Bébée | Page 8

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 homespun linen 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 hand, and there came from it
an odor 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
ignorance 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. These are her things,
you see; yes--all of them. That is the sprig of sweetbrier she wore in her
belt the day before the wagon 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--"
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 more.
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 liked 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.
The garlands that the children strung of daisies and hung about her had
never chilled her so.

But little Jeanne, the youngest of the charcoal-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? 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. "But, all the same, you
know, Bébée, things off a dead body bring mischance sometimes."
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
woollen 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 sparkled with each step one
took?
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