JAN RETURNS
All that spring and summer Jan spent in the thick caribou swamps and
low ridge-mountains along the Barrens. It was two months before he
appeared at the post again, and then he remained only long enough to
patch himself up and secure fresh supplies.
Mélisse had suffered quietly during these two months, a grief and
loneliness filling her heart which none knew but herself. Even from
Iowaka she kept her unhappiness a secret; and yet when the gloom had
settled heaviest upon her, she was still buoyed up by a persistent
hope. Until Jan's last visit to Lac Bain this hope never quite went out.
The first evening after his arrival from the swamps to the west, he
came to the cabin. His beard had grown again. His hair was long and
shaggy, and fell in shining dishevelment upon his shoulders. The
sensitive beauty of his great eyes, once responsive to every passing
humor in Mélisse, flashing fun at her laughter, glowing softly in their
devotion, was gone. His face was filled with the age-old silence of the
forest man. Firmly and yet gently, it repelled whatever of the old
things she might have said and done, holding her away from him as if by
power of a strong hand.
This time Mélisse knew that there was left not even the last comforting
spark of hope within her bosom. Jan had gone out of her life for ever,
leaving to her, as a haunting ghost of what they two had once been to
each other, the old violin on the cabin wall.
After he went away again, the violin became more and more to her what
it had once been to him. She played it as he had played it, sobbing her
loneliness and her heart-break through its strings, in lone hours
clasping it to her breast and speaking to it as Jan had talked to it in
years gone by.
"If you could only tell me--if you only could!" she whispered to it one
day, when the autumn was drawing near. "If you could tell me about him,
and what I might do--dear old violin!"
Once during the autumn Jan came in for supplies and traps, and his dogs
and sledge. He was planning to spend the winter two hundred miles to
the west, in the country of the Athabasca. He was at Lac Bain for a
week, and during this time a mail-runner came in from Fort Churchill.
The runner brought a new experience into the life of Mélisse--her first
letter. It was from young Dixon--twenty or more closely written pages
of it, in which he informed her that he was going to spend a part of
the approaching winter at Lac Bain.
She was reading the last page when Jan came into the cabin. Her cheeks
were slightly flushed by this new excitement, which was reflected in
her eyes as she looked at Jan.
"A letter!" she cried, holding out her two hands filled with the pages.
"A letter--to me, Jan, all the way from Fort Churchill!"
"Who in the world--" he began, smiling at her; and stopped.
"It's from Mr. Dixon," she said, the flush deepening in her cheeks.
"He's going to spend part of the winter with us."
"I'm glad of that, Mélisse," said Jan quietly. "I like him, and would
like to know him better. I hope he will bring you some more books--and
strings." He glanced at the old violin. "Do you play much?"
"A great deal," she replied. "Won't you play for me, Jan?"
"My hands are too rough; and besides, I've forgotten all that I ever
knew."
"Even the things you played when I was a baby?"
"I think I have, Mélisse. But you must never forget them."
"I shall remember them--always," she answered softly. "Some day it may
be that I will teach them to you again."
He did not see her again until six months later, when he came in to the
caribou roast, with his furs. Then he learned that another letter had
come to Mélisse, and that Dixon had gone to London instead of coming to
Lac Bain.
The day after the carnival he went back into the country of the
Athabasca. Spring did not see him at Lac Bain. Early summer brought no
news of him. In the floods, Jean went by the water-way to the
Athabasca, and found Thoreau's cabin abandoned. There had not been life
in it for a long time. The Indians said that since the melting snows
they had not seen Jan. A half-breed whom Jean met at Fond du Lac said
that he had found the bones of a white man on the Beaver, with a
Hudson's Bay gun and a horn-handled knife beside them.
Jean came back to Lac Bain heavy at heart.
"There is no doubt but that he is dead," he told Iowaka. "I do not
believe that it will hurt very much if you tell Mélisse."
One day early in September a lone figure came in to the post at noon,
when the company people were at dinner. He carried a pack, and six dogs
trailed at his heels. It was Jan Thoreau.
"I have been down to civilization," was his explanation. "I have
returned to spend this winter at Lac Bain."