CHAPTER XXXIV.
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.
When Valentine was his fellow-student at the college of Keszmár, Henry was a stuck-up youth, proud of his learning, who was always boasting to his comrades of his mental capacity and his physical strength till he became positively unendurable. The weaker ones he persecuted. In his wrestling-bouts with them he shockingly maltreated them, and when they played pranks he reported them to the authorities. But the end and aim of all his brutal self-assertion was to become a clergyman. In this calling he would also have been sly and tyrannous, always looking after himself and a scourge and a burden to his colleagues; but his father had violently torn him away from this path of life, and forced him to go back to his proper trade. And perhaps the old man was right.
For this was, after all, the trade for which Henry was intended by nature, and within a few years he was as much at home in it as if he had done nothing else all his life. Coarse society soon brings down everyone who mixes in it to its own level. The feeling, too, that all the world despises him, arouses in a man the defiant instinct to avenge himself on the whole world for such contempt. Till then he had led the life of a recluse, but now he suddenly plunged into a continual orgy, and hated sobriety. The ghastly death of his father had filled him with the cruelty of a wild beast, and the destruction of his house had extinguished in him the last sparks of human feeling. After the loss of his wife, whom he had loved passionately, he sank completely into the slough of vileness, and sought the society of those women whom not the altar but the pillory would sooner or later unite to him—to-day a glowing kiss, to-morrow a hissing iron. As, moreover, he had lost a large part of his treasures in the burning of his house, he became avaricious likewise. He wanted to make up again what he had lost. Just then they were beginning in Poland to play at games of chance with the painted cards invented by Peter Gringenoir, and Henry spent all his time in the Polish cities playing cards with the cheats and filchers of the district. And in these gambling dens he generally managed to lose some fresh piece of his silver plate which he brought with him in the leg of his boot. Woe betide them who then fell into his hands!
Once he was warned by the authorities that he would be degraded and expelled from his office if he did not attend to it better.
After all this we may readily suppose that Henry Catsrider, when he received the summons from the town council of Kassa, did not hesitate a moment to appear personally in answer to it. That this summons was signed by Valentine Kalondai, as sheriff, did not disturb him in the least. On the contrary, the idea of appearing before his former rival as executioner rather tickled him than otherwise. That one of the victims was Red Barbara afforded him the greatest satisfaction. He suspected at once that the witch had set his house on fire and stolen a portion of his treasures. That she had also filched from him his greatest treasure was, however, unknown to him as yet. He would not for any consideration have relinquished to anyone else the bliss of tormenting her.
A week after the dispatch of the citation, the wagon of the executioner of Zeb rattled over the stones of the market-place of Kassa. It was a black vehicle, with red wheels and axles, on which the somber company, like a troupe of itinerant comedians, brought with them all the requisites of their terrible stage. Mounted drabants and musketeers escorted them before and behind.