Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/297

 And here the cloth-pedlar and the kalounkar looked at Joseph as though they would have said, “Art thou that Joseph who sat here beside us, and listened to our story-telling.”

And out loud the kalounkar said, “I must entreat you, dear Mister Joseph, to ask our good old master and mistress to come hither that we may thank them for all their kindness. We do not venture to present ourselves in their apartments, and yet how can we go away without bidding them adieu?”

“There is no need, I assure you, I will give them any message you may choose to leave.”

Here the old kalounkar said almost crying, “Then tell them that the old kalounkar salutes them a hundred times, and that he thanks them for this roof which they have condescended to lend him for so many years, and that he never supposed that he would have to leave on the very day when he thought that a feast would be toward.”

“I will tell him, I will not forget”, said Joseph, cutting short further explanations, turned, and went into the principal apartment.

And thus in a brief space of time were banished from the estate, after the musicians, the kalounkar, the cloth-pedlar, and the rest. At a moment which is the sweetest in human life, at a moment which every family scores in letters of gold on the page of its domestic history—at that moment in sorrow left this house several people who by right of dear custom considered that it was in part their home.

“Pray, where are the pedlar and the kalounkar being banished”, said old Loyka, seeing from the window how they were trailing across the court-yard with their wares.

“I have purged the chambers of them also”, said Joseph in elucidation. “They were no better than the musicians, they had no right to hang about the place. If we young people have to take up our abode in the pensioner’s house we shall want these chambers for ourselves, and not for all sorts of underlings. It would be quite a sin if we were to tolerate them any longer.”

There cannot be a severer blow for an old man than to hear his past life and actions condemned in a single word; and this happened when Joseph declared Loyka’s previous system of hospitality to be a sin. And if there was anything praiseworthy at the Loykas’s it was, perhaps, this, that their court-yard opened freely to shelter any who wished to enter.