Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/86

 scarcely knew what had come over them. Already they held but empty tones, already their melody had ceased to speak.

The river hummed its old perpetual song and above the neighbouring village, his home and birth-place, the sleep of dreams descended. And fitful slumber seemed to flap about the hollow tree and to mock and gibe at Venik.

But perhaps only that aged tree understood the deep delight of slumber. Venik crept out of it and then he began again to muse and speculate and question within himself, whether all must be that had been, and whether there was not some power in Nature to efface and roll back the past. And his own soul answered him that all must be as it was and that he and Krista had understood one another at last. Krista had always smiled and smiled, and still she smiled even in the earth.

Then it seemed strange to him that he and Krista, who had grown up together like folded leaves upon a single bough, should have diverged so far from one another, that one could neither see nor touch the other; or they were like two mountains set side by side—for half their height they were like one single growth, for the other half their summits grew wider and wider apart, and nevermore encountered, or only when the snow-wreath and the tempest swept over them, and one summit sent its message to the other on the wings of the lightning. Thus he had sent his message to Krista on the wings of the lightning, and it had stricken her to death.

And he began to feel oppressed within that hollow tree, or perhaps it oppressed him to be on that couch of leaves and moss, which now so vainly began to be a couch. He laid himself down before the tree just on the spot where in the old days he and Krista had buried his mother, that is to say, the sweetbrier and the willow-wands and the sweet marjoram, and out of it had made his mother. And here on that little tomb he felt more at peace.

And it was just as if he saw and heard around him everything that he saw and heard here in yonder distant past, when here he shepherded the sheep.

There stood the little Krista, whose piping treble sang the gloria to his violin, and who wept because he chased her from him, and because she was a poor orphaned girl! And he began anew to smile vacantly at everything, just, ah! just as he had seen the dead Krista coldly smile.

And then a cuckoo cuckooed and its note rang lonely through that lonely wood, where now but few birds sang, rang out as if