Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/372

 On this Vena vented his brimming choler in these words, “You have not wagons enough to carry home a single one of her good qualities. So you want to be sarcastic, do you? What do you know, ye peasant proprietors, of the essentials of a happy marriage? You barter your daughters on the market-place to the man who makes the highest bid. ‘A crown! two crowns! ten crowns! twelve crowns!’—those are your daughters. And so you would sneer, would you? He who throws down most of the dross is the heaven-sent husband. And then you shrink into your pension house when you have accomplished this feat of wondrous wisdom, and how many wagons are wanted to carry your pensioner’s portion? I would undertake to wheel you away, portion and all, on a handbarrow.”

Here Vena had worked himself into a frenzy, so that he did not know when he ought to conclude his declamation, although we must add in conclusion that all the neighbours condemned Kmoch’s ill-timed question.

“She will not be such a one,” continued Vena, “that her father must wander through the market-places like a beggar, because they tormented him under his own roof. There will be no need that the vejminkar should make his last will before she sets foot in his house, because afterwards he will be worried out of his five senses. And with such good qualities as she possesses Staza will need many wagons to carry all easily.”

Perhaps Vena would have declaimed at yet greater length had not the march of events deadened the effect of Kmoch’s insolent remark.

From the cemetery, whither Frank had driven to claim his bride, his best man rode at a gallop, and said that the happy pair would be at the village in a trice, that old Bartos had joined their hands by the graves of Staza’s mother and Frank’s grandfather and said, “Your love grew out of the grave; may it last beyond all graves.”

At this moment Vanek began to ring the bell in the chapel, and outside the village resounded the fiddles of well-known fiddlers, who were assisted by musicians from the whole surrounding district.

The neighbours on the village green flocked into the green arcade which formed an alley as far as the chapel, and awaited the young bride and bridegroom, only Kmoch turned away in another direction.