Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/313

 “Dolt! idiot!” said Loyka, “then you ought to have discovered the harper and brought back Frank. And so begin the search again—the sooner, the better and without Frank do not venture near my house.”

Vena departed and found the harper, but Frank, so it was said, had gone with a fiddler and now, doubtless, was once more with the kalounkar. “Pantata,” exclaimed Vena, “I should never have ventured home again as long as I lived, for no one will find Frank again till the Day of Judgment. He goes off with the people he meets, and we should have to run the circuit for ever of all the wayfarers who ever passed the night here, for it is with these he roves the world.”

Although it might have seemed that such news would have not a little ruffled Loyka, such was not the case. Hearing with whom Frank roved the world, he in a sort of way reconciled himself to the young renegade: “They dare not come to us, so he has gone to them”, reasoned Loyka; this appeared to be so certainly true that this truth even, in some sort, gave him satisfaction; at all events Frank published to the world the fact that these humble dependants were no longer domesticated at the Loykas’s, at all events he, in some sort, incriminated Joseph of having so ruthlessly stripped their home of its previous mirth and jollity.

“He is not in bad hands”, thought Loyka to himself, and out loud he said, “The roving young scamp, but I suppose he knows what a flogging he will get when he comes home again.”

But Frank knew nothing about a flogging and returned home no more. Then more messengers besides Vena were dispatched from the farm, and all returned with the news that where he last was heard of, he was no longer to be found, and that they could not track him further.

T drew nigh to Easter Day when old Loyka said to his wife, “For my part I no longer wish to be hospodar, but would fain retire altogether to the pension house.”

On this Loyka’s wife said, “And are almost five years of our hospodarship to be so completely cancelled. That would be just as though we were to take flight from the farmhouse.”

“And what are we in the farmhouse? Dost think that we are still hospodar here?” inquired Loyka with a kind of angry fervour.