I remained standing at the door.
The silence went on for several minutes; but suddenly she bent forward, pressed a kiss on the cold forehead, and said, “Good-bye, good-bye, dear Vadim”; then she walked with a steady step into an inner room. The painter went on with his work; he nodded to me, and I sat down by the window in silence; we felt no wish to talk.
The lady was Mme. Chertkóv, the sister of Count Zachar Chernyshev, one of the exiled Decembrists.
Melchizedek, the Abbot of St. Peter’s Monastery, himself offered that Vadim should be buried within the convent walls. He knew Vadim and respected him for his researches into the history of Moscow. He had once been a simple carpenter and a furious dissenter; but he was converted to Orthodoxy, became a monk, and rose to be Prior and finally Abbot. Yet he always kept the broad shoulders, fine ruddy face, and simple heart of the carpenter.
When the body appeared before the monastery gates, Melchizedek and all his monks came out to meet the martyr’s poor coffin, and escorted it to the grave, singing the funeral music. Not far from his grave rests the dust of another who was dear to us, Venevitínov, and his epitaph runs—
“He knew life well but left it soon”—
and Vadim knew it as well.
But Fortune was not content even with his death. Why indeed did his mother live to be so old? When the period of exile came to an end, and when she had seen her children in their youth and beauty and fine promise for the future, life had nothing more to give her. Any man who values happiness should seek to die young. Permanent happiness is no more possible than ice that will not melt.
Vadim’s eldest brother died a few months after Diomid, the soldier, fell in Circassia: a neglected cold proved fatal to his enfeebled constitution. He was the oldest of the family, and he was hardly forty.
Long and black are the shadows thrown back by these three coffins of three dear friends; the last months of my youth are veiled from me by funeral crape and the incense of thuribles.