Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/345

 LD LOYKA continued to be a constant figure of the district surrounding Frishets. If any one from the neighbourhood or from abroad had come there and inquired what novel or peculiar event had happened there, he would have learnt that they had there a vejminkar [pensioner] belonging to a large estate and with a large pension, but who would not dwell on his estate, and roved about even in the woods and dwelt in the cemetery with the grave-digger Bartos.

“You have here a strange and ludicrous thing”, he would hear said: for people frequently regard what is strange as also ludicrous. “Perhaps he wood sooner allow himself to be nailed to a cross than to return to the farm in which his son is hospodar. Some years ago he was just a little touched in the head and walked with a band of musicians from village to village—what a peasant it is! Now he is a little more reasonable; only no one can persuade him to go home-the fool!”

“And has he been long thus?” the stranger would perhaps inquire.

“Already a good many years. His wife dwells in the farmhouse, and about her Loyka says, ‘Let her stop there, she merits it.’ ’Tis a strange and ludicrous affair.” So would run the discourse of the native of the place.

And so we see that even over his sufferings several years have flown and, before he had expected it, we are several years older, and with us Loyka and Frank and Staza and all the rest. During this time, it is true, Joseph importuned his father to return home. He dispatched servants after him with the assurance that he never dreamed his father would make such a fuss about the two chambers by the coach-house and take the matter so seriously, and that if only he would return he might dwell in the pension house unmolested. But the servants who were sent with these messages never succeeded much, because on these occasions old Loyka behaved as though they wished to hale him to the butcher’s, stuffed his fingers in his ears, and took to flight. Moreover, at times, he sent strange messages to his son, though it is hard to say whether the servants delivered them just as he gave them.

But old Loyka took so violent an aversion, even to the servants. from the farm, that if he came to a village his first question was whether any one from Frishets was on the watch for him. And