Here the mother came to the rescue of her eldest son.
“Yes, Walter, you mustn’t ask more questions than anybody can answer.”
Walter did not ask any more questions, but he determined to get to the bottom of the matter at the first opportunity. His imagination roamed over immeasurable domains—such an insatiate conqueror was the little emperor Walter in his night-jacket!
He associated the heroes of his pictures with the doctor, who had been so friendly to him, and with his immortal Glorioso. The Peruvian story, too, furnished a few subjects for his empire. He married Telasco to Juliet; and the priests of the sun got their rights again. Master Pennewip received a new wig, but of gold-colored threads, on the model of the straw crown of a certain King Lear. Persons that he could see from the window were numbered among his subjects. He had to do something; and this foreign material was preferable to that in his immediate surroundings. Even Lady Macbeth, who was washing her hands and not looking particularly pleasing, seemed to him to be of a higher order than his mother or Juffrouw Laps.
In fact, for him those pictures were the greatest things in the world. He was carried away with the crowns, diadems, plumes, iron gratings over the faces, with the swords and the daggers with cross-hilts to swear on—with the trains and puff-sleeves and girdles with pendents of gold—and the pages. All this had nothing in common with his everyday surroundings. How is it possible, he thought, that anyone who has such beautiful pictures should sell them? The doctor must have inherited them!
Even if he had known that Lady Macbeth was the personification of crime, it would still have seemed to him a profanation to bring her into contact with the plebeian commonness around him.
All at once something in Ophelia’s form reminded him of Femke. She too could stand that way, plucking the petals from the flowers and strewing them on the ground.
He had dim recollections of what had happened, and occasionally he would ask indifferently about “that girl.” He was afraid to speak her name before Gertrude, Mina, and Pietro. He was always answered in tones that showed him that there was no room for his romance there; but he promised himself to visit her as soon as he got up.
“When you’re better you must go to see the doctor and thank him for curing you—but thank God first; and then you can show him what you’ve painted.”
“Of course, mother! I will give her the Prince of Denmark—I mean him, the doctor.”