Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida Part 22

"No," she answered him. "It comes into my head of itself. Sometimes I think the cathedral angels put it there. For the angels must be tired, you know; always pointing to G.o.d 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? G.o.d 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 Sun came and touched the lichens of the roof into gold.

Bebee 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 anything; but now I shall know as much as they know. Are you not glad for me, O Sun?"

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 s.h.i.+ning 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.

"And where are you going so fast, as if those wooden shoes of yours were sandals of mercury?"

"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 of; she only runs away to be run after, and if you do not pursue her, she comes back--always."

Bebee did not understand at all.

"I thought G.o.d made women?" she said, a little awe-stricken.

There is a dignity of peasants as well as of kings--the dignity that comes from all absence of effort, all freedom from pretence. Bebee 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 fourscore.

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.

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 forest 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 rabbits, and the sound of the wings of birds.

Soignies is not legend-haunted like the Black Forest, nor king-haunted like Fontainebleau, nor sovereign of two historic streams like the brave woods of Heidelberg; nor wild and romantic, 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.

"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, Bebee," said Franz, the biggest boy.

"Perhaps not," said Bebee; "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, Bebee?"

"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 gra.s.s 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 gingerbread and currant cake."

To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.

"Ay dear; when the frost kills your brave rosebush, root and bud, do you think of the thorns that p.r.i.c.ked you, or only of the fair sweet-smelling things that flowered all your summer?"

Flowers belong to fairyland; the flowers and the birds, and the b.u.t.terflies are all that the world has kept of its golden age; the only perfectly beautiful things on earth, joyous, innocent, half divine, useless, say they who are wiser than G.o.d.

When the day was done, Bebee 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 her basket, and the red and white currants that had been given her for her dinner.

She went along the twisting, many-coloured, quaintly-fas.h.i.+oned 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 ca.n.a.l, dusky wharves crowded with barrels, and bales, and cattle, and timber, and all the various freightage that the good s.h.i.+ps come and go with all the year round, to and from the Zuyder Zee, and the Baltic water, and the wild Northumbrian sh.o.r.es, 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.

Bebee was fond of watching the brigs and barges, that looked so big to her, with their national flags flying, and their tall masts standing thick as gra.s.s, and their tawny sails 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; sometimes some curly-headed cabin-boy would give her a sh.e.l.l or a plume of seaweed, and try and make her understand what the wonderful wild water was like, which was not quiet and sluggish and dusky as this ca.n.a.l 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.