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Updated: May 23, 2025
It was dark already, but in the square there was still the cool bright primrose-colored evening light. Bébée's wooden shoes went pattering down the sloping and uneven stones. Her little gray 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.
The shadows grew very long. He painted, not glancing once elsewhere than at his study. Bébée's baskets were quite empty. She rose, and lingered, and regarded him wistfully: he was angered; perhaps she had been rude? Her little heart failed her. If he would only look up! But he did not look up; he kept his handsome dark face studiously over the canvas of the Broodhuis.
We are of market value, you know. Care, indeed! 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.
In the little village above St. Guido, Bébée's neighbors 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.
Bébée's was one. It was dark. The May days are short 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.
He was idle and 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.
The door stood open, with the broad, bright day beaming through; and Bébée's little world came streaming in with it, the world which dwelt in the half-dozen cottages that fringed this green lane of hers like beavers' nests pushed out under the leaves on to the water's edge.
The Varnhart children would gather now and then open-mouthed 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 sweetbrier, and wonder stupidly if this strange man who could make Bébée's face beam over again upon 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 the boys and girls called old.
"Who was that seigneur with you last night, Bébée?" 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 Rubes was in Antwerpen; he wanted roses the night before last in the cathedral." "But he was walking with you?"
"Well, if I did?" 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 me at all.
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