The wedding-day arrived, and the marriage took place with full ceremonials. The bride was fetched from her sister's house, and conveyed to the House of God in a carriage drawn by four horses, with plumes and coloured kerchiefs on the horses' heads, and thence to the house of the bridegroom through all the chief streets of the town, to the accompaniment of merry music; and every young man who saw the bride sitting in the beribboned carriage smiled and said to himself, "What a Caschau complexion she has got."
On that day Catharine was paler than usual. In the church itself her sadness, her anguish, were observed generally. Once, when her bridegroom took her hand, she burst into tears, and shrank timidly away from him. Her pallor, her timidity, her weeping, were, all of them, not unbecoming to a bride, so nobody was much struck thereby at the time.
After the dancing came the ceremonial of conducting the bride and the bridegroom to the marriage bed, when the bridesman seized Catharine's hand, while two sword-girt youths went before them, two bridesmaids following after with the bridegroom, and the musicians began to play a gentle, dreamy melody, to the music of which the two torch-bearing youths and the two bridesmaids danced round the bridegroom and the bride, as if thereby the better to enlace them together, till they came to the bedroom, and there also they danced round them once more, each man taking his and each girl her fellow's hands, and then all together they scampered out of the door, which they banged to behind them, leaving the young couple alone; but the music droned on outside ever more softly, ever more gently, at last scarce audibly, as if it would imitate the whispering of the happy pair inside.
But no sooner were the bride and the bridegroom alone in the bridal chamber than Catharine quickly plucked the bridal wreath from her head, tore it desperately to pieces, and then, opening the window looking on to the courtyard, leaped out of it.
The astonished bridegroom, in the first moment of his surprise, did not know what to do, but looking out after the girl, and perceiving that she was making straight for the well at the top of her speed, he quickly rushed after her, and caught the wench at the very moment when she was about to plunge down the well and kill herself outright.
Joseph pressed the lass tightly in his strong arms so that she could do herself no harm, and asked her anxiously what was the matter, and why she wanted to run away from him. At first the girl only sobbed, and begged him to let her die; but inasmuch as the bridegroom would by no means consent thereto, the girl confessed something to him which made the hairs of his head rise to heaven with horror; indeed, by the time the girl had told him everything, the bridegroom also had fainted, and lay there at her feet.
And within there, in the house of dancing, they were playing the dreamy melody which imitates the lisping of happy lovers, and stately maids and stalwart lads were dancing together and singing:—
"Dance, dance, the stately dance,
Wave, wave the rosy chain,
To knit together bride and groom."
The marriage came to nought. Catharine, half dead, was carried back to her sister's house, the bridal guests scattered in dismay. Nevertheless, Joseph said not a word of what Catharine had told him to any one, but mounted his horse, took a cudgel in one hand and a lance with a streamer to it in the other, and trotted off to the Sheriff's house. There, without leaving the saddle, he rattled at the gate with the point of the lance, and cried aloud in the hearing of all the people—
"Hearken, Michael Dóronczius! Here am I, Joseph Sándor, sitting on horseback, with lance and cudgel in my hands. Mount thy horse also, if thou be a man; take thy lance and thy cudgel and come out with me in the open, there to fight together; thou knowest wherefore, but tell it to none. Let God judge betwixt us."