had almost reached her twenty-fifth year without landing one of them, and yet she had a good, honest heart and a dowry of several hundred florins.
It has already been said what Svejnoha was to Loukov; it now remains to be told what Loukov was to Svejnoha. It was an oasis in a desert, a clear sky in harvest time, a terrestrial paradise, a sure ladder to heaven. He knew Loukov by heart; he saw its needs, its possible improvements, and any rent in its social fabric at once arrested his attention. Such an ugly, never to be healed, rent Marka was about to become; for spinisterhood is displeasing to God, and his wrath will fall with equal might upon all who have neglected the sacred duty of establishing families and raising a proportionate number of sons.
At that time Svejnoha was not quite forty. One day he heard a mighty voice within his heart saying: “Vincenc, go be a husband, a father, a father-in-law, a grandfather. It is time; duty calls!” Svejnoha went. That he did not go shooting hares with a hoe was proved the following shrovetide, which ended for him with a sprig of rosemary in his coat, a flower in his hat, and plighted troth at the altar.
So Marka became his wife, and a devoted wife she was, with no other desire in the world than how she might fulfil his every wish. Svejnoha had won a prize, and that he knew it and appreciated it was proved by the floods of honest tears he shed when, after ten years of happy married life, he followed his wife’s coffin to the grave.
Marka left her husband but a single living remembrance, and that remembrance wore calico frocks, had two long braids dangling down her back, bright eyes, a pretty dimple in her chin, and was named Nanka. Svejnoha loved Loukov, and the thing in Loukov that he loved best was his only child.
He had not married again—most likely there was no need of any bridegroom at that time—and he had brought Nanka up himself, according to his own very original ideas.
He tried to teach her all he himself knew, and planned to make of her one of the wonders of the world. But alas, there are some minds that are as unyielding and unresponsive as a stone, and Nanka’s was one of these. If, after years of earnest effort, he had taken her pretty head and wrung it out like a washed sack, of all the facts he had tried to pound into it he would not have got back a particle as large as a poppy seed. Nanka’s head was empty.
It was with a very heavy heart that he at last gave up. It was bitter for him to have all his magnificent plans brought to nought by a mixing spoon that seemed to be Nanka’s favorite sceptre, by needle and thread that were her daily necessity, and by her love for gaudy ribbons and gowns and kerchiefs with the most beautiful borders.
Svejnoha buried his hopes, mournfully signing them with a large cross: but he forgave his daughter, coming to the sage conclusion that it was only God who could make something out of nothing.
Some time after this he began to make other discoveries, not so weighty or unusual, but very important to him as a father.
“God bless us, I shall be a father-in-law, the first thing I know,” said Svejnoha one day as he took down his best coat, in whose button hole was still the sprig of rosemary that had adorned it at his wedding. I shall be a father-in-law; I am old enough for it, am I not? But let young Hukac look out!”
Young Hukac was the man who so warmly admired the dimple in Nanka’s chin, and who had come to the conclusion that if old Svejnoha would add at least six hundred florins to that dimple, it would not be against his convictions to lead her to the altar.
Antonin Hukac owned a small farm, which, however, was so heavily mortgaged that it belonged more to his creditors than it did to himself. The cause of this state of affairs could easily be divined by observing a well trodden path leading from his gate directly to the door of the cosey saloon of Frankel the Jew, where at all hours of
