“Oh, a great many!” answered she, looking up gravely; “but nothing, I’m afraid, that you can get for me. Though—you’ll bring yourself back to dinner, I suppose, won’t you?”
She bent over her knitting as she said it, and her mouth and downcast eyelids were very demure. Nevertheless, I was encouraged to fancy that my former remark about church-going had not fallen so entirely unheeded as it had appeared to do. Before I could hammer out a fitting answer (my brain always seemed to work with really abnormal sluggishness when I most wanted to do myself credit with Agatha), Poyntz rolled out in his deep, jovial voice, “Back to Sunday dinner? Well, I should hope so. Why, the old woman is baking a pie as I’d sail round the Horn to get a snack of! Come on, Mr. Firemount; it’ll go hard but we fetches back an appetite as ’ll warm the women’s hearts to look at.”
We trudged off at a tolerably round pace, and soon struck into a narrow grass-grown lane which led towards the east; and had proceeded some distance along it before I said:
“Do you know, Mr. Poyntz, that your daughter is one of the loveliest women in the world?”
“Ye mean Agatha? Ay, surely, that she is, heaven bless her! She was always that. A tiny bit of a lass, I remember her, not so long as my arm; as pretty a baby she was then as she’s a woman now.”
“Has she any thought of getting married soon? Such a face and character must have suitors enough.”
“Well, as touching that, sir,” said Poyntz, taking his pipe out of his mouth and looking at it carefully, “ye mustn’t think of Agatha just the same as of the fishermen’s girls you meet round about. Good, honest girls they all are, I’m saying naught against that; but Agatha, d’ye see, is a bit different. Ye’ll maybe think it queer I should say it, sir; but say it I will that Agatha is a lady. She may live in our house, and put up with our ways—nay, and love us too, which sure I am she does; but all the same, if ye notice, she don’t speak the same as me and the old woman do, nor she don’t think the same neither. She’s built on other lines, as I may say—a clipper yacht, while we’re but fishing smacks, or trading schooners at best. And that being so as it is, the young fellows of our neighbourhood don’t find they’ve got much show alongside of her somehow. They’re afraid of her, that’s the long and short of it. Not but she treats ’em kind enough, ye understand, as a lady should; but ’tis the kindness of a lady, and not of an equal, and there’s not one of ’em staunch enough to hold out against it. And how be they’re fine lads, many of them, I can’t truly say as I’m sorry for it, if so as Agatha is content.”
“Nor can I,” I echoed to myself, with devout earnestness. “She does seem of a different stock from most I see here,” I said aloud. “I have seen women somewhat like her at Copenhagen; though I don’t know whether I should have thought of that if I hadn’t happened to say something in Danish, yesterday, and she answered me in the same language.”
“Did she now!” said Poyntz, tipping forward his hat and scratching the back of his head. “And if I might ask it, sir, how came ye to speak Danish your own self?”
“My family was Danish before I was born; and I was taught the language almost before I knew English. Our name used to be Feuerberg; but we’ve translated it since we’ve emigrated, you see.”