Chapter 8
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 cornfields 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 spoilt 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 honor, whilst 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, whilst 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 color 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.
