Bebee Part 30

She sat up in her bed and slipped her feet on to the floor; the pretty little rosy feet that he had used to want to clothe in silken stockings.

Poor little feet! she felt a curious compa.s.sion for them; they had served her so well, and they were so tired.

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 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 gray 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.

"He does not want me!" she murmured; "he does not want me--and I am so tired. Dear G.o.d!"

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 Bebee: the ways of G.o.d 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.