THE MOST WONDERFUL PART
And now comes the most wonderful part of the story!
Madame Dujardin prepared a bath and said to Marie: "You may have the first turn in the tub because you're a girl.In America the girls have the best of everything", she laughed at Jan, as she spoke."I will help you undress.Jan, you may get ready and wait for your turn in your own room." She unbuttoned Marie's dress, slipped off her clothes, and held up the gay little wrapper for her to put her arms into, and just then she noticed the locket on her neck."We'll take this off, too," she said, beginning to unclasp it.
But Marie clungto it with both hands."No, no," she cried.
"Mother said I was never, never to take it off.It has her picture in it.""May I see it, dear?" asked Madame Dujardin."I should like to know what your mother looks like." Marie nestled close to her, and Madame Dujardin opened the locket.
For a moment she gazed at the picture in complete silence, her eyes staring at it like two blue lights.Then she burst into a wild fit of weeping, and cried out, "Leonie! Leonie! It is not possible! My own sister's children!" She clasped the bewildered Marie in her arms and kissed her over and over again.She ran to the door and brought in Jan and kissed him; and then she called her husband.When he came in and saw her with her arms around both children at once, holding the locket in her hands, and laughing and crying both together, he, too, was bewildered.
"What in the world is the matter, Julie?" he cried.
For answer, shepointed to the face in the locket."Leonie!
Leonie!" she cried."They are my own sister's children! Surely the hand of God is in this!"Her husband looked at the locket."So it is! So it is!" he said in astonishment."I thought at first you had gone crazy,""See!" cried his wife."It's her wedding-gown, and afterward she gave me those very beads she has around her neck! I have them yet!" She rushed from the room and returned in a moment with the beads in her hand.
Meanwhile Jan and Marie had stood still, too astonished to do more than stare from one amazed and excited face to the other, as their new father and mother gazed, first at them, and then at the locket, and last at the beads, scarcely daring to believe the testimony of their own eyes."To think," cried Madame Dujardin at last, "that I should not have known! But there are many Van Hoves in Belgium, and it never occurred to me that they could be my own flesh and blood.It is years since I have heard from Leonie.In fact, I hardly knew she had any children, our lives have been so different.Oh, it is all my fault," she cried, weeping again.
"But if I have neglected her, I will make it up to her children!
It may be, oh, it is just possible that she is still alive, and that she may yet write to me after all these years! Sorrow sometimes bridges wide streams!"Then she turned more quietly to the children.
"You see, dears," she said, "I left Belgium many years ago, and came with your uncle to this country.We were poor when we came, but your uncle has prospered as one can in America.At first Leonie and I wrote regularly to each other.Then she grew more and more busy, and we seemed to have no ties in common, so that at last we lost sight of each other altogether." She opened her arms to Marie and Jan as she spoke, and held them for some time in a close embrace.
Finally she lifted her head and laughed."This will never do!"she exclaimed."You must have your baths, even if you are my own dear niece and nephew.The water must be perfectly cold by this time!"She went into the bathroom, turned on more hot water, and popped Marie into the tub.In half an hour both children had said their prayers and were tucked away for the night in their clean white beds.
Wonderful days followed for Jan and Marie.They began to go to school; they had pretty clothes and many toys, and began to make friends among the little American children of the neighborhood.
But in the midst of these new joys they did not forget their mother, still looking for them, or their father, now fighting, as they supposed, in the cruel trenches of Belgium.But at last there came a day when Aunt Julie received a letter with a foreign postmark.She opened it, with trembling fingers, and when she saw that it began, "My dear Sister Julie," she wept so for joy that she could not see to read it, and her husband had to read it for her.
This was the letter: