"Then I do not care. No place will seem like home but this."
He would not go to France, but busied himself with his fields and his tenants. He came back to the old house, altered a little, the room where miladi had spent her fretful invalid years was quite remodelled. Vines grew up about it. The narrow steps were widened.
Autumn came, and winter. The cold and somewhat careless living carried off many of the English. But Madame Hébert had married again, and Thérèse had found a husband. There was Nicolas Revert, with some growing children. Duchesne, a surgeon, they had been glad to welcome. Thomas Godefroy, Pierre Raye, and the Couillards formed quite a French colony. They met now and then, and kept the old spirit alive with their songs and stories.
June had come again, and the town had begun to bloom. There were still parties searching for the north sea, for the route to India, for the great river that was said to lie beyond the lakes. The priests, too, were stretching out their lines, especially the Jesuits, about whom still lingers the flavor of heroic martyrdom. Father Breibouf coming back for a short stay, to get some new word from France, told the fate of one unfortunate party. Among them he said "was that fine Indian interpreter, Savignon, who you must remember went to the rescue of a party the last time he was in Quebec. He was a brave man, and a great loss to us. He had come to an excellent state of mind, and was one of the few Indians that give me faith in the salvation of the race."
Rose's eyes were lustrous with tears as she listened to this eulogy. He had proved nobler than his first passion of love. She had some Masses said for his soul, but it pleased her better to give thanks to God for his redemption.
"Now you belong to no one but me," Destournier said to her some weeks later, when she had recovered from her sorrow. "Yet I feel that it is selfish to take your sweet youth. I am no longer young. I shall always be a little lame, and never perhaps realize my dream of prosperity. But I love you. I loved you as a little girl, you have always, in some fashion, belonged to me."
"I am glad to belong to you, to take your name. Do you remember that I have no other name but Rose? You are very good to shelter me thus. I think I could never have gone gladly to any one else. We are a part of old Quebec, we are still French," and there was a little triumph in her tone.
It was true the English had taken possession after peace had been declared, and had not the right to hold the country. When France demanded the recession King Charles held off, and the Kirkes were unwilling to yield up the government, as they found great profit in the fur trade. But needing money sorely, and as the Queen's dowry as a French princess had only been half paid, he made this a condition, and Richelieu accepted it.
So in 1632 Acadia, and all the important points in Canada, were ceded back to France.
In the spring of the next year Champlain was again commissioned Governor, and he set sail from Dieppe, with three vessels freighted with goods, provisions, and the farming implements of that day, clothing and some of the new hand-looms, beside seeds of all kinds. Two hundred persons, many of them married couples, and farmers were to found a new Quebec.