Ouida

“ Jeannot looked up at her, then went on his slow sad way through the wet lavender-shrubs and the opening buds of the lilies.
"You will only think of that stranger, Bébée, never of any of us—never again," he said; and wearily opened the little gate and went through it, and down the daybreak stillness of the lane. It was a foolish thing to say; but when were lovers ever wise?
Bébée did not heed; she did not understand herself or him; she only knew that she was happy; when one knows that, one does not want to seek much further. ”

“ Here Bébée, from three years old, had been used to sit beside him. By nature she was as gay as a lark. The people always heard her singing as they passed the garden. The children never found their games so merry as when she danced their rounds with them; and though she dreamed so much out there in the air among the carnations and the roses, or in the long, low workroom in the town, high against the crocketed pinnacles of the cathedral, yet her dreams, if vaguely wistful, were all bright of hue and sunny in their fantasies. ”

“ It has gilded balconies, and tossing flags, and comic operas, and leisurely pleasure seekers, and tries always to believe and make the world believe that it is Paris in very truth.
But this is only the Brussels of the noblesse and the foreigners.
There is a Brussels that is better than this—a Brussels that belongs to the old burgher life, to the artists and the craftsmen, to the master-masons of the Moyen-âge, to the same spirit and soul that once filled the free men of Ghent and the citizens of Bruges and the besieged of Leyden, and the blood of Egmont and of Horn. ”

“ He who had painted Phryne so long and faithfully had got a taint on his brush—he could not paint this pure, bright, rosy dawn—he who had always painted the glare of midnight gas on rouge or rags. Yet he felt that if he could transfer to canvas the light that was on Bébée's face he would get what Scheffer had missed. For a time it eluded him. You shall paint a gold and glistening brocade, or a fan of peacock's feathers, to perfection, and yet, perhaps, the dewy whiteness of the humble little field daisy shall baffle and escape you. ”

“ But this year they did not see the little figure itself like a rosy crocus standing against the brown timbers of the Maison de Roi.
Bébée had not heart to pluck a single blossom of them all. She let them all live, and tended them so that the little garden should look its best and brightest to him when his hand should lift its latch.
Only he was so long coming—so very long; the violets died away, and the first rosebuds came in their stead, and still Bébée looked every dawn and every nightfall vainly down the empty road.
Nothing kills young creatures like the bitterness of waiting. ”

“ Bébée smiled up at the white clear moon that sailed above the woods.
She was not awake out of her dream. She only dimly heard the words he spoke.
"You are a little peasant," said Jeannot roughly, as he paused at the gate. "It is all you can do to get your bread. You have no one to stand between you and hunger. How will it be with you when the slug gets your roses, and the snail your carnations, and your hens die of damp, and your lace is all wove awry, because your head runs on reading and folly, and you are spoilt for all simple pleasures and for all honest work?" ”

“ I cannot ask people's names because they buy my roses."
"As if it were only roses!"
There was the length of the garden between them, and Bébée did not hear as she sat on the edge of her roof with that light dreamful enjoyment of air and sky and coolness, and all the beauty of the dawning day, which the sweet vague sense of a personal happiness will bring with it to the dullest and the coldest.
"You are cross, Jeannot, that is what it is," she said, after a while. "You should not be cross; you are too big and strong and good. ”

“ Though, to be sure, they had been very heartless when Antoine's coffin had gone past them, still they had sympathy; the daisies smiled at her with their golden eyes, and the roses dropped tears on her hand, just as her mood might be; the flowers were closer friends, after all, than any human souls; and besides, she could say so much to them!
Flowers belong to fairyland; the flowers and the birds and the butterflies are all that the world has kept of its Golden Age; the only perfectly beautiful things on earth, joyous, innocent, half divine, useless, say they who are wiser than God. ”

“ The bird is made to feed on the brown berries, on the morning dews, on the scarlet hips of roses, and the blossoms of the wind-tossed pear boughs; the gem, though it be a monarch's, will only strike hard and tasteless on its beak.
"I would like to see it all," said Bébée, musingly trying to follow out her thoughts. "But as for the garden work and the spinning—that I do not want to leave, because I have done it all my life; and I do not think I should care to wear lace—it would tear very soon; one would be afraid to run; and do you see I know how it is made—all that lace. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Tired of the strange, sleepless, feverish nights; tired of the long, dull, empty days: tired of watching down the barren, leafless lane: tired of hearkening breathless to each step on the rustling dead leaves; tired of looking always, always, always, into the ruddy autumn evenings and the cold autumn starlight, and never hearing what she listened for, never seeing what she sought; tired as a child may be lost in a wood, and wearily wearing its small strength and breaking its young heart in search of the track forever missed, of the home forever beyond the horizon. ”

“ She felt no shame for the smallness of her home; no confusion at the poverty of her little place; such embarrassments are born of self-consciousness, and Bébée had no more self-consciousness than her own sweet, gray lavender-bush blowing against the door.
The lavender-bush has no splendor like the roses, has no colors like the hollyhocks; it is a simple, plain, gray thing that the bees love and that the cottagers cherish, and that keeps the moth from the homespun linen, and that goes with the dead to their graves. ”

“ CHAPTER XIII. But the next noon-time brought him to the market stall, and the next also, and so the summer days slipped away, and Bébée was quite happy if she saw him in the morning time, to give him a fresh rose, or at evening by the gates, or under the beech-trees, when he brought her a new book, and sauntered awhile up the green lane beside her.
An innocent, unconscious love like Bébée's wants so little food to make it all content. Such mere trifles are beautiful and sweet to it. Such slender stray gleams of light suffice to make a broad, bright golden noon of perfect joy around it. ”

“ It has many virtues and infinite sweetness, but it does not know it or think of it; and if the village girls ever tell it so, it fancies they only praise it out of kindness as they put its slender fragrant spears away in their warm bosoms. Bébée was like her lavender, and now that this beautiful Purple Emperor butterfly came from the golden sunbeams to find pleasure for a second in her freshness, she was only very grateful, as the lavender-bush was to the village girls. ”

“ By the time her baskets were full, her fowls fed, her goat foddered, her starling's cage cleaned, her hut door locked, and her wooden shoes clattering on the sunny road into the city, Bébée was almost content again, though ever and again, as she trod the familiar ways, the tears dimmed her eyes as she remembered that old Antoine would never again hobble over the stones beside her.
"You are a little wilful one, and too young to live alone," said Father
Francis, meeting her in the lane. ”

“ But the roses shook the water off them in the wind, and said, as she wished them to say,—
"No—no one—ever before, Bébée—no one ever before."
For roses, like everything else upon earth, only speak what our own heart puts into them.
An old man went past up the lane; old Jehan, who was too ailing and aged to make one of the pilgrimage. He looked at the little quick-moving form, grayish white in the starlight, with the dark copper vessel balanced on her head, going to and fro betwixt the well and the garden. ”

“ There is little talk of love in the lives of the poor; they have no space for it; love to them means more mouths to feed, more wooden shoes to buy, more hands to dive into the meagre bag of coppers. Now and then a girl of the commune had been married, and had ploughing in the fields or to her lace-weaving in the city. Bébée had thought little of it.
"They marry or they do not marry. That is as it may be," said Flamen, with a smile. "Bébée, I must paint you as Gretchen before she made a love-dial of the daisies. ”

“ Women are never grateful, my dear, except when they are very ill-treated. Mercury, whom we were talking of, gave them, among other gifts, a dog's heart."
Bébée felt bewildered; she did not reason about it, but the idle, shallow, cynical tone pained her by its levity and its unlikeness to the sweet, still, gray summer evening.
"Why are you in such a hurry?" he pursued. "The night is cool, and it is only seven o'clock. I will walk part of the way with you."
"I am in a hurry because I have Annémie's patterns to do," said Bébée, glad that he spoke of a thing that she knew how to answer. ”

“ Under the vast shadowy wings of angels in the stillness of the cathedral, across whose sunny aisles some little child goes slowly all alone, laden with lilies for the Feast of the Assumption, till their white glory hides its curly head.
In all strange quaint old-world niches withdrawn from men in silent grass-grown corners, where a twelfth-century corbel holds a pot of roses, or a Gothic arch yawns beneath a wool warehouse, or a waterspout with a grinning faun's head laughs in the grim humor of the Moyen-âge above the bent head of a young lace-worker. ”

“ All the delirium, and fever, and desire, and despair, that are in maturer passion, are far away from it: far as is the flash of the meteor across sultry skies from the blue forget-me-not down in the brown meadow brook.
It was very wonderful to Bébée that he, this stranger from Rubes' fairyland, could come at all to keep pace with her little clattering wooden shoes over the dust and the grass in the dim twilight time. The days went by in a trance of sweet amaze, and she kept count of the hours no more by the cuckoo-clock of the mill-house, or the deep chimes of the Brussels belfries ”

“ When one has not father, or mother, or brother, and all one's friends have barely bread enough for themselves, life cannot be very easy, nor its crusts very many at any time.
Bébée had a cherub's mouth, and a dreamer's eyes, and a poet's thoughts sometimes in her own untaught and unconscious fashion.
But all the same she was a little hard-working Brabant peasant girl; up whilst the birds twittered in the dark; to bed when the red sun sank beyond the far blue line of the plains; she hoed, and dug, and watered, and planted her little plot ”

“ She fancied she would wait on him, and tend him, and make him well, and be caressed by him, and get all gracious pretty things of leaf and blossom about him, and kneel at his feet, and be quite happy if he only touched her now and then with his lips;—her thoughts went no further than that;—her love for him was of that intensity and absorption in which nothing But itself is remembered.
When a creature loves much, even when it is as little and as simple a soul as Bébée, the world and all its people and all its laws and ways are as naught. They cease to exist ”

“ A blameless life, an eventless life, a life as clear as the dewdrop, and as colorless; a life opening, passing, ending in the little green wooded lane, by the bit of water where the swans made their nests under the willows; a life like the life of millions, a little purer, a little brighter, a little more tender, perhaps, than those lives usually are, but otherwise as like them as one ear of barley is like another as it rises from the soil, and blows in the wind, and turns brown in the strong summer sun, and then goes down to the sod again under the sickle. ”

“ I sat here watching them come and go, and my child sickened and died, and the summer passed, and the autumn, and all the while I looked—looked—looked; for the brigs are all much alike; and only her I always saw as soon as she hove in sight (because he tied a hank of flax to her mizzen-mast) ; and when he was home safe and sound I spun the hank into hose for him; that was a fancy of his, and for eleven voyages, one on another, he had never missed to tie the flax nor I to spin the hose. But the hank of flax I never saw this time; nor the brave brig; nor my good man with his sunny blue eyes. ”