Page:Three stories by Vítězslav Hálek (1886).pdf/198

 turn to! and her boy on her hands! Where is she to work? What wages can she earn?” And he wished to set off at once and say to Malka that she had better give her boy to him, that he would take him like any other boy, and that he would relieve her of all anxiety. He would have gone but then again he said to himself, “What should I do with the little scamp? He will be like his father, he will never have heard of scavenging and care for nothing but the water. What is the profit of purifying his will from the taint of scavenging, when he has no will to be a scavenger? And only because he had neither skill nor power to fit the thing into his own mental economy, he hesitated and did not go for the boy.

But once it was made known to him that Malka was ill, and that she did not know how her illness might end. Hereupon Poldik went directly to Malka and said, “Ah! Malka, give me this boy of yours: he will be very useful to me, and then you will be freed from all anxiety about him. The boy will be as though he was my own!”

On this Malka said, “I thank you, Poldik, for your kindly offer: but I will not give the boy to you.”

These words made on Poldik the impression as though he had fallen from the sky. So then, she still even now so despised him that she would not even trust her child to him, although she was sick and in distress.