"Did he ever come back again?" asked the children. Old Marie shook her head.
"Never," she said. "But I got a letter that he had got the curé somewhere in the Amérique du sud—I know not where, I have not learnt all about the geography like these little young ladies—to write for him, before he died of the yellow fever. And he asked me to forgive him all the sorrows he had caused me: it was a good letter, and it consoled me much. That was a long time ago; my Louis would have been in the fifties by now, and my other children were obedient. The good God sends us comfort."
"And about the apple-tree, tell us more, Marie," said Molly. "Did it do well?"
"Indeed yes. Mademoiselle can judge, are not the apples good? Ah, yes, it did well, it grew and it grew, and the first walk I could take with the hand of the bon papa was to the apple-tree. And the first words I could say were 'Mi pommier à Malie.' Before many years there were apples, not so fine at the first, of course, but every year they grew finer and finer, and always they were for me. What we did not eat were sold, and the money given to me to keep for the Carnival, when the bon papa would take me to the town to see the sights."
"And did you grow finer and finer too, Marie?" said Sylvia.
Marie smiled.
"I grew strong and tall, Mademoiselle," she said. "As for more than that it is not for me to say. But they all thought so, the father and mother and the eight brothers, and the bon papa, of course, most of all. And so you see, Mademoiselle, the end was I got spoilt."
"But the apple-tree didn't?"
"No, the apple-tree did its work well. Only I was forgetting to tell you there came a bad year. Everything was bad—the cows died, the harvest was poor, the fruit failed. To the last, the bon papa hoped that 'le pommier de la petite' would do well, though nothing else did, but it was not so. There was a good show of blossom, but when it came to the apples, every one was blighted. And the strange thing was, my little young ladies and little Monsieur, that that was the year the small-pox came—ah, it was a dreadful year!—and we all caught it."
"All?" exclaimed Sylvia.