Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/284

 Frank said to Staza, “Staza, guess whom I love better than anybody else.”

“Whom?”

“Thee.”

Staza said, “I am so glad for thee to lead me about that I could walk by thy side for ever. I have never gone about with any one before.”

And they went about together before everybody.

HE Loykas, man and wife, by the bedside of their defunct parent, perhaps, left the impression of being an avaricious couple. And cruelly should we wrong them if we held them up to scorn as avaricious. Avaricious they were only towards the pensioner on their bounty, and in this they had the common vice of perhaps a thousand of our families. To be pensioned off—that was to be the enemy of the property. That the pensioner and father were one and the same person, did not diminish the grave crime of being pensioned off by a tax upon the farm produce. The pensioner effaced the father, and the Loykas saw in their father only a pensioner on their bounty. And granted that the pensioner did them a good turn now and then—that was his duty as a father; but the Loykas did not dare ever to do him a good turn—he was pensioned off, and one’s pensioner must be thwarted everyway.

And yet the Loykas were not in this matter by a single hair worse than many others; I say it with a sigh, but you find Loykas certainly in every second or third village.

It was not, then, avariciousness; it was the relation between the peasant and the father who had pensioned himself off. For in other respects the Loykas had all the good qualities of the Czech peasant. They were honest, affectionate, and hospitable. From their farmstead no needy person ever departed without aid. If a beggar had gone through the village and departed empty-handed from every house, he went to the Loykas’s certain of being relieved. If strolling fiddlers or harpers came to the village they stopped at the Loykas’s as at their own home, there they got their victuals, passed several nights, and no one ever inquired when they meant to be off. Ay! the Loykas had two chambers specially set apart in the court-yard next to the coach-house, and these