"Oh, dear swans, how good it is to be sixteen!—how good it is to live at all!—do you not tell the willows so?" said Bébée to the gleam of silver under the dark leaves by the water's side, which showed her where her friends were sleeping, with their snowy wings closed over their stately heads, and the veiled gold and ruby of their eyes.
The swans did not awake to answer.
Only the nightingale answered from the willows, with Desdemona's song.
But Bébée had never heard of Desdemona, and the willows had no sigh for her.
"Good night!" she said, softly, to all the green dewy sleeping world, and then she lay down and slept herself.—The nightingale sang on, and the willows trembled.
CHAPTER V
"If I could save a centime a day, I could buy a pair of stockings this time next year," thought Bébée, locking her shoes with her other treasures in her drawer the next morning, and taking her broom and pail to wash down her little palace.
But a centime a day is a great deal in Brabant, when one has not always enough for bare bread, and when, in the long chill winter, one must weave thread lace all through the short daylight for next to nothing at all; for there are so many women in Brabant, and every one of them, young or old, can make lace, and if one do not like the pitiful wage, one may leave it and go and die, for what the master lacemakers care or know; there will always be enough, many more than enough, to twist the thread round the bobbins, and weave the bridal veils, and the trains for the courts.
"And besides, if I can save a centime, the Varnhart children ought to have it," thought Bébée, as she swept the dust together. It was so selfish of her to be dreaming about a pair of stockings, when those little things often went for days on a stew of nettles.
So she looked at her own pretty feet,—pretty and slender, and arched, rosy, and fair, and uncramped by the pressure of leather,—and resigned her day-dream with a brave heart, as she put up her broom and went out to weed, and hoe, and trim, and prune the garden that had been for once neglected the night before.
"One could not move half so easily in stockings," she thought with true philosophy as she worked among the black, fresh, sweet-smelling mould, and kissed a rose now and then as she passed one.
When she got into the city that day, her rush-bottomed chair, which was always left upside down in case rain should fall in the night, was set ready for her, and on its seat was a gay, gilded box, such as rich people give away full of bonbons.
Bébée stood and looked from the box to the Broodhuis, from the Broodhuis to the box; she glanced around, but no one had come there so early as she, except the tinker, who was busy quarrelling with his wife and letting his smelting fire burn a hole in his breeches.
"The box was certainly for her, since it was set upon her chair?"—Bébée pondered a moment; then little by little opened the lid.
Within, on a nest of rose-satin, were two pair of silk stockings!—real silk!—with the prettiest clocks worked up their sides in color!
Bébée gave a little scream, and stood still, the blood hot in her cheeks; no one heard her, the tinker's wife, who alone was near, having just wished Heaven to send a judgment on her husband, was busy putting out his smoking smallclothes. It is a way that women and wives have, and they never see the bathos of it.
The place filled gradually.
The customary crowds gathered. The business of the day began underneath the multitudinous tones of the chiming bells. Bébée's business began too; she put the box behind her with a beating heart, and tied up her flowers.
It was the fairies, of course! but they had never set a rush-bottomed chair on its legs before, and this action of theirs frightened her.
It was rather an empty morning. She sold little, and there was the more time to think.
About an hour after noon a voice addressed her,—
"Have you more moss-roses for me?"
Bébée looked up with a smile, and found some. It was her companion of the cathedral. She had thought much of the red shoes and the silver clasps, but she had thought nothing at all of him.
"You are not too proud to be paid to-day?" he said, giving her a silver franc; he would not alarm her with any more gold; she thanked him, and slipped it in her little leathern pouch, and went on sorting some clove-pinks.
"You do not seem to remember me?" he said, with a little sadness.
"Oh, I remember you," said Bébée, lifting her frank eyes. "But you know I speak to so many people, and they are all nothing to me."
"Who is anything to you?" It was softly and insidiously spoken, but it awoke no echo.
"Varnhart's children," she answered him, instantly. "And old Annémie by the wharfside—and Tambour—and Antoine's grave—and the starling—and, of course, above all, the flowers."
"And the fairies, I suppose?—though they do nothing for you."
She looked at him eagerly,—
"They have done something to-day. I have found a box, and some stockings—such beautiful stockings! Silk ones! Is it not very odd?"
"It is more odd they should have forgotten you so long. May I see them?"
"I cannot show them to you now. Those ladies are going to buy. But you can see them later—if you wait."
"I will wait and paint the Broodhuis."
"So many people do that; you are a painter then?"
"Yes—in a way."
He sat down on an edge of the stall, and spread his things there, and sketched, whilst the traffic went on around them. He was very many years older than she; handsome, with a dark, and changeful, and listless face; he wore brown velvet, and had a red ribbon at his throat; he looked a little as Egmont might have done when wooing Claire.
Bébée, as she sold the flowers and took the change fifty times in the hour, glanced at him now and then, and watched the movements of his hands, she could not have told why.
Always among men and women, always in the crowds of the streets, people were nothing to her; she went through them as through a field of standing corn,—only in the field she would have tarried for poppies, and in the town she tarried for no one.
She dealt with men as with women, simply, truthfully, frankly, with the innocent fearlessness of a child. When they told her she was pretty, she smiled; it was just as they said that her flowers were sweet.
But this man's hands moved so swiftly; and as she saw her Broodhuis growing into color and form beneath them, she could not choose but look now and then, and twice she gave her change wrong.
He spoke to her rarely, and sketched on and on in rapid bold strokes the quaint graces and massive richness of the Maison du Roi.
There is no crowd so busy in Brabant that it will not find leisure to stare. The Fleming or the Walloon has nothing of the Frenchman's courtesy; he is rough and rude; he remains a peasant even when town bred, and the surly insolence of the "Gueux" is in him still. He is kindly to his fellows, though not to beasts; he is shrewd, patient, thrifty, industrious, and good in very many ways, but civil never.
A good score of them left off their occupations and clustered round the painter, staring, chattering, pushing, pointing, as though a brush had never been seen in all the land of Rubens.
Bébée, ashamed of her people, got up from her chair and rebuked them.
"Oh, men of Brussels; fie then for shame!" she called to them as clearly