Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/83

 so faithlessly. And his hand also had strewn the couch on which she lay to-day, but she was not truant now.

Then Venik questioned the shade of her—the lost one. “Krista, why didst thou desert me in the old days?” But Krista’s lips were mute and her shadow answered not, and on her face she smiled the same cold smile. And Venik’s tongue faltered his reproaches—“Only once in the old days thou didst desert me.” But the dead Krista treated both his questions and his repinings with the same icy calm and smiled the same cold smile which froze the life-blood within him.

And he gazed at the fair corpse again and sighed and wondered. “Was it to sleep in fruitless beauty on a gilded couch and silken cushions that thou didst leave so recklessly my couch of moss and leaves?”

And then Venik whispered to himself that he would carry her away by stealth and lay her on the couch of moss and leaves and then perhaps she would awaken—perhaps she would rise once more. And then he thought that it would be easier to go to the hollow tree, bring away the leaves and moss, and strew it here, and then perhaps she might awaken. But, however he planned and plotted, Krista treated all his day-dreams with the same icy calm and smiled the same cold smile as though she wished to say, “I am contented with everything thou dost”, or again just as though she said, “Fool, fool, all is over, I am well-cared-for now.”

Then Krista in that calm unnatural repose was such a riddle to him that he turned away and vowed that he would strive to unriddle it no more. He turned away and taking his violin in his hand examined it all over inch by inch to see where lay that secret source whence had issued words so shrewdly tempered that they had smitten Krista to the death, and then as if to solve the secret his fingers closed idly round the bow and he swept it gently across the strings. But only as though he coaxed and stroked them lest they should utter their words of death anew, only just as Krista had done that night when stepping to the window and gazing at the evening star, she had sung half whispering, half aloud “The Orphaned Child”.

And Venik, too, stepped to that open window and looked toward the heaven, looked wellnigh in the same direction as did Krista ere death had robbed her of the light for ever. And his strings sighed out in whispers “The Orphaned Child”. Did Krista listen as she used to listen in the old days? He turned to look at her once more and she smiled as smoothly as before and seemed to