“In the meantime I may give a few particulars that may be of interest to those who will read these pages. Pierre and Edmée never saw poor Marguerite Ribou again; but years after they had news of her death—she died peacefully—from the kind priest in Paris, who had never lost sight of her, and who restored to Edmée the jewels and money the poor girl had so honestly kept for her. And thanks to him—for neither my father or mother ever entered Paris again—the little portrait, which had been the means of Pierre’s finding Edmée and her mother, was recovered from the old dealer in antiquities, and placed, with the other relics of her child-life, in the best parlour at Belle Prairie Farm, where I trust it may be admired and loved by many generations of the descendants of Pierre and Edmée Germain. And now—”
Madame Marceau stopped suddenly, and looked up.
“What is it, mother dear? Go on, please—that is if you are not tired,” said several voices.
“No, dears, I am not tired. I have not read as much to-day as the two last times.” (For though I have not interrupted the course of the story to say so, it will be readily understood that the reading of the old manuscript had occupied several holiday or Sunday evenings). “But,” she went on, “I have stopped simply because there is no more to read! Those two words, ‘and now,’ are the last of the manuscript.”
“Oh dear!”—“What a pity!”—“Did our great-grandmother never write any more to it, as our grandmother hoped she would?” exclaimed the children.
“No, my dears. She often intended to do so, but she did not live many years after her husband’s death. She lived to see my mother happily married to my good father and then she died. I think the world seemed a strange place to her without her Pierre. She spoke of the manuscript not long before her death. ‘After all,’ she said, ‘no words of mine could have done justice to his goodness. Teach your children to honour the memory of their grandfather, and to know that a long line of ancestry is not the only thing to be proud of.’”
“But mother,” said Pierre Marceau, half-timidly, “if one’s ancestors have been good people?”
“Ah yes, my boy. In such case be not so much proud of them as grateful to the good God for having come of such a stock, be they noblemen or farmers, high in the world’s esteem, or working with their hands for their daily bread,” said Farmer Marceau, as he rose from the arm-chair where he had been sitting to listen to his wife’s reading.
“And the Valmonts were good,” whispered Pierre to his sister Edmée; “so we may be a little proud of them, you see, after all.”