Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/183

 Thus it was that Vojtech’s position at the Horskas’s had at times something of constraint about it. Sometimes, when he went there he felt as weak and gentle as a child. It seemed to him as though that day linked itself with all that had gone before and that on the morrow some one else would come and teach his children according to some current receipt and would be preferred before himself. Then he taught the little boy and girl and even Lidunka in haste as if he wished to compensate beforehand for his future absence, as though he gave them lessons for a lifetime. Moment flew after moment, hour after hour, and Pani Horska had to suggest to him that the hour had already long run out and that other occupations awaited her daughter. Vojtech concluded and at the same time felt ashamed lest he should have seemed to wish to ingratiate himself with the family and to strengthen his position in it. The idea vexed him. Even the next day when in the evening the street-children played together, they called to one another, “To-day he is not coming. To-day he has not come.” About an hour later they said to one another, “He won’t come to-day.”

Vojtech in fact did not go that day to the Horskas’s, wishing to efface from his mind the slightest feeling of having cringed to them.

The second day he went and offered no excuse. But he expected every moment that Pani Horska would in some way give him to understand that it was intolerable to have the children overworked one day and not employed at all the next. And he understood well enough that such a reproach would be at the same time a reason for him to announce his retirement.

Thus one side of his life at the Horskas’s wavered in perpetual uncertainty and it is impossible to contend that he in any way diminished that uncertainty by his manner or behaviour.

But I have not yet enumerated all the reasons why Vojtech felt himself so fondly touched at the Horskas’s and I think that Vojtech himself would hardly have succeeded in analysing them completely. But it seemed to him at times as though nothing unlovable could happen at the Horskas’s. It seemed inscribed on all the walls that here, at least for a moment, he might dream of happiness and that although his whole future existence were a waste, he might yet be able to testify that at least for some few hours he was blessed. A kind of sanctity, a kind of peace reigned here through all the dwelling. He did not reason about it but he felt it. It seemed to him as though life might yet be of some Rh