Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/302

 Loyka scrutinized Vena, and seemed half as though he had heard, half as though he had not heard him. “Oh! Vena,” he said, “prithee, tell me how gall diffuses itself through the body.” And he took him and looked into his eyes as though he expected from him a serious answer.

“Let me fool you only just once”, sneered Vena.

“Prithee, boy, fool on,” entreated Loyka in a voice of humiliation that was almost pitiable.

“And why, pray, should I mix myself up in the concern?” sneered Vena. “Of course, your son will do the business for you. How, pray, could he fail to do it for you when you are, after all, but a pensioner on his bounty? You managed to fool your own father, why then should your son not manage to do the same by you? But what surprises me is that in your son it begins so precious soon. You put the foolscap on your father later. But who can change the course of Nature? Nowadays youth develops faster. Joseph, methinks, will have done with you sooner than you had done with your defunct father.”

“Don’t you know anything more to tell me than that?” inquired old Loyka.

“I do know”, said Vena. “But there is nothing in all that. You to talk about happiness, indeed! You, verily! You will be hospodar six years longer, you will dwell in the farmhouse, you are still master there. Oh! oh! things will grow worse and worse until they crack, and until you are mast-headed on yonder balcony whence your father looked at the farmhouse, because he did not dare to cross the court-yard.”

As Vena said these words Barushka came out bearing a message, “from Joseph, you know, papa dear”, to the effect that during harvest time the old people could take up their abode with her mother in the pension house, and that the young folk would shift into the farmhouse. “We have so much to do, and it is so tiring to run to the pension house and then back again to the farm”, she remarked. After this she marched off as though she had already gained her father-in-law’s consent to this arrangement.

“Look, look, yonder, pantata, the maids are already heaving you out of the nest”, said Vena. And forth from the farmhouse the maid-servants were already carrying Loyka’s furniture.

“So! you are to be shelved instanter”, said Vena. “See! see! I did think that they would have waited a little longer. You did