Page:Three stories by Vítězslav Hálek (1886).pdf/282

 The musicians did not finish their performance, nor did they finish what they had further wished to say; old Loyka stood as though a stream of hot water was running down his back, and Loyka’s aged wife, had it not been the very day of the wedding would, perhaps, have stoutly seconded her lord and master.

The musicians did not finish their performance, and trailed like draggled chickens across the courtyard toward the coach-house, and entered their two chambers.

“And that is a pretty welcome,” said they to one another.

“Truly, she begins wondrous well,” they murmured.

“This is something new on the estate,” they added.

Loyka’s aged wife still could not bring herself to believe that the new bride wished so ruthlessly to abolish on the very threshold of her new life what had been for so long a series of years a speciality of the family. “When you danced here at your grandfather’s funeral I did not think, Barushka, that you were an enemy to music,” said she with a certain asperity.

“I cannot stand things where they are out of place,” replied Barushka with yet greater asperity. Music is in its place at an alehouse, not at such a farm as this. I could not endure to live under the