The Honor of the Big Snows, James Oliver Curwood [classic novels for teens TXT] 📗

I thought my heart had shriveled into a bit of salt blubber; but she came back to me before I had completely died, with her braids done up on the top of her head!"
He stopped suddenly, startled into silence by the strange look that had come into the other's face. For a full minute Jan stood as if the power of movement had gone from him. He was staring over the Frenchman's head, a ghastly pallor growing in his cheeks.
"No--it--means--nothing," he said finally, speaking as if the words were forced from him one by one.
He dropped into a chair beside the table like one whose senses had been dulled by an unexpected blow. With a great sighing breath that was almost a sob, he bowed his head upon his arms.
"Jan Thoreau," whispered Jean softly, "have you forgotten that it was I who killed the missioner for you, and that through all of these years Jean de Gravois has never questioned you about the fight on the mountain top?" There was in his voice, as gentle as a woman's, the vibrant note of a comradeship which is next to love--the comradeship of man for man in a world where friendship is neither bought nor sold. "Have you forgotten, Jan Thoreau? If there is anything Jean de Gravois can do?"
He sat down opposite Jan, his thin, eager face propped in his hands, and watched silently until the other lifted his head. Their eyes met, steady, unflinching, and in that look there were the oath and the seal of all that the honor of the big snows held for those two.
Still without words, Jan reached within his breast and drew forth the little roll which he had taken from his violin. One by one he handed the pages over to Jean de Gravois.
"Mon Dieu!" said Jean, when he had finished reading. He spoke no other words. White-faced, the two men stared, Jan's throat twitching, Gravois' brown fingers crushing the rolls he held.
"That was why I tried to kill the missioner," said Jan at last. He pointed to the more coarsely written pages under Jean's hand. "And that--that--is why it could not signify that Melisse has done up her hair." He rose to his feet, straining to keep his voice even, and gathered up the papers so that they shot back into the little cylinder-shaped roll again. "Now do you understand?"
"I understand," replied Jean in a low voice, but his eyes glittered like dancing dragon-flies as he raised his elbows slowly from the table and stretched his arms above his head. "I understand, Jan Thoreau, and I praise the blessed Virgin that it was Jean de Gravois who killed the missioner out upon the ice of Lac Bain!"
"But the other," persisted Jan, "the other, which says that I--"
"Stop!" cried Jean sharply. He came around the table and seized Jan's hands in the iron grip of his lithe, brown fingers. "That is something for you to forget. It means nothing--nothing at all, Jan Thoreau! Does any one know but you and me?"
"No one. I intended that some day Melisse and her father should know; but I waited too long. I waited until I was afraid, until the horror of telling her frightened me. I made myself forget, burying it deeper each year, until to-day--on the mountain--"
"And to-day, in this cabin, you will forget again, and you will bury it so deep that it will never come back. I am proud of you, Jan Thoreau. I love you, and it is the first time that Jean de Gravois has ever said this to a man. Ah, I hear them coming!"
With an absurd bow in the direction of the laughing voices which they now heard, the melodramatic little Frenchman pulled Jan to the door. Half-way across the open were Melisse and Iowaka, carrying a large Indian basket between them, and making merry over the task. When they saw Gravois and Jan, they set down their burden and waved an invitation for the two men to come to their assistance.
"You should be the second happiest man in the world, Jan Thoreau," exclaimed Jean. "The first is Jean de Gravois!"
He set off like a bolt from a spring-gun in the direction of the two who were waiting for them. He had hoisted the basket upon his shoulder by the time Jan arrived.
"Are you growing old, too, Jan?" bantered Melisse, as she dropped a few steps behind Jean and his wife. "You come so slowly!"
"I think I'm twenty-nine."
"You think!" Her dancing eyes shot up to his, bubbling over with the mischief which she had been unable to suppress that day. "Why, Jan--"
He had never spoken to Melisse as he did now.
"I was born some time in the winter, Melisse--like you. Perhaps it was yesterday, perhaps it is to-morrow. That is all I know."
He looked at her steadily, the grief which he was fighting to keep back tightening the muscles about his mouth.
Like the quick passing of sunshine, the fun swept from her face, leaving her blue eyes staring up at him, filled with a pain which he had never seen in them before. In a moment he knew that she had understood him, and he could have cut out his tongue. Her hand reached his arm, and she stopped him, her face lifted pleadingly, the tears slowly gathering in her eyes.
"Forgive me!" she whispered, her voice breaking into a sob. "Dear, dear Jan, forgive me!" She caught one of his hands in both her own, and for an instant held it so that he could feel the throbbing of her heart. "To-day is your birthday, Jan--yours and mine, mine and yours-- and we will always have it that way--always--won't we, Jan?"


CHAPTER XVII
THE RENUNCIATION
Jan was glad when the evening came, and was gone. Not until Jean and Iowaka had said good night with Croisset and his wife, and both Cummins and Melisse had gone to their rooms, did he find himself relieved of the tension under which he had struggled during all of that night's merry-making in the cabin.
From the first he knew that his nerves were strung by some strange and indefinable sensation that was growing within him--something which he could hardly have explained at first, but which swiftly took form and meaning, and oppressed him more as the hours flew by. Almost fiercely he strove to fight back the signs of it from his face and voice. Never had he played as on this night. His violin leaped with life, his voice rose high in the wild forest songs of Jean de Gravois and Croisset, he sprang aloft in the caribou dance until the tips of his fingers touched the log beams overhead; and yet there was none of the flush of excitement in his face, no joyous fire flashing from his eyes upon Melisse.
She saw this, and wondered. A dozen times her eyes encountered his, straight and questioning, when the others were not looking. She saw in response only a dull, lusterless glow that was not like the Jan who had pursued her that day on the mountain-top.
Jan was unaware of what was lacking in him. He smiled when she gave him these glances; deep down in him his heart trembled at the beauty of her flushed cheeks, the luster of her coiled hair, the swimming depths of her clear eyes; but the mask of the thing at which she wondered still remained.
After the others had gone, Cummins sat up to smoke a pipe. When he had finished, he went to his room. Jan was now sleeping in a room at the company's store, and after a time he rose silently to take down his cap and coat. He opened the outer door quietly, so as not to arouse Melisse, who had gone to bed half an hour before.
As he was about to go out, there came a sound--a low, gentle, whispered word.
"Jan!"
He turned. Melisse stood in her door. She had not undressed, and her hair was still done up in its soft coils, with the crimson bakneesh shining in it. She came to him hesitatingly, until she stood with her two hands upon his arm, gazing into his tense face with that same question in her eyes.
"Jan, you were not pleased with me to-night," she whispered. "Tell me, why?"
"I was pleased with you, Melisse," he replied.
He took one of the hands that was clinging to his arm, and turned his face to the open night. Countless stars gleamed in the sky, as they had shone on another night fifteen years ago. From where they stood they saw the pale flicker of the aurora, sending its shivering arrows out over the dome of the earth, with the same lonely song that it had played when the woman died. Gaunt and solitary, the tall spruce loomed up against the silver glow, its thick head sighing faintly in the night wind, as if in wailing answer to that far-away music in the skies.
Suddenly there leaped up from Jan Thoreau's breast a breath that burst from his lips in a low cry.
"Melisse, Melisse, it was just fifteen years ago that I came in through that forest out there, starved and dying, and played my violin when your mother died. You were a little baby then, and since that night you have never pleased me more than now!"
He dropped her hand and turned squarely to the door, to hide what he knew had come into his face. He heard a soft, heart-broken little sob behind him, and something fell rustling upon his arm.
"Jan, dear Jan!"
Melisse crowded herself into his arms, her hair torn down and tumbling about her shoulders. In her eyes there were the old pride and the old love, the love and pride of what seemed to Jan to be, years ago, the old, childish pleading for his comradeship, for the fun of his strong arms, the frolic of his laugh. Irresistibly they called to him, and in the old glad way he tightened his arms about her shoulders, his eyes glowing, and life leaping back, flushed and full, into his face.
She laughed, happy and trembling, her lips held up to him.
"I didn't please you to-day," she whispered. "I will never do up my hair again!"
He kissed her, and his arms dropped from her shoulders.
"Never, never again--until you have forgotten to love me," she repeated. "Good night, Brother Jan!"
Across the open, through the thinned edge of the black spruce, deeper and deeper into the cold, unquivering lifelessness of the forest, Jan went from the door that closed between him and Melisse, her last words still whispering in his ears, the warm touch of her hair on his cheeks--and the knowledge of what this day had meant for him swiftly surging upon him, bringing with it a torment which racked him to the soul.
Fifteen years ago! He stopped and looked up, the starlight whitening his face. There was no change in this night from that other one of ages and ages ago. There were the same stars, like fierce eyes of pale fire, robbed of softness by the polar cold; there were the same cloudless blue space, the same hissing flashes of the aurora leaping through its infinity, the same trees that had listened to his moaning prayers on that night when he had staggered into Lac Bain.
He went on until he came to where the beaten trail swept up and away from a swamp. As vividly as if it had happened but yesterday, he remembered how he had dragged himself through this swamp, bleeding and starving, his violin clutched to his breast, guided by the barking of dogs, which seemed to come from a million miles away. He plunged