"Look, she sends you this. She is not angry, you see, and it is much more pleasure when she is pleased--do you not know?"

He shrank a little as her fingers touched him.

"What a pity you had no mother, Bebee!" he said, on an impulse of emotion, of which in Paris he would have been more ashamed than of any guilt.

CHAPTER XV.

In the deserted lane by the swans' water, under the willows, the horses waited to take him to Mechlin; little, quick, rough horses, with round bra.s.s bells, in the Flemish fashion, and gay harness, and a low char-a-banc, in which a wolf-skin and red rugs, and all a painter's many necessities, were tossed together.

He lifted her in, and the little horses flew fast through the green country, ringing chimes at each step, till they plunged into the deep glades of the woods of Cambre and Soignies.

Bebee sat breathless with delight.

She had never gone behind horses in all her life, except once or twice in a wagon when the tired teamsters had dragged a load of corn across the plains, or when the miller's old gray mare had hobbled wearily before a cart-load of noisy, happy, mischievous children going home from the ma.s.ses and fairs, and flags, and flowers, and church banners, and puppet-shows, and lighted altars, and whirling merry-go-rounds of the Fete Dieu.

She had never known what it was to sail as on the wings of the wind along broad roads, with yellow wheat-lands, and green hedges, and wayside trees, and little villages, and reedy ca.n.a.l water, all flying by her to the sing-song of the joyous bells.

"Oh, how good it is to live!" she cried, clapping her hands in a very ecstasy, as the clear morning broadened into gold and the west wind rose and blew from the sands by the sea.

"Yes--it is good--if one did not tire so soon," said he, watching her with a listless pleasure.

But she did not hear; she was beyond the reach of any power to sadden her; she was watching the white oxen that stood on the purple brow of the just reapen lands, and the rosy clouds that blew like a shower of apple-blossoms across the sky to the south.

There was a sad darkling Calvary on the edge of the harvest-field that looked black against the blue sky; its shadow fell across the road, but she did not see it: she was looking at the sun.

There is not much change in the great Soignies woods. They are aisles on aisles of beautiful green trees, crossing and recrossing; tunnels of dark foliage that look endless; long avenues of beech, of oak, of elm, or of fir, with the bracken and the brushwood growing dense between; a delicious forest growth everywhere, shady even at noon, and by a little past midday dusky as evening; with the forest fragrance, sweet and dewy, all about, and under the fern the stirring of wild game, and the white gleam of little rabbits, and the sound of the wings of birds.

Soignies is not legend-haunted like the Black Forest, nor king-haunted like Fontainebleau, nor sovereign of two historic streams like the brave woods of Heidelberg; nor wild and romantic, arid broken with black rocks, and poetized by the shade of Jaques, and swept through by a perfect river, like its neighbors of Ardennes; nor throned aloft on mighty mountains like the majestic oak glades of the Swabian hills of the ivory carvers.

Soignies is only a Flemish forest in a plain, throwing its shadows over corn-fields and cattle pastures, with no panorama beyond it and no wonders in its depth. But it is a fresh, bold, beautiful forest for all that.

It has only green leaves to give,--green leaves always, league after league; but there is about it that vague mystery which all forests have, and this universe of leaves seems boundless, and Pan might dwell in it, and St. Hubert, and John Keats.

Bebee, in her rare holidays with the Bac children or with Jeannot's sisters, had never penetrated farther than the glades of the Cambre, and had never entered the heart of the true forest, which is much still what it must have been in the old days when the burghers of Brabant cut their yew bows and their pike staves from it to use against the hosts of Spain.

To Bebee it was as an enchanted land, and every play of light and shade, every hare speeding across the paths, every thrush singing in the leaves, every little dog-rose or harebell that blossomed in the thickets, was to her a treasure, a picture, a poem, a delight.

He had seen girls thus in the woods of Vincennes and of Versailles in the student days of his youth: little work-girls fresh from chalets of the Jura or from vine-hung huts of the Loire, who had brought their poor little charms to perish in Paris; and who dwelt under the hot tiles and amidst the gilded shop signs till they were as pale and thin as their own starved balsams; and who, when they saw the green woods, laughed and cried a little, and thought of the broad sun-swept fields, and wished that they were back again behind their drove of cows, or weeding among the green grapes.

But those little work-girls had been mere homely daisies, and daisies already with the dust of the pavement and of the dancing-gardens upon them.

Bebee was as pure and fresh as these dew-wet dog-roses that she found in the thickets of thorn.

He had meant to treat her as he had used to do those work-girls--a little wine, a little wooing, a little folly and pa.s.sion, idle as a b.u.t.terfly and brief as a rainbow--one midsummer day and night--then a handful of gold, a caress, a good-morrow, and forgetfulness ever afterwards--that was what he had meant when he had brought her out to the forest of Soignies.

But--she was different, this child.

He made the great sketch of her for his Gretchen, sitting on a moss-grown trunk, with marguerites in her hand; he sent for their breakfast far into the woods, and saw her set her pearly teeth into early peaches and costly sweetmeats; he wandered with her hither and thither, and told her tales out of the poets and talked to her in the dreamy, cynical, poetical manner that was characteristic of him, being half artificial and half sorrowful, as his temper was.

But Bebee, all unconscious, intoxicated with happiness, and yet touched by it into that vague sadness which the summer sun brings with it even to young things, if they have soul in them,--Bebee said to him what the work-girls of Paris never had done.

Beautiful things: things fantastic, ignorant, absurd, very simple, very unreasonable oftentimes, but things beautiful always, and sometimes even very wise by a wisdom not of the world; by a certain light divine that does shine now and then as through an alabaster lamp, through minds that have no grossness to obscure them.

Her words were not equal to the burden of her thoughts at times, but he knew how to take the pearl of the thought from the broken sh.e.l.l and tangled sea-weed of her simple, untutored speech.

"If there be a G.o.d anywhere," he thought to himself, "this little Fleming is very near him."

She was so near that, although he had no belief in any G.o.d, he could not deal with her as he had used to do with the work-girls in the primrose paths of old Vincennes.

CHAPTER XVI.

"To be Gretchen, you must count the leaves of your daisies," he said to her, as he painted,--painted her just as she was, with her two little white feet in the wooden shoes, and the thick green leaves behind; the simplest picture possible, the dress of gray--only cool dark gray--with white linen bodice, and no color anywhere except in the green of the foliage; but where he meant the wonder and the charm of it to lie was in the upraised, serious, child-like face, and the gaze of the grave, smiling eyes.

It was Gretchen, spinning, out in the open air among the flowers.

Gretchen, with the tall dog-daisies growing up about her feet, among the thyme and the roses, before she had had need to gather, one to ask her future of its parted leaves.

The Gretchen of Scheffer tells no tale; she is a fair-haired, hard-working, simple-minded peasant, with whom neither angels nor devils have anything to do, and whose eyes never can open to either h.e.l.l or heaven. But the Gretchen of Flamen said much more than this: looking at it, men would sigh from shame, and women weep from sorrow.

"Count the daisies?" echoed Bebee. "Oh, I know what you mean. A little--much--pa.s.sionately--until death--not at all. What the girls say when they want to see if any one loves them? Is that it?"

She looked at him without any consciousness, except as she loved the flowers.

"Do you think the daisies know?" she went on, seriously, parting their petals with her fingers. "Flowers do know many things--that is certain."

"Ask them for yourself."

"Ask them what?"

"How much--any one--loves you?"

"Oh, but every one loves me; there is no one that is bad. Antoine used to say to me. 'Never think of yourself, Bebee; always think of other people, so every one will love you.' And I always try to do that, and every one does."

"But that is not the love the daisy tells of to your s.e.x."

"No?"

"No; the girls that you see count the flowers--they are thinking, not of all the village, but of some one unlike all the rest, whose shadow falls across theirs in the moonlight! You know that?"

"Ah, yes--and they marry afterwards--yes."

She said it softly, musingly, with no embarra.s.sment; it was an unreal, remote thing to her, and yet it stirred her heart a little with a vague trouble that was infinitely sweet.