personal affairs and bringing them to a satisfactory settlement.
The breach between him and Jenny was all his fault, and had been caused entirely by his cowardly conduct; and yet, from the wavering nature of his own character, he could not believe it to be altogether irreparable. He thought the one person to bridge it over was Father Cvok of Záluz̓í, with whom he felt daily more and more sympathy for his noble-minded, self-sacrificing treatment of his little son. The castle carriage was now often seen going between Labutín and Záluz̓í, and at last the scales fell completely from people’s eyes. They saw now that not Cvok, but the baron himself, was the father of the child in question.
“Well,” they would say to each other round the domestic hearth, “Heavens has won a prize in the lottery, after all! Who would ever have thought that he was such a shrewd fellow, and so well up in the castle intrigues? One thing is sure—if the old baroness lived he would get small thanks for his pains.”
“True, he did not live on the fat of the land in Záluz̓í,” a clerical brother would say here and there; but rather than try to better one’s self in such a manner, man in holy orders ought to be satisfied with potatoes.”
Our good friend Cvok was certainly not particularly fit to wear the swallow-tailed coat of a diplomatist, but he had to put it on for all that, in spite of himself, not only for the baron’s sake, but also for his dear Pepíc̓ek, ior whom he felt it his duty to provide a splendid future, He also thought that one must strike while the iron is hot, and not allow it to cool by procrastination and delay.
And so he entered upon his diplomatic career by taking up his pen and writing a long letter to Jenny, in
