Reicht received these instructions like an order to sweep a room, and obeyed them punctually.
When they had subjected poor Luke to this double artillery for a couple of years, he got to look upon Margaret as his fog and wind, and Reicht as his sunshine; and his affections transferred themselves, he scarce knew how or when.
On the wedding day Reicht embraced Margaret, and thanked her almost with tears. “He was always my fancy,” said she, “from the first hour I clapped eyes on him.”
“Heyday, you never told me that. What, Reicht, are you as sly as the rest?”
“Nay, nay,” said Reicht eagerly; “but I never thought you would really part with him to me. In my country the mistress looks to be served before the maid.”
Margaret settled them in her shop, and gave them half the profits.
1476 and 7 were years of great trouble to Gerard, whose conscience compelled him to oppose the Pope. His Holiness, siding with the Grey Friars in their determination to swamp every palpable distinction between the Virgin Mary and her Son, bribed the Christian world into his crotchet by proffering pardon of all sins to such as would add to the Ave Mary this clause: “and blessed be thy Mother Anna, from whom, without blot of sin, proceeded thy virgin flesh.”
Gerard, in common with many of the northern clergy, held this sentence to be flat heresy. He not only refused to utter it in his church, but warned his parishioners against using it in private; and he refused to celebrate the new feast the Pope invented at the same time, viz., “the feast of the miraculous conception of the Virgin.”
But this drew upon him the bitter enmity of the Franciscans, and they were strong enough to put him into more than one serious difficulty, and inflict many a little mortification on him. In emergencies he consulted Margaret, and she always did one of two things, either she said, “I do not see my way,” and refused to guess; or else she gave him advice that proved wonderfully sagacious. He had genius, but she had marvellous tact.
And where affection came in and annihilated the woman's judgment, he stepped in his turn to her aid. Thus though she knew she was spoiling little Gerard, and Catherine was ruining him for life, she would not part with him, but kept him at home, and his abilities uncultivated. And there was a shrewd boy of nine years, instead of learning to work and obey, playing about and learning selfishness from their infinite unselfishness, and tyrannizing with a rod of iron over two women, both of them sagacious and spirited, but reduced by their fondness for him to the exact level of idiots.