"A missionary is coming over from Fort Churchill to talk to our trappers when they come in. She shall be baptized!"
Like a cat Jan was on his feet, his eyes flashing, his long, thin fingers clenched, his body quivering with a terrible excitement.
"No—no—not baptize by missioner!" he cried. "She shall be good, an' love ze great God, but not baptize by missioner! No—no—no!"
Cummins turned upon him in astonishment. Before him Jan Thoreau stood for a minute like one gone mad, his whole being consumed in a passion terrible to look upon. Lithe giant of muscle and, fearlessness that he was, Cummins involuntarily drew back a step, and the mainspring of instinct within him prompted him to lift a hand, as if to ward off a leaping thing from his breast.
Jan noted the backward step, the guarded uplift of hand, and with an agonized cry he buried his face in his hands. In another instant he had turned, and, before Cummins' startled voice found words, had opened the door and run out into the night. The man saw him darting swiftly toward the forest, and called to him, but there was no response.
There was a hot fire burning in Jan's brain, a blazing, writhing contortion of things that brought a low moaning from his lips. He ran tirelessly and swiftly until he sank down upon the snow in a silent place far from where he had left John Cummins. His eyes still blazed with their strange fire upon the desolation about him, his fingers clenched and unclenched themselves, digging their nails into his flesh, and he spoke softly to himself, over and over again, the name of the little Mélisse.
Painting itself each instant more plainly through the tumult of his emotions was what Jan had come to know as the picture in his brain. Shadowy and indistinct at first, in pale, elusive lines of mental fabric, he saw the picture growing; and in its growth he saw first the soft, sweet outlines of a woman's face, and then great luring eyes, dark like his own—and before these eyes, which gazed upon him with overwhelming love, all else faded away from before Jan Thoreau. The fire went out of his eyes, his fingers relaxed, and after a little while he got up out of the snow, shivering, and went back to the cabin.
Cummins asked no questions. He looked at Jan from his cot, and watched the boy silently as he undressed and went to bed; and in the morning the whole incident passed from his mind. The intangible holds but little fascination for the simple folk who live under the Arctic Circle. Their struggle is with life, their joys are in its achievement, in their constant struggle to keep life running strong and red within them. Such an existence of solitude and of strife with nature leaves small room for curiosity. So the nature of John Cummins led him to forget what had happened, as he would have forgotten the senseless running away of a sledge-dog, and its subsequent return. He saw no tragedy, and no promise of tragedy, in the thing that had occurred.
There was no recurrence of the strange excitement in Jan. He gave no hint of it in word or action, and the thing seemed to be forgotten between the two.
The education of the little Mélisse began at once, while the post was still deserted. It began, first of all, with Maballa. She stared dumbly and with shattered faith at these two creatures who told her of wonderful things in the upbringing of a child—things of which she had never so much as heard rumor before. Her mother instincts were aroused, but with Cree stoicism she made no betrayal of them.