Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/324

 And so, then, to-day on the farm were two sorts of gaiety: one like the fire flickering in the embers, and that was the gaiety of the old folk; the other like a fire just emerging from the faggots, and that was the gaiety of the young folk, and the one sort of gaiety—the gaiety of the old folks was extinguished that very day. When evening spread itself above the patriarchal acres and above the farmstead, and the musicians were departed thence and the old folk crept into their isolated hall, to their pension house, it seemed to them as though around them and within their heart yawned a mighty void which could not be filled by any sounds of earth. No expansiveness of heart was possible, and every hearty expression died away upon their lips. And when they glanced fearfully around, it seemed to them as though the spirit of the aged grandfather entered into them, and said, “I am freed at last from these torture-chambers, ye have entered into them.”

The other gaiety, the gaiety of the young folk, lasted long into the night, and when they stepped into the hall of their farmhouse they seemed to hear even the walls re-echoing with mirth and jollity, and they had but to lightly hint their will and all was full of merriment. And they did hint their will: and it was as though the tutelary deity of the place threw wide the doors, and said, “Ye enter here omnipotent; so, then, tarry not, but enter.”

HEN Frank learnt that his parents dwelt in the pension house, he began to yearn for home. To his shame, be it said, not for the sake of his parents, to whom he had already become disaccustomed owing to his fondness for his grandfather, but for his own sake, because he longed to see once more a spot where he had fashioned for himself in company with his grandfather so special a mode of existence that he fancied on the whole estate there was nothing to be compared with it.

As we know, Frank at present tramped the world, and, indeed, in the true sense of tramping. But it is much stranger that his parents should have permitted him to tramp abroad, aye, that later they wholly ceased to search for him in order to forbid it. From the beginning old Loyka had learnt that he walked about with the kalounkar, the fiddler, or the sieve-maker—let him walk with them, thought Loyka to himself, to be sure, even at home