Which shows what a good thing it is when "publica
privatis præcedunt," or, in other words, when public
duties take precedence of private affairs.
As the time approached when the return of Valentine Kalondai with
the deputation from Pressburg might be reasonably expected, Simplex
joined the town watchman, with whom he, as trumpeter, stood on terms
of good fellowship, and watched with him for the approach of the
sledges.
The carnival was now pretty far advanced, when a postilion arrived
to say that the deputation was already on its homeward way, and the
town was to send four fresh horses to meet it, so that it might make
its solemn entry with due dignity; the four nags which had been
hired at Pressburg being by this time splashed up to the very ears
with mud.
As the deputies approached the gate, Simplex seized his trumpet--it
was the custom when notables drew near to play in their honor a
selection of the choicest melodies--and played a tune, the text of
which begins with these words:
Hasten, little nag, gallop and fly,
At home thy mistress sick doth lie.
He thought that Valentine would understand the allusion.
And Valentine did understand it, but he would not take the hint. He
told the coachman to drive direct to the townhall.
The civic coachman was a very old man. He had many a time driven
Valentine's father on the business of the town, and was also very
much attached to his son.
"Mr. Sheriff," he inquired, as they passed beneath the portcullis,
"hadn't we better drive home first of all?"
"No, old fellow! the business of the city comes first. I'll go home
afterward."
As the sledge stopped before the townhall, where the
town-councilors, apprised of the arrival of the deputies, had
already assembled, the first person whom Valentine met on
dismounting was Count Hommonai.
He drew Valentine aside.
"Have you been home yet?" he asked.
"Not yet," replied the other, "'publica præcedunt privatis.'"
"Go home first."
"No, my lord! That I will not do. Tidings may there be awaiting me
which will either irritate or delight me, and so either make me too
severe or too soft-hearted. The circumstances of the city are at
this moment so very serious that, till they have been set right, we
must let our private affairs go. So, by your leave, the townhall
first and my own house afterward."
And when Valentine explained in the council the actual situation of
affairs, everyone said that he had acted quite rightly.
The Prince of Transylvania, in order to bring King Ferdinand over to
his side, had surrendered to him the five counties on this side of
the Theiss which had been ceded to Transylvania by the Peace of
Linz. Then, shutting his ears against all good advice, he had
invaded Poland, and his first attack was crowned with success, for
Cracow fell into his hands.
King Ferdinand had accepted the portions of Transylvania offered to
him, but at the same time intimated to Prince George Rakoczy that if
he did not evacuate Poland at once, he, Ferdinand, would be forced
to make common cause with the Poles, and compel him to do so by
force of arms.
And now, too, the Sultan was very wroth with Prince George Rakozcy
for beginning the war without his consent, and also for surrendering
portions of the land to Ferdinand. When they are wroth in Stamboul
it is no joke. The Sultan declared that George Rakoczy had forfeited
his throne, and issued an athname which gave the scepter to Achatius
Baresai, at the same time commanding the Khan of the Crim Tartars to
march into Transylvania and chastise his rebellious vassal.
So the town of Kassa had now to choose between two things.
It might quietly conform to the will of Prince George Rakoczy, and
consent to be transferred to Ferdinand of Austria, the first
consequence of which would be that the troops of the Prince of
Transylvania would quit the town in order to garrison the fortress
of Onod, while a Walloon regiment, under the command of General
Löffelholz, would take their place; in which case the Jesuits would
have their cloisters restored to them, and would reënter the town
behind the Walloons.
That would be a bitter morsel to swallow.
The second alternative for the town, in case it disliked the
Emperor's friendship, was to throw itself into the arms of the
Turks. The Sultan had deposed George Rakoczy, and appointed Achatius
Baresai Prince in his stead. If the town of Kassa chose, it could
side with Baresai and summon the Pasha of Eger to its assistance.
One of these two courses had to be adopted.
Good advice was now scarce.
There lay the stone which one fool had cast into the well, and one
hundred wise men could not pull it out.
The session of the council, when these things had been explained was
extraordinarily stormy. Valentine Kalondai, who presided, was
scarcely able to maintain order, so heated were the tempers of his
colleagues.
One of them threatened to burn his house to the ground rather than
permit German troops to be quartered upon him, while another
protested that he would rather massacre his own wife and children
than allow the Turkish janissaries to perpetrate their atrocities
upon them; and while some exhausted the whole vocabulary of abuse
against the unbelieving heathen, others excelled themselves in
blackening the Jesuits. Thus there arose two fiercely antagonistic
parties, neither of which would give way a hair's breadth to the
other.
The president alone was silent.
At last the superrector turned to him and asked him for his opinion.
"Well, if you want to know what I think," began Kalondai, "let me
tell you that I do not agree with either opinion. Judging the case
on its merits, I think the Theiss counties ought not to have been
ceded to Ferdinand till he had fulfilled his obligation of assisting
George Rakoczy against Poland, which he has not done. But on the
other hand, neither has the Sultan any right to dispose of the free
city of Kassa; such right belongs to the Estates of the Realm alone.
So again, Rakoczy can only be deposed by the Estates of
Transylvania, and if they wish Baresai for their Prince they alone
can elect him. My opinion, therefore, is that neither Walloon
horsemen nor Turkish _Spahis_ be allowed to enter here, but we must
close the city gates, and, if need be, oppose force to force as our
fathers have done. If the council wish it so, I'll stake my head
upon the issue, and God shall judge betwixt us."
But Mr. Zwirina was by no means enamored of so adventurous a policy,
and he so dexterously strung together the evil consequences which
would accrue to the town from such obstinacy--to wit, bombardments
with red-hot bullets, loss of life, famine, plague, conflagrations,
bankruptcy of the merchants, ruin of the guilds, storms,
capitulations, wholesale blackmailing, nay, even the wresting of the
churches from the hands of the Protestants--that when it came to
voting, the majority of the council decided that the town ought
rather to conform to the will of the Prince by submitting to the
change, than come to loggerheads with the Kaiser and the Sultan at
the same time; and that the Walloons should be allowed to enter,
especially as they were, after all, the soldiers of the King of
Hungary.
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. "I also lay down the
sheriff's staff on the table; let a better man bear it!"
And so saying, he placed the gold-headed Spanish cane on the table,
and rose from his seat. It must certainly have been his guardian
angel that gave him the idea of resignation at that moment, for he
thereby averted the point of the sword that was actually suspended
over his head.
But now he was suddenly assailed on all sides. His friends, his
enemies also (especially the latter), begged and prayed him to
remain. Most earnestly of all Mr. Zwirina implored him not to
forsake the town at such a crisis. Was he not so very much wiser
than they all? Without him the concord of the town would become
sheer anarchy; it was just at such times as these that they needed a
strong hand like his to guide them, for where could they find such
another? At last they attacked him on his weak point. It was
cowardice, they said, to hide his head just as danger was
approaching. They pestered him so long that at last the voice of
ambition drowned the suggestion of his good angel; but it is only
fair to say that his love for his native place, and his sense of
duty, also, contributed not a little thereto. He allowed them to
lead him back to his place, for which complacency he received a loud
_vivat_. They even wished to lift him up in the air, chair and all,
as upon the occasion of his election, but he motioned to them not to
do so.
Then Count Hommonai withdrew from the council-chamber; he had no
longer any business there.
Valentine Kalondai declared, however, that he would only hold office
till the new order of things had been established; then they must
elect them a new sheriff in his place.
After this weighty matter had thus been satisfactorily settled, the
recorder and the fiscal procurator brought in sundry official
documents, which only needed the signature of the sheriff, the
council having already passed them; they were urgent criminal cases,
in which every delay would be cruel. In all penal matters a swift
execution is merciful. Not till all this business had been disposed
of could Valentine quit the council-chamber.
The first document presented for his signature was a death-warrant.
It was the first sentence of death he had ever signed; his heart
beat violently.
To kill a man in the battlefield, in the heat of the combat; to
manfully grapple with a man who is already mowing his way through
the ranks, sword in hand, first bidding him defend himself or
surrender; to cut down with a strong hand and dash to pieces a man
who breaks into the land as an enemy, and ravages it like a wild
beast--all that he had often and cheerfully done, as became a
soldier. But to sit in a soft armchair and kill a man in cold blood,
a man in fetters who cannot fly, who cannot defend himself; a man of
the same town as yourself, a fellow-citizen, perhaps an
acquaintance, who, pale with mortal agony, begs you for mercy; to
kill such a man by breaking the staff of office over him--in such a
thing as that he was quite a novice.
He asked what crime this man had committed.
"He has killed his wife."
A terrible crime!
"He killed his wife, and she, too, big with child."
A horrible, unnatural crime. Such a wound as that none but the
headsman can heal.
The headsman! He had not thought of that on the day of his triumph,
when he had visited every church, and prayed before every altar,
"God preserve this noble city from the misfortune of requiring the
headsman to come hither to execute justice before the year is out!"
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. He requested that the charge
brought against the accused should be laid before him. A sheriff
cannot sign a death-warrant before he has heard the defense of the
accused.
The conrector, acting as secretary, then recited to him both the
accusation and the defense. A militiaman--Valentine knew him very
well, for he was a butcher's apprentice--came home drunk one night
from patrolling. His wife began scolding him, and he furiously drew
his sword and aimed a blow at her. He only meant to hit her with the
flat of the blade, but the devil jogged his hand, and the point went
right through her heart. She died. The murderer gave himself up
immediately the deed was done. He repented of his crime, and himself
demanded death as his punishment.
"Then he did this dreadful deed when he was in liquor and is now
sorry for it?" said Valentine, by way of extenuation.
"Yes, and that is certainly a reason for mitigating the punishment,"
replied the superrector. "Just for that very reason he has only been
condemned to be beheaded, otherwise he would have been quartered
alive for his bloody deed."
"Has he any children?" asked the sheriff.
"Seven," replied the conrector.
"He leaves behind him seven orphans," sighed Valentine, "seven
innocent orphans, who will be forever branded as the children of the
man who died beneath the hand of the headsman!"
"So it is!" answered the cold and grim superrector; "seven will be
branded with infamy for the crime of one. But if we were to pardon
him, all the inhabitants of Kassa would be branded for all time."
"I don't ask you to pardon him. Lifelong imprisonment in the
treadmill of the civic reservoir, with the sting of conscience in
his heart, would be a still greater punishment for him than death."
"Pray don't let us have any mawkish sentiment, good Master Sheriff!
If we don't kill, people will kill us. If we pardon the evil-doers
we shall leave the good defenseless. This hard-mouthed people
requires an example which shall strike its eyes and so frighten it.
If we pardon one malefactor, a hundred others will spring up. It is
a sad duty, no doubt, but it is a duty none the less, and must be
done."
The cold sweat started out on Valentine's forehead like the morning
dew on a flower-bed, as he dipped the pen into the inkhorn, and his
large powerful hand trembled so much as he wrote his name under the
warrant that his signature, ordinarily so bold and energetic, was
now scarcely legible.
"Are there any more arrears?"
"One more sentence, only one, a 'harum palczarum.'"
We must linger a little on these words in order to find out what
they mean. Both of the German chroniclers whom we here follow write
"harum pallizarum," possibly a corrupt contraction with Latin
terminations of the Hungarian expression "három pálczára," _i. e._,
"with three staves." But what is the meaning of the expression? In
the annals of the Debreczin town council we find this peculiar
punishment (reserved for witches found guilty of pimping and
seduction) very plainly described. The Debreczin chronicle says,
"let them be crowned with three staves!" The German chronicler adds
it was very seldom that anyone survived this punishment. The head of
the condemned was pressed between three staves, and then the
executioner slowly screwed them together, thereby causing the
felons truly infernal torments. Very often they swooned away, and
then they were beaten with bunches of thorn till they came to again.
This was the horrible sentence which Valentine Kalondai had now to
sign.
When he read the name of the condemned, he fancied the whole house
was sinking with him.
"Red Barbara!"
Sparks and rings of fire danced before his eyes.
That _she_ should have fallen into _his_ hands!
"Examine the documents, Master Sheriff; the case will interest you!"
said the conrector.
Valentine Kalondai read.
It was indeed a hellish message which these documents conveyed.
The confessions of the imprisoned witch, the charge brought by
Valentine's mother, the testimony of acquaintances and friends all
showed that a detestable plot had been forged against his happiness
and honor. The accused denied nothing. She confessed everything at
the very first examination. The great and mighty Mr. Zurdoki had
sent her to corrupt the wife of Valentine Kalondai. She had
intended, by fair means or foul, to have carried Michal off and made
her Zurdoki's mistress. She had been paid to do so, and had got
everything ready for carrying out this diabolical plan.
But when they had asked by what means she had managed to approach
the wife of Valentine Kalondai, and how she had got her to listen to
her filthy insinuations, seeing that Michal had recoiled from them
with horror, nay, at least, had even fainted away, the accused had
simply replied: "I am a witch, I can do everything." Nay, even when
they applied the question extraordinary, she stood them out that
she had no other help but her own magic power. At last, however,
under the extremest torture, she had declared herself the mother of
Dame Valentine Kalondai. That was why the latter had allowed her
free access to her person. Nay, so far did this woman's impudence
go, that she actually maintained that when the sheriff came home, he
would be the first to implore the town council to let the mother of
his wife go free.
Valentine felt as if the whole world was falling to pieces over his
head. And then it was that the maxim occurred to him, that it was
just when the universe lies in ruins around him that a true man
raises his head most defiantly.
His friends and foes at the green table were watching him with
curiosity and concern to see what he would do. Would he quail
beneath the blow, and justify the assertion of the witch by
imploring them to do her no harm?
Valentine Kalondai took the pen, dipped it into the inkhorn, and
wrote, no longer with a trembling hand, the date and his own name at
the bottom of the warrant, underlining the words "with three staves"
twice, and taking good care not to mistake the inkhorn for the
sandbox when he sanded his signature.
And then, his heavy fist still reposing on the bundle of documents,
he requested the conrector to fold together a sheet of paper and,
"fracto margine," to write, in the name of the town council, a
letter of citation to the headsman of Zeb, Henry Catsrider, bidding
him, as in duty bound, to appear within eight days at the city of
Kassa, in order to execute the law's sentences which had been passed
that day, copies of which were sent him. He was then to present his
account to the civic auditor, who was authorized to discharge it.
This citation Valentine also subscribed.
He had still a faint glimmer of hope.
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.
Valentine actually believed that there was still some human feeling
left in Henry Catsrider!
When all this had been done he arose from his seat of honor.
The whole town council bowed before him. The conrector, Ignatius
Zwirina the younger, expressed the satisfaction felt by all the
burgesses at having a sheriff whose wise and firm administration
would serve as an example to all his successors.
And now Valentine hastened home.
He asked no questions. He let no one speak. He stifled the words on
the lips of his mother and his wife with kisses. Then he took his
pretty Michal on his knee, and whispered in her ear in the tones of
a lover to his lady:
"Come what may or must! Be it weal or woe, our comfort is that we
shall share it together!"
And pretty Michal was content that it should be so.