Page:Three stories by Vítězslav Hálek (1886).pdf/310

 them. And when Joseph told his father and mother quite seriously that they were teaching Frank to be a tramp, Loyka strictly enjoined upon his younger son to stay at home and not to leave it any more.

But even these injunctions soon ceased to be taken seriously. Frank obeyed for a day or two, and after a day or two was already far away from home without his parents paying any heed to him.

Old Loyka, indeed, already began to grow rather blind to everything novel that originated around him, and Frank’s vagabond habits were something novel. Moreover he himself was too much afflicted by the relation subsisting between himself and Joseph, and was too full of it, with the best intentions in the world, to have much room left in his heart for Frank.

And here we must say, once for all, that old Loyka’s power of resistance which had in some respects so stoutly confronted Joseph’s encroachment upon its rights, now began in everything to slacken at all points. He felt himself crushed and broken, he already found but few sources of support within himself, and thus he willed and acted only by halves. Each new motive entered into him only as it were by one ear, to vanish again immediately by the other. And so it was that he ordered Frank not to quit the house, as to whether his son obeyed his orders or not, the father had already ceased to trouble himself.