“From a hundred and fifty sizes, colors, and dispositions you can surely pick yourself one mate, my man.”
“But the honesty of them,” demurred Jacques, “and their obedience after you are at the trouble of getting them home; though girls from Rouen were always good girls. I have not made this long voyage to pick a Rouen wife, to go back again empty of hand. M’sieur, it is certainly your affair as much as mine; and if you see me open my mouth to gaze at a rouged woman who will eat up our provender and bring us no profit, give me a punch with your scabbard. What I want is a good hearty peasant girl from Rouen, who can milk, and hoe, and cut hay, and help grind in the mill, and wait on Mademoiselle de Granville without taking fright.”
“And one whom I can bless as my joint heir with you, my Jacques,” said the young commandant, turning a pleasant face over his subaltern. “Ultimately you will be my heirs, when Renée is done with St. Bernard and the other islands of the seigniory. Therefore—yes—I want a very good girl indeed, from Rouen, to perpetuate a line of my father’s peasantry on Adam Dollard’s estate in New France.”
“Yes, m’sieur,” responded Jacques dejectedly as he plodded upward.
It grieved him that a light leg and a high bright face like Dollard’s were sworn to certain destruction. His pride in the house of Des Ormeaux was great, but his love for the last male of its line was greater. This Adam Daulac, popularly called Dollard, was too mighty a spirit for him to wrestle with; so all his dissent was silent. When he recalled the cavalier’s gay beginning in France, he could not join it to the serious purpose of the same man in New France.
Jacques climbed with his face towards the ground, but Dollard gazed over the St. Lawrence’s upper flood where misty headlands were touched with spring grayness. The river, like an elongated sea, wound out of distances. There had been an early thaw that year, and no drowned fragments of ice toppled about in the current.
So vast a reach of sight was like the beginning of one of St. John’s visions.