Anneke called me out to the kitchen just then, and I was not sorry to get away and recover my composure. When I had settled the domestic difficulty, whatever it was, I retired to my chamber, and strove by prayer and meditation to bring myself to a better temper. I succeeded so far that I was able to meet my husband with a pleasant face when he came in to dinner, and to ask him particulars of the news he had received from England. He was the same as ever, and told me all he had heard; but he said never a word of returning to Devon, and I felt that I would not trust myself with the subject just now.
We were bidden to supper at Garrett Van Alstine's house that night, to meet the guests who had brought the news. I was pleased to meet in one of them a gentleman I had often seen in her Grace of Suffolk's withdrawing-room— one Mr. Evans, a West country man and a great scholar. While I sat talking with him, I heard Avice say to my husband in a tone of surprise—
"But you will never think of leaving us, and returning to England, surely?"
"Of course not," said Mynheer Bogardus, Garrett's uncle, a very rich and consequential merchant, who always seemed to think he was to carry all before him by sheer force of will. "I take it Master Walter is too wise a man to leave certainty for uncertainty."
"I have hitherto found uncertainty the only certain thing in this world," answered Walter, smiling. "I suppose our poor friends in Honak were as certain of rising in the morning as we are." He alluded to a flourishing village, which only a few days before had been destroyed in the night so that not a trace remained, and that not by an inundation, but by that strange undermining of the sea, which gives no warning, and which has destroyed thousands of lives in Holland.
"But why should you wish to change again?" asked another. "I do not understand that your benefice in England is a very wealthy one."
"I would you could see it," said Walter, smiling, and then turning to me: "Tell me, sweetheart, what would Mistress Van Sittart think were she translated to one of our Devon farmhouses?"
"She would think herself transported to some island of savages," said I; and I could not but laugh as I thought of Carolina Van Sittart, who was a wonder of neatness even among Dutch women, in an ordinary farmer's kitchen, or even a gentleman's dining-hall, in our old neighborhood at Peckham Hall.
"Then I am sure Mistress Corbet will not wish to go," said Carolina. "You would not be so cruel as to carry her off among savages," and with that they all fell upon him at once for thinking of such cruelty.
"As to that, different people have different customs," said I, in some heat, for when it came to the pinch, of course I took Walter's part; "and if the people are such savages, they have the more need of one to teach them the way of life. Here in Rotterdam every one can have at least a Testament, or if not, they can hear the Word read and preached every Sunday."