The winds had blown, and the rains had rained, and the sun had shone on
her, indeed, and had warmed the whiteness of her limbs, but they had only
given to her body and her soul a hardy, breeze-blown freshness like that
of a field cowslip.
She had never been called anything but Bebee.
One summer day Antoine Maees--a French subject, but a Belgian by adoption
and habit, an old man who got his meagre living by tilling the garden
plot about his hut and selling flowers in the city squares--Antoine,
going into Brussels for his day's trade, had seen a gray bundle floating
among the water-lilies in the bit of water near his hut and had hooked
it out to land, and found a year-old child in it, left to drown, no
doubt, but saved by the lilies, and laughing gleefully at fate.
Some lace-worker, blind with the pain of toil, or some peasant woman
harder of heart than the oxen in her yoke, had left it there to drift
away to death, not reckoning for the inward ripple of the current or the
toughness 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 to
care for the homeless, motherless thing, and they and the people about
all called it Bebee--only Bebee.
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