E-text prepared by Sara Peattie, Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg
Online Distributed Proofreading Team
Or, Two Little Wooden Shoes
by
1896
Bébée sprang out of bed at daybreak. She was sixteen.
It seemed a very wonderful thing to be as much as that—sixteen—a womanquite.
A cock was crowing under her lattice. He said how old you are!—how oldyou are! every time that he sounded his clarion.
She opened the lattice and wished him good day, with a laugh. It was sopleasant to be woke by him, and to think that no one in all the worldcould ever call one a child any more.
There was a kid bleating in the shed. There was a thrush singing in thedusk of the sycamore leaves. There was a calf lowing to its mother awaythere beyond the fence. There were dreamy muffled bells ringing in thedistance from many steeples and belfries where the city was; they allsaid one thing, "How good it is to be so old as that—how good, how verygood!"
Bébée was very pretty.
No one in all Brabant ever denied that. To look at her it seemed as ifshe had so lived among the flowers that she had grown like them, and onlylooked a bigger blossom—that was all.
She wore two little wooden shoes and a little cotton cap, and a graykirtle—linen in summer, serge in winter; but the little feet in theshoes were like rose leaves, and the cap was as white as a lily, and thegray kirtle was like the bark of the bough that the apple-blossom parts,and peeps out of, to blush in the sun.
The flowers had been the only godmothers that she had ever had, and fairygodmothers too.
The marigolds and the sunflowers had given her their ripe, rich gold totint her hair; the lupins and irises had lent their azure to her eyes;the moss-rosebuds had made her pretty mouth; the arum lilies had uncurledtheir softness for her skin; and the lime-blossoms had given her theirfrank, fresh, innocent fragrance.
The winds had blown, and the rains had rained, and the sun had shone onher, indeed, and had warmed the whiteness of her limbs, but they had onlygiven to her body and her soul a hardy, breeze-blown freshness like thatof a field cowslip.
She had never been called anything but Bébée.
One summer day Antoine Mäes—a French subject, but a Belgian by adoptionand habit, an old man who got his meagre living by tilling the gardenplot about his hut and selling flowers in the city squares—Antoine,going into Brussels for his day's trade, had seen a gray bundle floatingamong the water-lilies in the bit of water near his hut and had hookedit out to land, and found a year-old child in it, left to drown, nodoubt, but saved by the lilies, and laughing gleefully at fate.
Some lace-worker, blind with the pain of toil, or some peasant womanharder of heart than the oxen in her yoke, had left it there to driftaway to death, not reckoning for the inward ripple of the current or thetoughness of the lily leaves and stems.
Old Antoine took it to his wife, and the wife, a childless and aged soul,begged leave to keep it; and the two poor lonely, simple folks grew tocare for the homeless, motherless thing, and they and the people aboutall called it Bébée—only Bébée.
The church got at it and added to it a saint's name; but for all itslittle world it remained Bébée—Bébée when it trott