Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/344

 it did that day, and, perhaps, never in their lives did such tones reverberate from its rocky walls as did that day.

Even old Loyka felt as though he were seated in the chambers by the coach-house at his home, and listened to the old, old stories. Only that on this occasion it was Frank who narrated his youthful experiences in that ravine, in which he pointed out where the wind-hover was wont to hang suspended in the air, where the brambles trailed, where hung the clinging sweetbrier, and where the streamlet bubbled in which those blue flowers flourished. And the fiddler played; and it was all so strange to those rocky walls that one after the other they repeated it all, as if they gloried in their ready memory, and as if they wondered what it was all about.

And then at last there fell upon the place, after the playing and the story-telling, a silence like the grave. When the birch-tree, safely anchored by its roots above them, stirred, even old Loyka heard it, and looked to see what it was. When the lizard, sunning itself by the bushes in the warm sunlight, let fall over the rock a fragment of pebble or a crumb of earth, Loyka looked to see what had happened there above his head. And when in the centre of the ravine a leaflet was whirled along tremulous and fluttered like thought itself, Loyka glanced upward, and wondered, “Whence art thou? Where, I wonder, did they treat thee like myself?”

And then it came to pass that his eyelids drooped wearily, and he fell asleep. When he awoke he would no more hear of going into the villages, he would no more hear of the musicians, and said he fain would come hither oftener. He could come here as often as he chose, because the woodman at whose house Frank had been staying for some time now welcomed Frank’s father also as an old and well-known acquaintance. And Frank led him into this ravine every day, here every day he slept most comfortably, and when he awoke he seemed always as though he found a portion of himself which he had lost.

It almost seemed as though Bartos’s device was destined to succeed, at all events it partially succeeded. But it still failed of its full effect, because Loyka would not ear of returning to his home. But at the same time he would not hear of strolling through the villages any more.

People had already ceased to say in telling his story that he was wandering through the villages. Now they said he wandered in the woods.