Page:Three stories by Vítězslav Hálek (1886).pdf/252

 “Delve so that I may come quite close to Maminka, then I shall sleep with her,” said StaraStaza [sic], as if she consoled herself with the idea, for anyone who had looked for melancholy from this poor child, would have proven himself completely ignorant of the heart of childhood. Staza was but three years of age when her mother died; in such a little heart sorrow cannot obtain a foothold, and after six years a child does not know what it means to have lost a mother.

After these words Frank again drew near the grave on the pretence that he wanted to see whether Bartos and Staza would delve so cleverly as not to disturb the neighbouring grave.

“Thou hast never yet slept in a grave Franky,” said Staza not at all interrogatively, but just as though she were stating a certainty.

“In a grave?” enquired Frank in astonishment. Staza grew on graves as the grass and the floweret grew upon them. This cemetery was her playing ground, her village green where she frolicked, where she delved and watered the plants and tended them, it was her school where with Bartos on those graves she learnt little of literary lore ’tis true, but more than all the patter of the class room.

When she was yet quite young she had once asked Bartos “What is my mamma doing in the grave?”

“She sleeps,” said Bartos.