he knew well that when the steel cuts the silk, when the hound hunts the fawn, when the snake wooes the bird, when the king covets the vineyard, there is only one end possible at any time. It is the strong against the weak, the fierce against the feeble, the subtle against the simple, the master against the slave; there is no equality in the contest and no justice--it is merely inevitable, and the issue of it is written.

CHAPTER XI.

The next day she had her promised book hidden under the vine-leaves of her empty basket as she went homeward, and though she had not seen him very long or spoken to him very much, she was happy.