Page:Three stories by Vítězslav Hálek (1886).pdf/262



HE Loykas, man and wife, by the bedside of their defunct parent, perhaps, left the impression of being an avaricious couple. And cruelly should we wrong them if we held them up to scorn as avaricious. Avaricious they were only towards the pensioner on their bounty, and in this they had the common vice of perhaps a thousand of our families. To be pensioned off—that was to be the enemy of the property. That the pensioner and father were one and the same person, did not diminish the grave crime of being pensioned off by a tax upon the farm produce. The pensioner effaced the father, and the Loykas saw in their father only a pensioner on their bounty. And granted that the pensioner did them a good turn now and then—that was his duty as a father; but the Loykas did not dare ever to do him a good turn—he was pensioned off, and one’s pensioner must be thwarted every way.

And yet the Loykas were not in this matter by a single hair worse than many others; I say it with a sigh, but you find Loykas certainly in every second or third village.