The Walloon perceived that he had met his match. Such courage pleased him. He held out his hand to the sheriff and said with a laugh: "Well, well, Master Sheriff, I have not come hither to squabble. Pray sit down again and deliberate," and with that he drew back.
This resolute behavior made such an impression on the members of the council that, as the sheriff resumed his seat, they greeted him with a loud vivat, while the victorious prior stretched forth his skinny arm toward him and said: "Deus benedicat tibi!"
"I have asked no blessing of your reverence; he who sits in the judgment-seat may not even accept a benediction;" and he forthwith began to investigate the points in dispute between the city and the College of Jesuits.
If you really want to test a man's presence of mind and dialectic skill, just engage him in an argument in a foreign language. Valentine now showed that he could negotiate with the Jesuit in Latin and with the Walloon in German, without stammering or stuttering in the least. And indeed, as the conrector could not help remarking to his neighbor, the sheriff was a far greater master of both languages than those with whom he was negotiating. His precise, curial style was easily victorious over the Jesuit's dog Latin, and his expressive German, with his pithy Lutheranisms, was more than a match for the general's Platt-Deutsch dialect.
And the headsman was standing behind him all the time!
The questions before him were by no means easy to solve. On the part of the town a charter had to be drafted and signed, guaranteeing to the Jesuits all their privileges and possessions, and declaring their cloisters a sacred asylum, whose very threshold the secular authorities should never cross. The College of Jesuits had also to subscribe an agreement pledging itself not to convert Protestants to the Roman faith by force, artifice, moral pressure, or any sort of cajolery.
Valentine's clear intelligence knew exactly how to hit the proper mean between these directly antagonistic pretensions, and keep the document entirely free from those artfully insinuated clauses whereby the Jesuits tried again and again to smuggle in their mental reservations.
The prior was satisfied with the compact, and when Valentine took up his pen to subscribe it the other unctuously exclaimed:
"Such a good sowing will produce a good harvest!"
And Valentine could not help thinking, as he handled the pen, "I wonder what sort of harvest the letters I am now sowing will bring in to me."