Part 14

“I could have seen them with that franc,” he murmured to Patrasche, “but I could not sell her picture--not even for them.”

Baas Cogez went into his mill-house sore troubled in his mind. “That lad must not be so much with Alois,” he said to his wife that night. “Trouble may come of it hereafter; he is fifteen now, and she is twelve; and the boy is comely of face and form.”

“And he is a good lad and a loyal,” said the housewife, feasting her eyes on the piece of pine wood where it was throned above the chimney with a cuckoo clock in oak and a Calvary in wax.

“Yea, I do not gainsay that,” said the miller, draining his pewter flagon.

“Then, if what you think of were ever to come to pass,” said the wife, hesitatingly, “would it matter so much? She will have enough for both, and one cannot be better than happy.”

“You are a woman, and therefore a fool,” said the miller, harshly, striking his pipe on the table. “The lad is naught but a beggar, and, with these painter’s fancies, worse than a beggar. Have a care that they are not together in the future, or I will send the child to the surer keeping of the nuns of the Sacred Heart.”

The poor mother was terrified, and promised humbly to do his will. Not that she could bring herself altogether to separate the child from her favorite playmate, nor did the miller even desire that extreme of cruelty to a young lad who was guilty of nothing except poverty. But there were many ways in which little Alois was kept away from her chosen companion; and Nello, being a boy proud and quiet and sensitive, was quickly wounded, and ceased to turn his own steps and those of Patrasche, as he had been used to do with every moment of leisure, to the old red mill upon the slope. What his offence was he did not know; he supposed he had in some manner angered Baas Cogez by taking the portrait of Alois in the meadow; and when the child who loved him would run to him and nestle her hand in his, he would smile at her very sadly and say with a tender concern for her before himself, “Nay, Alois, do not anger your father. He thinks that I make you idle, dear, and he is not pleased that you should be with me. He is a good man and loves you well; we will not anger him, Alois.”

But it was with a sad heart that he said it, and the earth did not look so bright to him as it had used to do when he went out at sunrise under the poplars down the straight roads with Patrasche. The old red mill had been a landmark to him, and he had been used to pause by it, going and coming, for a cheery greeting with its people as her little flaxen head rose above the low mill wicket, and her little rosy hands had held out a bone or a crust to Patrasche. Now the dog looked wistfully at a closed door, and the boy went on without pausing, with a pang at his heart, and the child sat within with tears dropping slowly on the knitting to which she was set on her little stool by the stove; and Baas Cogez, working among his sacks and his mill-gear, would harden his will and say to himself, “It is best so. The lad is all but a beggar, and full of idle, dreaming fooleries. Who knows what mischief might not come of it in the future?” So he was wise in his generation, and would not have the door unbarred, except upon rare and formal occasions, which seemed to have neither warmth nor mirth in them to the two children, who had been accustomed so long to a daily gleeful, careless, happy interchange of greeting, speech, and pastime, with no other watcher of their sports or auditor of their fancies than Patrasche, sagely shaking the brazen bells of his collar and responding with all a dog’s swift sympathies to their every change of mood.

All this while the little panel of pine wood remained over the chimney in the mill kitchen with the cuckoo clock and the waxen Calvary; and sometimes it seemed to Nello a little hard that while his gift was accepted, he himself should be denied.

But he did not complain; it was his habit to be quiet. Old Jehan Daas had said ever to him, “We are poor; we must take what God sends--the ill with the good; the poor cannot choose.”

To which the boy had always listened in silence, being reverent of his old grandfather; but nevertheless a certain vague, sweet hope, such as beguiles the children of genius, had whispered in his heart, “Yet the poor do choose sometimes--choose to be great, so that men cannot say them nay.” And he thought so still in his innocence; and one day, when the little Alois, finding him by chance alone among the corn-fields by the canal, ran to him and held him close, and sobbed piteously because the morrow would be her saint’s day, and for the first time in all her life her parents had failed to bid him to the little supper and romp in the great barns with which her feast-day was always celebrated, Nello had kissed her and murmured to her in firm faith, “It shall be different one day, Alois. One day that little bit of pine wood that your father has of mine shall be worth its weight in silver; and he will not shut the door against me then. Only love me always, dear little Alois; only love me always, and I will be great.”

“And if I do not love you?” the pretty child asked, pouting a little through her tears, and moved by the instinctive coquetries of her sex.

Nello’s eyes left her face and wandered to the distance, where, in the red and gold of the Flemish night, the cathedral spire rose. There was a smile on his face so sweet and yet so sad that little Alois was awed by it. “I will be great still,” he said under his breath--“great still, or die, Alois.”

“You do not love me,” said the little spoiled child, pushing him away; but the boy shook his head and smiled, and went on his way through the tall yellow corn, seeing as in a vision some day in a fair future when he should come into that old familiar land and ask Alois of her people, and be not refused or denied, but received in honour; while the village folk should throng to look upon him and say in one another’s ears, “Dost see him? He is a king among men; for he is a great artist and the world speaks his name; and yet he was only our poor little Nello, who was a beggar, as one may say, and only got his bread by the help of his dog.” And he thought how he would fold his grandsire in furs and purples, and portray him as the old man is portrayed in the Family in the chapel of St. Jacques; and of how he would hang the throat of Patrasche with a collar of gold, and place him on his right hand, and say to the people, “This was once my only friend;” and of how he would build himself a great white marble palace, and make to himself luxuriant gardens of pleasure, on the slope looking outward to where the cathedral spire rose, and not dwell in it himself, but summon to it, as to a home, all men young and poor and friendless, but of the will to do mighty things; and of how he would say to them always, if they sought to bless his name, “Nay, do not thank me--thank Rubens. Without him, what should I have been?” And these dreams--beautiful, impossible, innocent, free of all selfishness, full of heroical worship--were so closely about him as he went that he was happy--happy even on this sad anniversary of Alois’s saint’s day, when he and Patrasche went home by themselves to the little dark hut and the meal of black bread, while in the mill-house all the children of the village sang and laughed, and ate the big round cakes of Dijon and the almond gingerbread of Brabant, and danced in the great barn to the light of the stars and the music of flute and fiddle.

“Never mind, Patrasche,” he said, with his arms round the dog’s neck, as they both sat in the door of the hut, where the sounds of the mirth at the mill came down to them on the night air; “never mind. It shall all be changed by-and-by.”

He believed in the future; Patrasche, of more experience and of more philosophy, thought that the loss of the mill supper in the present was ill compensated by dreams of milk and honey in some vague hereafter. And Patrasche growled whenever he passed by Baas Cogez.

“This is Alois’s name-day, is it not?” said the old man Daas that night, from the corner where he was stretched upon his bed of sacking.

The boy gave a gesture of assent; he wished that the old man’s memory had erred a little, instead of keeping such sure account.

“And why not there?” his grandfather pursued. “Thou hast never missed a year before, Nello.”

“Thou art too sick to leave,” murmured the lad, bending his handsome head over the bed.

“Tut! tut! Mother Nulette would have come and sat with me, as she does scores of times. What is the cause, Nello?” the old man persisted. “Thou surely hast not had ill words with the little one?”

“Nay, grandfather, never,” said the boy quickly, with a hot colour in his bent face. “Simply and truly, Baas Cogez did not have me asked this year. He has taken some whim against me.”

“But thou hast done nothing wrong?”

“That I know--nothing. I took the portrait of Alois on a piece of pine; that is all.”

“Ah!” The old man was silent; the truth suggested itself to him with the boy’s innocent answer. He was tied to a bed of dried leaves in the corner of a wattle hut, but he had not wholly forgotten what the ways of the world were like.

He drew Nello’s fair head fondly to his breast with a tenderer gesture. “Thou art very poor, my child,” he said, with a quiver the more in his aged, trembling voice; “so poor! It is very hard for thee.”

“Nay, I am rich,” murmured Nello; and in his innocence he thought so; rich with the imperishable powers that are mightier than the might of kings. And he went and stood by the door of the hut in the quiet autumn night, and watched the stars troop by and the tall poplars bend and shiver in the wind. All the casements of the mill-house were lighted, and every now and then the notes of the flute came to him. The tears fell down his cheeks, for he was but a child; yet he smiled, for he said to himself, “In the future!” He stayed there until all was quite still and dark; then he and Patrasche went within and slept together, long and deeply, side by side.

Now he had a secret which only Patrasche knew. There was a little outhouse to the hut which no one entered but himself--a dreary place, but with abundant clear light from the north. Here he had fashioned himself rudely an easel in rough lumber, and here, on a great gray sea of stretched paper, he had given shape to one of the innumerable fancies which possessed his brain. No one had ever taught him anything; colours he had no means to buy; he had gone without bread many a time to procure even the few rude vehicles that he had here; and it was only in black or white that he could fashion the things he saw. This great figure which he had drawn here in chalk was only an old man sitting on a fallen tree--only that. He had seen old Michel, the woodman, sitting so at evening many a time. He had never had a soul to tell him of outline or perspective, of anatomy or of shadow; and yet he had given all the weary, worn-out age, all the sad, quiet patience, all the rugged, care-worn pathos of his original, and given them so that the old, lonely figure was a poem, sitting there meditative and alone, on the dead tree, with the darkness of the descending night behind him.