The City and the World and Other Stories Part 15

"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 scholars.h.i.+p 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 wors.h.i.+p learning after G.o.d." 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 G.o.d's children, but I could think only of you as she pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d 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.