Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/182

 moments were just when they happened to occur, and the mother looked out through her children’s eyes, and the fondness of the children beamed in the mother’s. The mother did not approach them like some majestic being, once or twice a day, in order that she might estrange the hearts of her children rather than make them her own. Here the mother melted into her children and the children as long ago from her breast sucked the milk of devoted love. An unspeakable charm lay in all this for Vojtech, and if teaching supplied a want in his heart the momentary pauses at lesson time or before or after it was like the realization of a poet’s dream.

In our life at Prague we have no truly social family life. A young man comes to us for his course of study and stands isolated like a pear-tree on a prairie. Over and above all this Vojtech had experienced all the hardships of a youth of poverty and the memory of his cottage home lingered like a sweet dream out of which he was awakened for ever. In the houses in which he had taught long ago, he had few opportunities of observing closely the family life. The children lived apart from their parents. Master after master came to them in succession, and then the governess took them in hand, and Vojtech only met these parents when they received him the first day or gave him his dismissal. His own poor home offered him but scant luxuries: going thence to the Horskas’s and catching a glimpse from time to time of those gleams of domestic happiness he felt his strength renewed and was able to say, “Here is a resting-place on the toilsome road of life.”

He felt himself at home with them in a moment and confessed to himself more than once that it would be a cruel blow to him, if he and his lessons were to be banished from that house. Overlooking his own home, he felt as though all or most of his life was spent at the Horskas’s, and confessed to himself, without disguise, that he should feel like a banished outcast if those doors were to be closed to him. And yet he must have been well aware from previous experiences that all his steps tended in that and no other direction. At times this thought made him sick at heart, and for a moment he would fancy that on the morrow he should be alone in the world once more: particularly at the beginning of the month when Pani Horska paid his salary, he trembled each time with dread lest it should be coupled with an expression of gratitude for his past efforts and a desire that he should trouble himself no further on their behalf.