Page:Three stories by Vítězslav Hálek (1886).pdf/67



T seems to me that then for the first time was Venik without a public, without listeners, when seated again on the hillside, he took once more his violin in his hands and played, “The Orphaned Child.”

He was that orphaned child. Long ago, when Krista had accompanied him with her voice for the first time in the gloria, she had burst into tears because she was an orphan; and Venik convinced her that she was not an orphan. Then his father died: Krista was driven from the house, and when she had to begin her wandering in the world he had taken her by the hand, and wandered with her, and pointed out the way; again she was not an orphan. And when it was all finished, she voluntarily departed from him, at the very moment when he had hoped with her to enter paradise. That paradise closed upon him—where was it now?

Venik’s thoughts had no beginning and no end, they were like an unbroken wilderness, where the eye tires itself. There was nothing for it to rest