Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/365

 Then they begged old Loyka to come and sit down with them. After this they began to relate about things past and present, and what changes there had been, and old Loyka felt as though some one was planting a new heart in his breast, and in his head the song of the laverock once more resounded.

Then the old kalounkar said, “I think, pantata, if you would be so good as to suffer us to stay here some time under this roof, that the Lord God would reward you for it on the other side.”

Old Loyka said, “When I see you here I can believe that I am here—just as if you had been my roots and I could again anchor myself here by you.”

They were in very truth his roots, and old Loyka anchored himself here by them.

After this his neighbours from the village came and welcomed old Loyka. They declared that they were interested about the construction of some public gardens, and that they only waited for his advice before beginning to lay them out.

In a word, every one treated old Loyka just as though there had never been a period when he was a fugitive from his home, just as though this day was a continuation of the brighter, happier days of old. Not, perhaps, that Loyka should no more remember what had been. By no means. He very well remembered that but yesterday he was a wanderer in the world, but at the same time there emerged in him to-day a fresh consciousness that, perhaps, there might be an end of this wandering.

And so Bartos’s plan succeeded. Those spiders’ webs which had obscured old Loyka’s mind, dissipated themselves of their own accord, and he every day visibly convalesced. Once more he took his walk every evening to the chambers by the coach-house, and himself invited the inmates to converse and sing. “Be merry, lads, be merry”, he used to say.

And the old life began again at the Loykas’s. That farm was now once more just as people had known it all their lives. Old Loyka so far convalesced that he threw off several years as though they had been a few heavy sheaves of corn; so that at last his friends ventured to tell him the whole truth, both about what had happened to Joseph, how he had sold out of the farm, and how the farm was bought for Frank, and how being still young, Frank begged that he, Loyka, should manage it for him. Ay, he so far convalesced that sometimes he would say, when he paid a visit to the chambers, “So, my lads, tell me the story of old Loyka when he was a wanderer in the world.”