Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/354

 “Not I, but you, mayor, are to be the purchaser.”

“Oh! so I am to buy Loyka’s farm?”

“Yes, as Frank’s guardian, with Frank’s money, and for Frank. If there is not sufficient, you can advance the money, or a debt might remain on the estate. Frank is young and can economize. Besides this, he has his younger-son’s portion on the estate. That would accrue.”

The mayor began to reflect. “Hum! It would accrue: perhaps it might be done.”

“If only he wishes to sell?”

“That I could find out from him. I could, indeed, invite him to our house; but now, no one can entice him out of his own at any price of which you are the cause. I could go to him myself.”

„No, no, mayor! No, no! He must send for you. We must so contrive, not that we should seem bent on buying the farm, but that Joseph should seem bent on selling it.”

“Not in vain do they call you a ‘sapient grave-digger’”, said the mayor flatteringly. “But, frankly, my dear Bartos, I do not as yet see your drift.”

Bartos was glad that he had hit upon something which no one else had hit upon before, and that the mayor had said in so many words that his [Bartos’s] more elaborate design eluded his penetration.

“It is as follows”, explained Bartos. “Old Loyka will not return to his estate. Of that you are convinced?”

“Of that I am convinced”, repeated the mayor.

“That is to say, so long as Joseph is on the farm”, continued Bartos.

“So long as Joseph is there?” said the mayor, interrogatively, as though he again failed to grasp the scheme of the grave-digger.

“Then my idea is this. Might not old Loyka return to his farmstead if Joseph was there no more?”

“If he was not there? That pleases me. That might be.”

“And if everything else there was rearranged just as it was wont to be in times gone by—Loyka to command the servants; in the chambers by the coach-house mirth to reign as in the days of old; Loyka to dwell in the farmhouse and be hospodar, both in name and reality; Frank, voluntarily, to be subservient to his wishes, whereby we should make a good hospodar of Frank. Do you not think that in this manner old Loyka might yet recover his health?”