The Honor of the Big Snows Part 9

But the second problem was one whose perplexities troubled him.

c.u.mmins' word of the school at Churchill had put a new and thrilling thought into his head, and always with that thought he coupled visions of the growing Melisse. This year the school would be at Churchill, and the next at York Factory, and after that it might be gone for ever, so that when Melisse grew up there would be none nearer than what Jan looked upon as the other end of the world. Why could not he go to school for Melisse, and store up treasures which in time he might turn over to her?

The scheme was a colossal one, by all odds the largest that had ever entered into his dreams of what life held for him--that he, Jan Th.o.r.eau, should learn to read and write, and do other things like the people of the far South, so that he might help to make the little creature in the cabin like her who slept under the watchful spruce. He was stirred to the depths of his soul, now with fear, again with hope and desire and ambition; and it was not until the first cold chills of approaching winter crept down from the north and east that the ultimate test came, and he told c.u.mmins of his intention.

Once his mind was settled, Jan lost no time in putting his plans into action. Mukee knew the trail to Churchill, and agreed to leave with him on the third day--which gave Williams' wife time to make him a new coat of caribou skin.

On the second evening he played for the last time in the little cabin; and after Melisse had fallen asleep he took her up gently in his arms and held her there for a long time, while c.u.mmins looked on in silence.

When he replaced her in the little bed against the wall, c.u.mmins put one of his long arms about the boy's shoulders and led him to the door, where they stood looking out upon the grim desolation of the forest that rose black and silent against the starlit background of the sky.

High above the thick tops of the spruce rose the lone tree over the grave, like a dark finger pointing up into the night, and c.u.mmins' eyes rested there.

"She heard you first that night, Jan," he spoke softly. "She knew that you were coming long before I could hear anything but the crackling in the skies. I believe--she knows--now--"

The arm about Jan's shoulder tightened, and c.u.mmins' head dropped until his rough cheek rested upon the boy's hair. There was something of the gentleness of love in what he did, and in response to it Jan caught the hand that was hanging over his shoulder in both his own.

"Boy, won't you tell me who you are, and why you came that night?"

"I will tell you, now, that I come from ze Great Bear," whispered Jan.

"I am only Jan Th.o.r.eau, an' ze great G.o.d made me come that night because"--his heart throbbed with sudden inspiration as he looked up into his companion's face--"because ze leetle Melisse was here," he finished.

For a time c.u.mmins made no move or sound; then he drew the boy back into the cabin, and from the little gingham-covered box in the corner he took a buckskin bag.

"You are going to Churchill for Melisse and for HER" he said in a voice pitched low that it might not awaken the baby. "Take this."

Jan drew a step back.

"No, I fin' work with ze compan-ee at Churchill. That is ze gold for Melisse when she grow up. Jan Th.o.r.eau is no--what you call heem?"

His teeth gleamed in a smile, but it lasted only for an instant.

c.u.mmins' face darkened, and he caught him firmly, almost roughly, by the arm.

"Then Jan Th.o.r.eau will never come back to Melisse," he exclaimed with finality. "You are going to Churchill to be at school, and not to work with your hands. THEY are sending you. Do you understand, boy? THEY!"

There was a fierce tremor in his voice. "Which will it be? Will you take the bag, or will you never again come back to Lac Bain?"

Dumbly Jan reached out and took the buckskin pouch. A dull flush burned in his cheeks. c.u.mmins looked in wonder upon the strange look that came into his eyes.

"I pay back this gold to you and Melisse a hundred times!" he cried tensely. "I swear it, an' I swear that Jan Th.o.r.eau mak' no lie!"

Unconsciously, with the buckskin bag clutched in one hand, he had stretched out his other arm to the violin hanging against the wall.

c.u.mmins turned to look. When he faced him again the boy's arm had fallen to his side and his cheeks were white.

The next day he left. No one heard his last words to Melisse, or witnessed his final leave-taking of her, for c.u.mmins sympathized with the boy's grief and went out of the cabin an hour before Mukee was ready with his pack. The last that he heard was Jan's violin playing low, sweet music to the child. Three weeks later, when Mukee returned to Lac Bain, he said that Jan had traveled to Churchill like one who had lost his tongue, and that far into the nights he had played lonely dirges upon his violin.

CHAPTER XII

A RUMOR FROM THE SOUTH

It was a long winter for c.u.mmins and Melisse. It was a longer one for Jan. He had taken with him a letter from the factor at Lac Bain to the factor at Churchill, and he found quarters with the chief clerk's a.s.sistant at the post--a young, red-faced man who had come over on the s.h.i.+p from England. He was a cheerful, good-natured young fellow, and when he learned that his new a.s.sociate had tramped all the way from the Barren Lands to attend the new public school, he at once invested himself with the responsibilities of a private tutor.

He taught Jan, first of all, to say "is" in place of "ees." It was a tremendous lesson for Jan, but he struggled with it manfully, and a week after his arrival, when one evening he was tuning his violin to play for young MacDonald, he said with eager gravity:

"Ah, I have it now, Mr. MacDonald. It ees not 'EES,' it ees 'EES!'"

MacDonald roared, but persisted, and in time Jan began to get the twist out of his tongue.

The school opened in November, and Jan found himself one of twenty or so, gathered there from forty thousand square miles of wilderness. Two white youths and a half-breed had come from the Etawney; the factor at Nelson House sent up his son, and from the upper waters of the Little Churchill there came three others.

From the first, Jan's music found him a premier place in the interest of the tutor sent over by the company. He studied by night as well as by day, and by the end of the second month his only compet.i.tor was the youth from Nelson House. His greatest source of knowledge was not the teacher, but MacDonald. There was in him no inherent desire for the learning of the people to the south. That he was storing away, like a faithful machine, for the use of Melisse. But MacDonald gave him that for which his soul longed--a picture of life as it existed in the wonderful world beyond the wilderness, to which some strange spirit within him, growing stronger as the weeks and months pa.s.sed, seemed projecting his hopes and his ambitions.

Between his thoughts of Melisse and Lac Bain, he dreamed of that other world; and several times during the winter he took the little roll from the box of his violin, and read again and again the written pages that it contained.

"Some time I will go," he a.s.sured himself always. "Some time, when Melisse is a little older, and can go too."

To young MacDonald, the boy from Lac Bain was a "find." The Scottish youth was filled with an immense longing for home; and as his homesickness grew, he poured more and more into Jan's attentive ears his knowledge of the world from which he had come. He told him the history of the old bra.s.s cannon that lay abandoned among the vines and bushes, where a fort had stood at Churchill many years before. He described the coming of the first s.h.i.+p into the great bay; told of Hudson and his men, of great wars that his listener had never dreamed of, of kings and queens and strange nations. At night he read a great deal to Jan out of books that he had brought over with him.

As the weeks and months pa.s.sed, the strange spirit that was calling to the forest boy out of that other world stirred more restlessly within him. At times it urged him to confide in MacDonald what was hidden away in the box of his violin.

The secret nearly burst from him one Sunday, when MacDonald said:

"I'm going home on the s.h.i.+p that comes over next summer. What do you say to going back with me, Jan?"

The spirit surged through Jan in a hot flood, and it was only an accident that kept him from saying what was in his heart.

They were standing with the icy bay stretching off in interminable miles toward the pole. A little way from them, the restless tide was beating up through the broken ice, and eating deeper into the frozen sh.o.r.e. From out of the bank there projected, here and there, the ends of dark, box-like objects, which, in the earlier days of the company, had been gun-cases. In them were the bones of men who had lived and died an age ago; and as Jan looked at the silent coffins, now falling into the sea, another spirit--the spirit that bound him to Melisse--entered into him, and he shuddered as he thought of what might happen in the pa.s.sing of a year.

It was this spirit that won. In the spring, Jan went back to Lac Bain with the company's supplies. The next autumn he followed the school to York Factory, and the third year he joined it at Nelson House. Then the company's teacher died, and no one came to fill his place.

In midwinter of this third year, Jan returned to Lac Bain, and, hugging the delighted Melisse close in his arms, he told her that never again would he go away without her. Melisse, tightening her arms around his neck, made his promise sacred by offering her little rosebud of a mouth for him to kiss. Later, the restless spirit slumbering within his breast urged him to speak to c.u.mmins.

"When Melisse is a little older, should we not go with her into the South?" he said. "She must not live for ever in a place like this."

c.u.mmins looked at him for an instant as if he did not understand. When Jan's meaning struck home, his eyes hardened, and there was the vibrant ring of steel in his quiet voice.

"Her mother will be out there under the old spruce until the end of time," he said slowly; "and we will never leave her--unless, some day, Melisse goes alone."

From that hour Jan no longer looked into the box of his violin. He struggled against the desire that had grown with his years until he believed that he had crushed it and stamped it out of his existence. In his life there came to be but one rising and one setting of the sun.

Melisse was his universe. She crowded his heart until beyond her he began to lose visions of any other world.

Each day added to his joy. He called her "my little sister," and with sweet gravity Melisse called him "brother Jan," and returned in full measure his boundless love. He marked the slow turning of her flaxen hair into sunny gold, and month by month watched joyfully the deepening of that gold into warm shades of brown. She was to be like her mother!

Jan's soul rejoiced, and in his silent way c.u.mmins offered up wordless prayers of thankfulness.

So matters stood at Post Lac Bain in the beginning of Melisse's ninth year, when up from the south there came a rumor. As civil war spreads its deepest gloom, as the struggle of father against son and brother against brother stifles the breathing of nations, so this rumor set creeping a deep pall over the forest people.

Rumor grew into rumor. From the east, the south and the west they multiplied, until on all sides the Paul Reveres of the wilderness carried news that the Red Terror was at their heels, and the chill of a great fear swept like a s.h.i.+vering wind from the edge of civilization to the bay.