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.