These conversations had another charm, which Niels felt at first vaguely and without consciously thinking of it, in the look of delighted admiration with which seventeen-year-old Gerda’s eyes followed him as he spoke. She always managed to be present when he came, and would listen so eagerly that he often saw her flushing with rapture when he said something that seemed to her especially beautiful.
The truth was, he had unwittingly become this young lady’s ideal, at first chiefly because he often rode into town wearing a gray mantle of a very foreign and romantic cut, then because he always said Milano instead of Milan, and finally because he was alone in the world and had rather a sad countenance. There were certainly a great many ways in which he differed from the rest of the people in Varde and in Ringkjöbing too.
On a hot summer day, Niels came through the narrow street behind the Councillor’s garden. The sun was pouring down over the brick-red little houses, and the ships lying out on the sound had mats hung over their sides to prevent the tar from melting and oozing out of the seams. Round about him everything was open to admit a coolness which did not exist. Within the open doors, the children were reading their lessons aloud, and the hum of their voices mingled with that of the bees in the garden, while a flock of sparrows hopped silently from tree to tree, all flying up together and coming down together.
Niels entered a little house right behind the garden, and while the woman went to bring her husband from the neighbor’s, he was left alone in a spotless little room smelling of gillyflowers and freshly ironed linen.
When he had examined the pictures on the walls, the two dogs on the dresser, and the sea-shells on the lid of the work-box, he stepped over to the open window, whence he heard the sound of Gerda’s voice, and there were the four Skinnerup girls on the Councillor’s bleaching-green only a few steps away.
The balsamines and other flowers in the window hid him, and he prepared himself both to listen and to look.
It was clear that a quarrel was going on, and the three younger sisters were making common cause against Gerda. All carried whips of lemon-yellow withes. The youngest had formed three or four of them into rings wound about with red bark, and had put them on her head like a turban.
It was she who was speaking.
“She says he looks like Themistocles on the stove in the study,” she remarked to her fellow conspirators, and turned up her eyes with a rapt expression.
“Oh, pshaw,” said the middle one, a saucy little lady who had just been confirmed that spring; “do you suppose Themistocles was round-shouldered?” She imitated Niels Lyhne’s slight stoop. “Themistocles! Not much!”