The question was who in the world would reveal himself at 11 o’clock the next day, for the next day was the dreaded 3rd. Father, mother and also the brother, who had arrived to share in the general reconciliation, were all unconditionally in favour of marriage as long as the person was acceptable within reason. Everything possible should be arranged to make the Marquise’s situation a happy one. However, if the man’s circumstances were such that, even if helped by being considered favourably, he was still beneath the standing of the Marquise, the parents opposed the marriage. As previously, they determined to keep the Marquise with them and adopt the child. On the other hand, the Marquise seemed, whatever the case, to be in favour of giving her word in marriage as long as the person was not a villain, and thereby secure her child a father whatever the cost. In the evening the mother asked how they were going to receive the person. The Commandant thought it would be best to leave the Marquise on her own at 11 o’clock. The Marquise, however, insisted that both parents and her brother, too, should be there, because she didn’t want to share any secrets with that person. She also thought that this wish was implied in the person’s answer in suggesting the Commandant’s house as the place of meeting, a proposal which she freely admitted very much pleased her. The mother pointed out the awkwardness of the roles the father and brother would have to play, and asked her daughter to exclude the men, whereas she agreed to her wish that she herself be present when the person was received. After brief consideration by the daughter this last suggestion was finally accepted. Following a night of the tensest possible expectations, the morning of the dreaded 3rd now dawned. As the clock struck eleven, both women sat ceremoniously in the reception room, as if dressed for a betrothal. Their hearts beat loudly enough to have been audible had the day’s bustle been silenced. The eleventh chime was still reverberating when the groom Leopardo, whom the father had retained from the Tyrol, entered. On seeing him the women went pale. “Count F— has arrived and wishes to be announced.” “Count F—!” they exclaimed together, thrown from one kind of shock into another. The Marquise cried, “Shut the doors! We are not at home to him,” stood up ready to bolt the locks of the room herself and wanted to push the groom out of the way, when the Count came into the room towards her wearing exactly the same uniform, with medals and arms, as he had worn at the capture of the fortress. The Marquise thought she would sink into the earth with confusion. She reached for a handkerchief she had left on the chair and wanted to escape into a side room, but her mother, seizing her hand, cried, “Julietta—!” and, as if stifled by her thoughts, lost the power of speech. She stared hard at the Count and repeated, “I ask you, Julietta!”, pulling her after her, “who else are we waiting for?” Suddenly turning round, the Marquise exclaimed, “Who? But surely not him?” and flashed a look at him like a thunderbolt, while a deadly pallor came over her own face. The Count had gone down on one knee before her, his right hand on his heart, his head gently bowed to his chest. There he knelt, blushing deeply, looking down in front of him, silent. “Who else,” cried the Colonel’s wife in a faltering voice, “who else—did we lose our senses—but him?” The Marquise stood rigidly over him and said, “I’m going to go mad, dear Mother!” “Silly girl,” replied her mother, pulled her towards her and whispered something in her ear. The Marquise turned round and fell onto the divan, her hands to her face. Her mother cried, “Unhappy girl! What’s wrong? What has happened that you were not prepared for?” The Count did not stir from the mother’s side. Still kneeling, he took hold of the outer seam of her dress and kissed it. “Dearest lady! Merciful, honourable lady!” he whispered, and a tear rolled down his cheek. The Colonel’s wife said, “Get up, Count, get up! Comfort her, then we will all be reconciled and all will be forgiven and forgotten.” The Count got to his feet in tears. He knelt again before the Marquise, gently took her hand as if it were made of gold and the heat of his own might tarnish it. But the Marquise stood up and cried, “Go away! Go away! Go away! I was prepared for a villain, but not for a devil!”, and she opened the door of the room, avoided him as if he were a verminous pest and shouted, “Call the Colonel!” “Julietta!” cried her astonished mother. In deadly rage the Marquise looked now at the Count, now at her mother. Her heart was thumping, her face blazing. No Fury was more terrible. The Commandant and the head forester came. “I cannot marry this man, Father,” the Marquise said when the two men were still in the entrance, and she plunged her hand into a stoup of holy water fixed to the outer door, splashed with one big scoop father, mother and brother, and disappeared.
Struck by this strange behaviour, the Commandant asked what had happened and blenched when he saw Count F— in the room at such a decisive moment. The mother took the Count by the hand and said, “Don’t ask questions. This young man regrets from his heart everything that happened. Give him your blessing. Give it! Give it! And everything will end happily.” The Count looked devastated. The Commandant put his hand on him; his eyelids quivered and his lips went as white as chalk. “May heaven’s curse be gone from this head!” the Commandant exclaimed: “When do you intend getting married?” “Tomorrow,” the mother answered for the Count, for he couldn’t get a word out of his mouth. “Tomorrow or today, as you wish. For the Count, who has shown much laudable haste in making amends for his misdeed, no time will be too soon.” “So I will have the pleasure of your company at 11 o’clock tomorrow in St Augustine’s Church,” said the Commandant, bowing to the Count, calling his wife and son to enter the Marquise’s room, and leaving him to himself.
In vain were attempts made to learn the reason for the Marquise’s strange behaviour. She had the heaviest of fevers, didn’t want to know anything about the betrothal and asked to be left alone. To the question as to why she had suddenly changed her mind, and what made the Count seem more repellent to her than any other, she looked, distracted and with wide eyes, at her father and said nothing. The Colonel’s wife spoke up; had she forgotten she was herself a mother, to which she answered that in that case she must think more about herself than the child, and assured her once again, calling on all the angels and saints in heaven as witness, that she would not marry. Her father, who evidently saw her as being in an overexcited state of mind, declared that she must keep her word, then left her and gave orders for everything to do with the marriage after careful and written consultation with the Count. The Commandant then presented the latter with a marriage contract in which the Count would forgo all conjugal rights, binding him on the other hand to all the duties demanded of him. The Count sent the document back, drenched in tears, with his signature. When next morning the Commandant gave this document to the Marquise, her spirits had calmed down a little. Still sitting in bed, she read it through several times, gathered it thoughtfully together, opened and read it again and thereupon declared that she would be present at 11 o’clock at St Augustine’s Church. She got up, dressed without saying a word, climbed into her carriage with all her family as the clock struck, and drove off towards the church.
The Count was only allowed to join the family in the church porch. During the ceremony the Marquise stared rigidly at the altarpiece; she didn’t bestow one fleeting glance on the man with whom she exchanged rings. When the betrothal was over, the Count offered her his arm, but as soon as they were out of the church again the Countess bowed and took leave of him. The Commandant asked him if he would have the honour of seeing him sometimes in his daughter’s quarters. The Count muttered something nobody understood, raised his hat to the assembled company and disappeared. He moved into a house in M— in which he spent several months without even putting a foot in the Commandant’s house, where the Countess remained. It was only his gentle, dignified and absolutely exemplary behaviour whenever in any kind of contact with the family that he had to thank for being invited to the baptism after the Countess was delivered of a young son. She, with embroidered coverlets on her childbed, saw him only for a moment as he entered the door and greeted her from a respectful distance. Among the presents with which guests welcomed the newborn, he threw two sheets of paper into its cradle, one of which, it transpired after examination, was a gift of 20,000 roubles to the boy. The other was a will, which in the event of the Count’s death named the Countess as heir to his entire fortune. From that day on, at the instigation of the Colonel’s wife, he was frequently invited. The house was open to him and soon hardly an evening passed without him being there. As he had a feeling that he had been forgiven on all sides because of the world’s precarious nature, he resumed his wooing of the Countess—his wife—and after a year had elapsed received a second acceptance from her. A second marriage was also celebrated, happier than the first, after which the whole family moved out to V—. A whole row of little Russians now followed the first, and when the Count one day asked his wife in a happy moment why, on that dreaded 3rd, when she seemed ready to receive any villain of a man, she had fled from him as from a devil, she threw her arms round his neck and told him that he wouldn’t have seemed like a devil to her then if he hadn’t appeared like an angel to her when she first saw him.