Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/44

 song and all sweet scents. It never oppressed her now—the thought that she was an orphan. She felt no special want to be supplied, and if she could have managed to give full expression to her feelings, she must have said that she rejoiced to live in the world.

But all at once Venik was again a solitary on the hill-side. Riha, his father, began to fail in health, he took to his bed and Krista had to stop at home with him. From that moment Venik ceased to take his violin with him: the song and the playing were silenced; death, like the shadow of a heavy pinion, hovered over Riha’s cottage, and our children all at once ceased to be children. The world all at once took on a different colour; it suddenly lost for him its brilliance, and his breast was overflowing with anxiety. When Venik from the hill-side saw his cottage-home it looked to him as though it could be singled out from all the other buildings by particular signs, and to Krista sitting in complete silence in the sick-room with the ticking of the old clock and the groans of the failing Riha, it seemed as though an invisible finger had wiped off from the world all mirth and all sweet singing. All who came into the sick-room were gloomy and grave; those who went away from it seemed to be without hope, and Krista, who sat continually in the sick-room, felt as if all that gloom and hopelessness had concentrated itself on her; and time elapsed.

Krista flung herself on the bed sobbing, and out of doors the death-knell was sounding far and wide. When its deep vibration thrilled over the hill-side Venik started to his feet like a wounded hart. With weeping and lamentations he collected his sheep, and with weeping and lamentations drove them home. He had no need to ask for whom the death-knell was tolling, he knew it in an instant, and if he had not known it, a single glance at the sick-room would have told him all. The sign of death was visibly scored upon the house. That heavy wing had swooped down upon it, and the expression of everything was one of gloom and sorrow.

Krista knelt by the bedside on which Riha had just expired, Venik knelt beside Krista, and in broken syllables—for in such the deepest anguish is wont to speak if it finds words at all—thus addressed her, “Now I also am a poor orphan”; now he had sacrificed his father also; now Krista was at last in no sort poorer