Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/275

 The gate by which one entered the burial-ground was a wicket-gate, and painted the same colour as the great cross in the centre of the cemetery. When Frank had reached the gate he stopped outside it, and looked through the wicket into the cemetery. He looked upon it as upon that horrible Unknown, with which he must now make himself acquainted. He looked first at one grave and then at another, and then thought to himself, “Perhaps grandfather’s will look pretty much like that one.” Then he looked to see what state the graves were in. Some had half collapsed into the ground, some were covered with a fair green mound, on some were flowers, others were railed off, at the head of some stood a cross, at the head of others only a staff with a lath nailed across it to form a cross, at the head of a third was only a stave without any lath across it. In one corner of the burial-ground lay a few unburied bones.

Although it was a warm day at the beginning of June, and the air was clear and full of pleasant sounds, winter seemed to have entangled Frank in its icy folds. That icy winter breathed from the cemetery and from each and every grave within it. It seemed to Frank as though with the measure for his grandfather’s grave he had taken upon himself an unpropitious task, and as though he had undertaken a mission to an accursed place which it was impossible to carry out without contamination. He stood by the gate as if frozen to the spot, not knowing how to fulfil the task entrusted to him.

At that moment came out of the grave-digger’s dwelling the little Staza with a watering-pot in her hand. She came out into the cemetery and watered the graves, and all the while sang with a tiny treble, sweet and tuneful, the words, “Odpocinte v pokoji verne dusicky” [“Rest in peace ye faithful spirits”]. The grass and the flowers were half withered on the graves: where she sprinkled them they began to smell sweet, and their odour was wafted to the gate where Frank was standing.

It was a very tender sentiment which now filled the mind of Frank. That little girl fluttered like a butterfly over the graves, watering with the dew of life, like a spring shower, Nature’s exhausted and withered offspring—and singing all the while “odpocinte v pokoji verne dusicky” [“Rest in peace ye faithful spirits”]. From the cemetery the blast of winter ceased to blow, a sportive presence seemed to linger there, something breathed