Chapter V (4)

I could see all the Island respect for learning in the poor old lady's deference. Mac left us, and his mother asked if I would not have some tea. I refused the tea, giving as excuse that it was so close to the hour of the evening meal.

"So, you knew my son at college?" said the mother.

"I knew him well, Mrs. McKinney. He was my dearest friend."

The old lady began to cry softly.

"I am so sorry," she said, "that he failed in his examinations, and yet, I ought to be glad, I suppose, for it is a comfort to have him. Ellie is a cripple and without Alec what would we do? Of course, if he hadn't failed, I couldn't hope to keep him, so it is better, perhaps, as it is. But he was such a smart boy and so anxious to get on. It was a great disappointment to him; and then, of course, none of us liked to have the neighbors know that the boy was not cut out for something better than a farmer. But you must have liked him, when you came all the way from New York to see him."

I began to understand.

That night I thought it all out in my little room, with the flies buzzing around me and the four big posts standing guard over a feather bed, into which I sank and disappeared. I was prepared to face Mac in the morning.

He had already done a good day's work in the fields, before I was up for breakfast, so we went into the garden to thresh it out.

"Mac," I said severely, "did you tell your mother and sister and the people around here that you had failed in your examinations?"

"Well, Bruce," he said haltingly, "I did not exactly tell them that, but I let them think it."

"Good Lord!" I thought, "the man who easily led the whole college." But aloud: "Did you tell them you had no career open to you in New York?"

"Well, Bruce, I had to let them think that, too."

"And you did not tell them, Mac, of the traveling scholarship you won, or the offers that Yale made you?"

"Oh, what was the use, Bruce?" said Mac desperately. "I know it was wrong, but it was the only way I saw. Look here. When I got back home, with all these letters after my name and that traveling scholarship to my credit, I found sister as I told you she was--you'll see her yourself this morning, poor girl--and mother blind. Brother, the best brother that ever lived--it is his picture they have in that hideous frame in the front room--died two months before I graduated. Bruce, there was no one but me. If I had told the truth, they would not have let me stay. They would have starved first. Why, Bruce, sister never wore a decent dress or a decent hat, and mother never had that thing that every old lady on the Island prizes, a silk dress, just because she saved the money for me. I told you that these people worship learning after God." He put his hand to his eyes. "Bruce, I am lonely. I have grown out of the ways of my people. But you wouldn't ask me to grow out of a sense of my duty too?"

"No, I don't want you to come with me, Mac," I said. "I am going back alone. When you are free, the college is waiting. She can be as generous as her son, and, I hope, as patient."

Mac drove me back over Tea Hill and looked with me again from its summit over the waters of Pownal Bay. I understood now its appeal to him. The waters, beautiful as they were, were barriers to his Promised Land. Would Tea Hill, plain little eminence, be to Mac a new Mount Nebo, from which he should gaze longingly, but never leave?

Plain Mac of the Island, farmer with hard hands, scholar with a great mind, son and brother with heart of purest gold! I could not see you through the mist of my tears as the boat carried me from this your Island of the good and true amongst God's children, but I could think only of you as she passed the lighthouse, and the two tiny islands that every one knows but no one visits, and moved down the Strait of Northumberland toward the world that is yours by right of your genius, that wants you and is denied. And I did not ask God to bless you, Mac, though my heart was full of prayer, for I knew, oh, so well, that already had He given you treasures beyond a selfish world's ken to value or to understand.