Father Alexyéi paused for a moment, and covered his eyes with his hand.
But why should I weary you longer [he went on], and myself? My son and I dragged ourselves home, and there he soon afterward expired, and I lost my Yásha. For several days before his death he neither ate nor drank, but kept running back and forth in the room and repeating that there could be no forgiveness for his sin…. But he never saw him again. "He has ruined my soul," he said; "and why should he come any more now?" And when Yákoff took to his bed, he immediately sank into unconsciousness, and thus, without repentance, like a senseless worm, he went from this life to life eternal….
But I will not believe that the Lord judged harshly….
And among other reasons why I do not believe it is, that he looked so well in his coffin; he seemed to have grown young again and resembled the Yákoff of days gone by. His face was so tranquil and pure, his hair curled in little rings, and there was a smile on his lips. Márfa Sávishna came to look at him, and said the same thing. She encircled him all round with flowers, and laid flowers on his heart, and set up the gravestone at her own expense.
And I was left alone…. And that is why, my dear sir, you have beheld such great grief on my face…. It will never pass off—-and it cannot.
I wanted to speak a word of comfort to Father Alexyéi … but could think of none. We parted soon after.
OLD PORTRAITS[27]
(1881)
About forty versts from our village there dwelt, many years ago, the great-uncle of my mother, a retired Sergeant of the Guards and a fairly wealthy landed proprietor, Alexyéi Sergyéitch Telyégin, on his ancestral estate, Sukhodól. He never went anywhere himself, and therefore did not visit us; but I was sent to pay my respects to him a couple of times a year, at first with my governor, and later on alone. Alexyéi Sergyéitch always received me very cordially, and I spent three or four days with him. He was already an old man when I made his acquaintance; I remember that I was twelve years old at my first visit, and he was already over seventy. He had been born under the Empress Elizabeth, in the last year of her reign. He lived alone with his wife, Malánya Pávlovna; she was ten years younger than he. They had had two daughters who had been married long before, and rarely visited Sukhodól; there had been quarrels between them and their parents,[28] and Alexyéi Sergyéitch hardly ever mentioned them.
I see that ancient, truly noble steppe home as though it stood before me now. Of one story, with a huge mezzanine,[29] erected at the beginning of the present century from wonderfully thick pine beams—such beams were brought at that epoch from the Zhízdrin pine forests; there is no trace of them nowadays!—it was very spacious and contained a multitude of rooms, which were decidedly low-ceiled and dark, it is true, and the windows were mere slits in the walls, for the sake of warmth. As was proper, the offices and the house-serfs' cottages surrounded the manor-house on all sides, and a park adjoined it, small but with fine fruit-trees, pellucid apples and seedless pears; for ten versts round about stretched out the flat, black-loam steppe. There was no lofty object for the eye: neither a tree nor a belfry; only here and there a windmill reared itself aloft with holes in its wings; it was a regular Sukhodól! (Dry Valley). Inside the house the rooms were filled with ordinary, plain furniture; rather unusual was a verst-post which stood on a window-sill in the hall, and bore the following inscription: