Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/65

 shadow. And when he turned back without success, he did not wish to go again to the tree, or to the couch within it.

Then he cast his eyes over his own native district, and felt as though here he was in his own home once again. He longed to go back once more to the Rihas’s to offer to tend his flock, and even to leave behind him that violin which he knew not whether he ought to curse or bless. Once, indeed, under cover of evening he approached the village and wended his way to his own parental roof, and debated long with himself as to whether he should enter the house or not. He passed the court-yard and stood behind the hall-door, next to which was the kitchen. In the kitchen on the hearth burnt a fire, beside the hearth stood Riha’s wife preparing the evening meal. The fire flashed into her face, that face had the colour of the fire, and it was a strict face. But still it seemed to him like an honest face, and one that he could trust. Always it had never promised him anything, always it had only threatened him; and just because it realized its own threats, it was honest. Krista had never threatened him; there was no strictness in her words or face, and yet how had she sinned against him in comparison with yon poor old beldam.

Perhaps he would have entered, perhaps he would have offered to drudge at anything, and nothing would have been too burdensome for him. But at that moment Riha’s wife carried away the supper from the hearth, she returned no more, and Venik departed. He paused awhile at the window, and looked into the lighted room. And here it flashed across him that the cottage with its bit of land was his property, that it was a rare stroke of fortune for his uncle and aunt, the Rihas, when he went a-roving in the world, and that he might even now enter the chamber where they sat and demand of them an account of their stewardship over his farm and rights. He might settle here, leave his vagabond life far behind him, and become a well-ordered man. A well-ordered man!

Hereupon Venik turned from the windows and from the cottage, and went once more toward the hill-side.

To be a well-ordered man. What was that? Venik laughed sarcastically. When he had fled into the world with Krista he was a well-ordered man. When she departed from him—an end to orderliness! even though he should be the master of a farm. Perhaps Krista was well-ordered, and now he could be so, too. Fie upon it all! Where was the good of perfunctorily saying, “I will be a well-ordered man”—and then to have in one’s bosom