Page:Three stories by Vítězslav Hálek (1886).pdf/35

 and the weeping above the grave were ended, Venik began to weep above it. He wept on his violin; he wept so that all the people burst forth into tears afresh. He played “The orphan child.” It was a language which everyone understood better than words, it was the language of tears, which are disparate from words. In a region of the heart already inaccessible to words, those tones opened for themselves every fastening, and pierced and saturated all. People had never heard speech so moving, and Venik hitherto had never spoken in such moving language.

Everyone was astonished at him, and Krista stood as though changed to a statue. Those tones were not the outcome of mere memory; they were the offspring of anguish, and Krista again found force to weep. They were the tones of orphanhood, and where in the world are there tones more touching.

This time Venik for long would not detach himself from his violin, and long was the burial speech he spoke upon it.

Only now for the first time he saw exactly how people are laid in the grave, because he whom they laid there was his father.

When all was over Riha’s cottage had a new owner. Instead of Riha the cottager came Riha the peasant, brother of the defunct, and now Venik’s guardian. He was already at the cottage with his wife when Venik and Krista returned from the