Page:Selected Czech tales - 1925.djvu/234

Daily during the summer, when the weather was fine, Count Christopher des Loges, great adventurer, lover, and man of the world, and now a weak-minded septuagenarian, was led hither, tottering and supported by the two lackeys with dull red faces and a vague brutal fury hidden deep down under their clean-shaven skin and mask-like faces. There were moments when the count’s eyes rested scrutinizingly on these faces, and the old man seemed to grind something between his teeth. To be able to fasten your nails into these masks! Could they be torn off? Much blood would no doubt gush forth. Beasts! It seemed to him as if all life had crept far down below the surface, underneath its bark, or had hidden itself behind a mask. Here then he would sit, handsome and proud even in his decay, on a deck-chair brought by one of the footmen. There was still something leonine about his head with its grey locks and prominent cheek bones, with the sensual, disdainfully curved lips and forbidding expression. As he sat there, his head bent forward, his hands resting on the knob of his stick, he seemed more like an injured man brooding on revenge than one crushed by age. His heavy eyelids only, half covering his eyes and raised with