Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/304

 “We’ll see about that”, answered Loyka with great vehemence. And he had already taken Vena by the hand and said, “Come, Vena, with me into the farmhouse, thou art my guest there.”

And they entered the farmhouse.

“Look, mamma, I am bringing you a visitor”, said Loyka to his wife, without noticing Barushka, who was present. “He is helping us to ballast the furniture which the sweet Barushka finds so much in her way, that she allowed it to float out of the house.”

Barushka paid not the slightest heed to her father-in-law, and let fly straight at Vena, “Clear out of the house, thou impudent rogue! It were indeed a disgrace, if fellows like thee should be admitted even into our best drawing-room.”

Loyka laughed. “Meseems, Vena, she doth not appreciate thee. But seat thyself, boy, here by me. You shall see, I will not let them bundle thee out just as they are bundling out yonder packing-cases. Just seat thyself, thou art at my house. The dear young folk have already made a clean sweep of a good many things both from the farmhouse and from the two chambers, but none shall dare to brush thee off, no one, you understand, no one.”

At this Barushka, turning to her father-in-law, remarked, “For my part I thought that we had enough to do with one fool in the house; but you, pantata, must e’en bring in another one.”

“So! I am a fool! possibly, young lady, possibly”, said old Loyka with a curse, took the chair on which he was sitting in his hands and would, perhaps, have hurried after Barushka and, perhaps, have struck her a heavy blow. But at that moment he stopped short, and said, “No, just because we are at home and she is our guest, I do not dare forget myself.”

For that time, at any rate, the old Loykas were left in peace in their farmhouse.

OW occurred in the farmhouse a trying period which is a painful task to have to chronicle. And it is the more painful, because in the Loykas’s farm may be seen a picture of a hundred other farms in which similar scenes are enacted, only slightly differing in their details.

It is, perhaps, the most painful thing for a writer when in his pursuit of truth he has to delineate nauseous realities.