And now, when she bowed down, leaning over the remainder of the unwashed dishes with the tablecloth tied round her waist for an apron and started to carry the service to the beach to wash it, he hastened to relieve her of the load, urged by an irresistible desire not to see her in a servant's place, and feeling the sting of being served by one whom he would raise far above himself at the same time she was to look up to him as one that had granted her the power over him.
At this pretended combat that arose over which one should serve the other, the girl dropped the dishes. She gave a cry, but when she looked at the pieces, her face cleared up.
"Fortunately they were all old! My God, I was so frightened!"
He suppressed his paltry thoughts of the loss by at once placing himself on the side of her who had had the misfortune, and glad to have a noisy ending to the various feelings that rent him, he threw the shivers of porcelain like skipping stones out over the bay and rounded off the pointed situation with a jocose,
"Now we do not need to wash dishes, Miss Mary!"
Whereupon he reached her his hand and helped her into the boat, which was already pulling at the painter under the increasing dash of the waves.
[CHAPTER SEVENTH]
A bright, sunny summer morning the commissioner is sitting with his pupil up in the wooden pavilion, which he has had set up on the highest point of the skerry close to the newly laid foundation of the mission house. Down in the harbor lies a schooner, from which the frame for the new building is being unloaded and carried up to its place to be joined together by the foreman and his laborers. Therefore it has been unusually lively on the skerry for some time and small skirmishes have already arisen between the fishermen and the city workmen, in which the latter have treated the former with insolence, which has given rise to a series of feasts of atonement followed by drunkenness and new frays, attacks of immorality and appropriation of other's property. Therefore the commissioner and the elderly lady have a momentary regret at having undertaken the civilization of these people, when the first steps already showed such a sad result; so much more so as the nightly noises, singing, crying and complaining disturbed all work and all rest for them, who had come out here solely for the purpose of seeking quiet. The commissioner, who had lost all reputation by once yielding a little of his authority, could not restore the peace, but Miss Mary on the other hand succeeded better and understood how by a prompt appearance, and a good word now and then, to suppress the storm. This she would not impute to her beauty and agreeable manner; she had credited herself with a higher degree of strength and understanding than she possessed, and thus imbued herself in the belief of having an unusual faculty of mind, so that even now, when she sat as a pupil with her teacher, she received his instruction as though she were already acquainted with them, and answered with remarks more pointed than sagacious, seeming to correct and explain rather than to learn.
The mother, who was sitting beside her embroidering an altar cloth for the new mission house, seemed occasionally amazed at her daughter's penetrating insight and great knowledge, as she with a simple question nonplussed her teacher.