Burned Bridges Part 10

If his tone was harsh and curt he could not help that. It was all he could say and the only possible fashion of saying it. He wanted to cry aloud his pain, the yearning ache that filled him, and he could not, would not--no more than he would have whined under pure physical hurt.

But when he heard the faint rustle of her cotton dress and her step outside he put his face on his hands and took his breath with a shuddering sigh.

At that, he was mistaken. Sophie had not gone. There was the quick, light pad of her feet on the floor, her soft warm hands closed suddenly about his neck, and he looked up into eyes bright and wet. Her face dropped to a level with his own.

"I'm so sorry, big man," she whispered, in a small, choked voice. "It hurts me too."

He felt the warm moist touch of her lips on his cheek, the faint exhalation of her breath, and while his arms reached swiftly, instinctively to grasp and hold her close, she was gone. And this time she did not come back.

CHAPTER XI

A MAN'S JOB FOR A MINISTER

Having thus received a sad jolt through the medium of his affections, Mr. Thompson, like countless numbers of human beings before him, set about gathering himself together. He did a tremendous lot of thinking about things in general, about himself and Sophie Carr in particular.

Moping in that isolated cabin his mind took on a sort of abnormal activity. He could not even stop thinking when he wanted to stop. He would lie awake in the silent darkness long after he should have been asleep, going over his narrow and uneventful existence, the unwelcome and anguished present, the future that was nothing but a series of blank pages which he had yet to turn in G.o.d only knew what bitterness and sorrow. That was the way he gloomily put it to himself. He had still to learn what an adaptable, resilient organism man is. This, his first tentative brush with life, with the realities of pain and pa.s.sion, had left him exceedingly cast down, more than a little inclined to pessimism.

He experienced gusts of unreasoning anger at Sophie Carr, forgetting, as a man wounded in his egotism and disappointed in his first pa.s.sionate yearning for a mate is likely to forget, that he had brought it on himself, that Sophie had not encouraged him, nor lured him to his undoing, nor given him aught to nourish the illusion that she was his for the asking.

Sometimes he would have a vivid flash of jealousy when he thought about her and Tommy Ashe, when he recalled her admissions. And he would soften from that mood, twisting his lips wryly, when he remembered the pitying tenderness of her good-by.

He could not in the least understand the girl nor her motives, any more than he could understand the transformation that he felt vaguely was taking place in himself. She was too wise for her years and her experience. There was a stinging truth in some of the things she said.

And it was his fault, not hers, that they were unpalatable truths. What did a man like himself have to offer a girl like her? Nothing. She had his measure in everything but sheer brute strength, most of all in the stoutness of her resolution. For Mr. Thompson, pondering soberly, realized that if he gave free play to the feelings Sophie Carr had stirred up in him, there was no folly he was not capable of committing.

He, whose official creed it was to expound self-denial, would have followed his impulses blindly. He would have married out of hand.

And after that, what?

He could not see clearly, when he tried to see. He was no longer filled with the sublime faith that a beneficent Providence kept watch and ward over him, and all men. He was in fact now almost of the opinion that both sparrows and preachers might fall and the Great Intelligence remain unperturbed. It seemed necessary that a man should do more than have faith. He must imperatively make some conscious, intelligent effort on his own behalf. He was especially of this opinion since the Board of Home Missions had overlooked the matter of forwarding his quarterly salary on time. The faith that moveth mountains was powerless to conjure flour and sugar and tea out of those dusky woods and silent waterways--at least not without a canoe and labor and a certain requisite medium of exchange.

No, he did not blame Sophie Carr for refusing to allow her judgment to be fogged with sentiment. He only marvelled that she could do it where he had failed. He could not blame her--not if his speech and activities since he came to Lone Moose were the measure of his possible achievement.

He was taking grim, unsparing stock of himself, of what he had, of what he had accomplished altogether, by this time. It was not much. It was not even promising. A theological education, which, compared to the sort of culture Sam Carr and his daughter had managed to acquire, seemed rather inadequate and one-sided. They knew more about the principles he was supposed to teach than he knew himself. And their knowledge extended to fields where he could not follow. When he compared himself with Tommy Ashe--well, Tommy was an Oxford man, and although Oxford had not indelibly stamped him, still it had left its mark.

These people had covered all his ground--and they had gone exploring further in fields of general knowledge while he sat gazing smugly at his own reflection in a theological mirror. Upon that score certainly the count was badly against him.

As for his worldly possessions, when Mr. Thompson sardonically considered them as a means of supporting a wife he was forced to admit that the provision would be intolerably meager. His prospects included a salary that barely sufficed for one. It was apparent, he concluded, that the Board of Home Missions, like the Army and Navy, calculated its rank and file to remain in single blessedness and subsist frugally to boot.

As to his late accomplishments in the field of labor, Mr. Thompson looked out of his cabin door to where he could see dimly through the trees the uncompleted bulk of his church--and he set down a mental cipher against that account. It was waste effort. He felt in his heart that he would never finish it. What was the use?

He tried to whip up the old sense of duty to his calling, to the Church, to the great good which he had been taught he should accomplish. And he could muster up nothing but an irritating sense of hollow wordiness in many of his former dictums and utterances, a vast futility of effort.

Whereupon he at once found himself face to face with a fresh problem, in which the question of squaring his material needs and queer half-formed desires with his actions loomed paramount. In other words Mr. Thompson began, in a fashion scarcely apprehended, upon the painful process of formulating a philosophy of life that would apply to life as it was forcing itself upon his consciousness--not as he had hitherto conceived life to be.

But he was unable to pin himself down to any definite plan. He could not evolve a clear idea of what to do, nor even of what he wanted to do. And in the interim he did little save sit about his cabin, deep in introspection, chop firewood as needed and cook his plain fare--that was gradually growing plainer, more restricted. Sometimes he varied this by long solitary tramps through the woods along the brushy bank of Lone Moose Creek.

This hermit existence he kept up for over a fortnight. He had fought with Tommy Ashe and he felt diffident about inflicting his company on Tommy, considering the _casus belli_. Nor could he bring himself to a casual dropping in on Sam Carr. He shrank from meeting Sophie, from hearing the sound of her voice, from feeling the tumult of desire her nearness always stirred up in him. And there was nowhere else to go, no one with whom he could talk. He could not hold converse with the Crees.

The Lachlan family relapsed into painful stiffness when he entered their house. There was no common ground between him and them.

He was really marking time until the next mail should arrive at Fort Pachugan. The days were growing shorter, the nights edged with sharp frosts. There came a flurry of snow that lay a day and faded slowly in the eye of the weakening sun.

Mr. Thompson, watching his daily diminishing food supply with sedulous consideration, knew that the winter was drawing near, a season merciless in its rigor. He knew that one of these days the northerly wind would bring down a storm which would blanket the land with snow that only the sun of the next May would banish. He was ill-prepared to face such an iron-jawed season.

If he stayed there it would just about take his quarterly salary to supply him with plain food and the heavier clothing he needed. But--he drew a long breath and asked himself one day why he should stay there.

Why should he? He could not forbear a wry grimace when he tried to see himself carrying out his appointed task faithfully to the end--preaching vainly to uncomprehending ears month after month, year after year, stagnating mentally and suffocating spiritually in those silent forests where G.o.d and G.o.dly living was not a factor at all; where food, clothing, and shelter loomed bigger than anything else, because until these primary needs were satisfied a man could not rise above the status of a hungry animal.

Yet he shrank from giving up the ministry. He had been bred to it, his destiny sedulously shaped toward that end by the maiden aunts and the theological schools. It was, in effect, his trade. He could scarcely look equably upon a future apart from prayer meetings, from Bible cla.s.ses, from carefully thought out and eloquently delivered sermons. He felt like a renegade when he considered quitting that chosen field. But he felt also that it was a field in which he had no business now.

He was still in this uncertain frame of mind a few days later when he borrowed a canoe from Lachlan and set out for the Fort. He had kept away from Carr's for nearly five weeks. Neither Sophie nor her father had come to his cabin again. Once or twice he had hailed Carr from a distance. In the height of his loneliness he had traversed the half-mile to Tommy Ashe's shack up Lone Moose, only to find it deserted. He learned later that Lachlan's oldest son and Ashe had gone partners to run a line of traps away to the north of the village. It occurred to Thompson that he might do the same--if--well, he would see about that when he got home from Pachugan.

The birch bark Lachlan let him have occasioned him many a rare tussle before he finally beached it at the Fort. The fall winds were roughening the lake. It was his first single-handed essay with the paddle. But he derived a certain satisfaction from winning alone against wind and water, and also gained food for thought in the odd circ.u.mstance of his growing tendency to get a glow out of purely physical achievements. It did not irk nor worry him now to sweat and strain for hours on end.

Instead, he found in that continued, concentrated muscular effort a happy release from troublesome reflection.

His cheque was waiting. As he fingered the green slip whose face value was one hundred and twenty dollars, one fourth of his yearly stipend, he felt relieved, and at the same time oddly reluctant. Not until late in the evening did he get at the root of that reluctance. MacLeod had hospitably insisted on putting him up. They sat in the factor's living room before a great roaring fireplace. Their talk had lapsed into silence. MacLeod leaned back in his chair, pipe in hand, frowning abstractedly.

"Man," he said at length, his bearded face wrinkled with a smile, "I wish ye were no a preacher wi' labors i' the vineyard of the Lord tae occupy yer time. I'd have ye do a job for me."

"A job?" Thompson came out of his preoccupation.

"Aye," MacLeod grunted. "A job. A reg'lar man's job. There'd be a reasonable compensation in't. It's a pity," he continued dryly, "that a parson has a mind sae far above purely mateerial conseederation."

"It may surprise you," Mr. Thompson returned almost as dryly, "to know that I have--to a certain extent--modified my views upon what you term material considerations. They are, I have found, more important than I realized."

The factor took his pipe out of his mouth and regarded Thompson with frank curiosity.

"Well," he remarked finally. "Yer a young man. It's no surprisin'." He paused a second.

"Would it interest ye--would ye consider givin' a month or two of yer time to a legitimate enterprise if it was made worth yer while?" he asked bluntly.

"Yes," Thompson answered with equal directness. "If I knew what it was--if it's something I can do."

"I'm just marking time at Lone Moose," he went on after a pause. There was a note of discouragement in his voice. "I'm--well, completely superfluous there. I'd be tempted--"

He did not go farther. Nor did MacLeod inquire into the nature of the suggested temptation. He merely nodded understandingly at the first part of Thompson's reply.

"Ye could do it fine, I think," he said thoughtfully, "wi' the use of yer head an' the bit coachin' and help I'd provide. It's like this.

Pachugan's no so good a deestrict as it used tae be. The fur trade's slowin' down, an' the Company's no so keen as it was in the old days when it was lord o' the North. I mind when a factor was a power--but that time's past. The Company's got ither fish tae fry. Consequently there's times when we're i' the pickle of them that had tae make bricks wi'oot straw. I mean there's times when they dinna gie us the support needful to make the best of what trade there is. Difficulties of transportation for one thing, an' a dyin' interest in a decayin' branch of Company business. Forbye a' that they expect results, just the same.

"Now, I'm short of three verra necessary things, flour, tea, and steel traps. I canna get them frae Edmonton. They didna fully honor my fall requisitions, an' it's too late i' the season now. Yet they'll ask why I dinna get the skins next spring, ye understand. If the Indians dinna get fully supplied here, they'll go elsewhere; they can do that since there's a French firm strung a line o' posts to compete i' the region, ye see.

"Now I havena got the goods I need an' I canna get them frae Company sources. But there's a free trader set himsel' up tae the north o' here last season. The North's no a monopoly for the Company these days, ye ken. They canna run a free trader out i' the old high-handed fashion.

But there's a bit of the old spirit left--an' this laddie's met wi'

difficulties, in a way o' speakin'. He's discouraged tae the point where he'll sell cheap; an' he's a fair stock o' the verra goods I want. I'd tak' over his stock to-morrow--but he's ninety-odd miles away. I canna leave here i' the height o' the outfittin' season. I ha' naebody I can leave in charge.

"The job for ye wad be tae go up there, inventory his stock, take it over, an' stay there tae distribute it tae such folk as I'd send tae be supplied in that section. Wi' that completed, transfer the tag-ends doon here. I'd furnish ye a breed tae guide ye there an' interpret for ye, an' tae pa.s.s on the quality o' such furs as might offer. He'd grade them, an' ye'd purchase accordin'. Do ye see? It's no a job I can put on anny half-breed. There's none here can write and figure."

"As it sounds," Thompson replied, "I daresay I could manage. You said it would be worth my while. What do I gather from that?"