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TWO LITTLE WOODEN
SHOES.
3. Shettº.
By OUIDA,
“AUTHOR OF ‘CHANDos,’ ‘TR1cotRIN, ‘UNDER Two FLAGS,”
E"TC.
Aſ/2 IP /º/D/7/OA’.
§ 0 till Oil :
CHATTO AND WINDUS, PICCADILLY.

:
§:
* }
* *
* : 0 UIDA's Novels.
Uniform Edition, crown Sco, red cloth extra,
58. each.
FOLLE FARINE.
IDALI.A.
CHAN DOS. -
UNDER TWO FLAGS.
TRICOTRIN.
CECIL CASTLEMAINE’S GAGE.
HELD IN BOND AGE.
PASCAREL.
PUCK.
DOG OF FIL ANDERS.
STRATHMORE.
Two LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
SIGNA. .
IN A WINTER CITY.
CIATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY, W.
>
N
N
!
LÜrºom
VU'ſ aeva.
|- H - 2.7
| 3 || YST
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES,
3 Šhettº,
CHAPTER I.
—4–
޺ EBÉE sprang out of bed at daybreak.
§§§ She was sixteen.
It seemed a very wonderful thing to
be as much as that—sixteen— a woman quite.
A cock was crowing under her lattice—he said
how old you are 1–how old you are every time
that he sounded his clarion.
She opened the lattice and wished him good-
day, with a laugh. It was so pleasant to be
woke by him and to think that no one in all the
world could ever call her a child any more.
B

2 TTVO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES.
There was a kid bleating in the shed. There
was a thrush singing in the dusk of the sycamore
leaves. There was a calf lowing to its mother
away there beyond the fence. There were dreamy
muffled bells ringing in the distance from many
steeples and belfries where the city was ; they all
said one thing : “How good it is to be so old as
that—how good, how very good l’’
Bébée was very pretty.
No one in all Brabant ever denied that. To
look at herit seemed as if she had so lived amongst
the flowers that she had grown like them, and
only looked a bigger blossom—that was all.
She wore two little wooden shoes and a little
cotton cap, and a grey kirtle–linen in summer,
serge in winter; but the little feet in the shoes
were like rose-leaves, and the cap was as white
as a lily, and the grey kirtle was like the bark of
the bough that the apple blossom parts when
it peeps out to blush in the Sun.
The flowers had been the only godmothers
that she had ever had, and fairy godmothers too,
The marigolds and the sunflowers had given her
TVO LTTTLE WOODEN SEIOES. 3
their ripe rich gold to tint her hair; the lupins
had lent their azure for her eyes; the moss-rose
buds had made her pretty mouth; the arum lilies
had uncurled their softness for her skin; and the
lime-blossoms had given her their frank, fresh,
innocent fragrance. The winds had blown, and
the rains had rained, and the sun had shone
on her, indeed, but they had only warmed the
whiteness of her limbs, and had given to her
body and her soul a hardy, breeze-blown fresh-
ness like that of a field cowslip.
She had never been called anything but
Pébée.
One summer day Antoine Maes,'—a French sub-
ject, but a Belgian by adoption and habit, an old
man who got his meagre living by tilling the garden
plot about his hut and selling flowers in the city
squares—Antoine, going into Brussels for his day's
trade, had seen a grey bundle floating amongst
the water-lilies in the bit of water near his hut
and had hooked it out to land, and found a year-
old child in it, left to drown no doubt, but saved
by the lilies, and laughing gleefully at fate.
B 2
4 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
Some lace-worker, blind with the pain of toil,
or some peasant woman harder of heart than
the oxen in her yoke, had left it there to drift
away to death, not reckoning for the inward
ripple of the current or the toughness of the lily
leaves and stems.
Old Antoine took it to his wife, and the wife,
a childless aged soul, begged leave to keep it;
and the two poor lonely simple folks grew to
care for the homeless and motherless thing, and
they and the people about all called it Bébée—
only Bébée.
The church got at it and added to it a
saint's name; but for all its little world it re-
mained Bébée—Bébée when it trotted no higher
than the red carnation-heads;–Bébée when its
yellow curls touched as high as the lavender
bush ;-Bébée on this proud day when the
thrush's song and the cock's crow found her
sixteen years old.
Old Antoine's hut stood in a little patch of
garden ground with a briar hedge all round it,
in that byeway which lies between Laeken and
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES. 5
Brussels, in the heart of flat green Brabant,
where there are beautiful meadows and tall
flowering hedges, and forest trees, and fern-filled
ditches, and a little piece of water, deep and
cool, where the Swans sail all day long, and
the silvery willows dip and sway with the
wind.
Turn aside from the highway, and there it lies
to-day ; and all the place brims over with grass,
and boughs, and blossoms, and flowering beans
and wild dog-roses; and there are a few cottages
and cabins there near the pretty water, and farther
there is an old church sacred to S. Guido ; and
beyond goes the green, level country and the
endless wheat-fields, and the old mills with
their red sails against the sun ; and beyond all
these the pale, blue, sea-like horizon of the plains
of Flanders. -
It was a pretty little hut, pink all over like a
sea shell, in the fashion that the Netherlanders
love ; and its two square lattices were dark with
creeping plants and big rose-bushes; and its
roof, so low that you could touch it, was golden
6 TWO LTTTLE WOODEN SEIOES.
*-* **
and green with all the lichens and stoneworts
that are known on earth.
Here Bébée grew from year to year; and soon
learned to be big enough and hardy enough to
tie up bunches of stocks and pinks for the
market, and then to carry a basket for herself,
trotting by Antoine's side along the green road-
way and into the white, wide streets; and in the
market the buyers—most often of all when they
were young mothers—would seek out the little
golden head and the beautiful frank blue eyes,
and buy Bébée's lilies and carnations whether
they wanted them or not. So that old Antoine
Maes used to cross himself and say that, thanks
to Our Lady, trade was thrice as stirring since
the little one had stretched out her rosy fingers
with the flowers
All the same, however stirring trade might be
in summer, when the long winters came and the
Montagne de la Cour was a sharp slope of ice,
and the pinnacles of Ste. Gudule were all frosted
white with snow, and the hothouse flowers alone
could fill the market, and the country gardens
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES. 7
were bitter black wind-swept desolations where
the chilly roots huddled themselves together
underground like homeless children in a cellar,
—then the money gained in the time of leaf and
blossom was all needed to buy a black loaf and a
faggot of wood; and many a day in the little
pink hut Bébée rolled herself up in her bed like
a dormouse, to forget in sleep that she was Sup-
perless and as cold as a frozen robin.
So that when Antoine Maes grew sick and
died, more from age and weakness than any real
disease, there were only a few silver crowns in
the brown jug hidden in the thatch, and the hut
itself, with its patch of ground, was all that he
could leave to Bébée.
“Live in it, little one, and take nobody in it
to worry you, and be good to the bird and the
goat, and be sure to keep the flowers blowing,”
said the old man with his last breath; and, sob-
bing her heart out by his bedside, Bébée vowed
to do his bidding.
She was not quite fourteen then ; and when she
had laid her old friend to rest in the rough green
8 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
graveyard about S. Guido, she was very sorrow-
ful and lonely—poor little, bright Bébée, who
had never hardly known a worse woe than to run
the thorns of the roses into her fingers or to cry
because a thrush was found starved to death in
the snow.
Bébée went home, and sat down in a corner
and thought.
The hut was her own, and her own the little
green triangle just then crowded with its May-
day blossom in all the colours of the rainbow.
She was to live in it, and never let the flowers
die—so he had said; good, rough old ugly An-
toine Maes, who had been to her as father,
mother, country, king, and law.
The sun was shining. Through the little square
of the lattice she could see the great tulips open-
ing in the grass and a bough of the apple-tree
swaying in the wind. A chaffinch clung to the
bough, and swung to and fro singing. The door
stood open, with the broad bright day shining
through ; and Bébée's little world came stream-
ing in with it—the world which dwelt in the half
7 Wo LITTLE WooDEN SHOES 9
sa- =
dozen cottages that fringed this green lane of hers
like beavers' nests pushed out under the leaves
on to the water's edge.
They came in, six or eight of them, all women;
trim, clean, plain Brabant peasants, hard work-
ing, kindly of nature, and shrewd in their own
simple matters; people who laboured in the fields
all the day long or worked themselves blind over
the lace pillows in the city.
“You are too young to live alone, Bébée,”
said the first of them. “My old mother shall
come and keep house for you.”
“Nay—better come and live with me, Bébée,”
said the second. “I will give you bit and drop,
and clothing, too, for the right to your plot of
ground.” :
“That is to cheat her,” said the third. “Hark
here, Bébée—my sister, who is a lone woman,
as you know well, shall come and bide with you,
and ask you nothing—nothing at all—only you
shall just give her a crust, perhaps, and a few
flowers to sell sometimes.”
5
“No, no,” said a fourth ; “that will not do.
10 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
–4
You let me have the garden and the hut, Bébée,
and my sons shall till the place for you—and I
will live with you myself, and leave the boys the
cabin—so you will have all the gain, do you not
see, dear little one 2’’
“Pooh !” said the fifth, stouter and better
clothed than the rest. “You are all eager for
your own good, not for hers. Now I-Father
Francis says we should all do as we would be
done by—I will take Bébée to live with me, all
for nothing; and we will root the flowers up
and plant it with good cabbages and potatoes
and salad plants. And I will stable my cows
in the hut to sweeten it after a dead man, and
I will take my chance of making money out of
it, and no one can speak more fair than that
when one sees what weather is, and thinks what
insects do; and all the year round, winter and
summer, Bébée here will want for nothing, and
have to take no care for herself whatever.”
The speaker, Trine IGrebs, was the best-to-do
woman in the little lane, having two cows of her
own and earrings of solid silver, and a green
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEHOES 11
cart, and a big dog that took the milk into
Brussels. She was heard, therefore, with respect,
and a short silence followed her words. But it
was very short ; and a hubbub of voices crossed
each other after it as the speakers grew hotter
against one another and more eager to con-
vince each other of the disinterestedness and
delicacy of their offers of aid.
Through it all Bébée sat quite quiet on the
edge of the little truckle bed, with her eyes fixed
on the apple bough and the singing chaffinch.
She heard them all patiently.
They were all her good friends, friends old
and true. This one had given her cherries a
dozen of Summers. That other had bought her
a little waxen Jesus at Kermesse. The old
woman in the blue limen skirt had taken her
to her first communion. She who wanted her
sister to have the crust and the flowers, had
brought her a beautiful painted book of Hours
that had cost her a whole franc. Another had
given her the solitary wonder, travel and foreign
feast of her whole life, a day fifteen miles away
I2 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
*
at the fair at Mechlin. The last speaker of all
had danced her on her knee a hundred times
in babyhood and told her legends, and let her
ride in the green cart behind big curly-coated
Tambour.
Bébée did not doubt that these trusty old
friends meant well by her, and yet a certain
heavy sense fell on her that in all these coun-
sels there was not the same whole-hearted
and frank goodness that had prompted the gifts
to her of the waxen Jesus, and the book of
Hours. -
Bébée did not reason, because she was too
little a thing and too trustful; but she felt in a
vague, sorrowful fashion, that they were all of
them trying to make some benefit out of her poor
heritage, with small regard for herself at the
root of their speculations. .
Bébée was a child; wholly a child; body and
soul were both as fresh in her as a golden crocus
just born out of the snows. But she was not a
little fool, though people sometimes called her so
because she would sit in the moments of her
T})^O L1 TTLE WOODENT SHOES. 13
leisure with her blue eyes on the far away clouds
like a thing in a dream. -
She heard them patiently till the cackle of
shrill voices had exhausted itself, and the six
women stood on the sunny mud floor of the hut
eyeing each other with venomous glances; for
though they were good neighbours at all times,
each, in this matter, was hungry for the advan-
tages to be got out of old Antoine's plot of
ground.
They were very poor ; they toiled in the
scorched or frozen fields all weathers, or spent
from dawn to nightfall pouring over their cobweb
lace; and to save a Sou or gain a cabbage was of
moment to them, only second to the keeping of
their souls secure of heaven by Lenten mass and
IEaster psalm.
Bébée listened to them all, and the tears
dried on her cheeks, and her pretty rosebud
lips curled close in one another.
“You are very good, no doubt, all of you,”
she said at last. “But I cannot tell you that I
am thankful, for my heart is like a stone, and
34 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
I think it is not so very much for me as it is
for the hut that you are speaking. Perhaps it
is wrong in me to say so—yes—I am wrong, I
am sure, Lyou are all kind, and I am only
Bébée. But you see he told me to live here
and take care of the flowers, and I must do it,
that is certain. I will ask Father Francis, if
you wish; but if he tell me I am wrong as you
do, I shall stay here all the same.”
And in answer to their expostulations and
condemnation, she only said the same thing
over again always, in different words, but to the
same steadfast purpose. The women clamoured
about her for an hour in reproach and rebuke ;
she was a baby indeed, she was a little fool, she
was a naughty, obstinate child, she was an
ungrateful wilful little creature, who ought to be
beaten till she was blue, if only there was any-
body that had the right to do it!
“But there is nobody that has the right,”
said Bébée, getting angry and standing upright
on the floor, with Antoine's old grey cat in her
round arms, “He told me to stay here, and he
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES, 15
*s- vºy
would not have said so if it had been wrong;
and I am old enough to do for myself, and I am
not afraid, and who is there that would hurt me?
Oh, yes; go and tell Father Francis, if you
like. I do not believe he will blame me, but
if he do, I must bear it. Even if he shut the
church door on me, I will obey Antoine, and
the flowers will know I am right, and they will
let no evil spirits touch me, for the flowers are
strong for that ; they talk to the angels in the
night.”
What use was it to argue with a little idiot
like this? Indeed, peasants never do argue;
they use abuse. It is their only form of logic.
They used it to Bébée, rating her soundly, as
became people who were old enough to be her
grandmothers, and who knew that she had been
raked out of their own pond, and had no more
real place in creation than a water-rat, as one
might say.
The women were kindly, and had never
thrown this truth against her before ; and in
fact, to be a foundling was no sort of disgrace
16 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES.
to their sight ; but anger is like wine, and
makes the depths of the mind shine clear, and
all the mud that is in the depths stink in the
light; and in their wrath at not sharing Antoine's
legacy, the good souls said bitter things that
in calm moments they would no more have
uttered than they would have taken up a knife
to slit her throat. -
They talked themselves hoarse with impatience
and chagrin, and went backwards over the thres-
hold, their wooden shoes and their shrill voices
lceeping a clattering chorus.
By this time it was evening; the Sun had gone
off the floor, and the bird had done singing.
Bébée stood in the same place, hardening her
little heart, whilst big and bitter tears swelled
into her eyes, and fell on the soft fur of the
sleeping cat.
She only very vaguely understood why it was
in any sense shameful to have been raked out
of the waterlilies like a drowning field-mouse, as
they had said it was. She and Antoine had often
talked of that summer morning when he had
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. I7
found her there amongst the leaves, and Bébée
and he had laughed over it gaily, and she had been
quite proud in her innocent fashion that she had
had a fairy and the flowers for her mother and god-
mothers, which Antoine always told her was the
case beyond any manner of doubt.
Even Father Francis hearing the pretty harm-
less fiction had never deemed it his duty to
disturb her pleasure in it, being a good, cheerful
old man, who thought that woe and wisdom both
come soon enough to bow young shoulders and
to silver young curls without his interference.
Bébée had always thought it quite a fine
thing to have been born of water-lilies with the
sun for her father, and when people in Brussels
had asked her of her parentage, seeing her stand
in the market with a certain look on her that was
not like other children, she had always gravely
answered in the purest good faith,<
“My mother was a flower.”
“You are a flower, at any rate,” they would
say in return, and Bébée had been always quite
Content.
18 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
* *-*.
But now she was doubtful; she was rather
perplexed than sorrowful. These good friends
of hers seemed to see some new sin about
her. Perhaps, after all, thought Bébée, it might
have been better to have had a human mother
who would have taken care of her now old
Antoine was dead, instead of those beautiful
gleaming cold waterlilies which went to sleep
on their green velvet beds, and did not certainly
care when the thorns ran into her fingers, or
the pebbles got in her wooden shoes. -
In some vague way, disgrace and envy—the
twin Discords of the world—touched her inno-
cent cheek with their hot breath, and as the
evening fell, Bébée felt very lonely and a little
wistful. .
She had been always used to run out in the
pleasant twilight time amongst the flowers and
water them, Antoine filling the can from the
well, and the neighbours would come and lean
against the little low wall, knitting and gossip-
ing; and the big dogs, released from harness,
would poke their heads through the wicket for a
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 19
crust; and the children would dance and play
Colin Maillard on the green by the water, and
she, when the flowers were no longer thirsty,
would join them, and romp and dance and sing
the gayest of them all.
But now the buckets hung at the bottom of
the well, and the flowers hungered in vain, and
the neighbours held aloof, and she shut-to the
hut door and listened to the rain which began to
fall, and cried herself to sleep all alone in her
tiny kingdom. -
... When the dawn came the sun rose red and
warm ; the grass and boughs sparkled; a lark
sang; Bébée awoke, sad in heart indeed, for her
lost old friend, but brighter and braver.
“IEach of them wanted to get something out of
me,” thought the child. “Well, I will live
alone, them, and do my duty, just as he said.
The flowers will never let any real harm come,
though they do look so indifferent and smiling
sometimes, and though not one of them hung
their heads when his coffin was carried through
them yesterday.”
C 2
20 TJWO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES.
That want of sympathy in the flowers troubled
her. The old man had loved them so well,
and they had all looked as glad as ever, and
had blossomed saucily in the sun, and not
even a rose bud turned the paler as the poor
still stiffened limbs went by in the wooden
shell.
“I suppose God cares—but I wish they did,”
said Bébée, to whom the garden was more
intelligible than Providence.
“Why do you not care ?” she asked the pinks,
shaking the raindrops off their curled rosy petals.
The pinks leaned lazily against their sticks, and
seemed to say, “Why should we care for any-
thing, unless a slug be eating us 2—that is real
woe, if you like.”
Bébée, without her sabots on, wandered
thoughtfully among the Sweet wet sunlightened
labyrinths of blossom, her pretty bare feet
treading the narrow grassy paths with pleasure
in their coolness.
“He was so good to you,” she said reproach-
fully to the great gaudy gillyflowers and the
TWO LITTLE WOODENT SHOES. 21
ºssºms:
painted sweet peas. “He never let you know
heat or cold—he never let the worm gnaw
or the snail harm you;-he would get up in
the dark to see after your wants, and when
the ice froze over you, he was there to loosen
your chains. Why do you not care, any one
of you ?”
“How silly you are l’” said the flowers. “You
must be a butterfly or a poet, Bébée, to be as
foolish as that. Some one will do all he did.
We are of market value, you know. Care, in-
deed!—when the sun is so warm, and there is
not an earwig in the place to trouble us.”
The flowers were not always so selfish as this;
and perhaps the sorrow in Bébée's heart made
their callousness seem harder than it really
was. When we suffer very much ourselves,
anything that smiles in the sun seems cruel—a
child, a bird, a dragonfly—nay, even a flutter-
ing ribbon, or a spear-grass that waves in the
wind.
There was a little shrine at the corner of the
garden, set into the wall; a niche with a bit of
22 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES
glass and a picture of the Virgin, so battered
that no one could trace any feature of it. It had
been there for centuries, and was held in great
veneration; and old Antoine had always cut the
choicest buds of his roses and set them in a delf
pot in front of it every other morning all the
summer long.
Bébée, whose religion was the sweetest and
vaguest mingling of Pagan and Christian myths,
and whose faith in fairies and in Saints was
exactly equal in strength and in ignorance— -
Bébée filled the delf pot anew carefully, then
knelt down on the turf in that little green
corner, and prayed in devout hopeful childish
good faith to the awful unknown Powers who
were to her only as gentle guides and kindly
playmates.
Was she too familiar with the Holy Mother ?
She was almost fearful that she was ; but
then the Holy Mother loved flowers so well,
Pébée could not feel aloof from her, nor be
afraid.
“When one cuts the best blossoms for her,
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES. 23
and tries to be good, and never tells a lie,”
thought Bébée, “I am quite sure, as she loves
the lilies, that she will never altogether forget
me.”
So she said to the Mother of Christ fear-
lessly, and nothing doubting; and then rose
for her daily work of cutting the flowers for
the market in Brussels.
By the time her baskets were full, her
fowls fed, her goat foddered, her starling's cage
cleaned, and her hut door locked, and her
wooden shoes clattering on the Sunny road into S.
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 he did not scold her seriously; and she
kept to her resolve ; and the women who were
good at heart took her back into favour again;
24 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
-y
and so Bébée had her own way, and the fairies,
or the saints, or both together, took care of
her; and so it came to pass that all alone she
heard the cock crow whilst it was dark, and woke
to the grand and amazing truth that this fragrant
dusky June morning found her full sixteen years
old.
CHAPTER II.
–4–
"summer.
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 hardworking Brabant
peasant girl; up whilst the birds twittered in the
dark; to bed when the red sun sank beyond the

26 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES.
far blue line of the plains; she hoed, and dug,
and watered, and planted her little plot; she
kept her cabin as clean as a fresh blossomed
primrose; she milked her goat, and swept her
floor; she sat, all the warm days, in the town,
selling her flowers, and in the winter-time, when
her garden yielded her nothing, she strained
her sight over lace-making in the city to get
the small bit of food that stood between her
and that hunger which to the poor means
death.
A hard life : very hard when hail and snow
made the streets of Brussels like slopes of ice ;
a little hard even in the gay Summer-time when
Bébée sat under the awning fronting the Maison
du Roi; but all the time the child throve on it,
and was happy, and dreamed of many graceful and
gracious things whilst she was weeding amongst
her lilies, or tracing the threads to and fro on
her lace pillow.
She could not move amongst her flowers idly as
poets and girls love to do ; she had to be active
amidst them, else drought and rain, and worm
TWO LITILE WOODEN SEHOES. 27
and snail, and blight and brute would have made
havoc of their fairest hopes.
The loveliest love is that which dreams high
above all storms, unsoiled by all burdens; but,
perhaps, the strongest love is that which, whilst
it adores, drags its feet through mire, and burns
its brow in heat for the thing beloved. So
Bébée dreamed in her garden; but all the time
for sake of it hoed and dug, and hurt her
hands, and tired her limbs, and bowed her
shoulders under the great metal pails from the
well.
Now—when she woke to the full sense of her
wonderful sixteen years, LBébée, standing bare-
foot on the mud-floor, was as pretty a sight as
was to be seen betwixt Scheldt and Rhine. The
sun had only left a soft warmth like an apricot’s
on her white skin. Her limbs, though strong
as a mountain pony's, were slender and well
shaped. Her hair curled in shiny crumpled
masses, and tumbled about her shoulders.
Her pretty round plump little breast was
white as the daisies in the grass without, and
28 TWO LTTTLE WOODEN SHOES.
in this blossoming time of her little life Bébée,
in her way, was beautiful as a peach-bloom is
beautiful, and her innocent, courageous, happy
eyes had dreams in them underneath their
laughter—dreams that went farther than the
green woods of Laeken, farther even than the
white clouds of summer.
She was sixteen 1–quite a woman l—was it
possible, she said to herself, as she went out
to sit on her little wooden stool in the door-
way. There had been fresh rain in the night,
the garden was radiant ; the smell of the wet
earth was sweeter than all perfumes that are
burned in palaces. The dripping rosebuds
nodded against her hair as she went out; the
starling called to her—“Bébée, Bébée—bonjour,
bonjour,” which were all the words it knew.
It said the same words a thousand times a
week. But to Bébée it seemed that the starling
must certainly be aware that she was sixteen
years old that day.
Breaking her bread into the milk she sat in the
dawn and thought, without knowing that she
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES. 29
thought it, “How good it is to live when one is
young!”
Old people say the same thing often, but they
sigh when they say it. Bébée Smiled. {
Mère Kré opened her door in the next cottage
and nodded over the wall.
“What a fine thing to be sixteen l—a merry
year, Bébée.”
Marthe, the carpenter's wife, came out from
her gate, broom in hand.
“The Holy Saints keep you, Bébée ; why you
are quite a woman now !”
The little children of Wannhart, the charcoal-
burner, who were as poor as any mouse in the
old churches, rushed out of their little home up
the lane, bringing with them a cake stuck full of
sugar and seeds and tied round with a blue
ribbon, that their mother had made that very
week, all in her honour.
“Only see, Bébée Such a grand cake!” they
shouted, dancing down the lane ; “Jules picked
the plums, and Jeanne Washed the almonds, and
Christine took the ribbon off her own Commu-
30 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES.
nion cap—all for you—all for you—but you will
let us come and eat it too 2’’
Old gran’mère Bishot, who was the oldest
woman about Laeken, hobbled through the grass
on her crutches and nodded her white shaking
head, and smiled at Bébée.
“I have nothing to give you, little one—except
my blessing, if you care for that.”
Bébée ran out, breaking from the children,
and knelt down in the wet grass and bent her
sunny head to the benediction.
Trine Krebs, the miller's wife, the richest
woman of them all, called to the child from the
steps of the mill,
“A merry year and the blessing of heaven,
Bébée. Come up, and here is my first dish of
cherries for you; not tasted one myself; they
will make you a feast with Vannhart's cake,
though she should have known better, so poor
as she is. Charity begins at home, and these
children’s stomachs are empty.” *
Bébée ran up and then down again gleefully
with her lapful of big black Cherries; Tambour,
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 31
the old white dog, who had used to drag her
aboutin his milk-cart, leaping on her in Sympathy
and congratulation.
“What a supper we will have l’” she cried to
the charcoal-burner's children, who were turning
summersaults in the dock-leaves, while the Swans
stared and hissed.
When one is sixteen, cherries and a cake have
a flavour of Paradise still, especially when they are
tasted twice, or thrice at most, in all the year.
An old man called to her as she went by his
door.
All these little cabins lie close together, with
only their apple trees, or their tall beans, or
their hedges of thorn between them ; you may
ride by and never notice them if you do not look
for them under the leaves closely, as you would
for thrushes' nests.
He, too, was very old; a life-long neighbour and
gossip of Antoine's ; he had been a day-labourer
in these same fields all his years, and had never
travelled further than where the red mill-sails
turned amongst the colza and the corn.
32 TWO LITTLE WOOD ENT SHOES.
“Come in, my pretty one, for a second,” he
whispered, with an air of mystery that made
Bébée's heart quicken with expectancy. “Come
in ; I have something for you. They were my
dead daughter's—you have heard me talk of her;
Aimée, who died forty year or more ago, they
say; for me I think it was yesterday. Trine
Rrebs—she is a hard woman—heard me talking
of my girl. She burst out laughing, ‘Lord's sake,
fool, why your girl would be sixty now if she
had lived.’ Well, so it may be ; you see, the
new mill was put up the week she died, and you
call the new mill old; but, my girl, she is young
to me. Always young. Come here, Bébée.”
Bébée went after him, a little awed, into the
dusky interior, that Smelt of stored apples and of
dried herbs that hung from the roof. There was
'a walnut-wood press, such as the peasants of
France and the Low Countries keep their home-
spun linem in, and their old lace that serves
for the nuptials and baptisms of half a score of
generations.
The old man unlocked it with a trembling
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES. 33
hand, and there came from it an odour of dead
lavender and of withered rose leaves. On the
shelves there were a girl's set of clothes, and a
girl’s sabots, and a girl’s communion veil and
wreath.
“They are all hers,” he whispered; “all hers.
And sometimes in the evening-time I see her
coming along the lane for them—do you not
know? There is nothing changed; nothing
changed; the grass, and the trees, and the huts,
and the pond are all here—why should she only
be gone away ?”
“Antoine is gone.”
“Yes. But he was old; my girl is young.”
He stood a moment, with the press door open;
a perplexed trouble in his dim eyes; the divine
faith of love and the mule-like stupidity of igno-
rance made him cling to this one thought without
power of judgment in it.
“They say she would be sixty,” he said, with
a little dreary smile. “But that is absurd, you
know. Why, she had cheeks like yours, and she
would run—no lapwing could fly faster over corn.
D
34 TIVO LITTLE WOODEN SEHOES.
These are her things, you see; yes—all of them.
That is the sprig of Sweetbriar she wore in
her belt the day before the waggon knocked
her down and killed her. I have never touched
the things. But look here, Bébée, you are
a good child and true, and like her just a
little. I mean to give you her silver clasps.
They were her great-great-great-grandmother's
before her. God knows how old they are not.
And a girl should have some little wealth of that
sort—and for Antoine's sake } } e
The old man stayed behind, closing the press-
door upon the lavender - scented clothes, and
sitting down in the dull shadow of the hut to
think of his daughter, dead forty summers and
IſlOl'é.
Bébée went out with the brave, broad silver
clasps about her waist, and the tears wet on her
cheeks for a grief not her own. To be killed
just when one was young, and was loved like
that, and all the world was in its May-day flower
—the silver felt cold to her touch—as cold as
though it were the dead girl's hands that held her,
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES. 35
The garlands that the children strung of daisies
and hung about her had never chilled her so.
But little Jeanne, the youngest of the char-
coal-burner's little tribe, running to meet her,
screamed with glee, and danced in the gay
morning.
“Oh, Bébée how you glitter | Did the
Virgin send you that off her own altar 2 Let
me see-let me touch ! Is it made of the stars
or of the sun ?”
And Bébée danced with the child, and the
silver gleamed and sparkled, and all the people
came running out to see, and the milk-carts were
half an hour later for town, and the hens cackled
loud unfed, and the men even stopped on their
way to the fields and paused, with their scythes
on their shoulders, to stare at the splendid
gift. *
“There is not such another set of clasps in
Brabant; old work you could make a fortune of
in the curiosity shops in the Montagne,” said
Trine Krebs, going up the steps of her mill-
house. “Yet, all the same, you know, Bébée,
D 2
36 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
things off a dead body bring mischance some-
times.”
But Bébée danced with the child, and did
not hear.
Whose fête day had ever begun like this one
of hers ?
She was a little poet at heart, and should not
have cared for such vanities; but when one is
only sixteen, and has only a little rough wooller,
frock, and sits in the market-place or the lace-
room, with other girls around, how should one
be altogether indifferent to a broad, embossed,
beautiful shield of silver that sparkles with each
step one takes 2
A quarter of an hour idle thus was all,
however, that Bébée or her friends could spare
at five o'clock on a summer morning, when the
city was waiting for its eggs, its honey, its
flowers, its cream, and its butter, and Tambour
was shaking his leather harness in impatience to
be off with his milk-cans.
So Bébée, all holiday though it was, and
heroine though she felt herself, ran indoors, put
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEHOES. 37
up her cakes and cherries, cut her two baskets-
full out of the garden, locked her hut, and went
on her quick, happy little feet along the grassy
paths towards the city. The sorting and tying
up of the flowers she always left until she was
sitting under the awning in front of the Brood-
huis; the same awning, tawny as an autumn
pear and weather-blown as an old sail, which had
served to shelter Antoine Maes from heat and
rain, through all the years of his life.
“Go to the Madeleine ; you will make money
there, with your pretty blue eyes, Bébée,” people
had said to her of late ; but Bébée had shaken her
head. Where she had sat in her babyhood at
Antoine's feet, she would sit so long as she
sold flowers in Brussels—here, underneath the
shadow of the Gothic towers that saw Egmont die.
Old Antoine had never gone into the grand
market that is fashioned after the Madeleine of
Paris, and where in the cool, wet, sweet-smelling
halls, all the flowers of Brabant are spread in
bouquets fit for the bridal of Una, and large as
the shield of the Redcross Knight.
38 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEHOES.
Antoine could not compete with all those
treasures of greenhouse and stove. He had
always had his little stall amongst those which
spread their tawny awnings and their merry
hardy blossoms under the shadow of the Hôtel
de Ville, in the midst of the buyings and sellings,
the games and the quarrels, the auctions and the
Cheap Johns, the mountebanks and the marriage
parties, that daily and hourly throng the Grande
Place. - - e
Here Bébée, from three years old, had been
used to sit beside him, and ponder seriously on
grave and troublesome things, though 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 amongst the carnations
and the roses, or in the long, low workroom in
the town, high against the crocketted pinnacles
of the cathedral—yet her dreams, if vaguely
wistful, were all bright of hue and sunny in their
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 39
phantasies—still she had one unsatisfied and
sad desire: she wanted to know so much, and
she knew nothing. -
She did not care for the grand and gay
people. .
When the band played, and the park filled, and
the bright little cafés were thronged with plea-
sure-seekers, and the crowds flocked hither and
thither to the woods, to the theatres, to the gal-
leries, to the guinguettes, Bébée, going gravely
along with her emptied baskets homeward, envied
none of these.
When at Noël, the little children hugged
their loads of puppets and sugar-plums; when
at the Fête Dieu, the whole people flocked out
be-ribboned and vari-coloured like any bed
of spring-anemones; when in the merry mid-
summer the chars-à-bancs trundled away into
the forest with laughing loads of students and
maidens; when in the rough winters the car-
riages left furred and jewelled women at the
doors of the operas or the palaces—Bébée, going
and coming through the city to her flower-stall
40 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES
or lace-work, looked at them all, and never
thought of envy or desire. - -
She had her little hut; she could get ner
bread; she lived with the flowers; the neigh-
bours were good to her, and now and then, on
a saint’s day, she too got her day in the woods;
it never occurred to her that her lot could be
better. - -
But sometimes sitting, looking at the dark old
beauty of the Broodhuis, or at the wondrous
carven fronts of other Spanish houses, or at the
painted stories of the cathedral windows, or at
the quaint colours of the shipping on the quay,
or at the long, dark aisles of trees that went
away through the forest to the far Ardennes
mountains, where her steps had never wandered
—sometimes Bébée would get pondering on all
this unknown world that lay before and behind
and around her, and a sense of her own utter
ignorance would steal on her; and she would
say to herself: “If only I knew a little—just a
very little !” -
But it is not easy to know even a very little,
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 41
when you have to work for one's bread from sun-
rise to nightfall, and when none of your friends
know how to read or write; and even your old
priest is one of a family of peasants, and can
just teach you the alphabet, and that is all.
For Father Francis could do no more than this ;
and all his spare time was taken up in digging
his cabbage plot and seeing to his beehives; and
the only books that Bébée ever beheld were a
few tattered Lives of Saints that lay moth-eaten
on a shelf of his cottage. - -
But Brussels has stones that are sermons,
or rather that are quaint, touching, illuminated
legends of the middle ages, which those who run
may read.
Brussels is a gay little city that lies as bright
within its girdle of woodland as any butterfly
that rests upon Ill OSS, -
The city has its ways and wiles of Paris.
It decks itself with white and gold. It has
music under its trees and soldiers in its streets,
and troops marching and counter-marching along
its sunny avenues. It has blue and pink, and
42 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
*-* *-*.
yellow and green, on its awnings and on its
house-fronts. It has a merry open-air life on
its pavements at little marble tables before little.
gay-coloured cafés. 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 Moyen-age, 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 Horne.
Down there by the water-side, where the old
quaint walls lean over the yellow sluggish stream,
and the green barrels of the Antwerp barges
Swing against the dusky piles of the crumbling
blidges.
In the grey square desolate courts of the old
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 43
palaces, where in cobwebbed galleries and silent
chambers the Flemish tapestries drop to pieces.
In the great populous square, where, above the
clamorous and rushing crowds, the majestic front
of the Maison du Roi frowns against the sun,
and the spires and pinnacles of the Burgomaster's
gathering-halls tower into the sky in all the
fantastic luxuriance of Gothic fancy.
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 with-
drawn 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 water-spout with a grinning
faun's head laughs in the grim humour of the
Moyen-age above the bent head of a young lace-
worker.
In all these, Brussels, although more worldly
than her sisters of Ghent and Bruges, and far
44 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES.
*
T
more worldly yet than her Teuton cousins of
Freiburg and Nürnberg, Brussels is in her own
way still like some monkish story, mixed up
with the Romaunt of the Rose, or rather like
some light French vaudeville, all jests and
Smiles, illustrated in motley contrast with helm
and hauberk, cope and cowl, praying knights and
fighting priests, winged griffins and nimbused
Saints, flame-breathing dragons and enamoured
princes, all mingled together in the illuminated
colours and the heroical grotesque romance of
the Middle Ages.
And it was this side of the city that Bébée
Rnew, and she loved it well, and would not leave
it for the market of the Madeleine.
She had no one to tell her anything, and all
Antoine had ever been able to say to her con-
cerning the Broodhuis was that it had been there
in his father's time ; and regarding Ste. Gudule,
that his mother had burned many a candle before
its altars for a dead brother who had been drowned
off the dunes.
But the child's mind unled, but not misled,
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEHOES. 45
had pondered on these things, and her heart had
grown to love them ; and perhaps no student of
Spanish architecture, no antiquary of Moyen-age
relics, loved Ste. Gudule and the Broodhuis as
little ignorant Bébée did.
There had been a time when great dark fierce
men had builded these things, and made the
place beautiful. So much she knew ; and the
little wistful, untaught intelligence tried to
project itself into those unknown times, and
failed, and yet found pleasure in the effort.
And Bébée would say to herself as she walked
the streets—
“Perhaps some one will come some day who
will tell me all those things.”
Meanwhile, there were the flowers, and she
was quite content.
Besides, she knew all the people: the old
cobbler who sat next her, and chattered all day
long like a magpie ; the tinker, who had come
up many a summer night to drink a glass with
Antoine; the cheap John, who cheated every-
body, but who had always given her a toy or
46 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
a trinket at every Fête Dieu all the summers she
had known ; the little old woman, sour as a crab,
who sold rosaries and pictures of saints, and
little waxen Christs upon a tray; the big dogs
who pulled the carts in and lay panting all day
under the rush-bottomed chairs on which the
egg-wives and the fruit-sellers sat, and knitted,
and chaffered; nay, even the gorgeous huissier
and the frowning gendarme, who marshalled the
folks into order as they went up for municipal
registries, or for street-misdemeanours.
She knew them all; had known them all ever
since she had first trotted in like a little dog at
Antoine's heels. -
So Bébée stayed there. -
It is, perhaps, the most beautiful square in
all Northern Europe, with its black timbers and
gilded carvings, and blazoned windows, and ma-
jestic scutcheons, and fantastic pinnacles. This
Bébée did not know, but she loved it, and she
sat resolutely in front of the Broodhuis, selling
her flowers, Smiling, chatting, helping the old
woman, counting her little gains, eating her bit
T}VO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 47
of bread at noonday like any other market girl,
but, at times, glancing up to the stately towers
and the blue sky, with a look on her face that
made the old tinker and cobbler whisper together
—“What does she see there ?—the dead people
or the angels?” *
The truth was that even Bébée herself did not
know very surely what she saw—something that
was still nearer to her than even this kindly
crowd that loved her. That was all she could
have said had anybody asked her. -
But none did.
No one wanted to hear what the dead said ;
and for the angels, the tinker and the cobbler
were of opinion that one had only too much of
them sculptured about everywhere, and shining
on all the casements—in reverence, be it spoken
of course.
CHAPTER III.
-º-
Žº remembered it was your name-day,
§§ § child. Here are half-a-dozen eggs,”
* said one of the hen-wives, and the
little cross woman with the pedlar's tray, added
a waxen St. Agnes, coloured red and yellow to
the very life, no doubt ; and Père Melchior, the
sweetmeat seller, brought her a gilded horn of
comfits; and the old cheap John had saved her
a cage for the starling; and the tinker had a
cream cheese for her in a vineleaf, and the
cobbler had made her, actually, a pair of shoes
—red shoes, beautiful shoes to go to mass in,
and be a wonder in to all the neighbourhood.
And they thronged round her, and adored the

Two LITTLE WooDEN SHOES. 49
silver waist buckles; and when Bébée got fairly
to her stall and traffic began, she thought once
more that nobody's feast-day had ever dawned
like hers.
When the chimes began to ring all over the
city, she could hardly believe that the carillon
was not saying its “Laus Deo’’ with some
special meaning in its bells for her.
The morning went by as usual; the noise of
the throngs about her like a driving of angry
winds, but no more hurting her than the angels
on the roof of Ste. Gudule are hurt by the storm
when it breaks.
Hard words, fierce passions, low thoughts, evil
deeds, passed by the child without resting on
her ; her heart was in her flowers, and was like
one of them, with the dew of daybreak on it.
There were many strangers in the city, and
such are always sure to loiter in the Spanish
square ; and she sold fast and well her lilacs and
her roses, and her knots of thyme and sweet-
briar. She was always a little Sorry to see them
go, her kindly pretty playmates that, mine times
U;
50 TWTO LITTLE WOODEN SEHOES.
out of ten no doubt, only drooped and died in the
hands that purchased them, as human souls soil
and shrivel in the grasp of the passions that woo
them.
The day was a busy one, and brought in good
profit. Bébée has no less than fifty sous in her
leather pouch when it was over ; a sum of
magnitude in the green lane by Laeken. A few
of her moss roses were still unsold, that was all, -
when the Ave Maria began ringing over the
town, and the people dispersed to their homes or
their pleasuring. -
It was a warm grey evening, the streets were
full; there were blossoms in all the balconies,
and gay colours in all the dresses. The old
tinker put his tools together and whispered to
her—
“Bébé , as it is your feast-day, come and stroll
in St. Hubert's gallery, and I will buy you a
horn of sugar-plums or a ribbon, and we can see
the puppet-show afterwards, eh?”
But the children were waiting at home : she
would not spend the evening in the city; she
TWO LTTTLE WOODEN SHOES. 51
only thought she would just kneel a moment in
the cathedral and say a little prayer or two for a
minute—the saints were so good in giving her
So many friends.
There is something very touching in the
Netherlander's relation with his Deity. It is
all very vague to him ; a jumble of veneration
and familiarity, of sanctity and profanity, with-
out any thought of being familiar, or any idea
of being profane.
There is a homely poetry, an innocent
affectionateness, in it characteristic of the
Ueople.
He talks to his good angel Michel, and to his
friend that dear little Jesus, much as he would
talk to the shoemaker over the way, or the
cooper’s child in the doorway.
It is a very unreasonable, foolish, clumsy
sort of religion, this theology in wooden shoes;
it is half grotesque, half pathetic ; the grand-
mothers pass it on to the grandchildren, as they
pass the bowl of potatoes round the stove in the
long winter nights; it is as silly as possible, but
E 2
52 TWO LITTLE WOOD ENT SHOES.
it comforts them as they carry faggots over the
frozen canals or wear their eyes blind over the
squares of lace; and it has in it the supreme
pathos of a perfect confidence, of an utter child-
like and undoubting trust.
This had been taught to Bébée, and she
went to sleep every night in the firm belief that
the sixteen little angels of the Flemish prayer
kept watch and ward over her bed.
For the rest, being poetical, as Netherlanders
are not, and having in , her—wherever it came
from, poor little soul—a warmth of fancy and a
spirituality of vision not at all northern, she
had mixed up her religion with the fairies of
Antoine's stories, and the demons in which the
Flemish folk are profound believers, and the
flowers, into which she put all manner of sen-
tient life, until it was a fantastic medley so
entangled, that poor Father Francis had given
up in despair any attempt to arrange it more
correctly.
Indeed, being of the peasantry himself, he was
not so very full sure in his own mind that demons
TWO LTTTLE WOODEN SHOES. 53
were not bodily presences, quite as real and often
much more tangible than Saints. Any way he let
her alone; and only taught her to believe in the
goodness of God as in the shining of the stars.
People looked after her as she went through
the twisting, picture-like streets, where sun-
light fell still between the peaked high roofs,
and lamps were here and there lit in the bric-
a-brac shops and the fruit stalls.
Her little muslin cap blew back like the wings
of a white butterfly. Her sunny hair caught the
last sun-rays. Her feet were fair in the brown
wooden shoes. Under the short woollen skirts
the grace of her pretty limbs moved freely.
Her broad silver clasps shone like a shield, and
she was utterly unconscious that anyone looked;
she was simply and gravely intent on reaching
Ste. Gudule to say her one prayer and not keep
the children waiting.
Some one leaning idly over a balcony in the
street that is named after Mary of Burgundy saw
her going thus. He left the balcony and went
down his stairs and followed her.
54 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
The sun dazzle on the silver had first caught
his sight; and then he had looked downward at
the pretty feet. These are the chances that
women call Fate.
Bébée entered the cathedral. It was quite
empty. Far away at the west end there was an
old custodian asleep on a bench, and a woman
kneeling. That was all.
Bébée made her salutations to the high altar,
and stole on into the chapel of the Saint Sacra-
ment; it was that one that she loved best.
She said her prayer, and thanked the saints
for all their gifts and goodness, her clasped hands
against her silver shield; her basket on the
pavement by her; abovehead the sunset rays
streaming purple and crimson and golden through
the painted windows that are the wonder of the
world.
When her prayer was done she still kneeled
there; her head thrown back to watch the light;
her hands clasped still ; and on her upturned
face the look that made the people say, “What
does she see ?—the angels or the dead?”
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES. 55
She forgot everything. She forgot the cherries
at home, and the children even. She was look-
ing upward at the stories of the painted panes;
she was listening to the message of the dying
Sunrays; she was feeling vaguely, wistfully, un-
utterably the tender beauty of the sacred place
and the awful wonder of the world in which she
with her sixteen years was all alone, like a little
blue corn flower amongst the wheat that goes
for grist, and the barley that makes men drunk.
For she was alone, though she had so many
friends. Quite alone sometimes; for God had
been cruel to her, and had made her a lark
without Song.
When the sun faded and the beautiful case-
ments lost all glow and meaning, Bébée rose
with a startled look—had she been dreaming?—
was it night 2—would the children be sorry, and
go supperless to bed 2
“Have you a rosebud left to sell to me 2" a
man's voice said not far off; it was low and
sweet as became the Sacrament Chapel. Bébée
looked up; she did not quite know what she
56 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
saw; only dark eyes smiling into hers. By the
instinct of habit she sought in her basket and
found three moss-roses. She held them out to
him.
“I do not sell flowers here, but I will give
them to you,” she said, in her pretty grave
childish fashion. w
“I often want flowers,” said the stranger, as
he took the buds. “Where do you sell yours?—
in the market?” -
“In the Grande Place.”
“Will you tell me your name, pretty one 2"
“I am Bébée.”
There were people coming into the church.
The bells were booming abovehead for vespers.
There was a shuffle of chairs and a stir of feet.
Boys in white went to and fro, lighting the
candles. Great clouds of shadow drifted up
into the roof and hid the angels.
She nodded her little head to him.
“Good night—I cannot stay—I have a cake
at home to-night, and the children are waiting.”
“Ah! that is important, no doubt, indeed.
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES. 57
Will you buy some more cakes for the children
from me?” -
He slid a gold piece in her hand. She looked
at it in amaze. In the green lanes by Laeken no
One ever saw gold. Then she gave it him back.
“I will not take money in church, nor any-
where, except what the flowers are worth. Good
night.”
He followed her, and held back the heavy oak
door for her, and went out into the air with her.
It was dark already, but in the square there
was still the cool bright primrose - coloured
evening light.
Bébée's wooden shoes went pattering down the
sloping and uneven stones. Her little grey
figure ran quickly through the deep shade cast
from the towers and walls. Her dreams had
drifted away. She was thinking of the children
and the cake.
“You are in such a hurry because of the cake?”
said her new customer, as he followed her.
Bébée looked back at him with a smile in her
blue eyes.
58 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
“Yes—they will be waiting, you know, and
there are cherries too.”
“It is a grand day with you, then 2°
“It is my féte-day: I am sixteen.”
She was proud of this. She told it to the
very dogs in the street.
“Ah!—you feel old, I dare say?”
“Oh, quite old ! They cannot call me a child
any more.”
“Of course not. It would be ridiculous.
Are those presents in your basket 2'
“Yes, every one of them.” She paused a
moment to lift the dead vine-leaves, and show
him the beautiful shining red shoes. “Look l—
old Gringoire gave me these. I shall wear them
at mass next Sunday. I never had a pair of
shoes in my life.”
“But how will you wear shoes without stock-
ings?”
It was a snake cast into her Eden.
She had never thought of it.
“Perhaps I can save money and buy some,”
she answered, after a sad little pause. “But
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 59
that I could not do till next year. They would
cost several francs, I suppose.”
“ Unless a good fairy gives them to you?”
Bébée Smiled; fairies were real, things to her—
relations indeed. She did not imagine that he
spoke in jest.
“Sometimes I pray very much and things
come,” she said softly. “When the Gloire
de Dijon rose-tree was cut back too soon one
Summer, and never blossomed, and we all
thought it was dead, I prayed all day long for
it, and never thought of anything else, and by
autumn it was all in new leaf, and now its
flowers are finer than ever.”
“But you watered it whilst you prayed, I
suppose ?”
The sarcasm escaped her.
She was wondering to herself whether it
would be vain and wicked to pray for a pair of
stockings: she thought she would go and ask
IFather Francis.
By this time they were in the Rue Royale, and
half way down it. The lamps were lighted. A *l
60 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
regiment was marching up it with a band play-
ing. The windows were open, and people were
laughing and singing in some of them. The
light caught the white and gilded fronts of the
houses. The pleasure-seeking crowds loitered
along in the warmth of the evening.
Bébée, suddenly roused from her thoughts by
the loud challenge of the military music, looked
round on the stranger, and motioned him
back.
“Sir;—I do not know you—why should you
come with me? Do not do it, please. You
make me talk, and that makes me late.”
And she pushed her basket farther on her
arm, and nodded to him, and ran off—as fleetly
as a hare through fern—amongst the press of
the people.
“To-morrow, little one,” he answered her
with a careless smile, and let her go unpursued.
Above, from the open casement of a café, some
young men and some painted women leaned out,
and threw sweetmeats at him, as in carnival
time.
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 61
“A new model, Flamen, that pretty peasant?”
they asked him. .
He laughed in answer, and went up the steps
to join them : he dropped the moss-roses as he
went, and trod On them, and did not wait.
Bébée ran home as fast as her feet would take
her. -
The children were all gathered about her gate
in the dusky, dewy evening; they met her with
shouts of welcome and reproach intermingled ;
they had been watching for her since first the
sun had grown low and red, and now the moon
was risen. -
But they forgave her when they saw the splen-
dour of her presents, and she showered out
amongst them Père Melchior's horn of comfits.
They dashed into the hut; they dragged the
one little table out amongst the flowers; the
cherries and cake were spread on it; and the mil-
ler's wife had given a big jug of milk, and Father
Francis himself had sent some honeycomb.
The early roses were full of scent in the dew ;
the great gillyflowers breathed out fragrance in
62 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
the dusk; the goat came and nibbled the
sweetbriar unrebuked; the children repeated
the Flemish bread-grace, with clasped hands
and reverent eyes—“Oh, dear little Jesus, come
and sup with us, and bring your beautiful
Mother too; we will not forget you are God.”
Then that said, they ate, and drank, and
laughed, and picked cherries from each other's
mouths like little blackbirds; the big white
dog gnawed a crust at their feet; old Krebs,
who had a fiddle, and could play it, came out
and trilled them rude and ready Flemish tunes,
such as Teniers or Mieris might have jumped
to before an ale-house at Kermesse. Bébée
and the children joined hands, and danced
round together in the broad white moonlight,
on the grass, by the water-side ; the idlers came
and sat about, the women netting or spinning,
and the men Smoking a pipe before bedtime;
the rough hearty Flemish bubbled like a brook
in gossip, or rung like a horn over a jest ;
Bébée and the children, tired of their play, grew
quiet, and chaunted together the “Ave Maria
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEHOES. 63
Stella Virginis;” a nightingale amongst the
willows sang to the sleeping swans.
All was happy, quiet, homely; lovely also
in its simple way. They went early to their
beds, as people must do who rise at dawn.
Bébée leaned out a moment from her own
little casement, ere she too went to rest.
Through an open lattice there sounded the
murmur of some little child’s prayer; the wind
sighed amongst the willows; the nightingales
sang on in the dark—all was still.
Hard work awaited her on the morrow, and
on all the other days of the year.
She was only a little peasant; she must sweep,
and spin, and dig, and delve, to get daily her
bit of black bread; but that night she was as
happy as a little princess in a fairy tale; happy
in her playmates, in her flowers, in her sixteen
years, in her red shoes, in her silver buckles,
happy in the dewy leaves, in the singing birds,
in the hush of the night, in the sense of rest,
in the fragrance of flowers, in the drifting
changes of moon and cloud, happy because she
64 TWO LITTLE WOODEN. SHOES
was half a woman, because she was half a poet,
because she was wholly a child.
“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 2° 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 IV.
—)—
#º F I could save a centime a day, I
*Y &
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
F


66 TTWO LITTLE WOOD ENT SHOES.
leave it and go and die, for what the master
lace-makers 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 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. Sc
she looked at her own pretty feet—pretty, and -
slender, and arched, rosy and fair, and un-
cramped by the pressure of leather, and re-
signed 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 wise philosophy,
as she worked amongst the black fresh sweet-
smelling mould, and kissed a rose now and then
as she passed one,
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES 67
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 at the New Year. -
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 2–Bébée pondered a
moment; then little by little opened the lid.
Within, on a nest of rose satin, were two pair
of silk stockings 1–Real silk —with the prettiest
clocks worked up their sides in colour !
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
F 2
6S TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
*
small-clothes. 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 busi-
ness of the day began underneath the multi-
tudinous 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, L - -
“Have you three 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 ?”
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES. 69
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.
“Warnhart's children,” she answered him,
instantly. “And dear old Annémie by the
warside; 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?”
70 T WO LITTLE WOOD ENT SHOES.
“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 2 ” - -
“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.
Débée, as she sold the flowers, and took the
change fifty times in the hour, looked at him
now and then, and watched the movements of his
hands—she could not have told why.
Always amongst men and women—always in
the crowds of the streets—people were nothing
TWO LTTTLE WOODEN SHOES. 71
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 one's hands moved so swiftly, and
as she saw her Broodhuis growing into colour
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
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
72 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEHOES.
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, chatter-
ing, 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 as a robin sings.
“Did never you see a drawing before ? and are
there not brave pictures to see in the galleries,
St. Lieven and Our Lady, and all ? and have
you never some better thing to do than to gape
wide-mouthed at a stranger ? What laziness—
ah! just worthy of a people who sleep and
smoke while their dogs work for them Go
away, all of you; look, there comes the gen-
darme—it will be the worse for you. Sir—if
you sit under my stall; they will not dare
trouble you then.”
He moved under the awning, thanking her
TWO LITTLE WOODENT SHOES. 73
with a smile, and the people, laughing, shuffled
unwillingly aside and let him paint on in
peace.
It was only little Bébée, but they had spoilt
the child from her infancy, and were used to
obey her.
The painting took a long time. He set about
it with the bold ease of one used to all the
intricacies of form and colour, and he had the
skill of a master. But he spent more than
half the time looking idly at the humours of the
populace or watching how the treasures of
Bébée's garden went away one by one in the
hands of strangers.
Meanwhile, ever and again, sitting on the edge
of her stall, with his colours and brushes tossed
out on the board, he talked to her, and with the
soft imperceptible skill of long practice in those
arts, he drew out the details of her little simple
life.
There were not always people to buy, and
whilst she rested and sheltered the flowers from
the sun, she answered him willingly, and in one
74 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES.
of her longer rests showed him the wonderful
stockings.
“Do you think it could be the fairies 2 ” she
asked him a little doubtfully.
It was easy to make her believe any fantastical
nonsense; but her fairies were ethereal divinities.
She could scarcely believe that they had laid
that box on her chair.
“Impossible to doubt it !” he replied, unhesi-
tatingly. “Given a belief in fairies at all, why
should there be any limit to what they can do 2
It is the same with the saints, is it not ?”
“Yes,” said Bébée, thoughtfully.
The saints were mixed up in her imagination
with the fairies in an intricacy that would have
defied the best reasonings of Father Francis.
“Well, then, you will wear the stockings, will
you not ? Only believe me, your feet are far
prettier without them.”
Bébée laughed happily and took another peep
in the cosy rose-satin nest. But her little face had
a certain perplexity. Suddenly she turned on him.
“Did not you put them there 2 ”
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES. 75
“I ?—never !”
“Are you quite sure ?”
“Quite; but why ask?”
“Because,” said Bébée, shutting the box re-
solutely and pushing it a little away, “ because I
would not take it if you did. You are a stranger,
and a present is a debt, so Antoine always
said.” º
“Why take a present then from the Värnhart
children, or your old friend who gave you the
clasps?”
“Ah, that is very different. When people are
very, very poor, equally poor, the One with the
other, little presents that they save for and make
with such a difficulty, are just things that are
a pleasure ; sacrifices; like your sitting up with
a sick person at night, and then she sits up
with you another year when you want it. Do
you not know?”
“I know you talk very prettily. But why
should you not take any one else's present,
though he may not be poor ?”
“Because I could not return it.”
76 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
“Could you not ?”
The smile in his eyes dazzled her a little ;
it was so strange, and yet had so much light
in it; but she did not understand him one
whit.
“No ; how could I?” she said, earnestly.
“If I were to save for two years, I could not
get francs enough to buy anything worth giving
back; and I should be so unhappy, thinking
of the debt of it always. Do tell me if you put
those stockings there ?”
“No ; ” he looked at her and the trivial lie
faltered and died away; the eyes, clear as crystal,
questioned him so innocently.
“Well, if I did 2 ” he said, frankly, “you
wished for them ; what harm was there ? Will
you be so cruel as to refuse them from me?”
The tears sprang into Bébée's eyes. She was
sorry to lose the beautiful box, but more sorry
he had lied to her.
“It was very kind and good,” she said,
regretfully. “But I cannot think why you
should have done it, as you had never known
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 77
me at all. And, indeed, I could not take them,
because Antoine would not let me if he were
alive ; and if I gave you a flower every day all
the year round, I should not pay you the worth
of them—it would be quite impossible; and why
should you tell me falsehoods about such a
thing 2 A falsehood is never a thing for a
man.”
She shut the box and pushed it towards
him, and turned to the selling of her bouquets.
Her voice shook a little as she tied up a bunch
of mignonette and told the price of it. Those
beautiful stockings why had she ever seen
them, and why had he told her a lie 2
It made her heart heavy. For the first time
in her brief life the Broodhuis seemed to frown
between her and the sun. Undisturbed he
painted on and did not look at her.
The day was nearly done. The people began
to scatter. The shadows grew very long. He
painted on, not glancing once elsewhere than at
his study. Bébée's baskets were quite empty.
She rose, and slingered, and regarded him
7S TJWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
wistfully: he was angered; perhaps she had
been rude 2 Her little heart failed her.
If he would only look up 2——
But he did not look up ; he kept his handsome
dark face studiously over the canvas of the
Broodhuis. She would have seen a smile in his
eyes if he had lifted them ; but he never raised
his lids.
Bébée hesitated: take the stockings she would
not; but perhaps she had refused them too
roughly. She wished so that he would look up
and save her speaking first ; but he knew what
he was about too warily and well to help her
thus.
She waited awhile, then took One little red moss
rosebud that she had saved all day in a corner of
her basket, and held it out to him frankly, shyly,
as a peace offering.
“Was I rude 2 I did not mean to be. But I
cannot take the stockings; and why did you tell
me that falsehood 2 ”
He took the rosebud and got up too, and
smiled; but he did not meet her eyes.
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES. 79
“Let us forget the whole matter; it is not
worth a sou. If you do not take the box, leave
it; it is of no use to me.”
“I cannot take it.”
She knew she was doing right. How was it
that he could make her feel as though she were
acting wrongly 2
“Leave it, then, I say. You are not the first
woman, my dear, who has quarrelled with a wish
fulfilled. It is a way your sex has, of rewarding
gods and men. Here, you old witch—here is a
treasure trove for you. You can sell it for ten
francs in the town anywhere.”
As he spoke he tossed the casket and the
stockings in it to an old decrepid woman, who
was passing by with a baker's cart, drawn by a
dog; and not staying to heed her astonishment,
gathered his colours and easel together.
The tears swam in Bébée's eyes as she saw
the box whirled through the air.
She had done right—she was sure she had
done right. He was a stranger, and she could
meyer have repaid him ; but he made her feel
80 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
herself wayward and ungrateful, and it was hard
to see the beautiful fairy gift borne away for ever
by the chuckling, hobbling, greedy old bread-
woman. If he had only taken it himself, she
would have been glad then to have been brave
and to have done her duty. . -
|But it was not in his design that she should be
glad.
He saw her tears, but he seemed not to see
them.
“Good-night, Bébée,” he said carelessly, as
he sauntered aside from her. “Good-night, my
dear. To-morrow I will finish my painting; but
I will not offend you by any more gifts.”
Bébée lifted her drooped head, and looked
him in the eyes eagerly, with a certain sturdy
resolve and timid wistfulness intermingled in her
look. .
“Sir, you speak to me quite wrongly,” she
said with a quick accent, that had pride as well
as pain in it. “Say it was kind to bring me
what I wished for—yes, it was kind, I know—but
you told me a lie about it, and that is a cowardly
TWO LTTLE WOODEN SHOES. 81
thing, and, indeed, had no sense whatever in it.
Besides you never saw me till last night, and I
cannot tell even your name; and I am only Bébée,
and cannot give you anything back, because I have
only just enough to feed myself and the starling,
and not always that in winter. I thank you very
much for what you wished to do ; but if I had
taken those things, I think you would have
thought me very mean and full of greed; and
Antoine always said, ‘Do not take what you can-
not pay—not ever what you cannot pay—that is
the way to walk with pure feet.” Perhaps I
spoke ill, because they spoil me, and they say I
am too swift to say my mind. But I am not
thankless—not thankless, indeed—it is only I
could not take what I cannot pay. That is all.
You are angry still—not now—no 2'"
There was anxiety in the pleading. What did
it matter to her what a stranger thought 2 And
yet Bébée's heart was heavy as she went out of
the city homewards. He had only laughed a
little coldly, and bade her good-night, and left
the square. A sense of having done wrong
- G.
§
82 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
weighed on her ; of having been rude and
ungrateful. -
She had no heart for the children that evening.
Mère Krebs was sitting out before her door shell-
ing peas, and called to her to come in and have a
drop of coffee. Krebs had come in from Vilvöorde
fair, and brought a stock of rare good berries
with him. But Bébée thanked her, and went on
to her own garden to work. - -
She had always liked to sit out on the quaint
wooden steps of the mill and under the red
shadow of the sails, watching the swallows flutter
to and fro in the Sunset, and hearing the droll
frogs croak in the rushes, while the old people
told her tales of the time when in their babyhood
they had run out, fearful yet fascinated, to see
the beautiful Scots Greys flash by in the murky
night, and the endless line of guns and caissons
crawl black as a snake through the summer dust,
and the trampled corn, going out past the woods
to Waterloo.
But to-night she had no fancy for it: she
wanted to be alone with the flowers.
Two LITTLE WooDEN SHOES 83
T-mº
Though, to be sure, they had been very heart-
less 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, inno-
cent, half divine, useless, say they who are wiser
than God. -
Bébée went home and worked among her
flowers.
2 A little laborious figure, with her petticoats
twisted high, and her feet wet with the night
dews, and her back bowed to the hoeing and
clipping and raking amongst the blossoming
plants.
“How late you are working to-night, Bébée ”
one or two called out, as they passed the gate
G $
Å
84 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
She looked up and smiled; but went on working
while the white moon rose.
She did not know what ailed her. -
She went to bed without supper, leaving her
bit of bread and bowl of goat's milk to make a
meal for the fowls in the morning.
“Little ugly, shameful, naked feet !” she said
to them, sitting on the edge of her mattress, and
looking at them in the moonlight. They were
very pretty feet, and would not have been half so
pretty in silk hose and satin shoon; but she did
not know that: he had told her she wanted those
vanities.
She sat still a long while, her rosy feet swaying
to and fro like two roses that grow on one stalk,
and hang down in the wind. The little lattice
was open ; the Sweet and dusky garden was
beyond; there was a hand's breadth of sky, in
which a single star was shining; the leaves of
the vine hid all the rest.
But for once she saw none of it.
She only saw the black Broodhuis; the red
and gold Sunset overhead; the grey stones, with
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES. 85
the fallen roseleaves and crushed fruits; and in
the shadows two dark, reproachful eyes, that
looked at hers.
Had she been ungrateful?
The little tender, honest heart of her was
troubled and oppressed. For Once, that night
she slept ill.
CHAPTER V.
— Q-
sº LL the next day she sat under the
à yellow awning, but she sat alone.
It was market day; there were many
strangers. Flowers were in demand. The copper
pieces were ringing against One another all the
hours through in her leathern bag. The cobbler
was in such good humour that he forgot to
quarrel with his wife. The fruit was in such
plenty that they gave her a leaf-full of white and
red currants for her noon-day dinner. And the
people split their sides at the Cheap John's
jokes; he was so droll. No one saw the leaks
in his kettles, or the hole in his bellows, or the
leg that was lacking to his milking-stool.

TWO LITTLE WOODENT SHOES, 87
—ºn - -
Everybody was gay and merry that day ;
but Bébée's blue eyes looked wistfully over
the throng, and did not find what they sought.
Somehow the day seemed dull, and the square
empty. -
The stones and the timbers around seemed
more than ever full of a thousand stories that
they would not tell her because she knew nothing,
and was only Bébée.
She had never known a dull hour before. She,
a little bright, industrious gay thing, whose
hands were always full of work, and whose head
was always full of fancies, even in the grimmest
winter time, when she wove the lace in the grey,
chilly work-room, with the frost on the casements,
and the mice running out in their hunger over
the bare brick floor.
That bare room was a sad enough place
sometimes, when the old women would bewail
how they starved on the pittance they gained,
and the young women sighed for their aching
heads and their failing eyesight, and the children
dropped great tears on the bobbins, because they
€8 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
—-
had come out without a crust to break their
fast.
She had been sad there often for others, but
she had never been dull—not with this un-
familiar, desolate, dreary dulness, that seemed
to take all the mirth out of the busy life around
her, and all the colour out of the blue sky
above. Why, she had no idea herself. She
wondered if she were going to be ill; she
had never been ill in her life, being strong as
a little bird that has never known cage or
captivity.
When the day was done, Bébée gave a quick
sigh as she looked across the square. She had
so wanted to tell him that she was not ungrateful,
and she had a little moss rose ready, with a sprig
of sweetbriar, and a tiny spray of maiden-hair
fern that grew under the willows, which she had
kept covered up with a leaf of Sycamore all the
day long.
No one would have it now.
The child went out of the place sadly, as the
carillon rang. There was only the moss rose in
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 89
her basket, and the red and white currants that
had been given her for her dinner.
She went along the twisting, many-coloured,
quaintly-fashioned streets, till she came to the
water-side.
It is very ancient, there still ; there are all
manner of old buildings, black and brown and
grey, peaked roofs, gabled windows, arched doors,
crumbling bridges, twisted galleries leaning to
touch the dark surface of the canal, dusky
wharves crowded with barrels, and bales, and
cattle, and timber, and all the various freightage
that the good ships come and go with all the
year round, to and from the Zuyder Zee, and
the Baltic water, and the wild Northumbrian
shores, and the iron-bound Scottish headlands,
and the pretty grey, Norman seaports, and the
white sandy dunes of Holland, with the toy
towns and the straight poplar trees.
Bébée was fond of watching the brigs and
barges, that looked so big to her, with their
national flags flying, and their tall masts stand-
ing thick as grass, and their tawny Sails
90 TJWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
flapping in the wind, and about them the
Sweet, strong smell of that strange, unknown
thing, the sea.
Sometimes the sailors would talk with her;
sometimes some old salt, sitting astride of a
cask, would tell her a mariner's tale of far-
away lands and mysteries of the deep ; some-
times some curly-headed cabin-boy would give
her a shell or a plume of seaweed, and try
and make her understand what the wonder-
ful wild water was like, which was not quiet
and sluggish and dusky as this canal was, but
was for ever changing and moving, and curling
and leaping, and making itself now blue as her
eyes, now black as that thunder-cloud, now
white as the snow that the winter wind tossed,
now pearl-hued and opaline as the convolvulus
that blew in her own garden.
And Bébée would listen, with the shell in her
lap, and try to understand, and gaze at the ships
and then at the sky beyond them, and try to
figure to herself those strange countries, to which
these ships were always going, and saw in fancy
sº
TIVO LITTLE WOODENT SHOES. 91
* — — —
all the blossoming orchard province of green
France, and all the fir-clothed hills and rushing
rivers of the snow-locked Swedish shore, and
saw too, doubtless, many lands that had no
place at all except in dreamland, and were more
beautiful even than the beauty of the earth, as
poets' countries are, to their own sorrow, often-
times.
But this dull day Bébée did not go down upon
the wharf; she did not want the sailors' tales;
she saw the masts and the bits of bunting that
streamed from them, and they made her restless,
which they had never done before. Instead she
went in at a dark old door and climbed up a steep
staircase that went up and up and up, as though
she were mounting Ste. Gudule's belfry towers;
and at the top of it entered a little chamber in
the roof, where one square unglazed hole that
served for light looked out upon the canal, with
all its crowded craft, from the dainty Schooner
yacht, fresh as gilding and holystome could make
her, that was running for pleasure to the Scheldt,
to the rude, clumsy coal-barge, black as night,
92 TPWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
that bore the rough diamonds of Belgium to the
$now-buried roofs of Christiania and Stromsöon.
In the little dark attic there was a very old
woman in a red petticoat and a high cap, who sat
against the window, and pricked out lace patterns
with a pin on thick paper. She was eighty-five
years old, and could hardly keep body and soul
together.
Bébée, running to her, kissed her.
“Oh mother Annémie, look here ! Beautiful
red and white currants, and a roll ; I saved them
for you. They are the first currants we have
seen this year. Me 2 oh, for me, I have eaten
more than are good | You know I pick fruit like
a sparrow, always. Dear mother Annémie, are
you better ? Are you quite sure you are better
to-day ?”
The little old withered woman, brown as a
walnut and meagre as a rush, took the currants,
and smiled with a childish glee, and began to eat
them, blessing the child with each crumb she
broke off the bread.
“Why had you not a grandmother of your
TWO LITTLE Ty’OOY) EN SHOES. 93
own, my little one 2'' she mumbled. “How good
you would have been to her, Bébée ”
“Yes,” said Bébée seriously, but her mind
could not grasp the idea. It was easier for her
to believe the fanciful lily-parentage of Antoine's
stories. “How much work have you done,
Annémie? Oh, all that ? all that ? But there
is enough for a week. You work too early and
too late, you dear Annémie.”
“Nay, Bébée, when one has to get one's bread,
that cannot be. But I am afraid my eyes are
failing. That rose now, is it well done?”
“Beautifully done. Would the Bačs take
them if they were not ? You know he is one
that cuts every centime in four pieces.”
“Ah! sharp enough, sharp enough—that is
true. But I am always afraid of my eyes. I do
not see the flags out there so well as I used to do.”
“Because the Sun is so bright, Annémie ; that
is all. I myself, when I have been sitting all
day in the Place in the light, the flowers look
pale to me. And you know it is not age with
me, Annémie 2’’
94 TJWO LITTLE JWOODEN SHOES.
The old woman and the young girl laughed
together at that droll idea.
“You have a merry heart, dear little one,”
said old Annémie. “The saints keep it to you
always.”
“May I tidy the room a little 2"
“To be sure, dear, and thank you too. I
have not much time, you see ; and somehow
my back aches badly when I stoop.”
“And it is so damp here for you, over all that
water l’” said Bébée, as she swept and dusted
and set to rights the tiny place, and put in a
little broken pot a few sprays of honeysuckle
and rosemary that she had brought with her.
“It is so damp here. You should have come
and lived in my hut with me, Annémie, and sat
out under the vine all day, and looked after the
chickens for me when I was in the town. They
are such mischievous little Souls; as soon as my
back is turned one or other is sure to push
through the roof, and get out amongst the
flower-beds. Will you never change your mind,
and live with me, Annémie 2 I am sure you
TIVO LITT DE WOODEN SEIOES. 95
would be happy, and the starling says your name
quite plain, and he is such a funny bird to talk
to: you never would tire of him. Will you
never come 2 It is so bright there, and green
and sweet smelling, and to think you never even
have seen it !—and the Swans and all,—it is a
shame.”
“No, dear,” said old Annémie, eating her last
bunch of currants. “You have said so so often,
and you are good and mean it, that I know. But
I could not leave the water. It would kill me.
“Out of this window you know I saw my
Jeannot's brig go away—away
away—till the
masts were lost in the mists. Going with iron
to Norway; the Fleur d'Epine of this town, a
good ship, and a sure, and he her mate; and
as proud as might be, and with a little blest
Mary in lead round his throat.
“She was to be back in port in eight months,
bringing timber. Eight months—that brought
Easter time.
“But she never came. Never, never, never,
you know.
96 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
*
“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
Imuch alike ; only his I always saw as soon
as she hove in sight because he tied a hank
of flax to her mizen 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.
“Only one day in winter, when the great
blocks of ice were smashing hither and thither,
a coaster came in and brought tidings of how
off in the Danish waters they had come on
a waterlogged brig, and had boarded her, and
had found her empty, and her hull riven in
two, and her crew all drowned and dead beyond
any manner of doubt. And on her stern there
was her name painted white, the Fleur d'Epine,
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEHOES. 97
of Brussels, as plain as name could be ; and that
was all we ever knew—what evil had struck her,
or how they had perished, nobody ever told.
“Only the coaster brought that bit of beam
away, with the Fleur d'Epine writ clear upon it.
“But you see I never know my man is
dead.
“Any day—who can say?—any one of those
ships may bring him aboard of her, and he
may leap out on the wharf there, and come
running up the stairs as he used to do, and
cry, in his merry voice, ‘Annémie, Annémie,
here is more flax to spin, here is more hose to
weave l’ For that was always his homeward
word; no matter whether he had had fair weather
or foul, he always knotted the flax to his mast-
head.
“So you see, dear, I could not leave here.
For what if he came and found me away ? He
would say it was an odd fashion of mourning
for him.
“And I could not do without the window,
you know. I can watch all the brigs come in ;
. H
98 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
and I can smell the shipping smell that I have
loved all the days of my life; and I can see
the lads heaving, and climbing, and furling, and
mending their bits of canvas, and hauling their
flags up and down. -
“And then who can say?—the sea never took
him, I think—I think I shall hear his voice
before I die. *
“For they do say that God is good.”
Bébée, sweeping very noiselessly, listened, and
her eyes grew wistful and wondering. She had
heard the story a thousand times; always in
different words, but always the same little tale,
and she knew how old Annémie was deaf to all
the bells that tolled the time, and blind to all
the whiteness of her hair, and all the wrinkles of
her face, and only thought of her sea-slain lover.
as he had been in the days of her youth.
But this afternoon the familiar history had a
new patheticness for her, and as the old soul put
aside with her palsied hand the Square of canvas
that screened the casement, and looked Out, with
her old dim sad eyes strained in the longing that
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES. 99
God never answered, Bébée felt a strange chill
at her own heart, and wondered to herself:—
“What can it be to care for another creature
like that ? It must be so terrible, and yet it
must be beautiful too—does everyone suffer like
that?” -
She did not speak at all as she finished sweep-
ing the bricks, and went downstairs for a metal
cruche full of water, and set over a little char-
coal on the stove the old woman's brass soup
kettle with her supper of stewing cabbage.
Annémie did not hear or notice; she was still
looking out of the hole in the wall on to the
masts and the sails and the water.
It was twilight.
From the barges and brigs there came the
smell of the sea. The sailors were shouting to
each other. The craft were crowded close, and
lost in the growing darkness. On the other side
of the canal the belfries were ringing for vespers.
“Eleven voyages one and another, and he
never forgot to tie the flax to the mast,” Annémie
murmured, with her old Wrinkled face leaning
H 2
100 TWO LTTTLE WOODEN SHOES.
out into the grey air. “It used to fly there,
One could see it coming up half-a-mile off, just
a pale yellow flake on the wind, like a tress of
my hair, he would say. No, no, I could not
go away ; he may come to-night, to-morrow,
any time; he is not drowned, not my man; he
was all I had, and God is good, they say.”
|Bébée listened and looked; then kissed the old
shaking hand, and took up the lace patterns and
went softly out of the room without speaking.
When old Annémie watched at the window
it was useless to seek for any word or sign of
her ; people said that she had never been quite
right in her brain since that fatal winter noon
sixty years before, when the coaster had brought
into port the broken beam of the good brig
Fleur d'Epine.
Bébée did not know about that, nor heed
whether her wits were right or not.
She had known the old creature in the lace-
room where Annémie pricked out designs, and
she had conceived a great regard and sorrow
for her ; and when Annémie had become too
TWO LITTLE WOOD ENT SHOES. 101
-
ailing and aged to go herself any longer to the
lacemaker's place, Bébée had begged leave for
her to have the patterns at home, and had
carried them to and fro for her for the last
three or four years, doing many other little
useful services for the lone old soul as well—
services which Annémie hardly perceived, she
had grown so used to them, and her feeble
intelligence was so sunk in the one absorbing
idea that she must watch all the days through
and all the years through for the coming of the
dead man and the lost brig.
Bébée put the lace patterns in her basket, and
trotted home, her sabots clattering on the
Stones.
“What it must be to care for anyone like
that l” she thought, and, by some vague associa-
tion of thought that she could not have pursued,
she lifted the leaves and looked at the moss
rosebud.
It was quite dead.
CHAPTER WI.
—O-
sº:S she got clear of the city and out on
ſº her country road, a shadow fell across
her in the evening light.
“Have you had a good day, little one 2’’
asked a voice, that made her stop with a curious
vague expectancy and pleasure.
“It is you !” she said, with a little cry, as
she saw her friend of the silk stockings leaning
on a gate midway in the green and solitary road
that leads to Laeken. -
“Yes, it is I,” he answered, as he joined
her. “Have you forgiven me, Bébée 2"
She looked at him with frank, appealing eyes,
like those of a child in fault.

TWO LITTLE WooDEN SHOES 103
“Oh, I did not sleep all night,” she said,
simply. “I thought I had been rude and
ungrateful, and I could not be sure I had done
right, though to have done otherwise would
certainly have been wrong.”
He laughed.
“Well, that is a clearer deduction than is to
be drawn from most moral uncertainties. Do
not think twice about the matter, my dear. I
have not, I assure you.” --
“No I ?”
She was a little disappointed. It seemed
such an immense thing to her; and she had
lain awake all the night, turning it about in
her little brain, and appealing vainly for help
in it to the sixteen sleep-angels.
“No, indeed. And where are you going so
fast, as if those wooden shoes of yours were
sandals of Mercury 2”
“Mercury—is that a shoemaker ?”
“No, my dear. He did a terrible bit of
cobbling once, when he made Woman. But he
did not shoe her feet with swiftness that I know
I ()4 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
of ; she only runs away to be run after, and if
you do not pursue her, she comes back—
always.” -
Bébée did not understand at all.
“I thought God made women 2" she said, a
little awe-stricken.
“You call it God. People three thousand
years ago called it Mercury or Hermes. Both
mean the same thing, mere words to designate
an unknown quality. Where are you going?
Does your home lie here ?” -
“Yes, onward, quite far onward,” said Bébée,
wondering that he had forgotten all she had
told him the day before about her hut, her
garden, and her neighbours. “You did not
come and finish your picture to-day, why was
that ? I had a rosebud for you, but it is
dead now.”
“I went to Anvers. You looked for me a
little, then ?”
“Oh, all day long. For I was so afraid I
had been ungrateful.”
“That is very pretty of you. Women are
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 105
never grateful, my dear, except when they are
very ill treated. Mercury, whom we were talk-
ing of, gave them, amongst 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, grey Summer evening.
“Why are you in such a hurry 2” 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. “You
see, Annémie's hand shakes and her eyes are
dim, and she pricks the pattern all awry and
never perceives it ; it would break her heart
if one showed her so, but the Baes would not
take them as they are ; they are of no use at all.
So I prick them out myself on fresh paper, and
the Baes thinks it is all her doing, and pays her
the same money, and she is quite content. And
as I carry the patterns to and fro for her,
106 TWO LITTLE WOOD ENT SHOES.
because she cannot walk, it is easy to cheat her
like that ; and it is no harm to cheat 80, you
know.”
He was silent.
“You are a good little girl, Bébée, I can
See,” he said at last, with a graver sound in his
voice. “And who is this Annémie for whom
you do so much—an old woman, I suppose ?”
“Oh, yes, quite old; incredibly old. Her
man was drowned at sea sixty years ago, and she
watches for his brig still, night and morning.”
“The dog's heart. No doubt he beat her, and
had a wife in fifty other ports.”
“Oh, no,” said Bébée, with a little cry, as
though the word against the dead man hurt her.
“She has told me so much of him. He was as
good as good could be, and loved her so, and
between the voyages they were so happy.
Surely that must have been ; sixty years now,
and she is so sorry still, and still will not believe
that he was drowned.” -
He looked down on her with a smile that had
a certain pity in it.
TWO LITTLE WOODENT SHOES. I ()7
“Well, yes; there are women like that, I
believe. But be very sure, my dear, he beat
her. Of the two, one always holds the whip and
uses it, the other crouches.”
“I do not understand,” said Bébée.
“No–but you will.”
“I will?—when?”
He Smiled again.
“Oh—to-morrow perhaps, or next year—or
when Fate fancies.
“Or rather—when I choose,” he thought to
himself, and let his eyes rest with a certain
pleasure on the little feet, that went beside him
in the grass, and the pretty neck that showed
ever and again, as the frills of her linen bodice
were blown back by the wind, and her own quick
motion.
Bébée looked also up at him; he was
very handsome, or looked so to her, after the
broad blunt characterless faces of the Brabantois
around her. He walked with an easy grace, he
was clad in picture-like velvets, he had a beauti-
ful poetic head, and eyes like deep brown waters,
I08 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES
and a face like one of Jordaens or Rembrandt's
cavaliers in the galleries where she used to
steal in of a Sunday, and look up at the
paintings, and dream of what that world could
be in which those people had lived.
“You are of the people of Rubes' country,
are you not ?” she asked him.
“Of what country, my dear?”
“Of the people that live in the gold frames,”
said Bébée, quite seriously. “In the galleries,
you know—I know a charwoman that scrubs the
floors of the Arenenberg, and she lets me in
sometimes to look—and you are just like those
great gentlemen in the gold frames, only you
have not a hawk and a sword, and they always
have. I used to wonder where they came from,
for they are not like any of us one bit, and the
charwoman—she is Lisa Dredel, and lives in the
street of the Pot d’Etain—always said, ‘I)ear
heart, they all belong to Rubes' land—we never
see their like now-a-days.” But you must come
out of Rubes' land; at least, I think so, do you
not 2 ”
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES, l09
He caught her meaning; he knew that Rubes
was the homely abbreviation of Rubens, that all
the Netherlanders used, and he guessed the idea
that was reality to this little lonely fanciful mind.
“Perhaps I do,” he answered her with a smile,
for it was not worth his while to disabuse her
thoughts of any imgination that glorified him to
her. “Do you not want to see Rubes' world,
little one 2 To see the gold and the grandeur,
and the glitter of it all?—never to toil or get
tired ?—always to move in a pageant 2—always
to live like the hawks in the paintings you talk
of, with silver bells hung round you, and a hood
all sewn with pearls 2"
“No,” said Bébée, simply. “I should like to
see it—just to see it, as one looks through a
grating into the king's grape-houses here. But I
should not like to live in it. I love my hut, and
the starling, and the chickens, and what would
the garden do without me?—and the children,
and the old Annémie 2 I could not anyhow,
anywhere be any happier than I am. There is
only one thing I wish.”
| 10 TWO LITTLE WOODENT SHOES.
“And what is that ?”
“To know something. Not to be so ignorant;
just look—I can read a little, it is true, my
hours, and the letters, and when Krebs brings
in a newspaper I. can read a little of it—not
much. I know French well, because Antoine was
French himself, and never did talk Flemish to
me; and they, being Flemish, cannot, of course,
read the newspapers at all, and so think it very
wonderful indeed in me. But what I want is to
know things, to know all about what was before
ever I was living. Ste. Gudule now—they say
it was built hundreds of years before ; and
Rubes again—they say he was a painter-king in
Antwerpen before the oldest oldest woman like
Annémie ever began to count time. I am sure
books tell you all those things, because I see the
students coming and going with them; and
when I saw once the millions of books in the
Rue de la Musée, I asked the keeper what use
they were for, and he said, “to make men wise,
my dear.” But Bac the cobbler, who was with
me, it was a fête day—Bac, he said, ‘Do not
TWO LITTLE WOOD ENT SHOES. III
you believe that, Bébée ; they only muddle
folk's brains; for one book tells them one thing,
and another book another, and so on, till they
are dazed with all the contrary lying; and if you
See a bookish man, be sure you see a very poor
creature who could not hoe a patch, or kill a
pig, or stitch an upperleather, were it ever so.’
But I do not believe that Bac said right. Did
he 2”
“I am not sure. On the whole, I think it is
the truest remark on literature I have ever
heard, and one that shows great judgment in
Bac. Well ?”
“Well—sometimes, you know,” said Bébée,
not understanding his answer, but pursuing her
thoughts confidentially; “sometimes I talk like
this to the neighbours, and they laugh at me.
Because Mère Krebs says that when one knows
how to spin and sweep and make bread and say
one’s prayers and milk a goat or a cow, it is all a
woman wants to know this side of heaven. But
for me, I cannot help it—when I look at those
windows in the cathedral, or at those beautiful
Il2 TWO LITTLE WOODENT SHOES.
twisted little spires that are all over our Hôtel de
Ville, I want to know who the men were that
made them—what they did and thought—how
they looked and spoke—how they learned to shape
stone into leaves and grasses like that—how they
could imagine all those angel faces on the glass.
When I go alone in the quite early morning or
at night when it is still—sometimes in winter I
have to stay till it is dark over the lace—I hear
their feet come after me, and they whisper to me
close, “Look what beautiful things we have done,
Bébée, and you all forget us quite. We did what
never will die, but our names are as dead as the
stones.’ And then I am so sorry for them and
ashamed. And I want to know more. Can you
tell me?”
He looked at her earnestly ; her eyes were
shining, her cheeks were warm, her little mouth
was tremulous with eagerness.
“Did anyone ever speak to you in that way?”
he asked her.
“No,” she answered him. “It comes into my
head of itself. Sometimes I think the cathedral
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEHOES. 113
angels put it there. For the angels must be tired,
you know ; always pointing to God and always
Seeing men turn away. I used to tell Antoine
sometimes. But he used to shake his head and
say that it was no use thinking; most likely
Ste. Gudule and St. Michael had set the church
down in the night all ready made, why not ? God
made the trees, and they were more wonderful, he
thought, for his part. And so perhaps they are,
but that is no answer. And I do want to know.
I want some one who will tell me, and if you
come out of Rubes' country as I think, no doubt
you know everything, or remember it?”
He smiled.
“The free pass to Rubes' country lies in books,
pretty one. Shall I give you some 2—nay, lend
them, I mean, since giving you are too wilful to
hear of without offence. You can read, you said 2’
Bébée's eyes glowed as they lifted themselves
to his.
“I can read—not very fast, but that would
come with doing it more and more, I think, just
as spinning does – one knots the thread and
--
i.
114 T}} O LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
breaks it a million times before one learns to spin
as fine as cobwebs. I have read the stories of
S. Anne, and of S. Catherine, and of S. Lieven
fifty times, but they are all the books that Father
Francis has ; and no one else has any amongst
us.” - ...”
“Very well. You shall have books of mine.
Lasy ones first ; and then those that are more
serious. But what time will you have? You do
so much ; you are like a little golden bee.”
Bébée laughed happily.
“Oh give me the books and I will find the
time. It is light so early now. That gives one
so many hours. In winter one has so few, one
must lie in bed, because to buy a candle you
know one cannot afford except, of course, a taper
now and then, as one's duty is, for our Lady
or for the dead. And will you really, really, lend
me books?”
“Really—I will. Yes. I will bring you one
to the Grande Place to-morrow, or meet you on
your road here with it. Do you know what
poetry is, Bébée 2’’
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES 115
“No."
“But your flowers talk to you?”
“Ah ! always. But then no one else hears
them ever but me; and so no one else ever
believes.”
“Well—poets are folks who hear the flowers
talk as you do, and the trees, and the seas, and
the beasts, and even the stones; but no one else
ever hears these things, and so, when the poets
write them out, the rest of the world say, ‘That is
very fine, no doubt, but only good for dreamers;
it will bake no bread.' I will give you some
poetry—for I think you care more about dreams
than about bread.”
“I do not know,” said Bébée ; and she did
not know, for her dreams, like her youth, and
her innocence, and her simplicity, and her
strength, were all unconscious of themselves, as
such things must be to be pure and true at all.
Bébée had grown up straight, and clean, and
fragrant, and joyous as one of her own carna-
tions; but she knew herself no more than the
carnation knows its colour and its root.
I 2
116 TWO LITTLE WOODENT SHOES.
“No, you do not know,” said he, with a sort
of pity, and thought within himself—was it
worth while to let her know 2
If she did not know, these vague aspirations
and imaginations would drop off from her with
the years of her early youth, as the lime-flowers
drop downwards with the summer heats. She
would forget them. They would linger a little in
her heart, and, perhaps, always wake at Some
sunset hour or some angelus chime, but not to
trouble her. Only to make her cradle-song a little
sadder and softer than most women's was. Unfed,
they would sink away and bear no blossom. She
would grow into a simple, hardy, hard-working,
God-fearing Flemish woman like the rest. She
would marry, no doubt, sometime, and rear her
children honestly and well; and sit in the market
stall every day, and spin and sew, and dig and
wash, and sweep, and brave bad weather, and be
content with poor food to the end of her harm-
less and laborious days—poor little Bébée.
He saw her so clearly as she would be—if he
let her alone.
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 117
e—
A little taller, a little broader, a little browner,
less soft of skin, less flower-like in face; having
learned to think only as her neighbours thought
i of price of wood and cost of bread; labouring
cheerily but hardly from daybreak to nightfall
to fill hungry mouths ; forgetting all things
* except the little curly heads clustered round
her soup-pot, and the year-old lips sucking at
her breast.
A blameless life, an eventless life, a life as
clear as the dewdrop, and as colourless; 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 them
goes down to the sod again under the sickle.
He saw her just as she would be—if he let her
alone.
118 TWO LITTLE JWOODEN SHIOES.
|But should he leave her alone 2
He cared nothing; only her eyes had such a
pretty, frank, innocent look like a bird's in them,
and she had been so brave and bold with him
about those silken stockings; and this little
ignorant, dreamful mind of hers was so like a
blush rosebud, which looks so close shut, and so
sweet smelling, and so tempting fold within fold,
that a child will pull it open, forgetful that he
will spoil it for ever, and for ever prevent it
from being a full-grown rose, and that he will
let the dust, and the Sun, and the bee into its
tender bosom. Now men are true children, and
women are their rosebuds. w
Thinking only of keeping well with this
strange and beautiful wayfarer from that un-
known paradise of Rubes' country, she opened
the leaves of her basket.
“I took a bouquet for you to-day, but it is
dead. Look—to-morrow, if you will be there,
you shall have the best in all the garden.”
“You wish to see me again then 2° be asked
her. Bébée looked at him with troubled eyes,
TWO LITTLE WOOD ENT SHOES. 1.19
but with a sweet frank faith that had no hesitation
in it.
“Yes! you are not like anything I ever knew,
and if you will only help me to learn a little
I shall be so thankful: sometimes I think I am
not stupid, only ignorant, but I cannot be sure
unless I try.”
FIe smiled; he was listlessly amused ; the
day before he had tempted the child merely
because she was pretty, and to tempt her in that
way seemed the natural course of things, but
now there was something in her that touched
him differently; the end would be the same, but
he would change the means.
The sun had set. There was a low, dull red
glow still on the far edge of the plains—that was
all. In the distant cottages little lights were
twinkling. The path grew dark.
“I will go away and let her alone,” he thought.
“Poor little soul! it would give itself lavishly,
it would never be bought. I will let it alone; the
mind will go to sleep, and the body will keep
healthy and strong and pure, as people call it.
120 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
It would be a pity to play with both a day, and
then throw them away as a boy throws a dead
Sparrow. She is a little clod of earth that
has field-flowers growing in it. I will let her
alone; the flowers under the plough in due course
will die, and she will be content amongst the
other clods;–if I let her alone.”
At that moment there went across the dark
fields, against the dusky red sky, a young man
with a pile of brushwood on his back, and a
hatchet in his hand.
“You are late, Bébée,” he called to her in
Flemish, and Scowled at the stranger by her
side.
“A good-looking lad—who is it 2 ” said her
companion.
“That is Jeannot, the son of old Sophie,” she
answered him. “He is so good—oh, so good, you
cannot think; he keeps his mother and three
little sisters, and works so very, very hard in the
forest, and yet he often finds time to dig my
garden for me, and he chops all my wood in
winter.”
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. I21
They had come to where the road goes up by
the king's Summer-palace.
They were under great hanging beeches and
limes. There was a high grey wall, and over it
the blossoming fruit-boughs hung. In a ditch
full of long grass little kids bleated by their
mothers.
Away on the left went the green fields of
colza, and beetroot, and trefoil, with big forest
trees here and there in their midst, and, against
the blue low line of the far horizon, red mill-
sails and grey church spires; dreamy plaintive
bells far away somewhere were ringing the sad
Flemish carillon.
He paused and looked at her.
“I must bid you good-night, Bébée—you are
near your home now.”
She paused too and looked at him.
“But I shall see you to-morrow 2 ”
There was the wistful, eager, anxious uncon-
sciousness of appeal as when, the night before,
she had asked him if he were angry.
He hesitated a moment. If he said No, and
122 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
went away out of the city wherever his listless
and changeful whim called him, he knew how it
would be with her ; he knew what her life would
be as surely as he knew the peach would come
out of the peachflower rosy on the wall there ;
life in the little hut ; among the neighbours;
sleepy and safe and soulless;–if he let her
alone.
If he stayed and saw her on the morrow he
knew, too, the end as Surely as he knew that
the branch of white pear-blossom, which in care-
lessness he had knocked down with a stone on
the grass yonder, would fade in the might and
would never bring forth its sweet, simple fruit in
the sunshine.
To leave the peachflower to come to maturity
and be plucked by a peasant—or to pull down
the pear-blossom and rifle the buds 2
Carelessly and languidly he balanced the ques-
tion with himself, whilst Bébée, forgetful of the
lace patterns and the flight of the hours, stood
looking at him with anxious and pleading eyes,
thinking only—was he angry again, or would he
T}WO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES. 123
really bring her the books and make herwise, and
let her know the stories of the past?
“Shall I see you to-morrow?” she said wistfully.
Should she?—if he left the peach-blossom safe
on the wall, Jeannot the Woodcutter would come
by-and-by and gather the fruit. stº
If he left the clod of earth in its pasture with
all its daisies untouched, this black-browed young
peasant would cut it round with his hatchet and
carry it to his wicker cage, that the homely brown
lark of his love might sing to it some stupidwood-
note under a cottage eave.
The sight of the strong young forester going
over the darkened fields against the dull red
skies was as a feather that suffices to sway to one
side a balance that hangs on a hair.
PHe had been inclined to leave her alone, when
he saw in his fancy the clean, simple, mindless,
honest life that her fanciful girlhood would settle
down into as time should go on. But when in
the figure of the woodman there was painted
visibly on the dusky sky that end for her which
he had foreseen, he was not indifferent to it ; he
124 TWO LITTLE TVOODEN SHOES.
resented it ; he was stirred to a vague desire to
render it impossible.
If Jeannot had not gone by across the fields,
he would have left her and let her alone from
that night thenceforwards; as it was—
“Good-night, Bébée,” he said to her. “To-
morrow I will finish the Broodhuis and bring you
your first book. Do not dream too much, or you
will prick your lace patterns all awry. Good-
night, pretty One.”
Then he turned and went back through the
green dim lanes to the city.
Bébée stood a moment looking after him, with
a happy Smile ; then she picked up the fallen
pear-bough, and ran home as fast as her feet
would take her.
That night she worked very late watering her
flowers, and trimming them, and then ironing
out a little clean white cap for the morrow ; and
then sitting down under the open lattice to prick
out all old Annémie's designs by the strong light
of the full moon that flooded her hut with its
radiance.
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 12:
2
5
But she sang all the time she worked, and the
gay, pretty, wordless songs floated across the
water and across the fields, and woke some old
people in their beds as they lay with their win-
dows open, and they turned and crossed them-
selves, and said, “Dear heart —this is the Eve |
of the Ascension, and the angels are so near we
hear them.”
But it was no angel; only the thing that is
nearer heaven than anything else—a little human
heart that is happy and innocent.
Bébée had only one sorrow that night. The
pear-blossoms were all dead—and no care could
call them back even for an hour's blooming.
“He did not think when he struck them
down,” she said to herself regretfully.
CHAPTER VII.
–2–
said black Jeannot in the daybreak,
pushing her gate open timidly with
one hand.
“There is none to do, Jeannot. They want
so little in this time of the year—the flowers,”
said she, lifting her head from the sweet peas
she was tying up to their sticks.
The Woodman did not answer; he leaned over
the half-open wicket, and swayed it backwards
and forwards under his bare arm. He was a
good, harmless, gentle fellow, Swarthy as char-
coal and simple as a child, and quite ignorant;
having spent all his days in the great Soignies

TWO LITTLE WOOD ENT SHOES. 127
forests, making faggots when he was a little lad,
and hewing down trees or burning charcoal as he
grew to manhood.
“Who was that seigneur with you last night,
Bébée 2 ” he asked, after a long silence, watching
her as she moved. -
Bébée's eyes grew very soft, but they looked
up frankly.
“I am not sure. I think he is a painter—a
great painter-prince I mean—as Tubes was in
Antwerpen; he wanted roses the night before
last in the Cathedral.”
“But he was walking with you?”
“He was in the lane as I came home last
night—yes.”
“What does he give you for your roses 2”
“Oh—he pays me well. How is your mother
this day, Jeannot ?” .
“You do not like to talk of him 2’’
“Why should you want to talk of him 2—he is
nothing to you.”
“Did you really see him only two days ago,
Bébée 2 ”
128 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
“Oh, Jeannot l—did I ever tell a falsehood?
—you would not say that to one of your little
sisters.”
The forester swayed the gate to and fro drearily
under his folded arms.
Bébée, not regarding him, cut her flowers, and
filled her baskets, and did her other work, and
set a ladder against the hut and climbed on its
low roof to seek for eggs, the hens having strange
tastes sometimes for the rushes and lichens of
its thatch. She found two eggs, which she pro-
mised herself to take to Annémie, and looking
round as she sat on the edge of the roof, with
one foot on the highest rung of the ladder, saw
that Jeannot was still at the gate.
“You will be late in the forest, Jeannot,” she
cried to him. “It is such a long, long way in
and out. Why do you look so sulky 2 and you
are kicking the wicket to pieces.”
“I do not like you to talk with strangers,”
said Jeannot, Sullenly and sadly.
Bébée laughed as she sat on the edge of the
thatch, and looked at the shining grey skies of
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 129
the early day, and the dew-wet garden, and the
green fields beyond, with happy eyes that made
the familiar scene transfigured to her. -
“Oh, Jeannot, what nonsense ! As if I do
not talk to a million strangers every summer; as
if I could ever sell a flower if I did not You.
are cross this morning—that is what it is.”
“Do you know the man's name 2 ” said
Jeannot, suddenly. -
Bébée felt her cheeks grow warm as with some
noonday heat of Sunshine. She thought it was
with anger against blundering Jeannot's curiosity.
“No 1 and what would his name be to us, if
I did know it? 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 enjoy-
ment 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
I 30 TWO LITILE WOODEN SHOES.
“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.
Go in and get my bowl of bread and milk for
lme, and handit to me up here. It is so pleasant.
It is as nice as being perched on an apple-
tree.” •
Jeannot went in obediently and handed up
her breakfast to her, looking at her with shy,
worshipping eyes. But his face was overcast,
and he sighed heavily as he took up his hatchet
and turned away; for he was the sole support
of his mother and sisters, and if he did not do
his work in Soignies they would starve at home.
“You will be seeing that stranger again?”
he asked her.
“Yes!” she answered, with a glad triumph
in her eyes; not thinking at all of him as she
spoke. “You ought to go, Jeannot, now ; you
are so late. I will come and see your mother
to-morrow. And do not be cross, you dear
big Jeannot. Days are too short to snip them
up into little bits by bad temper; it is only a
*
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SE, OES. 131
- *
stupid sheep-shearer that spoils the fleece by
snapping at it sharp and hard—that is what
Father Francis says.”
Bébée having delivered her little piece of
wisdom, broke her bread into her milk and ate
it, lifting her face to the fresh wind and tossing
crumbs to the wheeling swallows, and watching
the rosebushes nod and toss below in the breeze,
and thinking vaguely how happy a thing it was
to live.
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 farther.
K 2.
132 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
She sat on the thatch and took her bread and
milk in the grey clear air, with the swallows
circling above her head, and one or two of them
€We]] resting a second on the edge of the bowl
to peck at the food from the big wooden spoon;
they had known her all the sixteen summers
of her life, and were her playfellows, only they
would never tell her anything of what they saw in
winter over the seas. That was her only quarrel
with them. Swallows do not tell their secrets.
They have the weird of Procne on them all.
The sun came and touched the lichens of the
roof into gold.
Bébée smiled at it gaily as it rose above
the tops of the trees, and shone on all the little
villages scattered over the plains.
“Ah, dear Sun ” she cried to it. “I am
going to be wise. I am going into great Rubes'
country. I am going to hear of the Past and the
Future. I am going to listen to what the Poets
say. The swallows never would tell me any-
thing; but now I shall know as much as they
know. Are you not glad for me, oh Sun ?”
'I'WO LITTLE TVOOD EN SEHOES. I 33
The Sun came over the trees, and heard and
said nothing. If he had answered at all he
must have said:—
“The only time when a human soul is either
wise or happy, is in that one single moment
when the hour of my own shining or of the
moon's beaming seems to that single soul, to
be past and present and future, to be at once
the creation and the end of all things. Faust
knew that ; so will you.”
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 VIII.
—-O-
ŞUT Bébée, who only saw in the Sun
i 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 butterflies, the kindly
light that the waking birds and the ringing
carillon welcomed—Bébée, who was not at all
afraid of him, smiled at his rays and saw in
them only fairest promise of a cloudless mid-
summer day as she gave her last crumb to the
swallows, dropped down off the thatch, and
busied herself in making bread, that Mère Krebs
would bake for her, until it was time to cut
her flowers and go down into the town.

TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 135
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 glass she
had none.
She was used to hear herself called pretty;
but 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, “God keep you.” But
In OW
“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 look-
ing 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.
136 TJWO LITTI, E WOODEN SHOES.
“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 applebough. -
She got the money for Annémie and took it
to her with fresh patterns to prick, 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 pricking out the
parchment in all faith that she earned her
money, and looking every now and then through
TWO LITTLE TVOODEN SHOES. l37
*
the forests of masts for the brig with the hank
of flax flying; the brig that had foundered sixty
long years before in the northern seas, and in
the days of her youth.
“What is the dog's heart 2" thought Bébée ;
she had seen a dog she knew—a dog who 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 2
“Was her sailor, indeed, so good to her ?”
she asked an old gossip of Annémie's, as she
went down the stairs.
The old soul stopped to think with difficulty
of such a far off time, and resting her brass
flagon of milk on the steep step,
“Ell, 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 some-
188 TWO LITTLE WooDEN SHOES.
times 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 belabour what they love
best; it is a way they have.”
“But she speaks of him as of an angel
nearly 2” said Bébée bewildered. -
The old woman took up her flagon, with a
smile flitting across her wintry face.
“Ay, dear; when the frost kills your brave
rosebush, root and bud, do you think of the
thorns that pricked you, or only of the fair,
sweet-smelling things that flowered all your
summer ?”
Bébée went away thoughtfully out of the old
crazy waterwashed house by the quay; and into
the square to her familiar place: 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 IX.
*=<>=
ºf ER 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 colour, 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.

140 TWO LITTLE WOOD ENT SHOES.
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 fear 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
canal-water, mirroring between its rushes a life
that had scarcely changed for centuries, had a
charm for him.
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOE'S. 141
He stayed awhile in Antwerpen. The town
is ugly and beautiful; it is like a dull quaint
grès 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 colour, and
monkish story and heroic ballad, that could
only have been executed in the days when Art
was a religion.
He gazed himself into a 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 Taffaelle Out of Rome;) and he
studied the Gretchen carefully, delicately, sym-
pathetically, 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 pourtray a
142 T}}WO LITTLE WOOD ENT SHOES.
Gretchen. All his pictures were Phryne —
Phryne in triumph, in ruin, in a palace, in a
poorhouse, 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,
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES, 143
he leaned out of the casement of an absent
friend's old palace in the Brabant street that is
named after Mary of Burgundy; an old case-
ment 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 Cham-
pagne, or whether he would go into the East
and seek new types, and lie under the red Egyp-
tian heavens and create a true Cleopatra which
no man has ever done yet—a 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 him-
self, 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,
144 TWO LITTLE JVOODEN SHOES.
-
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 passed
35
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.
And yet, strolling there in the dusky red of
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 sex
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 woos the bird, when the
king covets the vineyard, there is only one end
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SLIOES. 145
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 X.
—Q —
hidden under the vine-leaves of her
empty basket as she went homeward,
and though she had not seen him very long Ol'
spoken to him very much, she was happy.
The golden gates of knowledge had just opened
to her; she saw a faint, far-off glimpse of the
Hesperides gardens within : of the dragon she
had never heard, and had no fear.
“Might I know your name 2 ” she had asked
him wistfully, as she had given him the rosebud,
and taken the volume in return that day.
“They call me Flamen.”
“It is your name 2"
“Yes, for the world. You must call me

TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 147
Victor, as other women do. Why do you want
my name 2"
“Jeannot asked it of me.”
“Oh, Jeannot asked it, did he 2"
“Yes, besides,” said Bébée, with her eyes very
soft and very serious, and her happy voice hushed,
“besides I want to pray for you of course, every
day, and if I do not know your name, how can
I make Our Lady rightly understand? The
flowers know you without a name, but she might
not, because so very many are always beseeching
her, and you see she has all the world to look
after.”
He had looked at her with a curious look, and
had bade her farewell, and let her go home alone
that night.
Her work was quickly done, and by the light
of the moon she spread her book on her lap
in the porch of the hut and began her new
delight.
The children had come and pulled at her skirts
and begged her to play. But Bébée had shaken
her head.
L 2
148 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
“I am going to learn to be very wise, dear,”
she told them ; “I shall not have time to dance
or to play.”
“But people are not merry when they are wise,
Bébée,” said Franz, the biggest boy.
“Perhaps not,” said Bébée ; “but one cannot
be everything, you know, Franz.”
“But surely, you would rather be merry than
anything else ?” -
“I think there is something better, Franz. I
am not sure; I want to find out ; I will tell you
when I know.”
“Who has put that into your head, Bébée 2’”
“The angels in the Cathedral,” she told them,
and the children were awed and left her, and
went away to play blindman's-buff by themselves
on the grass by the swan's water.
“But for all that the angels have said it,” said
Franz to his sisters, “I cannot see what good
it will be to her to be wise, if she will not
care any longer afterwards for almond ginger-
bread, and currant cake.”
It was the little tale of “Paul and Virginia.”
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES. 149
that he had given her to begin her studies
with ; but it was a grand copy, full of beautiful
drawings nearly at every page.
It was hard work for her to read at first, but
the drawings enticed and helped her, and she
soon sank breathlessly into the charm of the
story. Many words she did not know ; many
passages were beyond her comprehension ; she
was absolutely ignorant, and had nothing but the
force of her own fancy to aid her.
But though stumbling at every step, as a
lame child through a flowery hillside in summer,
she was happy as the child would be, because
of the Sweet strange air that was blowing about
her, and the blossoms that she could gather into
her hand, so rare, so wonderful, and yet withal
so familiar, because they were blossoms.
With her fingers buried in her curls, with her
book on her knee, with the moonrays white and
strong on the page, Bébée sat entranced as the
hours went by ; the children's play shouts died
away, the babble of the gossip at the house
doors ceased; people went by and called good-
lö0 THVO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
night to her ; the little huts shut up one by one,
like the white and purple convolvulus cups in
the hedges.
Bébée did not stir, nor did she hear them ;
she was deaf even to the singing of the night-
ingales in the willows, where she sat in her little
dark porch, with the ivy dropping from the
thatch above, and the wet garden ways beyond
her.
A heavy step came tramping down the lane. A
voice called to her, L
“What are you doing, Bébée, there this time
of the night? It is on the strike of twelve.”
She started as if she were doing some
evil thing, and stretched her arms out, and
looked around with blinded wondering eyes,
as if she had been rudely wakened from her
sleep.
“What are you doing up so late 2 ” asked
Jeannot ; he was coming from the forest in the
dead of night to bring food for his family; he
lost his sleep thus often, but he never thought
that he did anything except his duty in those
jº.
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES. I51
-
long, dark, tiring tramps to and fro between
Soignies and Laeken.
Bébée shut her book and smiled with dreaming
eyes, that saw him not at all.
“I was reading and, Jeannot, his name is
Flamen for the world—but I may call him
Victor.”
“What do I care for his name 2 ”
“You asked it this morning.”
“More fool I. Why do you read 2 Reading
is not for poor folk like you and me.”
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
car, do to get your bread. You have no one to
stand between you and hunger. How will it be
with you when the sluggets 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
152 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
spoilt for all simple pleasures, and for all honest
work?' - -
She smiled, still looking up at the moon, with
the dropping ivy touching her hair.
“You are cross, dear Jeannot. Good-night.”
A moment afterwards the little rickety door
was shut, and the rusty bolt drawn within it;
Jeannot stood in the cool summer night all
alone, and knew how stupid he had been in his
wrath.
He leaned on the gate a minute; then crossed
the garden as softly as his wooden shoes would
let him. He tapped gently on the shutter of the
lattice. &
“Bébée—Bébée—just listen. I spoke roughly,
dear—I know I have no right. I am sorry.
Will you be friends with me again?—do be
friends again.” - --
She opened the shutter a little way, so that he
could see her pretty mouth speaking.
“Oh, Jeannot, what does it matter? Yes, we
are friends—we will always be friends, of course
—only you do not know. Good-night.”
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. I53
He went away with a heavy heart and a long-
drawn step. He would have preferred that she
should have been angry with him.
Bébée, left alone, let the clothes drop off her
pretty round shoulders and her rosy limbs, and
shook out her coils of hair, and kissed the book,
and laid it under her head, and went to sleep
with a smile on her face.
Only, as she slept, her fingers moved as if she
were counting her beads, and her lips mur-
mured.
“Oh, dear Holy Mother, you have so much to
think of—yes, I know—all the poor, and all the
little children. But take care of him ; he is
called Flamen, and he lives in the street of Mary
of Burgundy; you cannot miss him ; and if you
will look for him always, and have a heed that
the angels never leave him, I will give you my
great cactus flower—my only one—on your Feast
of Roses this very year. Oh, dear Mother, you
| ??
will not forget
CHAPTER XI.
—0–
*
tº EBEE was a dreamer in her way, and
3 aspired to be a scholar too. But all
the same, she was not a little fool.
She had been reared in hardy, simple, honest
ways of living, and would have thought it as
shameful as a theft to have owed her bread to
other folk. A'
So, though she had a wakeful, restless night,
full of strange phantasies, none the less was
she out in her garden by daybreak; none
the less did she sweep out her floor and make
her mash for the fowls, and wash out her bit
of linen and hang it to dry on a line amongst

TWO LITTLE WOOD ENT SHOES. 155
the tall, flaunting hollyhocks that were so proud
of themselves because they reached to the
roof.
“What do you want with books, Bébée 2 ”
said Reine, the sabot-maker's wife, across the
privet hedge, as she also hung out her limen.
“I’ranz told me you were reading last night.
It is the silver buckles have done that : one
mischief always begets another.”
“Where is the mischief, good Reine 2" said
Bébée, who was always prettily behaved with her
elders, though, when pushed to it, she could hold
her own.
“The mischief will be in discontent,” said
the sabot-maker's wife. “People live on their
own little patch, and think it is the world; that
is as it should be—everybody within his own,
like a mutin its shell. But when you get reading,
you hear of a swarm of things you never saw,
and you fret because you cannot see them, and
you dream, and dream, and a hole is burnt in
your soup-pot, and your dough is as heavy as
lead. You are like bees that leave their own
156 TTP O LITTLE WOOD ENT SHOES.
clover fields to buzz themselves dead against the
glass of a hothouse.”
Bébée Smiled, reaching to spread out her linen.
But she said nothing. -
“What good is it talking to them?” she
thought; “they do not know.”
Already the neighbours and friends of her
infancy seemed so far, far away; creatures of a
distant world, that she had long left ; it was no
use talking, they never would understand.
“Antoine should never have taught you your
y
letters,” said Reine, groaning under the great
blue shirts she was hanging on high amongst the
leaves. “I told him so at the time. I said,
‘The child is a good child, and spins, and sews,
and sweeps, rare and fine for her age—why go
and spoil her?” But he was always headstrong.
Not a child of mine knows a letter, the Saints be
praised; nor a word of any tongue but our own
good Flemish. You should have been brought
up the same. You would have come to no trouble
then.”
“I am in no trouble, dear Reine,” said Bébée,
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 157
scattering the potato peels to the clacking
poultry, and she smiled into the faces of the
golden oxlips that nodded to her back again in
sunshiny sympathy.
“Not yet,” said Reine, hanging her last shirt.
- But Bébée was not hearing; she was calling
the chickens, and telling the Oxlips how pretty
they looked in the borders; and in her heart she
was counting the minutes till the old Dutch
cuckoo clock at Mère Rrebs—the only clock in
the lane—should crow out the hour at which she
went down to the city. -
She loved the hut, the birds, the flowers; but
they were little to her now compared with the
dark golden picturesque square, the changing
crowds, the frowning roofs, the grey stones, and
the delight of watching through the shifting
colours and shadows of the throngs for one face
and for one Smile. -
“He is sure to be there,' she thought, and
started half an hour earlier than was her wont.
She wanted to tell him all her rapture in the
book—no one else could understand.
158 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SETOES.
-—- wºme
IBut all the day through he never came.
Bébée sat with a sick heart and a parched
little throat, selling her flowers and straining her
eyes through the tumult of the square.
The whole day went by, and there was no sign
of him.
The flowers had sold well; it was a feast-day;
her pouch was full of pence—what was that to
her ? -
She went and prayed in the Cathedral, but it
seemed cold, and desolate, and empty; even the
storied windows seemed dark.
5
“Perhaps he is gone out of the city,” she
thought; and a terror fell on her that frightened
her ; it was so unlike any fear that she had ever
known—even the fear when she had seen death
on old Antoine's face had been nothing like this.
Going home through the streets, she passed
the café of the Trois Frères that looks out on
the trees of the park, and that has flowers in its
balconies, and pleasant windows that stand Open
to let the sounds of the soldiers' music enter.
She saw him in one of the windows. There were
TWO LITTLE WOODENT SHOES. 159
amber and scarlet and black; silks and satins
and velvets. There was a fan painted and
jewelled. There were women's faces. There
was a heap of purple fruit, and glittering sweet-
meats. He laughed there. His beautiful Murillo
head was dark against the white and gold within.
Bébée looked up—paused a second,-then went
onward, with a thorn in her heart.
He had not seen her.
“It is natural, of course—he has his world—
he does not think often of me—there is no
reason why he should be as good as he is,” she
said to herself as she went slowly over the
stones.
She had the dog's soul—only she did not
know it.
But the tears fell down her cheeks, as she
walked. -
It looked so bright in there, so gay, with the
sound of the music coming in through the trees,
and those women—she had seen such women
before ; sometimes in the winter nights, going
home from the lace-work, she had stopped at the
160 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
doors of the palaces, or of the opera-house, when
the carriages were setting down their brilliant
burdens; and sometimes on the great feast-days
she had seen the people of the court going out to
some gala, at the theatre, or some great review of
troops, or some ceremonial of foreign sovereigns;
but she had never thought about them before;
she had never wondered whether velvet was
better to wear than woollen serge, or diamonds
lighter on the head than a little cap of linen. ‘.
But now—
Those women seemed to her so dazzlingly, so
wondrously, so superhumanly beautiful; they
seemed like some of those new dahlia flowers, rose
and purple and gold, that out-blazed the sun, on
the south border of her little garden, , and
blanched all the soft colour out of the homely
roses, and pimpernels, and sweet-williams, and
double-stocks, that had bloomed there ever since
the days of Waterloo.
But, the dahlias had no scent—and Bébée
wondered if these women had any heart in them
—they looked all laughter, and glitter, and
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. I61
vanity. To the child, whose dreams of woman-
hood were evolved from the face of the Mary
of the Assumption, of the Susannah of Mieris,
and of that Angel in the blue coif whose face
has a light as of the sun : to her who had
dreamed her way into vague perceptions of her
own sex's maidenhood and maternity by help of
those great pictures which had been before her
sight from infancy, there was some taint, some
artifice, some want, some harshness in these
jewelled women—she could not have reasoned
about it, but she felt it, as she felt that the
grand dahlias missed a flower's divinity, being
scentless.
She was a little bit of wild thyme herself;
hardy, fragrant, clean, tender, flowering by the
wayside, full of honey, though only nourished on
the turf and the stones—these gaudy, brilliant,
ruby-bright, scarlet-mantled dahlias hurt her
with a dim sense of pain and shame.
Fasting, next day at Sunrise she confessed to
Father Francis.
“I saw beautiful rich women, and I envied

MI
162 TWO LITTLE WOOD ENT SHOES.
them ; and I could not pray to Mary last night
for thinking of them—for I hated them so
much.”
But she did not say:
“I hated them because they were with him.”
Out of the purest little soul, Love entering
drives forth Candour.
“That is not like you at all, Bébée,” said the
good old man, as she knelt at his feet on the
bricks of his little bare study, where all the books
he ever spelt out, were treatises on the art of
bee-keeping. “My dear, you never were covetous
at all, nor did you ever seem to care for the
things of the world. I wish Jehan had not given
you those silver buckles; I think they have set
your little soul on vanities.”
“It is not the buckles ; I am not covetous,”
said Bébée ; and then her face grew warm. She
did not know why, and she did not hear the rest
of Father Francis's admonitions.

CHAPTER XII.
*-Hº-
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.

M 2
I64 TWO LTTTLE WOODENT SHOES.
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 millhouse,
or the deep chimes of the Brussels belfries;
but only by such moments as brought her a
word from his lips, or even a glimpse of him
from afar, across the crowded square.
She sat up half the nights reading the books
he gave her, studying the long cruel poly-
syllables, and spelling slowly through the phrases
that seemed to her so cramped and tangled, and
which yet were a pleasure to unravel for sake of
the thought they held. -
For Bébée, ignorant little simple soul that she
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEHOES. 165
{
* -
was, had a mind in her that was eager, observant,
quick to acquire, skilful to retain ; and it would
happen in certain times that Flamen, speaking
to her of the things which he gave to her to
read, would think to himself that this child had
more wisdom than was often to be found in
Schools.
Meanwhile he pondered various studies in
various stages of a Gretchen, and made love to
Bébée—made love at least by his eyes and by
his voice, not hurrying his pleasant task, but
hovering about her softly, and mindful not to
scare her, as a man will gently lower his hand
over a poised butterfly that he seeks to kill, and
which one single movement, a thought too quick,
may scare away to safety.
Bébée knew where he lived in the street of
Mary of Burgundy; in an old palace that be-
longed to a great Flemish noble, who never
dwelt there himself; but to ask anything about
him—why he was there? what his rank was 2
why he stayed in the city at all ? was a sort of
treason that never entered her thoughts.
166 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
Psyche, if she had been as simple and loyal as
Bébée was, would never have lighted her own
candle; but even Psyche would not have bor-
rowed any one else's lamp to lighten the love
darkness.
To Bébée he was sacred, unapproachable, un-
questionable ; he was a wonderful, perfect happi-
ness that had fallen into her life ; he was a gift
of God, as the sun was.
She took his going and coming as she took
that of the Sun, never dreaming of reproaching
his absence, never dreaming of asking if in the
empty night he shone on any other worlds than
hers.
It was hardly so much a faith with her as an
instinct ; faith must reason ere it know itself to
be faith. Bébée never reasoned any more than
her roses did. -
The good folks in the market-place watched
her a little anxiously; they thought ill of that
little moss rose that every day found its way to
one wearer only, but after all they did not see
much, and the neighbours nothing at all. For
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. - 167
*
he never went home to her, nor with her, and
most of the time that he spent with Bébée was
in the quiet evening shadows, as she went up
with her empty basket through the deserted
country roads.
Bébée was all day long in the city, indeed, as
other girls were, but with her it had always been
different. Antoine had always been with her up
to the day of his death ; and after his death she
had sat in the same place, surrounded by the
people she had known from infancy, and an in-
sult to her would have been answered by a stroke
from the cobbler's strap or from the tinker's
hammer. There was one girl only who ever
tried to do her any harm—a good-looking, stout
wench, who stood at the corner of the Montagne
de la Cour with a stall of fruit in the summer
time, and in winter time drove a milk-cart over
the snow. This girl would get at her sometimes,
and talk of the students, and tell her how good
it was to get out of the town on a holiday, and
go to any one of the villages where there was
kermesse and dance, and drink the little blue
168 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES.
*= **
wine, and have trinkets bought for one, and come
home in the moonlight in a char-à-banc, with the
horns sounding, and the lads singing, and the
ribbons flying from the old horse's ears.
“She is such a little close sly thing !” thought
the fruit-girl, sulkily. To vice, innocence must
always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.
“We dance almost every evening, the chil-
dren and I,” Bébée had answered when urged
fifty times by this girl to go to fairs, and
balls at the wineshops. “That does just as
well. And I have seen kermesse Once at
Malines—it was beautiful. I went with Mère
Dax, but it cost a great deal I know, though she
did not let me pay.”
“You little fool!” the fruit-girl would say,
and grin, and eat a pear.
Dut the good honest old women who sat about
in the Grande Place, hearing, had always taken
the fruit-girl to task, when they got her by her-
self.
“Leave the child alone, you mischievous
one,” said they. “Be content with being base
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES, 169
yourself. Look you, Lisette—she is not one
like you to make eyes at the law-students, and
pester the painter lads for a day's outing. Let
her be, or we will tell your mother how you
leave the fruit for the gutter children to pick
and thieve, while you are stealing up the stairs
into that young French fellow's chamber. Oh,
Oh a fine beating you will get when she
knows.”
Lisette's mother was a fierce and strong old
Brabantoise, who exacted heavy reckoning with
her daughter for every single plum and peach that
she sent out of her dark sweet-smelling fruit-
shop to be sunned in the streets, and under the
students' love-glances.
So the girl took heed, and left Bébée alone.
“What should I want her to come with us
for ?” she reasoned with herself. “She is twice
as pretty as I am,_Jules might take to her
instead—who knows?”
So that she was at once savage and yet trium-
phant when she saw, as she thought, Bébée
drifting down the high flood of temptation,
| 70 TWO LITTLE WOOD ENT SHOES.
“Oh, oh, you dainty one !” she cried, one
day to her. “So you would not take the nuts
and mulberries that do for us common folk,
because you had a mind for a fine pine out of the
hothouses | That was all, was it 2 Eh, well—I
do not begrudge you. Only take care—remem-
ber, the nuts and mulberries last through summer
and autumn, and there are heaps of them on
every fair-stall and street-corner; but the pine
—that is eaten in a day, one springtime, and its
like does not grow in the hedges. You will have
your mouth full of Sugar an hour—and then,
eh !—you will go famished all the year.”
“I do not understand,” said Bébée, looking
up with her thoughts far away, and scarcely
hearing the words spoken to her.
“Oh, pretty little fool—you understand well
enough,” said Lisette, grinning, as she rubbed
up a melon. “Does he give you fine things 2—
you might let me see.”
“No one gives me anything.”
“Chut you want me to believe that. Why
Jules is only a lad, and his father is a silk-
TWO LITTLE WOOD ENT SHOES. 171
g-
mercer, and only gives him a hundred francs a
month, but Jules buys me all I want—somehow
—or do you think I would take the trouble to set
my cap straight when he goes by ? He gave me
these ear-rings, look. I wish you would let me
see what you get.”
But Bébée had gone away—unheeding—-
dreaming of Juliet and of Jeanne d'Arc, of whom
he had told her tales.
He made sketches of her sometimes, but
seldom pleased himself.
It was not so easy, as he had imagined that
it would prove, to pourtray this little flower-
like face, with the clear eyes and the child's open
brow. 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 glisten-
ing brocade, or a fan of peacock's feathers to
172 TWO LITTLE WOOD ENT SHOES.
perfection, and yet, perhaps, the dewy whiteness
of the humble little field daisy shall baffle and
escape you.
He felt, too, that he must catch her ex-
pression flying as he would do the flash of a
swallow's wing across a blue sky; he knew
that Bébée, forced to studied attitudes in an
atelier, would be no longer the ideal that he
wanted.
More than once he came and filled in more
fully his various designs in the little hut garden,
amongst the Sweet grey lavender and the golden
disks of the sunflowers; and more than once
Bébée was missed from her place in the front
of the Broodhuis.
The Yarnhart children would gather now and
then openmouthed at the wicket, and Mère Krebs
would shake her head as she went by on her
sheepskin saddle, and mutter that the child's head
would be turned by vanity, and old Jehan would
lean on his stick and peer through the Sweetbriar,
and wonder stupidly if this strange man who
could make Bébée's face beam over again upon
TWO LITTLE WOOD ENT SEHOES. 173
that panel of wood could not give him back his
dead daughter who had been pushed away under
the black earth so long, long before, when the red
mill had been brave and new, the red mill that
he boys and girls called old.
But except these no one noticed much.
Painters were no rare sights in Brabant.
The people were used to see them coming and
going, making pictures of mud and stones, and
ducks and sheep, and of all common and silly
things.
“What does he pay you, Bébée 2° they used to
ask, with the shrewd Flemish thought after the
main chance.
“Nothing,” Bébée would answer, with a quick
colour in her face, and they would reply in con-
temptuous reproof, “Careless little fool;-you
should make enough to buy you wood all
winter. When the man from Ghent painted
Trine and her cow, he gave her a whole gold bit
for standing still so long in the clover. The Krebs
would be sure to lend you her cow if it be the
cow that makes the difference.”
174 TWO Í, ITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
Bébée was silent, weeding her carnation bed;
—what could she tell them that they would
understand?
She seemed so far away from them all—those
good friends of her childhood—now that this
wonderful new world of his giving had opened
to her sight.
She lived in a dream.
Whether she sat in the market-place taking
copper coins, or in the moonlight with a book on
her knees, it was all the same. Her feet ran, her
tongue spoke, her hands worked ; she did not
neglect her goat or her garden, she did not for-
sake her house labour or her good deeds to old
Annémie ; but all the while she only heard one
voice, she only felt one touch, she only saw one
face.
Here and there—one in a million—there is a
female thing that can love like this, once and
for ever.
Such an One is dedicated, birth upwards, to
the Mater Dolorosa.
He had something nearer akin to affection for
TIVO LITTLE WOODEN SEHOES. iſ 5
her than he had ever had in his life for anything,
but he was never in love with her—no more
in love with her than with the moss-rosebuds that
she fastened in his breast. Yet he played with
her, because she was such a little, soft, tempting,
female thing; and because, to see her face flush,
and her heart heave, to feel her fresh feelings stir
into life, and to watch her changes from shyness
to confidence, and from frankness again into fear,
was a natural pastime in the lazy golden weather.
That he spared her as far as he did—when
after all she would have married Jeannot anyhow,
—and that he sketched her face in the open air,
and never entered her hut and never beguiled her
to his own old palace in the city was a new virtue
in himself for which he hardly knew whether
to feel respect or ridicule; anyway it seemed
virtue to him.
So long as he did not seduce the body it
seemed to him that it could never matter how
he slew the soul—the little, honest, happy, pure,
frank Soul, that amidst its poverty and hardships
was like a robin's song to the winter sun.
176 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
“Hoot, toot, pretty innocent, so you are no
better than the rest of us,” hissed her enemy,
Lisette, the fruit girl, against her as she went by
the stall one evening as the sun set. “Prut ! So
it was no such purity after all that made you
never look at the student lads and the soldiers,
eh 2—You were so dainty of taste, you must
needs pick and choose, and, Lord's sake, after all
your coyness, to drop at a beckoning finger as
one may say—pong !—in a minute, like an apple
over ripe Ohhè, you sly one !”
Bébée flushed red, in a sort of instinct of
offence; not sure what her fault was, but vaguely
stung by the brutal words.
Bébée walking homeward by him, with her
empty baskets, looked at him with grave wonder-
ing eyes.
“What did she mean? I do not understand.
I must have done some wrong—or she thinks so.
y 2
Do you know?
Flamen laughed, and answered her evasively:
“You have done her the wrong of a fair skin
when hers is brown, and a little foot, while hers
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEHOES. 177
is as big as a trooper's; there is no greater sin,
Bébée, possible in woman to woman.”
“Hold your peace, you shrill jade,” he added,
in anger to the fruiterer, flinging at her a crown
piece, that the girl caught and bit with her teeth
with a chuckle. “Do not heed her, Bébée. She
is a coarse-tongued brute, and is jealous, no
doubt.”
“Jealous 2—of what?”
The word had no meaning to Bébée.
“That I am not a student or a soldier as her
lovers are.”
As her lovers were ! Bébée felt her face burn
again. Was he her lover then 2 The child's
innocent body and soul thrilled with a hot, sweet,
delight and fear commingled.
Bébée was not quite satisfied until she had
knelt down that night and asked the Master of
all poor maidens to see if there were any wicked-
ness in her heart, hidden there like a bee
in a rose, and if there were to take it out
and make her worthier of this wonderful new
happiness in her life.
CHAPTER XIII.
—H-
in summer, Bébée was all alone in the
lane by the Swans' water. In the grey of the
dawn all the good folk except herself and lame
old Jehan had tramped off to a pilgrimage, Liège
way, which the bishop of the city had enjoined
on all the faithful as a sacred duty.
Bébée doing her work, singing, thinking how
good God was, and dreaming over a thousand
fancies of the wonderful stories he had told her,
and of the exquisite delight that would lie for
her in watching for him all through the shining
hours, Bébée felt her little heart leap like a

TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES. I '79
Squirrel as the voice that was the music of heaven
to her called through the stillness:
“Good day, pretty one you are as early
as the lark, Bébée. I go to Mayence, so I
thought I would look at you one moment as I
pass.”
Bébée ran down through the wet grass in a
tumult of joy. She had never seen him so early
in the day—never so early as this, when nobody
was up and stirring except birds and beasts and
peasant folk. -
She did not know how pretty she looked
herself; like a rain-washed wild rose; her
feet gleaming with dew, her cheeks warm with
health and joy; her Sunny clustering hair free
from the white cap and tumbling a little about her
throat, because she had been stooping over the
carnations.
Flamen loosed the wicket latch and thought
there might be better ways of spending the day
than in the grey shadows of old Mechlin.
“Will you give me a draught of water 2' he
asked her as he crossed the garden.
N 2
l80 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEHOES.
*
“I will give you breakfast,” said Bébée,
happy as a bird. 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, grey
lavender bush blowing against the door.
The lavender bush has no splendour like the
roses, has no colours like the hollyhocks; it is a
simple, plain, grey 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.
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.
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES. 181
“I will give you your breakfast,” said Bébée,
flushing rosily with pleasure, and putting away
the ivy coils that he might enter.
“I have very little, you know,” she added, wist-
fully. “Only goat's milk and bread; but if that
will do—and there is some honey—and if you
would eat a salad, I would cut one fresh.”
He did enter, and glanced round him with a
curious pity and wonder both in one.
It was such a little, Small, square place; and its
floor was of beaten clay; and its unceiled roof he
could have touched; and its absolute poverty was
so plain,_and yet the child looked so happy in
it, and was so like a flower, and was so dainty
and fresh, and even so full of grace.
She stood and looked at him with frank and
grateful eyes; she could hardly believe that he
was here ; he, the stranger of Rubes' Land, in
her own little rush-covered home.
But she was not embarrassed by it ; she was
glad and proud.
There is a dignity of peasants as well as of
kings—the dignity that comes from all absence
182 TWO LITTLE WOOD ENT SHOES.
of effort, all freedom from pretence. Bébée had
this, and she had more still than this: she had
the absolute simplicity of childhood with her
still.
Some women have it still when they are four-
SCOTé.
She could have looked at him for ever, she
was so happy; she cared nothing now for those
dazzling dahlias—he had left them ; he was
actually here—here in her own, little, dear home,
with the cocks looking in at the threshold, and
the sweetpeas nodding at the lattice, and the
starling crying “Bonjour ! Bonjour !”
“You are tired, I am sure you must be tired,”
she said, pulling her little bed forward for him
to sit on, for there were only two wooden stools in
the hut, and no chair at all.
Then she took his sketching easel and brushes
from his hand, and would have kneeled and taken
the dust off his boots if he would have let her;
and went hither and thither gladly and lightly,
bringing him a wooden bowl of milk and the rest
of the slender fare, and cutting as quick as thought
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SETO ES. 183
sºs = **r-
fresh cresses and lettuce from her garden, and
- bringing him, as the crown of all, Father Francis's
honeycomb on vine - leaves, with some pretty
sprays of box and mignonette scattered about
it—doing all this with a swift, sweet grace
that robbed the labour of all look of servi-
tude, and looking at him ever and again with
a smile that said as clearly as any words:
“I cannot do much, but what I do, I do with
all my heart.”
There was something in the sight of her going
and coming in those simple household errands,
across the sunlit floor, that moved him as some
mountain air sung on an alp by a girl driving her
cows to pasture may move a listener who in-
different has heard the swell of the organ of La
Hague, or the recitative of a great singer in San
Carlo.
The grey lavender blowing at the house-door
has its charm for those who are tired of the
camellias that float in the porcelain bowls of mid-
night Suppers.
This man was not good. He was idle and
184 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES.
vain, and amorous and cold, and had been
spoiled by the world in which he had passed his
days; but he had the temper of an artist; he
had something, too, of a poet's fancy; he was
vaguely touched and won by this simple soul
that looked at him out of Bébée's eyes with some
look that in all its simplicity had a divine gleam
in it that made him half ashamed,
He had known women by the thousand, good
women and bad; women whom he had dealt ill
with and women who had dealt ill with him; but
this he had not known—this frank, fearless,
tender, gay, grave, innocent, industrious little
life, helping itself, feeding itself, defending itself,
working for itself and for others, and vaguely
seeking all the while some unseen light, some
unknown god, with a blind faith so infinitely
ignorant and yet so infinitely pathetic.
“All the people are gone on a pilgrimage,”
she explained to him when he asked her why her
village was so silent this bright morning. “They
are gone to pray for a fine harvest, and then
each one prays for some other little thing that
Two LTTTLE WOODIN SHOES 185
she wants herself as well—it costs seven francs
apiece. They take their food with them ; they
go and laugh and eat in the fields. I think it is
nonsense. One can say one's prayers just as well
here. Mère Krebs thinks so too, but then she
says: ‘If I do not go, it will look ill; people
will say I am irreligious; and as we make so
much by flour, God would think it odd for me
to be absent; and, besides, it is only seven francs
there and back; and if it does please Heaven,
that is cheap, you know. One will get it over
and over again in Paradise.” That is what.
Mère Krebs says. But, for me, I think it is
nonsense. It cannot please God to go by train
and eat galette and waste a whole day in getting
dusty. -
When I give the Virgin my cactus flower, I do
give up a thing I love, and I let it wither on her
altar instead of pleasing me in bloom here all the
week, and then, of course, she sees that I have
done it out of gratitude. But that is different:
that I am sorry to do, and yet I am glad to do it
out of love. Do you not know 2°
186 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES
“Yes, I know very well. But is the Virgin
all that you love like this ?”
“No ; there is the garden, and there is
Antoine—he is dead, I know. But I think that
we should love the dead all the better, not the
less, because they cannot speak or say that they
are angry; and perhaps one pains them very
much when one neglects them, and if they are
ever so sad, they cannot rise and rebuke one—
that is why I would rather forget the flowers
for the Church than I would the flowers for his
grave, because God can punish me, of course, if
he like, but Antoine never can — any more—
now.”
“You are logical in your sentiment, my dear,”
said Flamen, who was more moved than he cared
to feel. “The union is a rare one in your sex.
Who taught you to reason ?”
“No one. And I do not know what to be
logical means. Is it that you laugh at me?”
“No. I do not laugh. And your pilgrims—
they are gone for all day ?” |
“Yes. They are gone to the Sacred Heart at
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES. 187
Ste. Marie en Bois. It is on the way to Liége.
They will come back at nightfall. And some of
them will be sure to have drunk too much, and
the children will get so cross. Prosper Bar, who
is a Calvinist, always says, “Do not mix up
prayer and play; you would not cut a gherkin in
your honey;' but I do not know why he called
prayer a gherkin, because it is sweet enough—
sweeter than anything, I think. When I pray to
the Virgin to let me see you next day, I go to bed
quite happy, because she will do it, I know, if it
will be good for me.”
“But if it were not good for you, Bébés 2
Would you cease to wish it then 2°
IHe rose as he spoke, and went across the floor
and drew away her hand that was parting the
flax, and took it in his own and stroked it, indul-
gently and carelessly, as a man may stroke the
soft fur of a young cat.
Leaning against the little lattice and looking
down on her with musing eyes, half smiling, half
serious, half amorous, half sad, Bébée looked up
with a sudden and delicious terror that ran
I88 TWO LTTTLE WOOD ENT SHOES.
through her as the charm of the Snake's gaze
runs through the bewildered bird.
“Would you cease to wish if it were not
good 2’’ he asked again.
Bébée's face grew pale and troubled. She left
her hand in his because she did not think any
shame of his taking it. But the question Sud-
denly flung the perplexity and darkness of doubt
into the clearness of her pure child's conscience.
All her ways had been straight and sunlit before
her. -
She had never had a divided duty.
The religion and the pleasure of her simple
little life had always gone hand-in-hand, greeting
one another, and never for an instant in conflict.
In any hesitation of her own she had always gone
to Father Francis, and he had disintangled the
web for her and made all plain.
But here was a difficulty in which she could
never go to Father Francis.
Right and wrong, duty and desire, were for the
first time arrayed before her in their ghastly and
unending warfare.
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. lS9
It frightened her with a certain breathless
sense of peril—the peril of a time when in lieu
of that gentle Mother of Roses whom she kneeled
to amongst the flowers, she would only see a
dusky shadow looming between her and the
beauty of life and the light of the sun.
What he said was quite vague to her. She
attached no definite danger to his words. She
if
Mary forbade it, would she not take it if she
only thought—to see him was so great a joy
could notwithstanding, always, always, always 2
He kept her hand in his, and watched with
contentment the changing play of the shade and
sorrow, the fear and fascination, on her face.
“You do not know, Bébée 2" he said at length,
knowing well himself; so much better than ever
she knew. “Well, dear—that is not flattering to
me. But it is natural. The good Virgin of
course gives you all you have, food, and clothes,
and your garden, and your pretty plump chickens
—and I am only a stranger. You could not
offend her for me—that is not likely.”
The child was cut to the heart by the sadness
190 TWO LTTTLE WOODEN SEIOES,
and humility of words of whose studied artifice
she had no suspicion.
She thought that she seemed to him ungrateful
and selfish, and yet all the mooring-ropes that
held her little boat of life to the harbour of its
simple religion seemed cut away, and she seemed
drifting helpless and rudderless upon an unknown
Seál.
“I never did do wrong—that I know,” she
said timidly, and lifted her eyes to his with an
unconscious appeal in them.
“But—I do not see why it should be wrong to
speak with you. You are good, and you lend me
beautiful things out of other men's minds that
will make me less ignorant :—Our Lady could
not be angry with that—she must like it.”
“Our Lady ?—oh, poor little simpleton l—
where will her reign be when Ignorance has
once been cut down, root and branch?” he
thought to himself; but he only answered—
“But whether she like it or not, Bébée 2—you
beg the question, my dear; you are—you are not
so frank as usual—think, and tell me honestly 2”
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES. I91
He knew quite well, but it amused him to see
the perplexed trouble that this the first divided
duty of her short years brought with it.
Bébée looked at him, and loosened her hand
from his, and sat quite still. Her lips had a little
quiver in them.
“I think,” she said at last, “I think—if it
be wrong, still I will wish it—yes. Only I will
not tell myself that it is right. I will just say to
Our Lady, “I am wicked, perhaps, but I cannot
help it.’ So–I will not deceive her at all; and
perhaps in time she may forgive. But I think
you only say it to try me. It cannot, I am sure,
be wrong—any more than it is to talk to Jeannot
or to Bac.”
He had driven her into the subtleties of doubt,
but the honest little soul in her found a way out,
as a flower in a cellar finds its way through the
stones to light. -
He plucked the ivy leaves and threw them at
the chickens on the bricks without, with a cer-
tain impatience in the action. The simplicity
and the directness of the answer disarryed him ;
I92 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES.
he was almost ashamed to use against her the
weapons of his habitual warfare. It was like a
maitre d’armes fencing with bare steel against a
little naked child armed with a blest palm-sheaf.
When she had thus brought him all she had,
and he to please her had sat down to the simple
food, she gathered a spray of roses and set it in a
pot beside him, then left him and went and stood
at a little distance, waiting, with her hands lightly
crossed on her chest, to see if there were any-
thing that he might want. -
He ate and drank well to please her, looking
at her often as he did so.
“I break your bread, Bébée,” he said, with a
tone that seemed strange to her. “I break your
bread. I must keep Arab faith with you.” -
“What is that ?”
“I mean—I must never betray you.”
“Betray me ! How could you?”
“Well—hurt you in any way.”
“Ah, I am sure you would never do that.”
He was silent, and looked at the spray of
TOS6S,
TWO LTTTLE WOODEN sºloss. Y.93
9 3
“Sit down and spin,” he said impatiently.
“I am ashamed to see you stand there, and a
woman never looks so well as when she spins.
Sit down—and I will eat the good things you
have brought me. But I cannot if you stand
and look.”
“I beg your pardon, I did not know,” she
said, ashamed lest she should have seemed rude
to him ; and she drew out her wheel under the
light of the lattice, and sat down to it, and began
to disentangle the threads.
It was a pretty picture—the low, square case-
ment; the frame of ivy, the pink and white of the
climbing sweet peas; the girl's head; the cool,
wet leaves; the old wooden spinning-wheel, that
purred like a sleepy cat.
“I want to paint you as Gretchen, only it will
be a shame,” he said.
“Who is Gretchen 2°
“You shall read of her by-and-by. And you
live here all by yourself?”
“Since Antoine died—yes.”
“And are never dull ?”
194 T}}'O LITTLE TVOODEN SHIOES.
“I have no time, and I do not think I would
be if I had time—there is so much to think of,
and One never can understand.”
“But you must be very brave and laborious to .
do all your work yourself. Is it possible a child
like you can spin, and wash, and bake, and gar-
den, and do everything 2"
“Oh, many do more than T. Babette's eldest
daughter is only twelve, and she does much
more, because she has all the children to look
after ; and they are very, very poor; they often
have nothing but a stew of nettles and perhaps a
few snails, days together.” -
“That is lean, bare, ugly, gruesome poverty;
there is plenty of that everywhere. But you,
Bébée
Bébée looked across the hut and smiled, and
you are an idyll.”
broke her thread. She did not know what he
meant, but if she were anything that pleased
him, it was well.
“Who were those beautiful women 2 ” she said
suddenly, the colour mounting into her cheeks.
“What women, my dear?”
Tro LITTLE WooDEN SHOES 195
“Those I saw at the window with you, the
other night—they had jewels.”
“Oh!—women, tiresome enough ; if I had
seen you, I would have dropped you some fruit.
Poor little Bébée Did you go by, and I never
knew 2 ”
“You were laughing——”
“Was I ?”
“Yes, and they were beautiful.”
“In their own eyes; not in mine.”
“ No 9 º'
She stopped her spinning and gazed at him
with wistful, wondering eyes. Could it be that
they were not beautiful to him 2 those deep-red,
glowing, sun-basked dahlia flowers ?
“Do you know,” she said very softly, with a
flush of penitence that came and went, “when I *
saw them, I hated them ; I confessed it to Father
Francis next day. You seemed so content with
them, and they looked so gay and glad there—and
then the jewels Somehow, I seemed to my-
self such a little thing, and so ugly and mean.
92
And yet, do you know
O 2
106 Tjj'O LITTLE jj'OODEN STIOES.
“And yet—well ?”
“They did not look to me good—those
women,” said Bébée thoughtfully, looking across
at him in deprecation of his possible anger.
“They were great people, I suppose, and they
appeared very happy; but though I seemed
nothing to myself after them, still I think I
would not change.”
“You are wise without books, Bébée.”
“Oh, no—I am not wise at all. I only feel.
And give me books; oh, pray, give me books!
You do not know ; I will learn so fast—and I
will not neglect anything,-that I promise. The
neighbours and Jeannot say that I shall let the
flowers die, and the hut get dirty, and never spin
or prick Annémie's patterns; but that is untrue.
I will do all, just as I have done, and more too, if
only you will give me things to read, for I do
think, when one is happy, one ought to work
more—not less.” \
“IBut will these books make you happy 2 If
you ask me the truth, I must tell you—no.
You are happy as you are, because you know
TJVO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 107
nothing else than your own little life; for igno-
rance is happiness, Bébée, let Sages, ancient and
modern, say what they will. But when you know a
little, you will want to know more ; and when you
know much, you will want to see much also, and
then—and them—the thing will grow—you will be
no longer content. That is, you will be unhappy.”
Bébée watched him with wistful eyes.
“Perhaps that is true. No doubt it is true, if
you say it. But you know all the world seems
full of voices that I hear, but that I cannot
understand; it is with me as I should think it is
with people who go to foreign countries and do
not know the tongue that is spoken when they
land; and it makes me unhappy, because I can-
not comprehend, and so the books will not make
me more so, but less. And as for being content—
when I thought you were gone away out of the
city, last night, I thought I would never be able
to pray any more, because I hated myself, and I
almost hated the angels, and I told Mary that she
was cruel, and she turned her face from me—as it
seemed, for ever,”
\98 TIVO LITTLE TVOODENT SHOES.
She spoke quite quietly and simply, spinning
as she spoke, and looking across at him with
earnest eyes, that begged him to believe her.
She was saying the pure truth, but she did not
know the force or the meaning of that truth.
He listened with a smile ; it was not new to
him ; he knew her heart much better than she
knew it herself, but there was an unconsciousness,
and yet a strength, in the words that touched
him though.
He threw the leaves away, irritably, and told
her to leave off her spinning.
“Some day I shall paint you with that
wheel as I painted the Broodhuis. Will you let
me, Bébée 2"
“Yes.”
She answered him as she would have an-
swered, if he had told her to go on pilgrimage
from one end of the Low Countries to the other.
“What were you going to do to-day ?”
“I am going into the market with the
flowers; I go every day.”
“How much will you make 2"
TWO LITTLE WOODENT SHOES. 199
“Two or three francs, if I am lucky.”
“And do you never have a holiday ?”
“Oh, yes; but not often, you know, because it
is on the fête-days that the people want the most
flowers.” -
“But in the Winter ?”
“Then I work at the lace.”
“Do you never go into the woods?”
“I have been, once or twice; but it loses a
whole day.”
“You are afraid of not earning?”
“Yes. Because I am afraid of owing people
anything.”
“Well, give up this one day, and we will make
holiday. The people are out ; they will not
know. Come into the forest, and we will dine at
a café in the woods; and we will be as poetic as
you like, and I will tell you a tale of one called
Rosalind, who pranked herself in boy's attire, all
for love, in the Ardennes country yonder. Come,
it is the very day for the forest ; it will make me
a lad again at Meudon, when the lilacs were in
bloom. Poor Paris | Come.”
200 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEHOES.
“Do you mean it 2 ”
The colour was bright in her face, her heart
was dancing, her little feet felt themselves already
on the fresh green turf.
She had no thought that there could be any
harm in it. She would have gone with Jeannot
or old Bac.
“Of course I mean it. Come. I was going
to Mayence to see the Magi and San Dyck’s
Christ. We will go to Soignies instead, and
study green leaves. I will paint your face by
sunlight. It is the best way to paint you. You
belong to the open air. So should Gretchen; or
how else should she have the blue sky in her
eyes?”
“But I have only wooden shoes ' "
Her face was scarlet as she glanced at her feet;
he who had wanted to give her the silk stockings—
how would he like to be seen walking abroad with
those two clumsy, clattering, work-a-day, little
sabots?
“Never mind. My dear, in my time I have
had enough of Satin shoes and of silver-gilt
TWO LITTLE WOOD ENT SHOES. 20]
* *-
heels; they click clack as loud as yours, and
cost much more to those who walk with them,
not to mention that they will seldom deign to
walk at all. Your wooden shoes are picturesque.
Paganini made a violin out of a wooden shoe.
Who knows what music may lurk in yours, only
you have never heard it 2 Perhaps I have. It
was Bac who gave you the red shoes that was the
barbarian, not I. Come.”
“You really mean it 2"
“Come.”
“But they will miss me at market 2"
“They will think you are gone on the pil-
grimage: you need never tell them you have not.”
“But if they ask me 2"
“Does it never happen that you say any other
thing than the truth 2"
“Any other thing than the truth ! Of course
not. People take for granted that one tells
truth; it would be very base to cheat them. Do
you really mean that I may come 2—in the forest!
—and you will tell me stories like those you give
me to read 2’”
202 T}} 'O LITTLE WOODENT SHOES.
“I will tell you a better story. Lock your
hut, Bébée, and come.”
“And to think you are not ashamed !”
“Ashamed ?”
“Yes, because of my wooden shoes.”
Was it possible 2 Bébée thought, as she ran
out into the garden and locked the door behind
her, and pushed the key under the water-butt
as usual, being quite content with that prudent
precaution against robbers which had served
Antoine all his days. Was it possible, this won-
derful joy 2—her cheeks were like her roses, her
eyes had a brilliance like the Sun ; the natural
grace and mirth of the child blossomed in a
thousand ways and gestures.
As she went by the shrine in the wall, she
bent her knee a moment and made the sign of
the cross; then she gathered a little moss-rose
that nodded close under the border of the pali-
sade, and turned and gave it to him.
“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 2°
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES 203
He shrank a little as her fingers touched
him.
“What a pity you had no mother, Bébée l’” he
said, on an impulse of emotion, of which in Paris
he would have been more ashamed than of any
guilt.
CHAPTER XIV.
ass-O-
º:N the deserted lane by the swans' water,
under the willows, the horses waited to
take him to Mechlin; little, quick,
rough horses, with round brass bells, in the
Flemish fashion, and gay harness, and a low
char-à-banc, in which a Wolfskin 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.
Bébée sat breathless with delight.
She had never gone behind horses in all her

TWO LITTLE Tſ’OOD EN SHOES. 205
life, except once or twice in a waggon when the
tired teamsters had dragged a load of corn across
the plains, or when the miller's old grey mare
had hobbled wearily before a cartload of noisy,
happy, mischievous children going home from
the masses and fairs, and flags and flowers,
and church banners, and puppet-shows, and
lighted altars, and whirling merry-go-rounds of
the Fête 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 way-
side trees, and little villages, and reedy canal-
water, all flying by her to the singsong of the
joyous bells.
“Oh, how good it is to live!”
she cried, clap-
ping her hands in a very ecstacy, 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
206 TWO LITTLE TVOOD EN SHOES.
*** **mm.
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
Sllll.
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 forcst 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 rab-
bits, and the sound of the Wings of birds.
Soignies is not legend-haunted like the Black
Forest, nor king-haunted like Fontainebleau,
TJji O LITTLE TVOODEN SLIOES. 207
nor sovereign of two historic streams like the
brave woods of Heidelberg; nor wild and roman-
tic, and broken with black rocks, and poetised by
the shade of Jaques, and swept through by a
perfect river, like its neighbours 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 shadow 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. *
Bébée, 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,
208 TJVO LITTLE WOODEN SLIOES.
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 Bébée 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 Vin-
cennes and of Versailles in the student days of
his youth ; little work-girls fresh from châlets 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 bal-
sams; 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
amongst the green grapes.
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEHOES. 209
But those little work-girls had been mere
tº ºr
homely daisies, and daisies already with the dust
of the pavement and of the dancing-gardens
upon them.
Bébée 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 passion, idle as a butterfly 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-ground 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
P
2.0 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
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 Bébée—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;
—Bébée 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 shell
and tangled seaweed of her simple, untutored
speech.
'I'WO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 21]
“If there be a God anywhere,” he thought to
mimself, “this little Fleming is very near him.”
She was so near that, although he had no belief
in any God, he could not deal with her as he had
used to do with the work-girls in the primrose
paths of old Vincennes.
CHAPTER XV.
—-O-
###|O 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 be-
hind; the simplest picture possible, the dress of
grey—only cool dark grey—with white linen
bodice, and no colour anywhere except in the
green of the foliage; but where he meant the
wonder and the charm of it to lie was in the up-
raised, serious, childlike face, and the gaze of
the grave, Smiling eyes. *
It was Gretchen, spinning, out in the open
air amongst the flowers. Gretchen, with the tall

TJWO DITTLE WOODEN SHOES, 213
dog daisies growing up about her feet, amongst
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 hell 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 2" echoed Bébée. “Oh,
I know what you mean. A little—much—pas-
sionately—until death—not at all. What the
girls say when they want to see if anyone loves
them 2 Is that it 2 ”
She looked at him without any consciousness
——except as she loved the flowers.
“Do you think the daisies know 2” she went
on, seriously, parting their petals with her fin-
gers. “Flowers do know many things—that is
certain.”
214 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
“Ask them for yourself.”
“Ask them what ?”
“How much—anyone—loves you.”
“Oh, but everyone loves me; there is no one
that is bad. Antoine used to say to me, ‘Never
think of yourself, Bébée; always think of other
people, so everyone will love you.' And I always
try to do that, and everyone does.”
“But that is not the love the daisy tells of to
your sex.” -
“No 2"
“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 9”
“Ah, yes – and they marry afterwards —
yes.” *
She said it softly, musingly, with no embar-
rassment; it was an unreal, remote thing to her,
and yet it stirred her heart a little with a vague
trouble that was infinitely sweet.
There is little talk of love in the lives of the
TIVO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 215
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 gone out just the
same the next day to her 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. What
is the story 2 Oh, I have told you stories
enough. Gretchen's you would not understand,
just yet.”
“But what did the daisies say to her ?”
“My dear, the daisies always Say the same
thing, because daisies always tell the truth and
know men. The daisies always say ‘a little’;
it is the girl’s ear that tricks her, and makes
her hear ‘till death,'—a folly and falsehood of
which the daisy is not guilty.”
“But who says it if the daisy do not?”
216 TWO LITTLE WooDEN SHOES.
“Ah, the devil perhaps—who knows? He
has so much to do in these things.”
But Bébée did not smile ; she had a look of
horror in her blue eyes; she belonged to a pea-
santry who believed in exorcising the fiend by
the aid of the cross, and who not so very many
generations before had driven him out of human
bodies by rack and flame. s
She looked with a little wistful fear on the
white, golden-eyed marguerites that lay on her
lap.
“Do you think the fiend is in these ?” she
whispered, with awe in her voice.
Flamen smiled. “When you count them he
will be there, no doubt.”
Bébée threw them with a shudder on the grass.
“Have I spoilt your holiday, dear?” he said,
with a certain self-reproach.
She was silent a minute, then she gathered up
the daisies again, and stroked them and put them
to her lips. \-
“It is not they that do wrong. You say the
irls’ ears deceive them. It is the girls, who
&B 7
T WO LITTLE WOOD ENT SHOES. 217
want a lie and will not believe a truth because it
humbles them, it is the girls that are to blame ;
not the daisies. As for me, I will not ask the
daisies anything ever, so the fiend will not enter
into them.”
“Nor into you. Poor little Bébée "
“Why, you pity me for that ?”
“Yes. Because, if women never see the
serpent's face, neither do they ever scent the
smell of the paradise roses; and it will be hard
for you to die without a single rose d’amour in
your pretty breast, poor little Bébée l’”
“I do not understand. But you frighten me
a little.”
He rose and left his easel and threw himself
at her feet on the grass; he took the little wooden
shoes in his hands as reverently as he would
have taken the broidered shoes of a duchess; he
looked up at her with tender, smiling eyes.
“Poor little Bébée (" he said again. “Did I
frighten you indeed ? Nay, that was very base
of me. We will not spoil our summer holiday.
There is no such thing as a fiend, my dear.
218 TVO LITTLE WOOD ENT SHOES.
*=-º-º: -*
There are only men—such as I am. Say the
daisy spell over for me, Bébée. See if I do not
love you a little, just as you love your flowers.”
She smiled, and the happy laughter came again
over her face. -
“Oh, I am sure you care for me a little,” she
said, softly, “ or you would not be so good and
get me books and give me pleasure ; and I do
not want the daisies to tell me that, because you
say it yourself, which is better.”
“Much better,” he answered her, dreamily,
and lay there in the grass, holding the little
wooden shoes in his hands. s
He was not in love with her. He was in no
haste. He preferred to play with her softly,
slowly, as one separates the leaves of a rose, to
see the deep rose of its heart. -
Her own ignorance of what she felt had a
charm for him. He liked to lift the veil from
her eyes by gentle degrees, watching each new
pulse beat, each fresh instinct tremble into
life. *
It was an old, old story to him ; he knew each
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 219
chapter and verse to weariness, though there still
was no other story that he still read as often.
But to her it was so new.
To him it was a long beaten track; he knew
every turn of it; he recognised every wayside
blossom ; he had passed over a thousand times
each tremulous bridge; he knew so well before-
hand where each shadow would fall, and where
each fresh bud would blossom, and where each
harvest would be reaped.
But to her it was so new.
She followed him as a blind child a man
that guides her through a garden and reads her
a wonder-tale.
He was good to her, that was all she knew.
When he touched her ever so lightly she felt a
happiness so perfect, and yet so unintelligible,
that she could have wished to die in it.
And in her humility and her ignorance she
wondered always how he—so great, so wise, so
beautiful—could have thought it ever worth his
while to leave the paradise of Rubes' Iland to wait
with her under her little rush-thatched roof, and
220 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
bring her here to see the green leaves and the
living things of the forest.
As they went, a man was going under the trees
with a load of wood upon his back. Bébée gave
a little cry of recognition.
“Oh, look, that is Jeannot How he will
wonder to see me here !”
Flamen drew her a little downward, so that
the forester passed onward without perceiving
them. -
“Why do you do that?” said Bébée. “Shall
I not speak to him 2’’
“Why? To have all your neighbours chatter
of your feast in the forest ? It is not worth
while.”
“Ah, but I always tell them everything,” said
Bébée, whose imagination had been already busy
with the wonders that she would unfold to Mère
Krebs and the Varnhart children.
“Then you will see but little of me, my dear.
Learn to be silent, Bébée. It is a woman's first
duty, though her hardest.”
“Is it 2 °
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 221
She did not speak for some time. She could
not imagine a state of things in which she would
not narrate the little daily miracles of her life to
the good old garrulous women and the little
open-mouthed romps. And yet—she lifted her
eyes to his.
“I am glad you have told me that,” she said.
“Though, indeed, I do not see why one should
not say what one does, yet—somehow—I do not
like to talk about you. It is like the pictures in
the galleries, and the music in the Cathedral,
and the great still evenings, when the fields are
all silent, and it is as if Christ walked abroad in
them ;—I do not know how to talk of those things
to the others—only to you—and I do not like
to talk about you to them—do you not know?”
“Yes, I know. But what affinity have I,
Bébée, to your thoughts of your God walking in
IHis corn-fields 2"
Bébée's eyes glanced down through the green
aisle of the forests, with the musing seriousness
in them that was like the child-angels of
Botticelli's dreams. *
222 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
“I cannot tell you very well. But when I am
in the fields at evening and think of Christ, I
feel so happy, and of such good-will to all the
rest, and I seem to see heaven quite plain
through the beatiful grey air where the stars are
—and so I feel when I am with you—that is all.
Only—”
“Only what?”
“Only in those evenings, when I was all
alone, heaven seemed up there, where the stars
are, and I longed for wings; but now, it is here
—and I would only shut my wings if I had them,
and not stir.”
He looked at her, and took her hands and
kissed them—but reverently—as a believer may
kiss a shrine. In that moment to Flamen she
was sacred; in that moment he could no more
have hurt her with passion than he could have
hurt her with a blow. -
It was an emotion with him, and did not
endure. But, whilst it lasted, it was true.
CHAPTER XVI.
-Ö–
wooden cafés under the trees. There
was a little sheet of water in front of
it, and a gay garden around. There was a
balcony and a wooden stairway; there were
long trellised arbours, and little white tables,
and great rosebushes, like her own at home.
They had an arbour all to themselves; a cool
sweetsmelling bower of green, with a glimpse
of scarlet from the flowers of some twisting
beans.
They had a meal, the like of which she had
never seen ; such a huge melon in the centre of it,
and curious wines, and coffee or cream in silver

224 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
pots, or what looked like silver to her—“just like
the altar-vases in the church,” she said to
herself. -
“If only the Varnhart children were here !”
she cried ; but he did not echo the wish.
It was just sunset. There was a golden
glow on the little bit of water. On the other
side of the garden, some one was playing a
guitar. Under a lime-tree some girls were
swinging, crying Higher higher at each
toss.
In a longer avenue of trellised green, at a long
table, there was a noisy party of students and
girls of the city; their laughter was mellowed
by distance as it came over the breadth of the
garden, and they sang, with fresh shrill Flemish
voices, songs from an opera-bouffe of La Mon-
naie.
It was all pretty, and gay, and pleasant.
There was everywhere about an air of light-
hearted enjoyment. Bébée sat with a wondering
look in her wide-opened eyes, and all the
natural instincts of her youth, that were like
TWO LTTTLE WOODEN SEIOES. 225
curled-up fruit-buds in her, unclosed softly to the
light of joy.
“Is life always like this in your Rubes'
Land 2’ she asked him; that vague far-away
country of which she never asked him anything
more definite, and which yet was so clear before
her fancy.
“Yes,” he made answer to her. “Only—instead
of those leaves, flowers and pomegranates; and in
lieu of that tinkling guitar, a voice whose notes
are esteemed like kings' jewels; and in place of
those little green arbours, great white palaces,
cool and still, with ilex woods and Orange groves,
and sapphire seas beyond them. Would you
like to come there, Bébée 2—and wear laces such
as you weave, and hear singing and laughter all
might long, and never work any more in the
mould of the garden, or spin any more at that
tiresome wheel, or go any more out in the wind,
and the rain and the winter mud to the
market 2'
Bébée listened, leaning her round elbows on
the table, and her warm cheeks on her hands, as
Q
226 T]]'O LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
a child gravely listers to a fairy story. But the
sumptuous picture, and the sensuous phrase he
had chosen, passed by her.
It is of no use to tempt the little chaffinch of
the woods with a ruby instead of a cherry. The
bird is made to feed on the brown berries, on the
Yorning 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 gard en 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. I know how blind
the eyes get over it, and hºw the hearts ache;
I know how the old women starve, and the little
children cry; I know that there is not a sprig of
it that is not stitched with pain; the great ladies
do not think, I dare say, because they have never
TWO LITTLE WOOD ENT SHOES. 227
worked at it or watched the others; but I have.
And so, you see, I think if I wore it I should feel
sad, and if a nail caught on it I should feel as if
it were tearing the flesh of my friends. Perhaps
but that is what I feel.”
“You do not say it badly—you speak well, for
I say it badly
you speak from the heart,” he answered her, and
felt a tinge of shame that he had tempted her
with the gold and purple of a baser world than
any that she knew.
“And yet you want to see new lands 2" he
pursued. “What is it you want to see there ?”
“Ah, quite other things than these,” cried
Bébée, still leaning her cheeks on her hands.
“That dancing and singing is very pretty and
merry, but it is just as good when old Claude
fiddles, and the children skip. This wine you
tell me is something very great—but fresh milk
is much nicer, I think. It is not these kind of
things I want—I want to know all about the people
who lived before us; I want to know what the
stars are, and what the wind is ; I want to know
where the lark goes when you lose him out of
Q 2
2
2
8 TWO LITTLE TWOODEN SEIOES.
sight against the sun ; I want to know how the
old artists got to see God, that they could paint
Him and all his angels as they have done ; I want
to know how the voices got into the bells, and
how they can make one's heart beat, hanging up
there as they do, all alone amongst the jackdaws;
I want to know what it is when I walk in the
fields in the morning, and it is all grey, and soft,
and still, and the corn-crake cries in the wheat,
and the little mice run home to their holes, that
makes me so glad and yet so sorrowful, as if I
were so very near God, and yet so all alone, and
such a little thing; because you see the mouse
she has her hole, and the crake her own people,
but I 55
Her voice faltered a little and stopped, she
had never before thought out into words her own
loneliness; from the long green arbour the
voices of the girls and the students sang—
“Ah, I le doux son d’un baiser tendre I ?”
Flamen was silent. The poet in him—and in
an artist there is always more or less of the poet—
TWO LTTTLE WOODENT SHOES. 220
kept him back from ridicule, nay, moved him to
pity and respect.
They were absurdly simple words no doubt,
had little wisdom in them, and were quite
childish in their utterance, and yet they moved
him curiously as a man very base and callous
may at times be moved by the look in a dying
deer's eyes, or by the sound of a song that Some
lost love once sang.
He rose and drew her hands away, and took
her small face between his own hands instead.
“Poor little Bébée ” he said gently, looking
down on her with 'a breath that was almost a
sigh. “Poor little Bébée –to envy the corn-
crake and the mouse !”
She was a little startled; her cheeks grew very
warm under his touch, but her eyes looked still
into his without fear.
He stooped and touched her forehead with his
lips, gently and without passion, almost reve-
rently ; she grew rose-hued as the bright bean-
flowers, up to the light gold ripples of her hair;
she trembled a little and drew back, but she was
230 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
not alarmed nor yet ashamed ; she was too
simple of heart to feel the fear that is born of
passion and of consciousness. -
It was as Jeannot kissed his sister Marie, who
was fifteen years old and sold milk for the Krebs
people in the villages with a little green cart and
a yellow dog—no more.
And yet the sunny arbour leaves and the
glimpse of the blue sky swam round her in-
distinctly, and the sounds of the guitar grew
dull upon her ear and were lost as in a rushing
hiss of water, because of the great sudden unin-
telligible happiness that seemed to bear her little
life away on it as a Sea wave bears a young child
off its feet.
“You do not feel alone now, Bébée 2 ” he
whispered to her. -
“No l’” she answered him softly under her
breath, and sat still, while all her body quivered
like a leaf.
No 1 how could she ever be alone now that
this sweet, soft, unutterable touch would always
be in memory upon her ; how could she wish
TWO LITTLE WOOD ENT SHOES. 231
ever again now to be the corn-crake in the
summer corn or the grey mouse in the hedge of
hawthorn ?
At that moment a student went by past the
entrance of the arbour; he had a sash round his
loins and a paper feather in his cap ; he was
playing a fife and dancing; he glanced in as he
went.
“It is time to go home, Bébée,” said Flamen.
CHAPTER XVII.
=-Q-
ſº O it came to pass that Bébée's day in the
big forest came and went as simply
- almost as any day that she had played
away with the Varnhart children under the beech
shadows of Cambre woods.
And when he took her to her hut at Sun-
set before the pilgrims had returned there was
a great bewildered tumult of happiness in her
heart, but there was no memory with her that
prevented her from looking at the shrine in the
wall as she passed it, and saying with a quick
gesture of the cross on brow and bosom :
“Ah, dear Holy Mother—how good you have
been l and I am back again, you See, and I will

TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEROES. 233
work harder than ever because of all this joy
that you have given me.”
And she took another moss rose and changed
it for that of the morning, which was faded, and
Said to Flamen:
“Look—she sends you this. Now do you
know what I mean 2 One is more content when
She is content.”
He did not answer, but he held her hands
against him a moment as they fastened in the
rosebud.
“Not a word to the pilgrims, Bébée—you re-
member 2”
“Yes, I will remember. I do not tell them
every time I pray—it will be like being silent
about that — it will be no more wrong than
that.”
But there was a touch of anxiety in the words;
she was not quite certain ; she wanted to be re-
assured. Instinct moved her not to speak of him:
but habit made it seem wrong to her to have any
secret from the people who had been about her
from her birth.
234 TWO LITTLE WOOD ENT SHOES.
º-
He did not reassure her; her anxiety was
pretty to watch, and he left the trouble in her
heart like a bee in the chalice of a lily. Besides,
the little wicket-gate was between them ; he was
musing whether he would push it open once
Eſ) Ol’é.
Her fate was in the balance, though she did not
dream it: he had dealt with her tenderly, honestly,
sacredly all that day—almost as much so as
stupid Jeannot could have done. He had been
touched by her trust in him, and by the uncon-
scious beauty of her fancies, into a mood that was
unlike all his life and habits. But after all, he
said to himself—
After all !—
Where he stood in the golden evening he saw
the rosy curled mouth, the soft troubled eyes,
the little brown hands that still tried to fasten
the rosebud, the young peach - like skin where
the wind stirred the bodice;—she was only a
little Flemish peasant, this poor little Bébée, a
little thing of the fields and the streets, for all the
dreams of God that abode with her. After all—
TWO LITTLE JPWOODEN SEIOES. 235
soon or late—the end would be always the same.
What matter
She would weep a little to-morrow, and she
would not kneel any more at the shrine in the
garden wall; and then—and then—she would
stay here and marry the good boor Jeannot,
just the same after a while; or drift away after
him to Paris, and leave her two little wooden
shoes, and her visions of Christ in the fields at
evening, behind her for evermore, and do as all
the others did, and take not only silken stockings
but the Cinderella slipper that is called Gold,
which brings all other good things in its train;–
what matter |
He had meant this from the first, because she
was so pretty, and those little wooden sabots ran
so lithely over the stones; though he was not in
love with her, but only idly stretched his hand
for her as a child by instinct stretches to a fruit
that hangs in the Sun a little rosier and a little
nearer than the rest.
What matter—he said to himself—she loved
him, poor little soul, though he did not know it
236 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES.
—and there would always be Jeannot glad enough
of a handful of bright French gold.
He pushed the gate gently against her; her
hands fastened the rosebud and drew open the
latch themselves.
“Will you come in a little 2" she said, with
the happy light in her face. “You must not stay
long, because the flowers must be watered, and
then there are Annémie's patterns—they must
be done or she will have no money and so no
food—but if you would come in for a little 2 And
see—if you wait a minute I will show you the
roses that I shall cut to-morrow the first thing,
and take down to S. Guido to Our Lady's altar in
thank-offering for to-day. I should like you to
choose them—you yourself—and if you would
just touch them I should feel as if you gave them
to her too. Will you?”
She spoke with the pretty out-spoken frank-
ness of her habitual speech, just tempered and
broken with the happy, timid hesitation, the
curious sense at once of closer nearness and of
greater distance, that had come on her since
Two LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 237
ºmº-mºmº ºm-ºs-º sº.
he had kissed her amongst the bright bean-
flowers.
He turned from her quickly. .
“No, dear—no. Gather your roses alone,
Bébée—if I touch them their leaves will fall.”
Then with a hurriedly backward glance down
the dusky lane to see that none were looking he
bent his head and kissed her again quickly, and
with a sort of shame, and swung the gate behind
him and went away through the boughs and
the shadows.
CHAPTER XVIII.
—e— `
The village was very quiet; a dog
barking afar off, and a cow lowing in the meadow,
were the only living things that made their
presence heard; the pilgrims had not returned.
She leaned on the gate a few minutes in that
indistinct, dreamy happiness which is the prerog-
ative of innocent love.
“How wonderful it is that he should give a
thought to me ! ” she said again and again to
herself. It was as if a king had stooped for a
little knot of daisied grass to set it in his crown
where the great diamonds should be.
She did not reason. She did not question.

TWO LITTLE WOODENT SHOES. 239
She did not look beyond that hour—such is the
privilege of youth. .
“How I will read How I will learn How
wise I will try to be ; and how good, if I can l’
she thought, swaying the little gate lightly under
her weight, and looking with glad eyes at the
goats as they frisked with their young in the
pasture on the other side of the big trees, whilst
One by One the stars came out, and an owl hooted
from the palace woods, and the frogs croaked good
Inights in the rushes. -
Then, like a little day-labourer as she was, with
the habit of toil and the need of the poor upon
her from her birth up, she shut down the latch
of the gate, kissed it where his hand had rested,
and went to the well to draw its nightly draught
for the dry garden.
“Oh, dear roses ” she said to them as she
rained the silvery showers over their noddiug
heads. “Oh, dear roses l—tell me—was ever
anybody so happy as I am 2 Oh, if you say
‘yes’ I shall tell you you lie; silly flowers that
were only born yesterday !”
240 TWO LITTLE WOODENT SHOES.
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, greyish white in the starlight,
with the dark copper vessel balanced on her
head, going to and fro betwixt the well and the
garden.
“You did not go to the pilgrimage, poor little
one !” he said across the sweetbriar hedge. “Nay,
that was too bad ; work, work, work—thy pretty
back should not be bent double yet. You want
a holiday, Bébée; well, the Fête Dieu is near.
Jeannot shall take you, and maybe I can find a
few sous for gingerbread and merry-go-rounds
You sit dull in the market all day; you want a
feast.”
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES. 24l
Bébée coloured behind the hedge, and ran in
and brought three new-laid eggs that she had left
in the flour-bin in the early morning, and thrust
them on him through a break in the briar.
It was the first time she had ever done anything
of which she might not speak; she was ashamed,
and yet the secret was so sweet to her. -
“I am very happy, Jehan, thank God!” She
murmured, with a tremulous breath and a shine
in her eyes that the old man's ears and sight
were too dull to discern.
“So was she,” muttered Jehan, as he thrust
the eggs into his old patched blue blouse. “So
was she. And then a stumble—a blow in the
lane there—a horse's kick—and all was over.
All over, lmy pretty One—for ever and ever.”
CHAPTER XIX
——º-
the woodland shadows to the City,
paused and turned back; all his im-
pulses were quick, and swayed him now hither
now thither in many contrary ways.
He knew that the hour was come—that he
must leave her and spare her, as to himself he
phrased it, or teach her the love-words that the
daisies whisper to women 2
And why not ?—any way she would marry
Jeannot.
He, half-way to the town, walked back again
and paused a moment at the gate; an emotion
balf pitiful, half cynical, stirred in him

TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 243
Any way he would leave her in a few days;
Paris had again opened her arms to him; his old
life awaited him; women, who claimed him by
imperious amorous demands, reproached him ;
and after all this day he had got the Gretchen of
his ideal, a great picture for the future of his fame.
As he would leave her any way so soon, he
would leave her unscathed — poor little field
flower—he could never take it with him to
blossom or wither in Paris.
IHis world would laugh too utterly if he made
for himself a mistress out of a little Fleming in
two wooden shoes. Besides——
Besides, something that was half weak and
half noble moved him not to lead this child,
in her trust and her ignorance, into ways that
when she awakened from her trance would seem
to her shameful and full of sorrow. For he
knew that Bébée was not as others are.
He turned back and knocked at the hut door
and opened it.
Bébée was just beginning to undress herself;
she had taken off her white kerchief and her
R 2
244 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEHOES.
wooden shoes; her pretty shoulders and her
little neck shone white in the moon; her feet
were bare on the mud floor.
She started with a cry, and threw the hand-
kerchief again on her shoulders, but there was
no fear of him; only the unconscious instinct
of her girlhood.
He thought for a moment that he would not
go away until the morrow
“Did you want me?” said Bébée softly, with
happy eyes of surprise and yet a little startled,
fearing some evil might have happened to him
that he should have returned thus.
“No ; I do not want you, dear,” he said
gently; no—he did not want her, poor little
soul; she wanted him, but he—there were so
many of these things in his life and he liked
her too well to love her.
“No, dear, I did not want you,” said Flamen,
drawing her arms about him, and feeling her
flutter like a little bird, while the moonlight
came in through the green leaves and fell in
fanciful patterns on the floor, “But I came to
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 245
say—you have had one happy day, wholly happy,
have you not, poor little Bébée P’’
“Ah, yes!” she sighed rather than said the
answer in her wondrous gladness; drawn there
close to him, with the softness of his lips upon
her. Could he have come back only to ask that ?
“Well, that is something. You will remember
it always, Bébée 2’’ he murmured in his un-
conscious cruelty. “I did not wish to spoil
your cloudless pleasure, dear—for you care for
me a little, do you not ?– so I came back to
tell you only now that I go away for a little
while to-morrow.”
“Go away !”
She trembled in his arms and turned cold as
ice : a great terror and darkness fell upon her;
she had never thought that he would ever go
away. He caressed her, and played with her
as a boy may with a bird before he wrings its neck.
“You will come back 2 ” -
He kissed her :—“Surely.”
“To-morrow 2 ”
“Nay—not so soon.”
246 Tro LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
“In a week 2”
“Hardly.”
“In a month, then 2''
“Perhaps.”
“Before winter, anyway?”
He looked aside from the beseeching, tearful,
candid eyes, and kissed her hair and her throat,
and said:—“Yes, dear—beyond a doubt.”
She clung to him, crying silently—he wished
that women would not weep.
“Come, Bébée, listen,” he said coaxingly,
thinking to break the bitterness to her. “This
is not wise, and it gives me pain. There is so
much for you to do. You know so little. There
is so much to learn. I will leave you many
books, and you must grow quite learned in my
absence. The Virgin is all very well in her
way, but she cannot teach us much, poor lady.
For her kingdom is called Ignorance. You
must teach yourself. I leave you that to do.
The days will go by quickly if you are labo-
rious and patient. Do you love me, little one?”
For an answer she kissed his hand.
TWO LITTLE WOODENT SHOES. 247
“You are a busy little Bébée always,” he
said, with his lips caressing her soft brown arms
that were round his neck. “But you must be
busier than ever whilst I am gone. So you will
forget. No, no, I do not mean that :--I mean
so the time will pass quickest. And I shall finish
your picture, Bébée, and all Paris will see you,
and the great ladies will envy the little girl with
her two wooden shoes. Ah that does not
please you?—you care for none of these vanities.
No. Poor little Bébée, why did God make you.
or Chance breathe life into you? You are so
far away from us all. It was cruel. What
harm has your poor little soul ever done that,
pure as a flower, it should have been sent to
the hell of this world 2*
She clung to him, sobbing without sound.
“You will come back 2 You will come back?”
she moaned, clasping him closer and closer.
Flamen’s own eyes grew dim. But he lied
to her:-"I will—I promise.”
It was so much easier to say so, and it would
break her sorrow. So he thought.
24S TWO LITTLE WooDEN SHOES.
For the moment again he was tempted to take
her with him—but, he resisted it—he would tire,
and she would cling to him for ever.
There was long silence. The bleating of the
little kid in the shed without was the only sound;
the grey lavender blew to and fro.
Her arms were close about his throat; he
kissed them again, and kissed her eyes, her
cheek, her mouth ; then put her from him quickly
and went out. -
She ran to him, and threw herself on the damp
ground and held him there, and leaned her fore-
head on his feet. But though he looked at her
with wet eyes, he did not yield, and he still said:—
“I will come back soon—very soon—be quiet,
dear, let me go.”
Then he kissed her once more many times, and
put her gently within the door and closed it.
A low, sharp, sudden cry reached him, went to
his heart, but he did not turn ; he went on
through the wet, green little garden, and the
curling leaves, where he had found peace and
had left desolation.
CHAPTER XX.
-Ö-
tº WILL let her alone and she will marry
§ Jeannot,” thought Flamen; and he
believed himself a good man for once
in his life, and pitied himself for having become
a sentimentalist.
She would marry Jeannot, and bear many
children, as those people always did, and ruddy
little peasants would cling about those pretty,
soft, little breasts of hers; and she would love
them after the manner of such women, and be
very content clattering over the stones in her
wooden shoes; and growing brown and stout, and
more careful after money, and ceasing to dream

250 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
*
of unknown things, and not seeing God at all
in the fields, but looking low and beholding only
the ears of the gleaming wheat and the feet of
the tottering children; and so gaining her bread,
and losing her soul, and stooping nearer and
nearer to earth till she dropped into it like one
of her own wind-blown wallflowers when the bee
has sucked out all its sweetness and the heats
have scorched up all its bloom:—yes, of course,
she would marry Jeannot and end so !
Meanwhile he had his Gretchen, and that was
the one great matter
So he left the street of Mary of Burgundy,
and went on his way out of the chiming city
as its matin bells were rung, and took with him
a certain regret, and the only innocent affection
that had ever awakened in him; and thought
of his self-negation with half admiration and
half derision; and so drifted away into the
whirlpool of his amorous, cynical, changeful,
passionate, callous, many-coloured life, and said to
himself as he saw the last line of the low, green
plains shine against the Sun:—“She will marry
TTWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 25]
Jeannot—of course, she will marry Jeannot.
And my Gretchen is greater than Scheffer's.”
What else mattered very much after all except
what they would say in Paris of Gretchen 2
CFIAPTER XXI.
=—G--—
tº BoPIE saw that Bébée had grown very
- fº 3
**
º § quiet. But that was all they saw.
Her little face was pale as she sat
amongst her glowing autumn blossoms, by the
side of the cobbler's stall, and when the Warnhart
children cried at the gate to her to come and
play, she would answer gently that she was too
busy to have playtime now.
The fruit girl of the Montagne de la Cour
hooted after her, “Gone so soon ?—ohhè what
did I say ?—a fine pine is sugar in the teeth a
second only, but the brown nuts you may crack
all the seasons round. Well, did you make good




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 253
harvest while it lasted ? has Jeannot a fat bridal
portion promised ?”
And old Jehan, who was the tenderest soul of
them all in the lane by the swans' water, would
come and look at her wistfully as she worked
amongst the flowers, and would say to her :
“Dear little one, there is some trouble—does
it come of that painted picture ? You never laugh
now, Bébée, and that is bad. A girl's laugh is
pretty to hear; my girl laughed like little bells
ringing—and then it stopped, all at Once ; they
said she was dead. But you are not dead,
Bébée. And yet you are so silent; one would
say you were.”
But to the mocking of the fruit girl as to the
tenderness of old Jehan, Bébée answered nothing;
the lines of her pretty curled mouth grew grave
and sad, and in her eyes there was a wistful
bewildered pathetic appeal like the look in the
eyes of a beaten dog, which, while it aches with
pain, does not cease to love its master.
One resolve upheld her and made her feet firm
on the stones of the streets and her lips mute
254 TWO LITTLE WOOD ENT SHOES.
under all they said to her. She would learn all
she could, and be good, and patient, and wise, if
trying could make her wise, and so do his will in
all things—until he should come back.
“You are not gay, Bébée,” said Annémie, who
grew so blind that she could scarce see the flags
at the mastheads, and who still thought that she
pricked the lace patterns and earned her bread.
“You are not gay, dear. Has any lad gone to
sea that your heart goes away with, and do you
watch for his ship coming in with the coasters?
It is weary work waiting—but it is all the men
think us fit for, child. They may set sail as they
like; every new port has new faces for them ; but
we are to sit still and to pray if we like, and never
murmur, be the voyage ever so long, but be ready
with a smile and a kiss, a fresh pipe of tobacco,
and a dry pair of socks;–that is a man. We
may have cried our hearts out—we must have
ready the pipe and the socks, or, ‘is that what
you call love?' they grumble. You want mortal
patience if you love a man,—it is like a fretful
child that thumps you when your breast is bare
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 255
*------,
to it. Still—be you patient, dear, just as I am,
just as I am.” *
And Bébée would shudder as she swept the
cobwebs from the garret walls, patient as she
was—she who had sat here fifty years watching for
a dead man and for a wrecked ship.
CHAPTER XXII.
-4–
the brown earth turned afresh. The
white and purple chrysanthemums
bloomed against the flowerless rose bushes,
and the little grey Michaelmas daisy flourished
where the dead carnations had spread their
glories. Leaves began to fall, and chilly
winds to sigh amongst the willows ; the
squirrels began to store away their nuts,
and the poor to pick up the broken, bare
boughs.
“He said he would come before winter,”
thought Bébée, every day when she rose and

TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 257
felt each morning cooler and greyer than the one
before it; winter was near.
Her little feet already were cold in their
wooden shoes; and the robin already sang in
the twigs of the sear sweetbriar, but she had
the brave sweet faith which nothing kills, and
she did not doubt—oh no, she did not doubt,
she was only tired.
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 rust-
ling 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 for ever
missed, of the home for ever beyond the
horizon.
Still she did her work and kept her courage.
She took her way into the town with her
S
258 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
basket full of the ruby and amber of the dusky
autumn blossoms, and when those failed, and
the garden was quite desolate, except for a pro-
mise of haws and of holly, she went as she had
always done, to the lace-room, and gained her
bread and the chickens' corn each day by winding
the thread round the bobbins; and at nightfall
when she had plodded home through the dark-
some roads, and over the sodden turf, and had
lit her rushlight and sat down to her books,
with her hand buried in her hair, and her eyes
smarting from the strain of the lace-work, and
her heart aching with that new and deadly pain
which never left her now, she would read—read
—read—read, and try and store her brain with
knowledge, and try and grasp these vast new
meanings of life that the books opened to her,
and try and grow less ignorant against he should
return.
There was much she could not understand,
but there was also much she could.
Her mind was delicate and quick, her intelli-
gence swift and strong; she bought old books at
TJVO LITTLE TVOODEN SHIOES. 259
bookstalls with pence that she saved by going
without her dinner. The keeper of the stall, a
shrewd old soul, explained some hard points to
her, and chose good volumes for her, and lent
others to this solitary little student in her wooden
shoes and with her pale child's face.
So she toiled hard and learned much, and
grew taller and very thin, and got a look in her
eyes like a lost dog's, and yet never lost heart or
wandered in the task that he had set her, or in
her faith in his return.
“Burn the books, Bébée,” whispered the
children again and again, clinging to her skirts.
“Burn the wicked, silent things. Since you
have had them you never sing, or romp, or laugh,
and you look so white—so white.”
Bébée kissed them, but kept to her books.
Jeannot going by from the forest night after
night saw the light twinkling in the hut window,
and sometimes crept Softly up and looked
through the chinks of the wooden shutter, and
saw her leaning over some big old volume with
her pretty brows drawn together, and her
S 2
260 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
mouth shut close in earnest effort, and he would
curse the man who had changed her so, and go
away with rage in his breast and tears in his
eyes, not daring to say anything, but knowing
that never would Bébée's little brown hand lie
in love within his own.
Nor even in friendship, for he had rashly
spoken rough words against the stranger from
IRube's Land, and Bébée ever since then had
passed him by with a grave simple greeting,
and when he had brought her in timid gifts
a barrow load of faggots, had thanked him, but
had bidden him take the wood home to his
mother.
“You think evil things of me, Bébée?” good
Jeannot had pleaded, with a sob in his voice ;
and she had answered gently,–
“No l but do not speak to me, that is all.”
Then he had cursed her absent lover, and
Débée had gone within and closed her door.
She had no idea that the people thought ill of
her. They were cold to her, and such coldness
made her heart ache a little more. But the one
TJ O LITTLE WOOD EN SHOES. 261.
great love in her possessed her so strongly that
all other things were half unreal.
She did her daily house-work from sheer
habit, and she studied because he had told her to
do it, and because, with the sweet, stubborn,
credulous faith of her youth, she never doubted
that he would return.
Otherwise there was no perception of real
life in her ; she dreamed and prayed, and
prayed and dreamed, and never ceased to
do either one or the other, even when she
was scattering potatoe peels to the fowls, or
shaking carrots loose of the soil, or sweeping
the . Snow from her hut door, or going out in
the raw dark dawn as the single little sad bell
of St. Guido tolled through the stillness for the
first mass.
I'or though even Father Francis looked an-
gered at her because he thought she was stub-
born, and hid some truth and some shame from
him at confession, yet she went resolutely and
oftener than ever to kneel in the dusty, dusky,
crumbling old church, for it was all she could do
262 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES.
-º-,
and
for him, who was absent—so she thought
she did not feel quite so far away from him
when she was beseeching Christ to have care of
his soul and of his body.
All her pretty dreams were dead.
She never heard any story in the robin's song,
or saw any promise in the sunset clouds, or
fancied that angels came about her in the night
—I) €Wel. In OW.
The fields were grey and sad ; the birds were
little brown things; the stars were cold and far
off; the people she had used to care for were like
mere shadows that went by her meaningless and
without interest, and all she thought of was the
one step that never came ; all she wanted was
the one touch she never felt.
“You have done wrong, Bébée, and you will
not own it,” said the few neighbours who ever
spoke to her.
Bébée looked at them with wistful, uncompre-
hending eyes.
“I have done no wrong,” she said gently, but
no one believed her.
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES. 263
A girl did not shut herself up and wane pale
and thin for nothing, so they reasoned. She
might have sinned as she had liked if she had
been sensible after it, and married Jeannot.
But to fret mutely, and shut her lips, and seem
as though she had done nothing—that was guilt
indeed.
For her village, in its small way, thought as the
big world thinks.
CHAPTER XXIII.
—H·-
#|ULL winter came.
× The snow was deep, and the winds
drove the people with whips of ice
along the dreary country roads and the steep
streets of the city. The bells of the dogs and
the mules sounded sadly through the white misty
silence of the Flemish plains, and the weary
horses slipped and fell on the frozen ruts, and
on the jagged stones in the little frost-shut
Flemish towns. Still the Flemish folk were gay
enough in many places.
There were fairs and kermesses; there were
puppet-plays and church feasts; there were
sledges on the plains and skates on the

TTWO LITTLE WOOD ENT SHOES. 265
canals; there were warm woollen hoods and
ruddy wood fires; there were tales of demons
and saints, and bowls of hot Onion soup ;
sugar images for the little children, and blessed
beads for the maidens clasped on rosy throats
with lovers' kisses; and in the city itself there
was the high tide of the winter pomp and
mirth, with festal scenes in the churches, and
balls at the palaces, and all manner of gay
things in toys and jewels, and music playing
cheerily under the leafless trees, and flashes of
Scarlet cloth, and shining furs, and happy faces,
and golden curls, in the carriages that climbed the
Montagne de la Cour, and filled the big place
around the statue of stout Godfrey.
In the little village above St. Guido, Bébée’s
neighbours were merry too, in their simple
way.
The women worked away wearily at their lace
in the dim winter light, and made a wretched
living by it, but all the same they got penny
playthings for their babies, and a bit of cake
for their Sunday hearth. They drew together
266 TWO LTTTLE WOODEN SHOES.
in homely and cordial friendship, and of an after-
noon when dusk fell wove their lace in company
in Mêre Kreb's millhouse kitchen, with the chil-
dren and the dogs at their feet on the bricks,
so that one big fire might serve for all, and all
be lighted with one big rush candle, and all be
beguiled by chit-chat and songs, stories of
Spirits, and whispers of ghosts, and now and
then when the wind howled at its worst, a pater-
noster or two said in common for the men toiling
in the barges or drifting up the Scheldt.
In these gatherings Bébée's face was missed,
and the blithe soft sound of her voice, like a
young thrush singing, was never heard.
The people looked in, and saw her sitting over
a great open book—often her hearth had no
fire.
Then the children grew tired of asking her to
play; and their elders began to shake their
heads; she was so pale and so quiet, there
must be some evil in it—so they began to
think.
Little by little people dropped away from her.
TWO LITTLE TVOODEN SLIOES.
{}
7
2
Who knew, the gossips said, what shame or sin
the child might not have on her sick little soul?
True, Bébée worked hard just the same, and
just the same was seen trudging to and fro in the
dusk of dawns and afternoons in her two little
wooden shoes. She was gentle and laborious,
and gave the children her goat's milk, and the
old women the brambles of her garden.
But they grew afraid of her—afraid of that sad,
changeless, far-away look in her eyes, and of the
mute weariness that was on her—and, being per-
plexed, were sure, like all ignorant creatures,
that what was secret must be also vile.
So they hung aloof, and let her alone, and by
and by scarcely nodded as they passed her, but
said to Jeannot, -
“You were spared a bad thing, lad ; the
child was that grand painter's light-o'-love, that
is plain to see. The mischief all comes of the
stuff old Antoine filled her head with—a stray
little bye-blow of chickweed that he cockered up
like a rare carnation. Oh I do not fly in a rage,
Jeannot ; the child is no good, and would have
268 TTVO LITTLE TVOODEN SEIOES.
made an honest man rue. Take heart of grace,
and praise the saints, and marry Ratto's Lisa.”
But Jeannot would never listen to the slam-
derers, and would never look at Lisa, even
though the door of the little hut was always
closed against him, and whenever he met Bébée
on the highway she never seemed to see bim
more than she saw the snow that her sabots
were treading.
One night in the midwinter time old Annémie
died
Bébée found her in the twilight with her head
against the garret window, and her left side all
shrivelled and useless. She had a little sense
left, and a few fleeting breaths to draw.
“Look for the brig,” she muttered. “You
will not see the flag at the masthead for the fog
to-night; but his socks are dry and his pipe is
ready. Keep looking—keep looking—she will be
in port to-night.”
But her dead sailor never came into port ;
she went to him. The poor, weakened, faithful
old body of her was laid in the graveyard of
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 269
wº------— *-m-m-
the poor, and the ships came and went under
the empty garret window, and Bébée was all
alone.
She had no more any thing to work for, or
any bond with the lives of others. She could
live on the roots of her garden and the sale of
her hen's eggs, and she could change the turnips
and carrots that grew in a little strip of her
ground for the small quantity of bread that she
needed.
So she gave herself up to the books, and
drew herself more and more within from the
outer world. She did not know that the neigh-
bours thought very evil of her ; she had only
one idea in her mind—to be more worthy of him
against he should return.
The winter passed away somehow ; she did
not know how.
It was a long, cold, white blank of frozen
silence; that was all. She studied hard, and
had got a quaint, strange, deep Scattered know-
ledge out of her old books; her face had lost
all its roundness and colour, but, instead, the
270 TJWO LITTLE JVOODEN SHOES.
-at-a- = *
forehead had gained breadth, and the eyes had
the dim fire of a student's.
Every might when she shut her volumes she
thought,
“I am a little nearer him. I know a little
more.”
Just so every morning, when she bathed her
hands in the chilly water, she thought to her-
self, “I will make my skin as soft as I can for
him that it may be like the ladies’ he has loved.”
Love to be perfect must be a religion, as well
as a passion. Bébée's was so. Like George
Herbert's serving maiden, she swept no specks
of dirt away from a floor without doing it to the
service of her lord.
Only Bébée's lord was a king of earth, made
of earth's dust and vanities.
Put what did she know of that ?
CHAPTER XXIV.
~~~6-
and crocus, and pale hepatica Smiled
at her from the black clods. Every
other spring time Bébée had run with fleet feet
under the budding trees down into the city, and
had sold sweet little wet bunches of violets and
briar before all the Snow was melted from the
eaves of Broodhuis.
“The winter is gone,” the townspeople
used to say ; “ look there is Bébée with the
flowers.”
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,

272 TTWO LITTLE TWOODEN SHOES.
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 bitter-
ness of waiting.
Pain they will bear, and privation they will
pass through, fire and water and storm will not
appal them, nor wrath of heaven and earth, but
waiting — the long, tedious, sickly, friendless
days, that drop one by one in their eternal
sameness into the weary past, these kill slowly
but surely, as the slow dropping of water frets
away rock.
The summer came.
Nearly a year had gone by. Bébée worked
early and late. The garden bloomed like one
TWO LTTTLE WOOD ENT SHOES. 2
7
3
big rose, and the neighbours shook their heads
to see the flowers blossom and fall without bring-
ing in a single coin.
She herself spoke less seldom than ever, and
now when old Jehan, who never had understood
the evil thoughts of his neighbours, asked her
what ailed her that she looked so pale and never
stirred down to the city, now her courage failed
her, and the tears brimmed over her eyes, and
she could not call up a brave brief word, to
answer him. For the time was so long, and she
was so tired.
Still she never doubted that her lover would
come back: he had said he would come : she
was as sure that he would come as she was sure
that God came in the midst of the people when
the silver bell rang and the Host was borne by
On high.
Bébée did not heed much, but she vaguely felt
the isolation she was left in : as a child too
young to reason feels cold and feels hunger.
“No one wants me here now that Annémie is
gone,” she thought to herself, as the sweet green
T
274 TIVO LTTTLE WOODEN SEHOES.
Spring days unfolded themselves one by one like
the buds of the briar-rose hedges.
And now and then even the loyal little soul of
her gave way, and sobbing on her lonely bed in
the long dark nights, she would cry out against
him, “Oh, why not have left me alone? I was so
happy—so happy
And then she would reproach herself with
treason to him and ingratitude, and hate herself
and feel guilty in her own sight to have thus
sinned against him in thought for one single
| , ,
instant.
For there are natures in which the generosity
of love is so strong that it feels its own just
pain to be disloyalty; and Bébée's was one of
them. And if he had killed her she would have
died hoping only that no moan had escaped her,
under the blow, that ever could accuse him.
These natures, utterly innocent by force of self-
accusation and self-abasement, suffer at once the
torment of the victim and the criminal.
CHAPTER XXV.
s—º-
5:Nºn E day in the May weather she sat within
! doors with a great book upon her table,
but no sight for it in her aching eyes.
The starling hopped to and fro on the sunny
floor; the bees boomed in the porch ; the tinkle
of sheep's bells came in on the stillness. All was
peaceful and happy except the little weary, break-
ing, desolate heart that beat in her like a caged
bird's.
“He will come ; I am sure he will come,”
she said to herself; but she was so tired,
and it was so long—oh, dear God!—so very
long.
A hand tapped at the lattice. The shrill voice

T 2
276 TJVO LTTTLE TVOODEN SEIOES.
of Reine, the sabot-maker's wife, broken with
anguish, called through the hanging ivy, L
“Bébée, you are a wicked one, they say, but
the only one there is at home in the village this
day. Get you to town for the love of Heaven,
and send Doctor Max hither, for my pet, my
flower, my child lies dying, and not a soul near,
and she black as a coal with choking—go, go, go!
—and Mary will forgive you your sins. Save the
little one, dear Bébée, do you hear? and I will
pray God and speak fair the neighbours for you.
G-O ! ”
Bébée rose up, startled by the now unfa-
miliar sound of a human voice, and looked
at the breathless mother with eyes of pitying
wonder.
“Surely I will go,” she said, gently ; “but
there is no need to bribe me. I have not sinned
greatly—that I know.”
Then she went out quickly and ran through
the lanes and into the city for the sick child, and
found the wise man, and sent him, and did the
errand rather in a sort of sorrowful sympathetic
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES. 277
instinct than in any reasoning consciousness of
doing good.
When she was moving through the once-
familiar and happy ways as the sun was setting
on the golden fronts of the old houses, and the
chimes were ringing from the many towers, a
Strange sense of unreality, of non-existence fell
upon her.
Could it be she 2—she indeed—who had gone
there the year before the gladdest thing that the
earth bore, with no care except to shelter her
flowers from the wind, and keep the freshest
blossoms for the burgomaster's housewife?
She did not think thus to herself; but a
vague doubt that she could ever have been
the little gay, laborious, happy Bébée, with
troops of friends and endless joys for every day
that dawned, came over her as she went by the
black front of the Broodhuis.
The strong voice of Lisa, the fruit girl, jarred
on her as she passed the stall under its yellow
awning that was flapping sullenly in the evening
wind,
278 TJWO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES.
“Ohhè, little fool,” the mocking voice cried,
“the rind of the fine pine is full of prickles, and
stings the lips when the taste is gone 2—to be
sure—crack common nuts like me, and you are
never wanting—hazels grow free in every copse.
Prut, tut ! your grand lover lies a-dying ; so the
students read out of this just now ; and you
such a simpleton as not to get a roll of napoleons
out of him before he went to rot in Paris. I
daresay he was poor as sparrows, if one knew the
truth. He was only a painter after all.”
Lisa tossed her as she spoke a torn sheet, in
which she was wrapping gentians: it was a piece
of newspaper some three weeks old, and in it
there was a single line or so which said that the
artist Flamen, whose Gretchen was the wonder
of the Salon of the year, lay sick unto death in
his rooms in Paris.
Bébée stood and read; the strong ruddy
western light upon the type, the taunting laugh-
ter of the fruit girl on her ear.
A bitter shriek rang from her that made even
the cruelty of Lisa's mirth stop in a sudden terror.
|
TJWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 279
She stood staring like a thing changed to
stone down on the One name that to her filled
all the universe.
“Ill—he is ill—do you hear?” she echoed pite-
ously, looking at Lisa; “and you say he is poor?”
“Poor 2 for sure ! is he not a painter ?” said
the fruit girl, roughly. She judged by her own
penniless student-lads; and she was angered
with herself for feeling sorrow for this little silly
thing that she had loved to torture.
“You have been bad and base to me ; but now
—l bless you, I love you, I will pray for you,”
said Bébée, in a swift broken breath, and with a
look upon her face that startled into pain her
callous enemy.
Then without another word, she thrust the
paper in her bosom, and ran out of the square
breathless with haste and with a great resolve.
He was ill—and he was poor The brave
little soul of her leapt at once to action. He
was sick, and far away; and poor, they said.
All danger and all difficulty faded to nothing
before the vision of his need.
280 TWO LITTLE WOODENT SHOES.
IBébée was only a little foundling who ran about
in wooden shoes; but she had the “dog's soul”
in her—the soul that will follow faithfully though
to receive a curse, that will defend loyally though
to meet a blow, and that will die mutely loving
to the last.
She went home, how she never knew ; and
without the delay of a moment packed up a
change of linen, and fed the fowls and took
the key of the hut down to old Jehan's cabin.
The old man was only half-witted by reason
of his affliction for his dead daughter,
but he was shrewd enough to understand what
she wanted of him, and honest enough to do
it. g
“I am going into the city,” she said to him;
“ and if I am not back to-night, will you feed
the starling and the hens, and water the flowers
for me 2 ”
Old Jehan put his head out of his lattice ; it
was seven in the evening, and he was going to
bed.
“What are you after, little one 2 ” he asked ;
TJVO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 281
“going to show the fine buckles at a students'
ball? Nay, fie—that is not like you.”
“I am going to—pray,+ dear Jehan,” she
answered, with a sob in her throat and the
first falsehood she ever had told. “Do what
I ask you—do for your dead daughter's sake—
or the birds and the flowers will die of hunger
and thirst. Take the key and promise me.”
IHe took the key and promised.
“Do not let them see those buckles shine ;
they will rob you,” he added.
Bébée ran from him fast; every moment that
was lost was so precious and so terrible. To
pause a second for fear's sake never occurred to
her. She went forth as fearlessly as a young
swallow, born in northern April days, flies forth
on instinct to new lands and over unknown seas
when autumn falls.
Necessity and action breathed new life into
her. The hardy and brave peasant ways of her
were awoke once more. She had been strong to
wait silently with the young life in her dying out
drop by drop in the heartsickness of long delay.
2S2 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES.
She was strong now to throw herself into strange
countries and dim perils and immeasurable
miseries, on the sole chance that she might be of
service to him.
A few human souls here and there can love
like dogs. Bébée's was one.
CHAPTER XXVI.
—4–-
zºº. T was dark. The May days are short
º in the north lands of the Scheldt.
She had her little winter cloak of frieze
and her wooden shoes and her little white cap, with
the sunny curls rippling out of it in their pretty
rebellion. She had her little lanthorn too ; and
her bundle; and she had put a few fresh eggs in
her basket, with some sweet herbs and the palm-
sheaf that Father Francis had blessed last Easter
—for who could tell, she thought, how ill he
might not be, or how poor ?
She hardly gave a look to the hut as she ran
by its garden gate ; all her heart was on in front,
in the vague far-off country where he lay sick unto
death,

284 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
She ran fast through the familiar lanes into
the city. She was not very sure where Paris
was, but she had the name clear and firm, and
she knew that people were always coming and
going thence and thither, so that she had no fear
she should not find it.
She went straight to the big busy bewildering
place in the Leopold quarter where the iron
horses fumed every day and night along the iron
ways. She had never been there before, but she
knew it was by that great highway that the traffic
to Paris was carried on, and she knew that it
would carry people also as well.
There were bells clanging, lights flashing, and
crowds pushing and shouting, as she ran up—a
little grey figure, with the lantern spark glim-
mering like any tiny glow-worm astray in a gas-
lit city.
“To Paris P’’ she asked, entreatingly, going
where she saw others going, to a little grated
wicket in a wall.
“Twenty-seven francs—quick l’’ they de-
manded of her.
TJWO LITTLE WOOD ENT SITOES. 2S5
Bébée gave a great cry, and stood still,
trembling and trying not to sob aloud. She
had never thought of money; she had forgotten
that youth and strength and love and willing feet
and piteous prayers—all went for nothing as this
world is made.
A hope flashed on her, and a glad thought.
. She loosed the silver buckles, and held them
out.
“Would you take these ? They are worth
much more.”
There was a derisive laughter; some one
bade her with an oath begome; rough shoulders
jostled her away. She stretched her arms out
piteously.
“Take me—oh, pray take me ! I will go with
the sheep, with the cattle—only, only, take
me ! ”
But in the rush and roar none heeded her ;
some thief Snatched the silver buckles from
her hand, and made off with them and was lost
in the throng; a great iron beast rushed by her,
snorting flame and bellowing smoke ; there was a
286 TJVO LTTTLE TVOOD ENT SEHOES.
roll like thunder, and all was dark: the night
express had passed on its way to Paris.
Bébée stood still, crushed for a moment with
the noise and the cruelty and the sense of abso.
lute desolation; she scarcely noticed that the
buckles had been stolen; she had only one
thought—to get to Paris.
“Can I never go without money?” she asked
at the wicket; the man there glanced a mo-
ment, with a touch of pity, at the little wistful
face.
“The least is twenty francs—surely you must
know that ?” he said, and shut his grating with
a clang.
Bébée turned away and went out of the great
cruel tumultuous place ; her heart ached and her
brain was giddy, but the sturdy courage of her
nature rose to need.
“There is no way at all to go without money
to Paris, I suppose ?” she asked of an old
woman whom she knew a little, who sold nuts
and little pictures of Saints and wooden play-
things under the trees, in the avenue hard by.
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEHOES. 287
The old woman shook her head.
“Eh 2—no, dear. There is nothing to be done
anywhere in the world without money. Look,
I cannot get a litre of nuts to sell unless I pay
beforehand.”
“Would it be far to Walk 2 ”
“Far ! Holy Jesus ! It is right away in the
heart of France—over two hundred miles, they
say; straight out through the forest. Not
but what my son did walk it once—and he a
shoemaker, who knows what walking costs;
and he is well to do there now—not that he
ever writes. When they want nothing people
never write.”
“And he walked into Paris 2 ”
“Yes, ten years ago. He had nothing but a
few sous and an ash stick, and he had a fancy to
try his luck there. And after all our feet were
given us to travel with. If you go there and you
see him, tell him to send me something—I am
tired of selling nuts.”
Bébée said nothing, but went on her road; since
there was no other way but to walk she would
288 TWO LITTLE WOODEN, SIZOES.
take that way; the distance and the hardship did
not appal two little feet that were used to
traverse so many miles of Sun-baked summer
dust and of frozen winter mud unblenchingly
year after year.
The time it would take made her heart sink
indeed. He was ill. God knew what might
happen. But neither the length of leagues nor
the fatigue of body daunted her. She only saw
his eyes dim with pain and his lips burned with
fever.
She would walk twenty miles a day, and
then, perhaps, she might get lifts here and
there on hay waggons or in pedlars' carts;
people had always used to be kind to her.
Anyhow she counted she might reach Paris
well in fifteen days.
She sat under a shrine in a bye street a
moment, and counted the copper pieces she
had on her; they were few, and the poor pretty
buckles that she might have sold to get
money, were stolen.
She had some twenty Sous and a dozen eggs;
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 289
she thought she might live on that ; she had
wanted to take the eggs to him, but after all,
to keep life in her until she could reach Paris
was the one great thing.
“What a blessing it is to have been born poor;
and to have lived hardly—one wants so little !”
she thought to herself.
Then she put up the sous in the linen bosom
of her gown, and trimmed her little lantern and
knelt down in the quiet darkness and prayed a
moment, with the hot agonised tears rolling down
her face, and then rose and stepped out bravely
in the cool of the night, on the great south-west
road towards Paris.
The thought never once crossed her to turn
back, and go again into the shelter of her own
little hut among the flowers. He was sick
there, dying, for anything she knew—that was
the only thing she remembered.
It was a clear, starlit night, and everywhere
the fragrance of the Spring was borne in from
the wide green plains, and the streams where
the rushes were blowing.
290 TJJ "O LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
She walked ten miles easily, the beautiful
grey shadow all about her. She had never been
so far from home in all her life, except to that
One Kermesse at Mechlin. But she was not
afraid.
With the movement, and the air, and the sense
that she was going to him, which made her happy
even in her misery, something of the old, sweet,
lost fancies came to her.
She smiled at the stars through her tears, and
as the poplars swayed and murmured in the wind,
they looked to her like the wings and the swords
of a host of angels.
Her way lay out through the forest, and in
that sweet green woodland, she was not afraid
—no more afraid than the fawns were.
At Boitsfort she shrank a little, indeed.
Here there were the open-air restaurants, and
the café gardens all alight for the pleasure-
seekers from the city; here there were music
and laughter, and horses with brass bells, and
bright colours on high in the wooden balconies,
and below among the blossoming hawthorn
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES. 291
hedges. She had to go through it all, and she
shuddered a little as she ran, thinking of that
one priceless, deathless, forest day when he had
kissed her first.
But the pleasure people were all busied with
their mirth and mischief, and took no notice of
the little grey figure in the starry night. She
went on along the grassy roads, under the high
arching trees, with the hoot of the owls and the
cry of the rabbits on the stillness.
At Groenendael, in the heart of the forest,
midnight was striking as she entered the village.
Everyone was asleep. The lights were all out.
The old ruined priory frowned dark under the
clouds.
She shivered a little again, and began to feel
chill and tired, yet did not dare to knock at
any one of the closed house-doors—she had no
money.
So she walked on her first ten unknown miles,
meeting a few people only, and being altogether
unmolested—a small grey figure, trotting in two
little wooden shoes.
292 T}}'O LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
They thought her a peasant going to a fair or
a lace mill, and no one did her more harm than
to wish her good-night in rough Flemish.
When the dawn began to whiten above the
plains of the east, she saw an empty cowshed
filled with hay ; she was a little tired, and lay
down and rested an hour or two, as a young
lamb might have lain on the dried clover, for she
knew that she must keep her strength and
husband her power, or never reach across the
dreary length of the foreign land to Paris.
But by full sunrise she was on her way again,
bathing her face in a brook and buying a sou's
worth of bread and flet milk at the first cottage
that she passed in bright, leaf-bowered
Hoeylaert.
The forest was still all around her, with its
exquisite life of bough and blsssom, and murmur
of insect and of bird. She told her beads, pray-
ing as she went, and was almost happy. g
God would not let him die. Oh no, not till
she had kissed him once more, and could die
with him.
TWO LTTTLE WOODEN SEIOES. 293
The hares ran across the path, and the blue
butterflies flew above head. There was purple
gloom of pinewood, and sparkling verdure of
aspen and elm. There were distant church
carillons ringing, and straight golden shafts of
sunshine streaming.
She was quite sure God would not let him
die.
She hoped that he might be very poor. At
times he had talked as if he were, and then
she might be of so much use. She knew how
to deal with fever and suffering. She had sat
up many a night with the children of the village.
The grey sisters had taught her many of their
ways of battling with disease ; and she could
make fresh cool drinks, and she could brew
beautiful remedies from simple herbs. There
was so much that she might do ; her fancy played
with it almost happily. And then, only to touch
his hand, only to hear his voice ; her heart rose
at the thought, as a lark to its morning song.
At Rixensart, buried in its greenery, as she
went through it in morning light, some peasants
294 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
greeted her cheerily, and called to her to rest in
a house-porch, and gave her honey and bread.
She could not eat much; her tongue was parched
and her throat was dry, but the kindness was
precious to her, and she went on her road the
stronger for it.
“It is a long way to walk to Paris,” said the
woman, with some curious wonder. Bébée
Smiled, though her eyes grew wet.
“She has the look of the little Gesu,” said
the Rixensart people, and they watched her away
with a vague timid pity.
So she went on through Ottignies and La
Roche, to Villers, and left the great woods and
the city chimes behind her, and came through the
green abbey valleys through Tilly and Ligny, and
Fleurus, and so into the coal and iron fields that
lie round Charleroi.
Here her heart grew sick, and her courage sank
under the noise and the haste, before the black-
ness and the hideousness. She had never seen
anything like it. She thought it was hell, with
the naked, swearing, fighting people, and the
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 295
red fires leaping night and day. Nevertheless,
if hell it were, since it lay betwixt her and him,
she found force to brave and cross it.
The miners and glass-blowers and mail-makers,
rough and fierce and hard, frightened her. The
women did not look like women, and the children
ran and yelled at her, and set their dogs upon
her. The soil was thick with dust like soot, and
the trees were seared and brown. There was no
peace in the place, and no loveliness. Eighty
thousand folks toiled together in the hope-
less Tophet, and swarmed, and struggled, and
laboured, and multiplied, in joyless and endless
wrestling against hunger and death.
She got through it somehow, hiding often from
the ferocious youngsters, and going sleepless
rather than lie in those dens of filth ; but
she seemed so many, many years older when
Charleroi lay at last behind her—so many, many
years older than when she had sat and spun in
the garden at home.
When she was once in the valley of the Sambre
she was more herself again, only she felt weaker
296 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES.
than she had ever done, because she only dared
to spend one of her sous each day, and one sou
got so little food.
In the woods and fields about Alne she began
to breathe again, like a bird loosed to the air
after being shut in a wooden trap. Green corn,
green boughs, green turf, mellow chimes of church
bells, humming of golden bees, cradle songs of
women spinning, homely odours of little herb
gardens and of orchard trees under cottage walls
—these had been around her all her life; she
only breathed freely amongst them.
She often felt tired, and her wooden shoes
were wearing so thin that the hot dust of the
road at noonday burnt her feet through them.
Sometimes, too, she felt a curious brief faintness
such as she had never known, for the lack of food
and the long fatigue began to tell even on her
hardy little body. But she went on bravely,
rarely doing less than her twenty miles a day,
and sometimes more, walking often in the night
to save time, and lying down in cowsheds or
under haystacks in the noontide.
TJWO LITTLE WOODENT SHOES. 297
*-*s
For the most part people were kind to her;
they saw she was so very young and so poor.
Women would give her leave to bathe herself
in their bed-chambers, and children would ask
her to wait on the village bench under the
chestnut tree, while they brought her their pet
lamb or their tumbler pigeons to look at, but,
for the most part—unless she was very, very
tired—she would not wait. It took her so long,
and who could tell how it fared with him in Paris?
Into the little churches, scattered over the
wide countries between Charleroi and Erque-
linnes, she would turn aside, indeed ; but, then,
that was only to say a prayer for him ; that was
Inot loss to him, but gain.
So she walked on until she reached the frontier
of France. She began to get a little giddy; she
began to see the blue sky and the green level
always swirling round her as if some one were
spinning them to frighten her, but still she would
not be afraid; she went on, and On, and on, till
she set her last step on the soil of Flanders.
Here a new strange, terrible, incomprehensible
298 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
obstacle opposed her : she had no papers; they
thrust her back and spoke to her as if she were
a criminal. She could not understand what they
could mean. She had never heard of these laws
and rules. She vaguely comprehended that she
must not enter France, and stunned and heart-
broken she dropped down under a tree, and for
the first time sobbed as if her very life would
weep itself away.
She could see nothing, understand nothing.
There were the same road, the same hedges, the
same fields, the same white cottages, and peasants
in blue shirts and dunhued oxen in the waggons.
She saw no mark, no difference, ere they told
her where she stood was Belgium, and where
they stood was France, and that she must not
pass from one into the other.
The men took no notice of her. They went
back into their guardhouse, and smoked and
drank. A cat sunned herself under a scarlet
bean. The white clouds sailed on before a
southerly sky. She might die here—he there—
and nothing seemed to care.
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 299
After a while an old hawker came up ; he was
travelling with wooden clocks from the Black
Forest. He stopped and looked at her, and
asked her what she ailed.
She knelt down at his feet in the dust.
“Oh, help me !” she cried to him. “Oh,
pray, help me ! I have walked all the way from
Drussels—that is my country, and now they will
not let me pass that house where the soldiers are.
They say I have no papers. What papers should
I have 2 I do not know. When one has done
no harm, and does not owe a sou anywhere, and
has walked all the way—Is it money that they
want? I have none; and they stole my silver
clasps in Brussels; and if I do not get to Paris
I must die—die without seeing him again—ever
again, dear God!”
She dropped her head upon the dust and
Crouched and sobbed there, her courage broken
by this new barrier that she had never dreamed
would come between herself and Paris.
The old hawker looked at her thoughtfully.
He had seen much of men and women, and
300 TTWO LITTLE WOODEN SLIOES.
knew truth from counterfeit, and he was moved
by the child’s agony.
He stooped and whispered in her ear.
“Get up quick, and I will pass you. It is
against the law, and I may go to prison for it.
Never mind; one must risk something in this
world, or else be a cur. My daughter has stayed
behind in Marbais sweethearting; her name is
on my passport, and her age and face will do for
yours. Get up and follow me close, and I will get
you through. Poor little soul, whatever your woe
is it is real enough, and you are such a young and
pretty thing. Get up, the guards are in their
house, they have not seen ; follow me, and you
must not speak a word ; they must take you for
a German, dumb as wood.”
She got up and obeyed him, not comprehend-
ing, but only vaguely seeing that he was friendly
to her, and would pass her over into France.
The old man made a little comedy at the barrier,
and scolded her as though she were his daughter
for losing her way as she came to meet him, and
then crying like a baby.
TJWO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES, 301
The guards looked at her carelessly, joked
the hawker on her pretty face, looked the papers
over, and let her through, believing her the child
of the clock-maker of the Hartz. Some lies are
blessed as truth.
“I have done wrong in the law, but not before
God, I think, little one,” said the pedlar. “Nay
—do not thank me, or go on like that ; we are
in sight of the Customs men still, and if they
suspected, it would be the four walls of a cell only
that you and I should see to-night. And now tell
me your story, poor maiden—why are you on foot
through a strange country 2”
But Bébée would not tell him her story; she
was confused and dazed still. She did not know
rightly what had happened to her; but she could
not talk of herself, nor of why she travelled thus
to Paris.
The old hawker got cross at her silence,
and called her an unthankful jade, and wished
that he had left her to her fate, and parted com-
pany with her at two cross-roads, saying his path
did not lie with hers; and then when he had done
3()2 TJJ O LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES.
that, was sorry, and being a tender-hearted soul,
hobbled back, and would fain press a five-franc
piece on her; and Bébée, refusing it all the while,
kissed his old brown hands and blessed him, and
broke away from him, and so went on again soli-
tary towards St. Quentin.
The country was very flat and poor, and yet
the plains had a likeness in them to her own wide
Brabant downs, where the tall green wheat was
blowing and the barges dropping down the slug-
gish streams.
She was very footsore; very weary; very
hungry so often ; but she was in France—in his
country;-and her spirit rose with the sense of
that nearness to him.
After all God was so good to her; there
were fine bright days and nights; a few showers
had fallen, but merely passing ones; the air
was so cool and so balmy that it served her
almost as food; and she seldom found people so
unkind that they refused for her single little sou
to give her a crust of bread and let her lie in an
Outhouse.
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHIOES. 303
After all God was very good ; and by the
sixteenth or seventeenth day she would be in
the city of Paris.
She was a little lightheaded at times from in-
sufficient nourishment; especially after waking
from strange dreams in unfamiliar places; some-
times the soil felt tremulous under her, and the
sky spun round; but she struggled against the
feeling, and kept a brave heart, and tried to be
afraid of nothing.
Sometimes at night she thought she saw old
Annémie. “But what if I do 2 ” she said to
herself; “Annémie never will hurt me.”
And now, as she grew nearer her goal, her
natural buoyancy of spirit returned as it had
never dome to her since the evening that he had
kissed and left her. As her body grew lighter
and more exhausted, her fancy grew keener and
more dominant. All things of the earth and air
spoke to her as she went along as they had used
to do. All that she had learned from the books
in the long cold months came to her clear and
wonderful. She was not so very ignorant now-
304 TWO LITTLE TVOODEN SEHOES.
ignorant, indeed, beside him—but still knowing
something that would make her able to read to
him if he liked it, and to understand if he talked
of grave things.
She had no fixed thought of what she would
be to him when she reached him.
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 farther 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 nought. They cease to exist; they
are as though they had never been.
Whoever recollects an outside world may play
with passion, or may idle with sentiment, but
does not love.
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES, 305
She did not hear what the villagers said to her.
She did not see the streets of the towns as she
passed them. She kept herself clean always, and
broke fast now and then by sheer instinct of
habit, nothing more. She had no perception
what she did, except of walking—walking--
walking always, and seeing the white road go by
like pale ribbons unrolled.
She got a dreamy, intense, sleepless light in
her blue eyes that frightened some of those she
passed. They thought she had been fever
stricken, and was not in her senses.
So she went across the dreary lowlands, wearing
out her little sabots, but not wearing out her
patience and her courage.
She was very dusty and jaded. Her woollen
skirt was stained with weather and torn with
briars. But she had managed always to wash
her cap white in brook-water, and she had
managed always to keep her pretty bright curls
soft and silken—for he had liked them so
much, and he would soon draw them through
his hand again. So she told herself a thousand
X.
306 T'PVO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES.
times to give her strength when the mist would
come over her sight, and the earth would seem
to tremble as she went. On the fifteenth day
from the night when she had left her hut by the
Swans' water, Bébée saw Paris.
Shining away in the sun; white and gold ;
amongst woods and gardens she saw Paris.
She was so tired—oh, so tired—but she could
Inot rest now. There were bells ringing always
in her ears, and a heavy pain always in her
head. But what of that ?—she was so near
to him.
“Are you ill, you little thing?” a woman
asked her who was gathering early cherries in
the outskirts of the great city.
Bébée looked at her and smiled: “I do not
know—I am happy.”
And she went onward.
It was evening. The sun had set. She had
not eaten for twenty-four hours. But she could
not pause for anything now. She crossed the
gleaming river, and she heard the cathedral
chimes. Paris in all its glory was about her, but
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEIOES. 307
she took no more note of it than a pigeon that
flies through it intent on reaching home.
No one looked at or stopped her; a little dusty
peasant with a bundle on a stick over her shoulder.
The click clack of her wooden shoes on the
hot pavements made none look up ; little rustics
came up every day like this to make their fortunes
in Paris. Some grew into golden painted silken
flowers, the convolvuli of their brief summer
days; and some drifted into the Seine water,
rusted, wind-tossed, fallen leaves, that were
wanted of no man. Anyhow it was so common
to see them, pretty but homely things, with their
noisy shoes and their little all in a bundle, that
no one even looked once at Bébée.
She was not bewildered. As she had gone
through her own city, only thinking of the roses
in her basket, and of old Annémie in her garret,
so she went through Paris, only thinking of him
for whose sake she had come thither.
Now that she was really in his home she was
happy; happy though her head ached with that
dull odd pain, and all the Sunny glare went
X 2
308 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
round and round like a great gilded humming-
top, such as the babies clapped their hands at
at Kermesse.
She was happy; she felt sure now that God
would not let him die till she got to him. She was
quite glad that he had left her all that long,
terrible winter, for she had learned so much and
was so much more fitted to be with him.
Weary as she was, and strange as the pain in her
head made her feel, she was happy, very happy;
a warm flush came on her little pale cheeks as she
thought how soon he would kiss them, her whole
body thrilled with the old Sweet nameless joy that
she had sickened for in vain so long.
Though she saw no thing else that was around
her, she saw some little knots of moss roses that a
girl was selling on the quay, as she used to sell
them in front of the Maison du Roi. She had
only two sous left, but she stopped and bought
two little rosebuds to take to him. He had used
to care for them so much in the summer in Bra-
bant.
The girl who sold them told her the way to
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES, 309
the street he lived in ; it was not very far off the
quay. She seemed to float on air, to have wings
like the swallows, to hear beautiful music all
around. She felt for her beads, and said aves of
praise. God was so good.
It was quite night when she reached the
street, and sought the number of his house.
She spoke his name softly, and trembling very
much with joy, not with any fear, but it seemed
to her too sacred a thing ever to utter aloud.
An old man looked out of a den by the door,
and told her to go straight up the stairs to the
third floor, and then turn to the right. The old
man chuckled as he glanced after her, and listened
to the wooden shoes pattering wearily up the
broad stone steps.
Bébée climbed them—tem, twenty, thirty,
forty. “He must be very poor!” she thought, “to
live so high,” and yet the place was wide and
handsome, and had a look of riches. Her heart
beat so fast, she felt suffocated; her limbs shook,
her eyes had a red blood-like mist floating before
them ; but she thanked God each step she
310 T'PVO LITTLE WOODEN SEHOES.
climbed—a moment, and she would look upon
the only face she loved.
“He will be glad ;-oh, I am sure he will be
glad l’” she said to herself, as a fear that had
never before come near her touched her for a
moment—if he should not care ?
But even then, what did it matter ? Since he
was ill she should be there to watch him night
and day, and when he was well again, if he
should wish her to go away—one could always
die.
“But he will be glad—oh, I know he will be
glad,” she said to the rose-buds that she carried
to him. “And if God will only let me save his
life, what else do I want more ?”
His name was written on a door before her.
The handle of a bell hung down, she pulled it
timidly. The door unclosed, she saw no one,
and went through. There were low lights
burning. There were heavy scents that were
strange to her. There was a fantastic gloom
from old armour, and old weapons, and old pic-
tures in the dull rich chambers. The sound
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SEHORS, 3.11
of her wooden shoes was lost in the softness
and thickness of the carpets.
It was not the home of a poor man. A great
terror froze her heart;-if she were not wanted
here 2
She went quickly through three rooms, seeing
no one, and at the end of the third there were
folding doors.
“It is I—Bébée,” she said softly, as she
pushed them gently apart ; and she held out the
two moss rosebuds.
Then the words died on her lips, and a great
horror froze her, still and silent, there.
She saw the dusky room as in a dream.
She saw him stretched on the bed, leaning OIl
his elbow, laughing, and playing cards upon
the lace coverlet. She saw women with loose
shining hair and bare limbs, and rubies and
diamonds glimmering red and white. She saw
men lying about upon the couch, throwing dice
and drinking and laughing one with another.
Beyond all she saw against the pillows of his bed
a beautiful brown wicked-looking thing like some
312 TIVO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES,
velvet snake who leaned over him as he threw
down the painted cards upon the lace, and who
had cast about his throat her curved bare arm
with the great coils of dead gold all a-glitter
On it.
And above it all there were odours of wines
and flowers, clouds of smoke, shouts of laughter,
music of shrill gay voices.
She stood like a frozen creature and saw—the
rose-buds in her hand. Then with a great
piercing cry she let the little roses fall, and
turned and fled. At the sound he looked up and
saw her, and shook his beautiful brown harlot off
him with an oath.
But Bébée flew down through the empty
chambers and the long stairway as a hare flies
from the hounds; her tired feet never paused,
her aching limbs never slackened; she ran on
and on, and on, into the lighted Streets, into the
fresh night air; on, and On, and On, straight to
the river.
From its brink some man's strength caught
and held her. She struggled with it.
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 313
“Let me die, let me die l’” she shrieked to him
and strained from him to get at the cool grey
silent water that waited for her there.
Then she lost all consciousness, and saw the
stars no more.
When she came back to any sense of life, the
stars were shining still, and the face of Jeannot
was bending over her, wet with tears.
He had followed her to Paris when they had
missed her first, and had come straight by train
to the city, making sure it was thither she had
come, and there had sought her many days,
watching for her by the house of Flamen.
She shuddered away from him as he held her,
and looked at him with blank tearless eyes.
“Do not touch me—take me home.”
That was all she ever said to him. She never
asked him or told him anything. She never
noticed that it was strange that he should have
been here upon the river bank. He let her be, and
took her silently in the cool night back by the
iron ways to Brabant.
CHAPTER XXVII.
s-O-
º HE sat quite still and upright in the
* waggon, with the dark lands rushing
by her. She never spoke at all. She
had a look that frightened him upon her face.
When he tried to touch her hand, she shivered
away from him.
The charcoal - burner, hardy and strong
amongst forest - reared men, cowered like a
child in a corner, and covered his eyes and wept.
So the night wore away.
She had no perception of anything that
happened to her until she was led through her
own little garden in the early day, and her
starling cried to her “Bonjour, Bonjour !” Even
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 315
then she only looked about her in a bewildered
Way, and never spoke.
Were the sixteen days a dream 2
She did not know.
The women whom Jeannot summoned, his
mother and sisters, and Mère Krebs, and one or
two others, weeping for what had been the hard-
ness of their hearts against her, undressed her,
and laid her down on her little bed, and opened
the shutters to the radiance of the sun.
She let them do as they liked, only she seemed
neither to hear nor see, and she never spoke.
All that Jeannot could tell was that he had found
her in Paris, and had saved her from the river.
The women were sorrowful, and reproached
themselves. Perhaps she had done wrong, but
they had been harsh, and she was so young.
The two little sabots with the holes worn
through the soles touched them; and they blamed
themselves for having shut their hearts and their
doors against her as they saw the fixed blue eyes,
without any light in them, and the pretty mouth
closed close against either Sob or Smile.
After all she was Bébée—the little bright blithe
316 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
thing that had danced with their children, and
sung to their singing, and brought them always
the first roses of the year. If she had been led
astray, they should have been gentler with her.
So they told themselves and each other.
What had she seen in that terrible Paris to
change her like this 2—they could not tell. She
never spoke.
The cock crowed gaily to the sun. The lamb
bleated in the meadow. The bees boomed
amongst the pear-tree blossoms. The grey
lavender blew in the open house-door. The
green leaves threw shifting shadows on the floor.
All things were just the same as they had been
the year before, when she had woke to the joy of
being a girl of sixteen.
But Bébée now lay quite still and silent on
her little bed; as quiet as the waxen Gesù that
they laid in the manger at the Nativity.
“If she would only speak l’” the women and
the children wailed, weeping sorely.
But she never spoke ; Ilor did she seem to
know any one of them. Not even the starling,
as he flew on her pillow and called her.
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 317
“Give her rest,” they all said; and one by
one moved away, being poorfolk and hard-working,
and unable to lose a whole day.
Mère Krebs stayed with her, and Jeannot sat
in the porch where her little spinning wheel
stood, and rocked himself to and fro; in vain
agony, powerless.
He had done all he could, and it was of no
avail. -
Then people who had loved her, hearing, came .
up the green lanes from the city—the cobbler and
the tinman, and the old woman who sold saints'
pictures by the Broodhuis. The Värnhart children
hung about the garden wicket, frightened and
sobbing. Old Jéhan beat his knees with his
hands, and Said only, over and over again,
“Another dead—another dead!—the red mill
and I see them all dead.”
The long golden day drifted away, and the
Swans swayed to and fro, and the willows, grew
silver in the sunshine.
Bébée, only, lay quite still and never spoke.
The starling sat above her head; his wings
drooped, and he was silent too.
3.18 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
Towards sunset Bébée raised herself and
called aloud: they ran to her.
“Get me a rosebud—one with the moss round
it,” she said to them.
They went out into the garden, and brought
her one wet with dew.
She kissed it, and laid it in one of her little
wooden shoes that stood upon the bed.
“Send them to him,” she said wearily; “tell
him I walked all the way.”
Then her head drooped; then momentary con-
sciousness died out : the old dull, lifeless look
crept over her face again like the shadow of death.
The starling spread his broad black wings
above her head. She lay quite still once more.
The women left the rosebud in the wooden
shoes, not knowing what she meant.
Night fell. Mère Krebs watched beside her.
Jeannot went down to the old church to beseech
heaven with all his simple, ignorant, tortured
soul. The villagers hovered about, talking in
low sad voices, and wondering, and dropping one
by one into their homes. They were sorry, very
sorry; but what could they do?
TWO LITTLE WOOD ENT SHOES, 319
*=e --
It was quite night. The lights were put out
in the lane. Jeannot, with Father Francis,
prayed before the shrine of the Seven Sorrows.
Mère Krebs slumbered in her rush-bottomed
chair; she was old and worked hard. The star-
ling was awake.
Bébée rose in her bed, and looked around, as
she had done when she had asked for the moss
rosebud.
A sense of unutterable universal pain ached
over all her body.
She did not see her little home, its four white
walls, its lattice shining in the moon, its wooden
bowls and plates, its oaken shelf and presses, its
plain familiar things that once had been so dear:
—she did not see them ;—she only saw the brown
woman with her arm about his throat.
She sat up in her bed and slipped her feet
on to the ground ; the pretty little rosy feet that
he had used to want to clothe in silken
stockings.
Poor little feet ! she felt a curious compas-
sion for them ;—they had served her so well, and
they were so tired.
320 Two LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
She sat up a moment with that curious
dull agony, aching everywhere in body and in
brain. She kissed the rosebud once more,
and laid it gently down in the wooden shoe.
She did not see anything that was around
her. She felt a great dulness that closed
in on her; a great weight that was like iron
on her head.
She thought she was in the strange, noisy,
cruel city, with the river close to her, and all her
dead dreams drifting down it like murdered
children, whilst that woman kissed him.
She slipped her feet on to the floor, and rose
and stood upright. There was a door open to
the moonlight—the door where she had sat
spinning and singing in a thousand happy days;
the lavender blew ; the tall, unbudded green
lilies swayed in the wind; she looked at them,
and knew none of them.
The night air drifted through her linen dress,
and played on her bare arms, and lifted the curls
of her hair; the same air that had played with
her so many times out of mind when she had
been a little tottering thing that measured its
T}}/O LITTLE TVOODEN SEIOES. 32?
*s
height by the red rosebush. But it brought her
no sense of where she was.
All she saw was the woman who kissed him.
There was the water beyond ; the kindly
calm water, all green with the moss and the
nests of the ouzels and the boughs of the
hazels and willows, where the Swans were asleep
in the reeds, and the broad lilies spread wide
and cool.
But she did not see any memory in it. She
thought it was the cruel grey river in the
strange white city; and she cried to it; and
went out into the old familiar ways, and knew
none of them ; and ran feebly yet fleetly through
the bushes and flowers, looking up once at the
stars with a helpless broken blind look, like a
thing that is dying.
“He does not want me !” she said to them.
“He does not want me !—other women kiss him
there ! ”
Then with a low fluttering sound like a bird's
when its wings are shot, and yet it tries to rise,
she hovered a moment Over the water, and
stretched her arms out to it.
322 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
“He does not want me!” she murmured; “he
does not want me—and I am so tired. Dear God!”
Then she crept down, as a weary child creeps
to its mother, and threw herself forward, and let
the green dark waters take her where they had
found her amidst the lilies, a little laughing
yearling thing.
There she soon lay, quite quiet, with her
face turned to the stars, and the starling poised
above to watch her as she slept.
She had been only Bébée—the ways of God
and man had been too hard for her.
When the messengers of Flamen came that day,
they took him back a dead moss-rose and a pair
of little wooden shoes worn through with walking,
“One creature loved me once,” he says to
women who wonder why the wooden shoes are
there.
THE END.
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CF/A 7TO & W/AWDUS, P/CCAA)/ZZY. 33
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greaf interest of the book, and £o the Zast amotºut of crazºozes information which,
% contains. We regreſſ that it has been £ublished without the sanction ºf /ais family,
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not only to his collected works, but also to any memoir of him that has been,
... that is likely to be written.”—BRITISH QuARTERLY REVIEW.
34 AOOKS PUBLISHED BY
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