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The halberdiers would have kept her back, but she sent them spinning to the left and right against the doorposts, and forced her way up to the green table itself. She could scarcely restrain herself while the syndic read out the accusation, according to which Valentine had abducted the wife of Henry Catsrider, and unlawfully cohabited with her. Then Dame Sarah could contain herself no longer.
The fulfilment of the proverb, as you make your bed so must you lie in it, comes to pass. Valentine Kalondai knew Henry Catsrider ill, and all his psychological calculations foundered completely. During the last few years Henry Catsrider's nature had entirely degenerated.
Unhappily, although the Hungarian lad was quite a match for the Zipser in all corporeal exercises, in mental contests he was far inferior to him. There, indeed, Catsrider stood without a rival. He was always eminent-issimus in every science, while Valentine Kalondai was constantly at the bottom of his class.
As for Henry Catsrider, he was driven from his profession three days later for putting to shame the dignity of his office, the reputation of the city, and the majesty of the law by his bungling. What became of the degraded headsman, how and where he ended his days, on these points nothing has ever been recorded. In which it is shown how ghosts haunt churchyards.
My name is Henry Catsrider," and with that the young man rose from his seat. But the lady, in a transport of conjugal loyalty and devotion, threw herself at the father's feet, seized his hand and kissed it. She actually kissed the hand of the vihodar, the headsman. With glowing, cleaving lips she kissed the hand which had never been kissed.
That will, indeed, be a painful meeting when Valentine Kalondai and Henry Catsrider meet each other in the narrow path leading to the scaffold, the one as the judge of wretched criminals, the other as the torturer, the executioner of the condemned felons! How will he be able to look that man in the face? He would not submit to the inevitable.
When Henry Catsrider receives this citation and learns that he, the headsman of Zeb, must come face to face with Valentine Kalondai whom he had formerly robbed of his beloved, he was then a genius, a luminary, a cleric and a scholar, face to face with him who had once been an expelled convict, but now was sheriff; when he reflects that he who was now a branded monster, an outcast from every city, is to appear before his former rival, who was now the first magistrate of one of the most important cities of the land; and when, besides all that, Henry Catsrider discovers that one of the condemned, on whom a masterpiece of his hellish art was to be performed, was his father's former housekeeper, who had once actually been his own nurse and suckled him, why, then, he would surely have human feeling enough to remain at home, and, as he was often wont to do, send his oldest apprentice to execute the sentence in his stead.
And now, my daughter Michal, proceed to your chamber and consider yourself in arrest there for the next four and twenty hours." And thus ended the festive day on which Henry Catsrider was ordained a priest. Wherein is clearly shown that he who tends the sheep is much more honorable than he who slaughters them.
Three weeks later he united pretty Michal and Henry Catsrider in holy wedlock, and gave them both his parental as well as his sacerdotal blessing. Valentine Kalondai had had no opportunity of doing anything desperate in the meantime.
In the course of which the stern father, in the hardness of his heart, chastizes his lost son, but finally grants forgiveness to the repentant prodigal. When Christian Catsrider felt the kiss of the young bride on his hand, he hissed three times like one who has been seared with a red-hot iron.
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