Page:Heavens!.djvu/102

 it was all quiet—not even any louder talk was heard from it. The bricklayer’s wife asserted, it is true, that she heard some crying going on there; but that it could have been from a baby, even she did not take into her head, though she was chief gossip among all the others.

The morning threw some light upon the dark mystery and unravelled surprisingly what had puzzled the heads of all the cronies the night before.

After the morning Mass, the priest went out and met the village warden, Omoc̓il, going to the field with spade over his shoulder. He told him the story as invented by Naninka.

Omoc̓il was a sharp, shrewd fellow, and it did not escape him that the priest, who always looked every one straight in the face when he had anything to say, on this occasion turned his eyes away, and either looked down on the ground, or at some indifferent object. He listened in silence, and when Father Cvok had finished, he replied slowly and cautiously, in official tone—

“All I care for is this—that no charge or expense may come upon our community through the business; and therefore I must ask you, reverend sir, to declare before me and two witnesses that this child will never fall a burden on our parish.”

“Oh, that I will readily do for you,” answered the priest.

“Have you the baptismal certificate of the child?” inquired Omoc̓il.

“It was born in Prague on the first of last March, and baptized on the third of the same month in the church of St. Egidius, with the name Joseph.”

“And what is the name of its father?”

Here the priest grew red with embarrassment, and felt