He raised her in his arms, and took her, radiant through her tears with joy, and returning life, and filial love, to his breast; and the pair passed a truly sacred moment, and the dignitary was as happy as he thought to be miserable; so hard is it for mortals to foresee.And they looked round for Margaret, but she had stolen away softly.
The young girl searched the house for her.
"Where is she hid? Where on earth is she?"Where was she? why, in her own house, dressing meat for her two old children, and crying bitterly the while at the living picture of happiness she had just created.
"Well-a-day, the odds between her lot and mine; well-a-day!"Next time she met the dignitary he hemm'd and hawed, and remarked what a pity it was the law forbade him to pay her who had cured his daughter."However, when all is done, 'twas not art, 'twas but woman's wit.""Nought but that, burgomaster," said Margaret bitterly."Pay the men of art for not curing her: all the guerdon I seek, that cured her, is this: go not and give your foul linen away from me by way of thanks.""Why should I?" inquired he.
"Marry, because there be fools about ye will tell ye she that hath wit to cure dark diseases, cannot have wit to take dirt out o'
rags; so pledge me your faith."
The dignitary promised pompously, and felt all the patron.
Something must be done to fill "To-morrow's" box.She hawked her initial letters and her illuminated vellums all about the town.
Printing had by this time dealt caligraphy in black and white a terrible blow in Holland and Germany.But some copies of the printed books were usually illuminated and fettered.The printers offered Margaret prices for work in these two kinds.
"I'll think on't," said she.
She took down her diurnal book, and calculated that the price of an hour's work on those arts would be about one-fifth what she got for an hour at the tub and mangle."I'll starve first," said she;"what, pay a craft and a mystery five times less than a handicraft!"Martin, carrying the dry clothes-basket, got treated, and drunk.
This time he babbled her whole story.The girls got hold of it and gibed her at the fountain.
All she had gone through was light to her, compared with the pins and bodkins her own sex drove into her heart, whenever she came near the merry crew with her pitcher, and that was every day.Each sex has its form of cruelty; man's is more brutal and terrible;but shallow women, that have neither read nor suffered, have an unmuscular barbarity of their own (where no feeling of sex steps in to overpower it).This defect, intellectual perhaps rather than moral, has been mitigated in our day by books, especially by able works of fiction; for there are two roads to the highest effort of intelligence, Pity; Experience of sorrows, and Imagination, by which alone we realize the grief we never felt.In the fifteenth century girls with pitchers had but one; Experience; and at sixteen years of age or so, that road had scarce been trodden.
These girls persisted that Margaret was deserted by her lover.And to be deserted was a crime (They had not been deserted yet.) Not a word against the Gerard they had created out of their own heads.
For the imaginary crime they fell foul of the supposed victim.
Sometimes they affronted her to her face.Oftener they talked at her backwards and forwards with a subtle skill, and a perseverance which, "oh, that they had bestowed on the arts," as poor Aguecheek says.
Now Margaret was brave, and a coward; brave to battle difficulties and ill fortune; brave to shed her own blood for those she loved.
Fortitude she had.But she had no true fighting courage.She was a powerful young woman, rather tall, full, and symmetrical; yet had one of those slips of girls slapped her face, the poor fool's hands would have dropped powerless, or gone to her own eyes instead of her adversary's.Nor was she even a match for so many tongues; and besides, what could she say? She knew nothing of these girls, except that somehow they had found out her sorrows, and hated her; only she thought to herself they must be very happy, or they would not be so hard on her.
So she took their taunts in silence; and all her struggle was not to let them see their power to make her writhe within.
Here came in her fortitude; and she received their blows with well-feigned, icy hauteur.They slapped a statue.
But one day, when her spirits were weak, as happens at times to females in her condition, a dozen assailants followed suit so admirably, that her whole sex seemed to the dispirited one to be against her, and she lost heart, and the tears began to run silently at each fresh stab.
On this their triumph knew no bounds, and they followed her half way home casting barbed speeches.
