For when Mrs. Lachlan hospitably brewed a cup of tea and Thompson took
the opportunity of making his customary prayer before food an appeal
for divine essence to be showered upon these poor sinful creatures of
earth, the Lachlan family rose from its several knees with an air of
some embarrassing matter well past. And they hastened to converse
volubly upon the weather and the mosquitoes and Sam Carr's garden and a
new canoe that Lachlan's boys were building, and such homely interests.
As to church and service they were utterly dumb, patently unable to
follow Thompson's drift when he spoke of those things. If they had souls
that required salvation they were blissfully unconscious of the fact.
But they urged him to come again, when he rose to leave. They seemed to
regard him as a very great man, whose presence among them was an honor,
even if his purposes were but dimly apprehended.
The three walked back across the meadow, Breyette and MacDonald
chattering lightly, Thompson rather preoccupied. It was turning out so
different from what he had fondly imagined it would be. He had envisaged
a mode of living and a manner of people, a fertile field for his labors,
which he began to perceive resentfully could never have existed save in
his imagination. He had been full of the impression, and the advice and
information bestowed upon him by the Board of Missions had served to
heighten the impression, that in Lone Moose he would fill a crying want.
And he was not so obtuse as to fail of perceiving that no want of him or
his message existed. It was discouraging to know that he must strive
mightily to awaken a sense of need before he could begin to fulfill his
appointed function of showing these people how to satisfy that need.
Apart from these spiritual perplexities he found himself troubled over
practical matters. His creed of blind trust in Providence did not seem
so sound and true. He found himself dreading the hour when his swarthy
guides would leave him to his lonely quarters. He beheld terrible vistas
of loneliness, a state of feeling to which he had always been a
stranger. He foresaw a series of vain struggles over that rusty
cookstove. It did him no good to recall that he had been told in the
beginning that he would occupy the mission quarters, that he must
provide himself with ample supplies of food, that he might have to
prepare that food himself.
His mind had simply been unable to envisage the sordid reality of these
things until he faced them. Now that he did face them they seemed more
terrible than they really were.
Lying wakeful on his bed that night, listening to the snoring of the
half-breeds on the floor, to the faint murmur of a wind that stirred the
drooping boughs of the spruce, he reviewed his enthusiasms and his
tenuous plans--and slipped so far into the slough of despond as to call
himself a misguided fool for rearing so fine a structure of dreams upon
so slender a foundation as this appointment to a mission in the outlying
places. He blamed the Board of Missions. Obviously that august circle of
middle-aged and worthy gentlemen were sadly ignorant of the North.