Chapter 9

"Yes, Mac, but are you sure you realize what it means to you?" I began urging, because I knew that I would soon have to play my trump card. "Here you are, a grayhead at thirty-five, without a thing in life but that farm, and you--heavens, Mac, don't you know that you are one of the greatest Greek scholars in the world? Don't you think you owe the world something? What are you giving? Nothing! You have suppressed even the knowledge of what you are from the people around you. You get a curt nod from the head of a little college. These people call you Alec, when the whole world wants to call you Master. You are doing work that any farm hand could do, when you ought to be doing work that no one can do as well as yourself. Is this a square deal for other people, Mac? Were you not given obligations as well as gifts?"

"Yes, Bruce." Mac said it sadly. "There's the rub. I was given obligations as well as gifts, and I am taking you home with me now, instead of threshing this out in the hotel at Charlottetown, because I want you and you alone to realize that I am not just a stubborn Islander. And there is home."

He pointed to a cottage in the field. The cottage was back from the road nearly a quarter of a mile. Mac opened the gate, led the horse through it, closed it again and climbed back into the buggy beside me. There were tears in his brown eyes.

"Is every one well?" said Mac hesitatingly. "Is everybody well--I mean of the people I knew best back there?" he asked. I knew what he meant.

"Yes, Mac, _she_ is well," I said, "and I know she is waiting."

I had played my "trump card," but Mac was silent.

The farm was typical of the Island. The kitchen door opened directly on the farmyard, and around it, at the moment, were gathered turkeys, ducks, geese and chickens. Mac brought me to a little gate in the flower-garden fence, and, passing through it, we walked along the pathway before the house, so that I could enter through the front door and be received in the "front room." Island opposition to affectation or "putting on," as the people say, forbade calling this "front room" a parlor. No one would think of doing such a thing, unless he was already well along the way to "aristocracy." One dare not violate the unwritten Island law to keep natural and plain.

I noticed that when Mac spoke to me he used the cultured accents of the old college; but before others he spoke as the Islanders spoke--good English, better English than that of the farmers I knew, but flat--the extremity of plainness. I could not analyze that Island brogue. It sounded like a mixture of Irish and Scotch, unpleasant only because unsoftened. But you could scarcely call it brogue. It struck me as a sort of protest against affectation; as the Islander's way of explaining, without putting it in the sense of the words, that he does not want to be taken at a false valuation. The Island brogue is a notice that the user of it meets you man to man. So it reflected Mac, and it reflected his people, unspoiled, unvarnished, true as steel, full of rigid honesty; but undemonstrative, with the wells of affection hidden, yet full to the top, of pure, bright, limpid water.

The "front room" had a hand-woven carpet on the floor, made of a material called "drugget." A few old prints, in glaring colors, were on the walls. There was a Sacred Heart and an odd-looking picture of the dead Christ resting in a tomb, with an altar above and candles all around it. It was a strange religious conceit. On another wall was a coffin plate, surrounded with waxed flowers and framed, with a little photograph of a young man in the center of the flowers. The chairs were plain enough, but covered with a coarse hand-made lace. It was not Mac's kind of a room, at all. It made me shudder and wonder how the scholar who loved his old book-lined college den and knew the old masters, could even live near to it.

Mac came in very soon, leading an old lady, who walked with a cane. She was bent and wrinkled with age. I could see that she was blind. She had a strange-looking old shawl, the like of which I had only a vague recollection of seeing as a boy, about her shoulders; and on her head was a black cap with white ruching around her face.

"My mother, Bruce," he said, very simply.

As I took the old lady's hand, he said to her: "This is my old friend, Professor Bruce, mother. He has come all the way from New York to see me. I'll leave you together while I go to see sister. Sister has been bedridden for years, Bruce."

The old lady was too much embarrassed to speak. Mac smiled at me as he led her to a chair and said: "Bruce does not look like a professor, mother. He just looks like me."

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.