This explanation by Stoffel quieted the family for half an hour.
“How would it do for you to go over there?” Juffrouw Pieterse proposed at last.
“I’m not going, mother. You know it isn’t on my way to school.”
That was a sufficient reason. Never do anything that isn’t on your way—one of the favorite maxims of conservatism. Stoffel himself did not know how profound was the wisdom of his political aphorism.
“How would it do, then, to send Leentje over to Juffrouw Laps’s to inquire about Walter?”
This proposal met with approval, and Leentje was dispatched forthwith.
Oh, poor Juffrouw Laps! She was “the most wretched woman in the world;” and the room from which Walter had fled so suddenly was now the temple of all the heterogeneous griefs and pains that novelists ever make use of.
I will not place Walter above Joseph, Theseus, Jason or Hippolytos. May Apollo preserve me from such blind partiality. Not by any means do I regard my hero as the most interesting mortal that ever left a woman in the lurch. No, not in Walter’s worth do I seek for the measure of the forsaken lady’s despair. Indeed, Juffrouw Laps’s pain was not caused by any reflections as to the beauty or excellence of the vanished knight. There was another element in the matter that was filling her with horror and driving her to distraction. With all due respect for the suffering of other abandoned ladies, Asnath, Ariadne, Medea, Phaedra—but Juffrouw Laps had to face Walter’s family. That was the trouble.
Her fertile brain evolved the most wonderful plans. How would it do for her to tell that he had been carried away in a fiery chariot before the eyes of the people, like Elias of old? She discarded the idea, for fear that no one would believe it.
At first she had waited at the window, watching for her little Theseus to return. When she saw him no more she thought that perhaps the mob had carried him off with them. That was not an unpleasant thought; since her fear for his return to his family was greater than her desire for his return to her. This is easily understood: what might he not tell at home?