Felice bent over and kissed him gently on the head. “I would make you my slave,” she said, softly. “And as for myself, take my hands; they are your willing servitors: take my heart; it is in chains that you have forged.”
And so it happened that Pierre Boutillier became the head of a large estate, and the husband of the pretty widow of Eugene Valleau.
M. Hervieu’s surprise came not in the news of the approaching marriage, but in the stranger fact that here was one who knew his daughter and who had come in search of him. “But I am still an engagé,” he said, “and I have no money for my passage to Manhatte.”
“You are not an engagé, and you are not penniless,” Felice told him. “M. Valleau believed that it would be better for you to serve out your time here, thinking it would not be altogether disagreeable to you.”
“It has been far otherwise. Your kindness and that of M. Valleau give me no unhappy recollection of my bondage,” he answered.
“Before my husband died,” Madame Valleau told him, “he gave me this,” she handed him a paper, “and told me that if ever you should wish to leave me, and it seemed advisable that you should do so, that you were to receive from my hands the amount brought by the sale of certain estates of yours in France, put up for sale and purchased by him for you. By his will he leaves that to you. ‘It is not a great gift,’ he said, ‘but it will start our friend again in some good enterprise when he is ready to take his place with his friends in another country. He has served me well for no wages, and I am doing only what is just in requiting for his services.’”
“Madame!” M. Hervieu was overcome, and could only murmur some unintelligible words of thanks.
“Therefore,” continued Felice, “if you will kindly remain with me until I am married, I will wish you God-speed. And will you please ask your daughter to write to me and send it by a safe hand, and will you give her this little packet?”
M. Hervieu promised, and two weeks later he left the island of St. Domingo, and set sail for the colony of New Netherlands, then beginning to be known as New York.
“This is a better voyage than the last I made,” he said to the captain of the ship in which he had taken passage; “in that I, with fifty others, was wedged into a space scarce big enough for a breath.”