The Honor of the Big Snows - James Oliver Curwood (best ereader for pdf and epub .txt) 📗

south.
"THAT'S hell for me!" said Thornton, pointing. "It's what we call civilization--but it's mostly hell, and it's all hell for me. It's a hell of big cities, of strife, of blood-letting, of wickedness. I never knew how great a hell it was until I came up here--among YOU. I wish to God I could stay--always!"
"You love her," breathed Jan. "You can stay."
"I can't," groaned Thornton. "I can't--unless--"
"What, m'sieur?"
"Unless I lose everything--but her."
Jan's fingers trembled as they sought Thornton's hand.
"And everything is--is--nothing when you give it for love and happiness," he urged. "The great God, I know--"
"Everything," cried Thornton. "Don't you understand? I said EVERYTHING!" He turned almost fiercely upon his companion. "I'd give up my name--for HER. I'd bury myself back there in the forests and never go out of them--for HER. I'd give up fortune, friends, lose myself for ever--for HER. But I can't. Good God, don't you understand?"
Jan stared. His eyes grew large and dark.
"I've spent ten years of WORSE than hell down there--with a woman," went on Thornton. "It happens among us--frequently, this sort of hell. I came up here to get out of it for a time. You know--now. There is a woman down there who--who is my wife. She would be glad if I never returned. She is happy now, when I am away, and I have been happy--for a time. I know what love is. I have felt it. I have lived it. God forgive me, but I am almost tempted to go back--to HER!"
He stopped at the change which had come in Jan, who stood as straight and as still as the blank spruce behind them, with only his eyes showing that there was life in him. Those eyes held Thornton's. They burned upon him through the gray gloom as he had never seen human eyes burn before. He waited, half startled, and Jan spoke. In his voice there was nothing of that which Thornton saw in his eyes. It was low, and soft, and though it had that which rung like steel, Thornton could not have understood or feared it more.
"M'sieur, how far have you gone--WITH HER?" Thornton understood and advanced with his hands reaching out to Jan.
"Only as far as one might go with the purest thing on earth," he said. "I have sinned--in loving her, and in letting her love me, but that is all, Jan Thoreau. I swear that is all!"
"And you are going back into the south?"
"Yes, I am going back into the south."
The next day Thornton did not go. He made no sign of going on the second day. So it was with the third, the fourth, and the fifth. On each of these days Jan went once, in the afternoon, to the office of the sub-commissioner, and Thornton always accompanied him. At times, when Jan was not looking, there was a hungry light in his eyes as he followed the other's movements, and once or twice Jan caught what was left of this look when he turned unexpectedly. He knew what was in Thornton's mind, and he pitied him, grieved with him in his own heart until his own secret almost wrung itself from his lips. Somehow, in a way that he could not understand, Thornton's sacrifice to honor, and his despair, gave Jan strength, and a hundred times he asked himself if a confession of his own misery would do as much for the other. He repeated this thought to himself again and again on the afternoon of the ninth day, when he went to the sub-commissioner's office alone. This time Thornton had remained behind. He had left him in a gloomy corner of the hotel room from which he had not looked up when Jan went out with Kazan.
This ninth day was the last day for Jan Thoreau. In a dazed sort of way he listened as the sub-commissioner told him that the work was ended. They shook hands. It was dark when Jan came out from the company's offices, dark with a pale gloom through which the stars were beginning to glow--with a ghostly gloom, lightened still more in the north with the rising fires of the northern lights. Alone Jan stood for a few moments close down to the river. Across from him was the forest, silent, black, reaching to the end of the earth, and over it, like a signal light, beckoning him back to his world, the aurora sent out its shafts of red and gold. And as he listened there came to him faintly a distant wailing sound that he knew was the voice from that world, and at the sound the hair rose along Kazan's spine, and he whined deep down in his throat. Jan's breath grew quicker, his blood warmer. Over there--across the river--his world was calling to him, and he, Jan Thoreau, was now free to go. This very night he would bury himself in the forest again, and when he lay down to sleep it would be with his beloved stars above him, and the winds whispering sympathy and brotherhood to him in the spruce tops. He would go--NOW. He would say good-by to Thornton--and GO.
He found himself running, and Kazan ran beside him. He was breathless when he came to the one lighted street of the town. He hurried to the hotel and found Thornton sitting where he had left him.
"It is ended, m'sieur," he cried in a low voice. "It is over, and I am going. I am going to-night."
Thornton rose. "To-night," he repeated.
"Yes, to-night--now. I am going to pick up my things. Will you come?"
He went ahead of Thornton to the bare little room in which he had slept while at the hotel. He did not notice the change in Thornton until he had lighted a lamp. Thornton was looking at him doggedly. There was an unpleasant look in his face, a flush about his eyes, a rigid tenseness in the muscles of his jaws.
"And I--I, too, am going to-night," he said. "Into the South, m'sieur?"
"No, into the NORTH." There was a fierceness in Thornton's emphasis. He stood opposite Jan, leaning over the table on which the light was placed. "I've broken loose," he went on. "I'm not going south--back to that hell of mine. I'm never going south again. I'm dead down there-- dead for all time. They'll never hear of me again. They can have my fortune--everything. I'm going North. I'm going to live with YOU people--and God--AND HER!"
Jan sank into a chair, Thornton sat down in one across from him.
"I am going back to her," he repeated. "No one will ever know."
He could not account for the look in Jan's eyes nor for the nervous twitching of the lithe brown hands that reached half across the table. But Kazan's one eye told him more than Thornton could guess, and in response to it that ominous shivering wave rose along his spine. Thornton would never know that Jan's fingers twitched for an instant in their old mad desire to leap at a human throat.
"You will not do that," he said quietly.
"Yes, I will," replied Thornton. "I have made up my mind. Nothing can stop me but--death."
"There is one other thing that can stop you, and will, m'sieur," said Jan as quietly as before. "I, Jan Thoreau, will stop you."
Thornton rose slowly, staring down into Jan's face. The flush about his eyes grew deeper.
"I will stop you," repeated Jan, rising also. "And I am not death."
He went to Thornton and placed his two hands upon his shoulders, and in his eyes there glowed now that gentle light which had made Thornton love him as he had loved no other man on earth.
"M'sieur, I will stop you," he said again, speaking as though to a brother. "Sit down. I am going to tell you something. And when I have told you this you will take my hand, and you will say, 'Jan Thoreau, I thank the Great God that something like this has happened before, and that it has come to my ears in time to save the one I love.' Sit down, m'sieur."


CHAPTER XXVII
JAN'S STORY
Jan had aged five years during those two hours in the office of the sub-commissioner; he aged now as Thornton looked at him. There came the same tired, hopeless glow into his eyes, the same tense lines in his face. And yet, quickly, he changed as he had not changed on that afternoon. Two livid spots began to burn in his cheeks as he sat down opposite Thornton. He turned the light low, and his eyes glowed more darkly and with an animal-like luster in the half gloom. Something in him now, a quivering, struggling passion that lay behind those eyes, held Thornton white and silent.
"M'sieur," he began in the low voice which Thornton was beginning to understand, "I am going to tell you something which I have told to but two other human beings. It is the story of another man--a man from civilization, like you, who came up into this country of ours years and years ago, and who met a woman, as you have met this girl at Oxford House, and who loved her as you love this one, and perhaps more. It is singular that the case should be so similar, m'sieur, and it is because of this that I believe Our Blessed Lady gives me courage to tell it to you. For this man, like you, left a wife--and two children--when he came into the North. M'sieur, I pray the Great God to forgive him, for he left a third child--unborn."
Jan leaned upon his hand so that it shaded his face.
"It is not so much of THAT as of what followed that I am going to tell you, m'sieur," he went on. "It was a beautiful love--on the woman's part, and it would have been a beautiful love on the man's part if it had been pure. For her he gave up everything, even his God--as you would give up everything--and your God--for this girl at Oxford House. M'sieur, I will speak mostly of the woman now. She was beautiful. She was one of the three most beautiful things that God ever placed in our world, and she loved this man. She married him, believed in him, was ready to die for him, to follow him to the ends of the earth, as our women will do for the men they love. God in Heaven, can you not guess what happened, m'sieur? A CHILD WAS BORN!"
So fiercely did Jan cry out the words that Thornton jerked back as though a blow had been struck at him from out of the gloom.
"A child was born!" repeated Jan, and Thornton heard his nails digging in the table. "That was the first curse of God--a child! La Charogne-- les betes de charogne--that is what we call them--beasts of carrion and carrion eaters, breeders of devils and sin! Mon Dieu, that is what happened! A child was born, with the curse of God upon him!"
Jan stopped, his nails digging deeper, his breath escaping from him as though he had been running.
"Down in YOUR world he would have grown up a MAN," he continued, speaking more calmly. "I have heard that--since. It is common down there to be a two-legged carrion--a man or a woman born out of wedlock. I have been told so, and that it is a curse not without hope. But here it is different. The curse never dies. It follows, day after day, year after year. And this child--more unfortunate than the wild things, was born one of them. Do you understand, m'sieur? If the winds had whispered the secret nothing would have come near him--the Indian