feast you freely, but you would spurn my dainties, saving such of you as are like me, pensioned off on a son’s bounty, and his son and his son’s wife have meted out to him for his portion two chambers which were reserved for tinkers and pedlars—but you know it all.”
Among the neighbours who had come thither was also the mayor, and he said, “Pantata, you would not have to dwell in those chambers. Joseph promises you that he will not meddle with you in the pension house.”
“Ha! ha!” laughed Loyka, “and so you believe him, do you? This man who went against me like an enemy until he had stripped me of everything! Of my rights of hospodarship, of my respect with the servants, of the love of my children, and of this last span of earth on which I had laid my head. If he were to stretch out his hand to this cross, and lay it here in the side of the martyred Jesus, I would say to him, ‘Thou liest’.”
On this no one spoke more. The neighbours saw that it would be in vain, and Joseph perhaps said nothing, because he saw that every further step he took only the more incensed his father. Only here and there among themselves the neighbours exchanged a few desultory remarks.
And after a while 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 grave-digger: 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
