Page:Three stories by Vítězslav Hálek (1886).pdf/382

 And after awhile Loyka began to speak again almost meekly, as though he were fit to cry. “What injury have I done you, my neighbours, that ye have leagued yourselves against me with yonder fellow. I always avoid you all, I do not get in any one’s way, I do not beg anything at your hands, I creep away like the field mouse beneath the hedgerow, for many years ye have not heard my voice, I suffer and am mute; what do ye find so sickening in me that you come to the cemetery against me as against a savage beast.”

This speech excited the neighbours compassion, they felt that they ought not to have yielded so easily to Joseph’s summons, and that old Loyka deserved more consideration at their hands than that they should have allowed themselves to bustle off as to a spectacle: just as when we wish to see something which is not to be seen every day. Even Joseph felt too well that he had invited them to play an ungracious part, and therefore used his best endeavours to turn their attention from his father and himself, and to concentrate it upon the gravedigger on whom he thought it high time to be revenged; and he began to talk as though it was Bartos alone who hindered his father from returning home, and here he began to threaten his neighbours with the anger of the bureaux if they did not aid him in rescuing his father from the power of Bartos.