The morning which followed was that of a warm, lulling, luxuriant June
day, whose high tides of life spread to everything. Maxwell felt them in
his weak pulses where he sat writing at an open window of the farmhouse,
and early in the forenoon he came out on the piazza of the farmhouse,
with a cushion clutched in one of his lean hands; his soft hat-brim was
pulled down over his dull, dreamy eyes, where the far-off look of his
thinking still lingered. Louise was in the hammock, and she lifted
herself alertly out of it at sight of him, with a smile for his absent
gaze.
"Have you got through?"
"I've got tired; or, rather, I've got bored. I thought I would go up to
the camp."
"You're not going to lie on the ground, there?" she asked, with the
importance and authority of a woman who puts herself in charge of a sick
man, as a woman always must when there is such a man near her.
"I would be willing to be under it, such a day as this," he said. "But
I'll take the shawl, if that's what you mean. I thought it was here?"
"I'll get it for you," said Louise; and he let her go into the parlor
and bring it out to him. She laid, it in a narrow fold over his
shoulder; he thanked her carelessly, and she watched him sweep languidly
across the buttercupped and dandelioned grass of the meadow-land about
the house, to the dark shelter of the pine grove at the north. The sun
struck full upon the long levels of the boughs, and kindled their
needles to a glistening mass; underneath, the ground was red, and
through the warm-looking twilight of the sparse wood the gray canvas of
a tent showed; Matt often slept there in the summer, and so the place
was called the camp. There was a hammock between two of the trees, just
beyond the low stone wall, and Louise saw Maxwell get into it.
Matt came out on the piazza in his blue woollen shirt and overalls and
high boots, and his cork helmet topping all.
"You look like a cultivated cowboy that had gobbled an English tourist,
Matt," said his sister. "Have you got anything for me?"
Matt had some letters in his hands which the man had just brought up
from the post-office. "No; but there are two for Maxwell--"
"I will carry them to him, if you're busy. He's just gone over to the
camp."
"Well, do," said Matt. He gave them to her, and he asked, "How do you
think he is, this morning?"
"He must be pretty well; he's been writing ever since breakfast."
"I wish he hadn't," said Matt. "He ought really to be got away somewhere
out of the reach of newspapers. I'll see. Louise, how do you think a
girl like Sue Northwick would feel about an outright offer of help at
such a time as this?"
"How, help? It's very difficult to help people," said Louise, wisely.
"Especially when they're not able to help themselves. Poor Sue! I don't
know what she _will_ do. If Jack Wilmington--but he never really cared
for her, and now I don't believe she cares for him. No, it couldn't be."
"No; the idea of love would be sickening to her now."
Louise opened her eyes. "Why, I don't know what you mean, Matt. If she
still cared for him, I can't imagine any time when she would rather know
that he cared for her."
"But her pride--wouldn't she feel that she couldn't meet him on equal
terms--"
"Oh, pride! Stuff! Do you suppose that a girl who really cared for a
person would think of the terms she met them on? When it comes to such a
thing as that there _is_ no pride; and proud girls and meek girls are
just alike--like cats in the dark."
"Do you think so?" asked Matt; the sunny glisten, which had been wanting
to them before, came into his eyes.
"I _know_ so," said Louise. "Why, do you think that Jack Wilmington
still--"
"No; no. I was just wondering. I think I shall run down to Boston
to-morrow, and see father--Or, no! Mother won't be back till to-morrow
evening. Well, I will talk with you, at dinner, about it."
Matt went off to his mowing, and Louise heard the cackle of his machine
before she reached the camp with Maxwell's letters.
"Don't get up!" she called to him, when he lifted himself with one arm
at the stir of her gown over the pine-needles. "Merely two letters that
I thought perhaps you might want to see at once."
He took them, and glancing at one of them threw it out on the ground.
"This is from Ricker," he said, opening the other. "If you'll excuse
me," and he began to read it. "Well, that is all right," he said, when
he had run it through. "He can manage without me a little while longer;
but a few more days like this will put an end to my loafing. I begin to
feel like work, for the first time since I came up here."
"The good air is beginning to tell," said Louise, sitting down on the
board which formed a bench between two of the trees fronting the
hammock. "But if you hurry back to town, now, you will spoil everything.
You must stay the whole summer."
"You rich people are amusing," said Maxwell, turning himself on his
side, and facing her. "You think poor people can do what they like."
"I think they can do what other people like," said the girl, "if they
will try. What is to prevent your staying here till you get perfectly
well?"
"The uncertainty whether I shall ever get perfectly well, for one
thing," said Maxwell, watching with curious interest the play of the
light and shade flecks on her face and figure.
"I _know_ you will get well, if you stay," she interrupted.
"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 nobility."
"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."