The Quality of Mercy Part 34

"And for another thing," he went on, "the high and holy duty we poor people feel not to stop working for a living as long as we live. It's a caste pride. Poverty obliges, as well as n.o.bility."

"Oh, pshaw! Pride obliges, too. It's your wicked pride. You're worse than rich people, as you call us: a great deal prouder. Rich people will let you help them."

"So would poor people, if they didn't need help. You can take a gift if you don't need it. You can accept an invitation to dinner, if you're surfeited to loathing, but you can't let any one give you a meal if you're hungry. You rich people are like children, compared with us poor folks. You don't know life; you don't know the world. I should like to do a girl brought up like you in the ignorance and helplessness of riches."

"You would make me hateful."

"I would make you charming."

"Well, do me, then!"

"Ah, you wouldn't like it."

"Why?"

"Because--I found it out in my newspaper work, when I had to interview people and write them up--people don't like to have the good points they have, recognized; they want you to celebrate the good points they haven't got. If a man is amiable and kind and has something about him that wins everybody's heart, he wants to be portrayed as a very dignified and commanding character, full of inflexible purpose and indomitable will."

"I don't see," said Louise, "why you think I'm weak, and low-minded, and undignified."

Maxwell laughed. "Did I say something of that kind?"

"You meant it."

"If ever I have to interview you, I shall say that under a mask of apparent incoherency and irrelevance, Miss Hilary conceals a profound knowledge of human nature and a gift of divination which explores the most unconscious opinions and motives of her interlocutor. How would you like that?"

"Pretty well, because I think it's true. But I shouldn't like to be interviewed."

"Well, you're safe from me. My interviewing days are over. I believe if I keep on getting better at the rate I've been going the last week, I shall be able to write a play this summer, besides doing my work for the _Abstract_. If I could do that, and it succeeded, the riddle would be read for me."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that I should have a handsome income, and could give up newspaper work altogether."

"Could you? How glorious!" said Louise, with the sort of maternal sympathy she permitted herself to feel for the sick youth. "How much would you get for your play?"

"If it was only reasonably successful, it would be worth five or six thousand dollars a year."

"And is that a handsome income?" she asked, with mounting earnestness.

He pulled himself up in the hammock to get her face fully in view, and asked, "How much do you think I've been able to average up to this time?"

"I don't know. I'm afraid I don't know at all about such things. But I should _like_ to."

Maxwell let himself drop back into the hammock. "I think I won't humiliate myself by giving the figures. I'd better leave it to your imagination. You'll be sure to make it enough."

"Why should you be ashamed of it, if it's ever so little?" she asked.

"But _I_ know. It's your pride. It's like Sue Northwick wanting to give up all her property because her father wrote that letter, and said he had used the company's money. And Matt says it isn't his property at all, and the company has no right to it. If she gives it up, she and her sister will have nothing to live on. And they _won't_ let themselves be helped--any more than--than--_you_ will!"

"No. We began with that; people who need help can't let you help them.

Don't they know where their father is?"

"No. But of course they must, now, before long."

Maxwell said, after the silence that followed upon this. "I should like to have a peep into that man's soul."

"Horrors! Why should you?" asked Louise.

"It would be such splendid material. If he is fond of his children--"

"He and Sue dote upon each other. I don't see how she can endure him; he always made me feel creepy."

"Then he must have written that letter to conciliate public feeling, and to make his children easier about him and his future. And now if you could see him when he realizes that he's only brought more shame on them, and forced them to beggar themselves--it would be a tremendous situation."

"But I shouldn't _like_ to see him at such a time. It seems to me, that's worse than interviewing, Mr. Maxwell."

There was a sort of recoil from him in her tone, which perhaps he felt.

It seemed to interest, rather than offend him. "You don't get the artistic point of view."

"I don't want to get it, if that's it. And if your play is going to be about any such thing as that--"

"It isn't," said Maxwell. "I failed on that. I shall try a comic motive."

"Oh!" said Louise, in the concessive tone people use, when they do not know but they have wronged some one. She spiritually came back to him, but materially she rose to go away and leave him. She stooped for the letter he had dropped out of the hammock and gave it him. "Don't you want this?"

"Oh, thank you! I'd forgotten it." He glanced at the superscription, "It's from Pinney. You ought to know Pinney, Miss Hilary, if you want the _true_ artistic point of view."

"Is he a literary man?"

"Pinney? Did you read the account of the defalcation in the _Events_--when it first came out? All ill.u.s.trations?"

"_That?_ I don't wonder you didn't care to read his letter! Or perhaps he's your friend--"

"Pinney's everybody's friend," said Maxwell, with an odd sort of relish.

"He's delightful. I should like to do Pinney. He's a type." Louise stood frowning at the mere notion of Pinney. "He's not a bad fellow, Miss Hilary, though he _is_ a remorseless interviewer. He would be very good material. He is a mixture of motives, like everybody else, but he has only one ambition: he wants to be the greatest newspaper man of his generation. The ladies nearly always like him. He never lets five minutes pa.s.s without speaking of his wife; he's so proud of her he can't keep still."

"I should think she would detest him."

"She doesn't. She's quite as proud of him as he is of her. It's affecting to witness their devotion--or it would be if it were not such a bore."

"I can't understand you," said Louise, leaving him to his letter.

XV.

Part of Matt Hilary's protest against the status in which he found himself a swell was to wash his face for dinner in a tin basin on the back porch, like the farm-hands. When he was alone at the farm he had the hands eat with him; when his mother and sister were visiting him he pretended that the table was too small for them all at dinner and tea, though he continued to breakfast with the hands, because the ladies were never up at his hour; the hands knew well enough what it meant, but they liked Matt.