“Good, good! But it has another meaning, which you would do well to notice, Sir Knight. Do you know the signification of eternity and eternal faith?”
“No, Fraulein, I wasn’t taught to think so deeply at Jena.”
“Of course. Your teachers were men. Men and faith, eternal faith!”
“Was Delilah, who betrayed Samson to the Philistines, a man or a woman?” asked Van Hout.
“She was a woman. The exception, that proves the rule. Isn’t that so, Maria?”
The burgomaster’s wife made no reply except a silent nod; then indignantly pushed back her chair, and the meal was over.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
Days and weeks had passed, July was followed by sultry August, and that, too, was drawing to a close. The Spaniards still surrounded Leyden, and the city now completely resembled a prison. The soldiers and armed citizens did their duty wearily and sullenly, there was business enough at the town-hall, but the magistrates’ work was sad and disagreeable; for no message of hope came from the Prince or the Estates, and everything to be considered referred to the increasing distress and the terrible follower of war, the plague, which had made its entry into Leyden with the famine. Moreover the number of malcontents weekly increased. The friends of the old order of affairs now raised their voices more and more loudly, and many a friend of liberty, who saw his family sickening, joined the Spanish sympathizers and demanded the surrender of the city. The children went to school and met in the playgrounds as before, but there was rarely a flash of the merry pertness of former days, and what had become of the boys’ red cheeks and the round arms of the little girls? The poor drew their belts tighter, and the morsel of bread, distributed by the city to each individual, was no longer enough to quiet hunger and support life.
Junker Georg had long been living in Burgomaster Van der Werff’s house.