A RUMOR FROM THE SOUTH
It was a long winter for Cummins and Mélisse. 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
assistant at the post--a young, red-faced man who had come over on the
ship from England. He was a cheerful, good-natured young fellow, and
when he learned that his new associate 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 competitor 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 Mélisse. 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 passed, seemed
projecting his hopes and his ambitions.
Between his thoughts of Mélisse 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 assured himself always. "Some time, when
Mélisse 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 brass 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 ship 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 passed, 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 ship 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
shore. 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
Mélisse--entered into him, and he shuddered as he thought of what might
happen in the passing 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 Mélisse close in his arms, he told her that never again
would he go away without her. Mélisse, 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 Cummins.
"When Mélisse 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."
Cummins 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,
Mélisse 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.
Mélisse 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 Mélisse 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 Cummins offered up wordless
prayers of thankfulness.
So matters stood at Post Lac Bain in the beginning of Mélisse'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 shivering wind from the edge of civilization to
the bay.