Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/319

 or sauce or seasoning, neither your son nor your son’s wife will salt or sauce it for you; then you just call down the backstairs, ‘Oh, Vena, come and be our sauce and seasoning!’ And I shall understand all that you have need of. Only, prithee, guarantee me those two chambers, or verily it will go hard with you.”

“The two chambers? If I had to take thee with me aloft into the pension house, thou should’st never quit the estate, Vena”, answered Loyka sententiously.

“I have your word, at all events”, said Vena, thanking him. “So now we may proceed with your banishment. I thought it important to insist upon the matter of my two chambers, because it is possible that to-day you will march across yon court-yard for the last time in your life.”

“And, prithee, how may that be I should like to know, thou sapient Solomon?” asked Loyka.

“As thus. If you have not in your written agreement reserved to yourself the right of walking across your son’s court-yard, who knows whether he will permit it. You will have to creep along the roof like grimalkin when she goes to the witches frolic”, and Vena laughed.

“It is not necessary to put such things into a written agreement”, said Loyka, with a kind of angry fervour.

“Oh! of course not, of course not, seeing that what stands in the written agreement is never carried out, the less there the better. Your own father never dared draw water from your well, and I think his right to do so was reserved in the written agreement.”

“It wasn’t”, cut in Loyka.

“Oh! it wasn’t; then see here. No doubt of it you have it in your agreement that you may draw water, but have forgot in the same agreement to reserve to yourself the right of walking across the court-yard to fetch the water. But do you know what, pantata, if it comes to that, I will carry you across the court-yard on my back, for then no one will be able to prove that you walked across the court-yard, and as for me I have still the right to carry on my back what I please.”

“Thou art all salt and sauce, boy, sauciness and seasoning”, said Loyka to cut short the conversation, and for a moment his breast heaved as though he was on the point of weeping. But after all nothing came of it except laughter, only that behind this laughter that weeping was quite apparent: tears and weeping