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Updated: June 23, 2025
"If it be Valentine Kalondai he will come hither, and we will take him prisoner; but if it be the devil 'twere best to leave him alone." That was very sage advice, certainly. The horseman found the churchyard-gate open and went in. He went straight to the spot where he had seen the flames shoot up.
The second cause of his rage was his unsatisfied personal grudge against those who had forestalled him, viz., Count Hommonai and Valentine Kalondai. In the third place he was in love with the wives of the count and the castellan, and the old miscreant had got the idea into his shaven head of corrupting them both, and to this idea he stuck through thick and thin.
Thereupon he handed him a written permission, duly sealed with the seal of the city of Kassa, for Valentine Kalondai to challenge Ignatius Zwirina to fight him with lances, according to ancient law and custom, as prescribed by the statutes of the city of Kassa.
But the Walloon general, a strapping fellow, tapped his saber, said he was the first man in the town, and made a terrible to-do. Valentine Kalondai thereupon shoved back his presidential chair, laid down his mace, girded on his sword, and donned his hat. There were now four persons in the council-chamber who had their hats on.
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.
David Fröhlich and assisted that gentleman in his Museum Physicum, wherefore the professor loved him dearly, and long ago destined him to be pretty Michal's consort in her journey through life. Valentine Kalondai, indeed, had no need to appropriate a very great amount of learning. He had a rich widowed mother at Kassa, from whom, when he came of age, he was to take over his patrimony.
No sooner had this resolution been adopted than Count Hommonai took the golden key of the town from his neck and threw it on the table, saying that from henceforth he no longer regarded himself as commandant, and would discharge his troops forthwith. He would now, he said, retire to his estates to shoot stags and plant cabbages. "If you go, I go too," said Valentine Kalondai.
Then Valentine said in a calm voice: "It is so it is true!" Augustus Zwirina immediately turned toward him and said: "Then, Mr. Valentine Kalondai, the time has come for you to lay down the sheriff's staff!" Valentine surrendered his staff, descended from the tribune, and went straight home. He went quite alone. Not a soul accompanied him.
He took the trouble to go all the way to Bártfa, searched on the spot the records which testify to the marriage of Valentine Kalondai, and learnt therefrom with whom pretty nay, ugly Michal, had been in service. There they recollected the freckle-faced girl very well, and they also told him what sort of a person it was who had brought the damsel thither.
The Turk Ali had exchanged rôles with Valentine in the gates of the cloister. The Lenten penance succeeds the carnival revels. When they brought the news to Augustus Zwirina that Valentine Kalondai had happily escaped, the big fat man suddenly grew blue in the face, and was struck down with apoplexy on the spot. So swiftly did death overtake him that he had not even time to make his will.
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