Short Fiction by Leo Tolstoy (book reader for pc TXT) 📕

an angel!” she said to the husband with tears in her eyes. The husband began to weep; the priest went in at the door; the old lady was still unconscious, and in the outer room there was a complete stillness. Five minutes later the priest came out, and taking off his stole smoothed back his hair.

“Thank God, the lady is calmer now,” he said; “she wants to see you.”

The cousin and the husband went in. The sick woman was weeping quietly, gazing at the holy picture.

“I congratulate you, my dear,” said her husband.

“Thank you! How happy I am now, what unspeakable joy I am feeling!” said the sick woman, and a faint smile played about her thin lips. “How merciful is God! Is it not true? Is He not merciful and almighty?” And again with eyes full of tears she gazed at the holy picture in eager prayer.

Then suddenly something seemed to recur to her mind. She beckoned her husband to her.

“You never will do what I ask,” she said in a weak, irritable voice.

Her husband, craning his neck forward, listened submissively.

“What is it, my dear?”

“How often I’ve told you those doctors don’t know anything; there are simple healers, who work cures.⁠ ⁠… The holy father told me⁠ ⁠… an artisan⁠ ⁠… send for him.”

“For whom, my dear?”

“My God, he won’t understand anything!⁠ ⁠…”

And the sick woman frowned and covered her eyes. The doctor went up and took her hand. The pulse was growing perceptibly weaker and weaker. He made a sign to the husband. The sick woman noticed this gesture and looked round in alarm. The cousin turned away, and burst into tears.

“Don’t cry, don’t torture yourself and me,” said the sick woman; “that destroys all the calm left me.”

“You are an angel!” said the cousin, kissing her hand.

“No, kiss me here, it’s only the dead who are kissed on the hand. My God! my God!”

The same evening the sick woman was a corpse, and the corpse lay in a coffin in the drawing-room of the great house. The doors of the big room were closed, and in it a deacon sat alone, reading the Psalms of David aloud in a rhythmic, nasal tone. The bright light of the wax candles in the tall silver candlesticks fell on the pale brow of the dead woman, on the heavy, waxen hands and the stone-like folds of the shroud, that jutted up horribly at the knees and toes. The deacon read on rhythmically without taking in the meaning of his own words, and the words echoed and died away strangely in the still room. From time to time the sounds of children’s voices and the tramp of their feet came from a faraway room.

“ ‘Thou unveilest Thy face, and they are confounded,’ ” the psalm-reader boomed; “ ‘Thou takest from them Thy breath, they die and return to the dust from which they came. Thou breathest Thy spirit into them⁠—they are created and renew the earth. Glory be to God now and forever.’ ”

The face of the dead woman was stern and solemn. Nothing stirred the pure, cold brow and the firmly set lips. She was all attention. But did she even now understand those grand words?

IV

A month later a stone monument had been raised over the dead woman’s grave. But there was still no stone over the driver’s grave, and there was nothing but the bright green grass over the mound, which was the only sign of a man’s past existence.

“It’ll be a sin in you, Seryoga,” the cook at the station said one day, “if you don’t buy a stone for Fyodor. You were always saying it was winter, but now why don’t you keep your word? I was by at the time. He’s come back once already to ask you for it; if you don’t buy it, he’ll come again and stifle you.”

“Why, did I say I wasn’t going to?” answered Seryoga; “I’ll buy a stone as I said I would; I’ll buy one for a silver rouble and a half. I’ve not forgotten, but it must be fetched, you know. As soon as I’ve a chance to go to the town I’ll buy it.”

“You might put a cross up anyway,” put in an old driver, “or else it’s a downright shame. You’re wearing the boots.”

“Where’s one to get a cross? You wouldn’t cut one out of a log of firewood?”

“What are you talking about? You can’t hew it out of a log. You take an axe and go early in the morning into the copse; you can cut a cross there. An aspen or something you can fell. And it’ll make a fine wooden monument too. Or else you’ll have to go and stand the forest-reeve a drink of vodka. One doesn’t want to have to give him a drink for every trifle. The other day I broke a splinter-bar; I cut myself a firstrate new one, and no one said a word to me.”

In the early morning, when it was hardly light, Seryoga took his axe and went into the wood. Over all lay a chill, even-coloured veil of still-falling dew, not lighted up by the sun. The east was imperceptibly growing clearer, reflecting its faint light on the arch of sky covered with fine clouds. Not a blade of grass below, not a leaf on the topmost twig stirred. The stillness of the forest was only broken at intervals by the sound of wings in a tree or a rustle on the ground. Suddenly a strange sound, not one of nature’s own, rang out and died away on the edge of the forest. But again the sound was heard, and began to be repeated at regular intervals near the trunk of one of the motionless trees. One of the treetops began shaking in a strange way; its sappy leaves whispered something; and a warbler that had been perched on one of its branches fluttered round it twice, and uttering a whistle and wagging its tail, settled on another tree.

The