Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/349

 cession of people carrying some one to the grave, whereas they went for a man in order to bring him from the grave and back to his own home.

When they reached the cemetery the neighbours remained in the rear. Joseph advanced to the dwelling of the grave-digger and shouted, “Bartos, now we are here, so let out my father.”

Bartos issued from his house, which had also a door into the fields, halted in front of the threshold, and seeing in reality half the village at Joseph’s back inquired jestingly, “Are you come to pay me a visit, neighbours? I am delighted, I am delighted, but you must only come one by one, because men do not enter these precincts all at once.”

“We are come for my father”, said Joseph. “I’ll teach thee, thou son of a spade, that I know how to keep my word.”

“For your father? You have him there”, said Bartos, and pointed vaguely all over the cemetery.

“Open the charnel-house, grave-digger,” said Joseph imperiously.

“It will not be necessary,” answered the grave-digger. “Yonder is thy father”, and he pointed to the great ruddy cross by which stood old Loyka with dishevelled hair, holding in his hand a human shin-bone which he had picked out for himself in the charnel-house, and looking from one to the other of those who had approached the cemetery, as much as to say, “If any one comes near me I will break his head for him with this shin-bone.”

All started back who saw it, even Joseph started. That grey-haired sire among the tombs, holding his left hand around the great cross on which hung the old white-iron figure of the Christus, and in his right hand a human bone, seemed standing there the defender of the dead against whom the living had come in battle-array.

“What went ye out for to see?” began old Loyka in the words of Scripture. “A notable son who promised in presence of you all to bear me on his arms, and then waved me to those chambers which I had reserved for beggars, and bade me dwell there. Behold him, yonder, he is among you. Or came ye out for to see a father bereft of sense and reason who long ago invited you to the feast, danced with you and made you merry? Behold me here, I stand beneath the crucified Jesus, but I have no more to spend on feasts, nothing remains to me save this bone, and none of you have much appetite for that. Surely, you do not believe that old Loyka has ceased to be hospitable? Oh, I could