carrying me back to that dark, close room, and all the details of that
dreadful time.
Mamma's eyes were wide open, but they could not see us. Never shall I
forget the terrible expression in them--the expression of agonies of
suffering!
Then we were taken away.
When, later, I was able to ask Natalia Savishna about Mamma's last
moments she told me the following:
'After you were taken out of the room, my beloved one struggled for a
long time, as though some one were trying to strangle her. Then at last
she laid her head back upon the pillow, and slept softly, peacefully,
like an angel from Heaven. I went away for a moment to see about her
medicine, and just as I entered the room again my darling was throwing
the bedclothes from off her and calling for your Papa. He stooped over
her, but strength failed her to say what she wanted to. All she could
do was to open her lips and gasp, 'My God, my God! The children, the
children!' I would have run to fetch you, but Ivan Vassilitch stopped
me, saying that it would only excite her--it were best not to do so.
Then suddenly she stretched her arms out and dropped them again. What
she meant by that gesture the good God alone knows, but I think that in
it she was blessing you--you the children whom she could not see. God
did not grant her to see her little ones before her death. Then she
raised herself up--did my love, my darling--yes, just so with her hands,
and exclaimed in a voice which I cannot bear to remember, 'Mother of
God, never forsake them!''
'Then the pain mounted to her heart, and from her eyes it as, plain that
she suffered terribly, my poor one! She sank back upon the pillows, tore
the bedclothes with her teeth, and wept--wept--'
'Yes and what then?' I asked but Natalia Savishna could say no more. She
turned away and cried bitterly.
Mamma had expired in terrible agonies.
XXVII -- GRIEF
LATE the following evening I thought I would like to look at her once
more; so, conquering an involuntary sense of fear, I gently opened the
door of the salon and entered on tiptoe.
In the middle of the room, on a table, lay the coffin, with wax candles
burning all round it on tall silver candelabra. In the further corner
sat the chanter, reading the Psalms in a low, monotonous voice. I
stopped at the door and tried to look, but my eyes were so weak with
crying, and my nerves so terribly on edge, that I could distinguish
nothing. Every object seemed to mingle together in a strange blur--the
candles, the brocade, the velvet, the great candelabra, the pink satin
cushion trimmed with lace, the chaplet of flowers, the ribboned cap, and
something of a transparent, wax-like colour. I mounted a chair to see
her face, yet where it should have been I could see only that wax-like,
transparent something. I could not believe it to be her face. Yet, as
I stood grazing at it, I at last recognised the well-known, beloved
features. I shuddered with horror to realise that it WAS she. Why were
those eyes so sunken? What had laid that dreadful paleness upon her
cheeks, and stamped the black spot beneath the transparent skin on one
of them? Why was the expression of the whole face so cold and severe?
Why were the lips so white, and their outline so beautiful, so majestic,
so expressive of an unnatural calm that, as I looked at them, a chill
shudder ran through my hair and down my back?
Somehow, as I gazed, an irrepressible, incomprehensible power seemed
to compel me to keep my eyes fixed upon that lifeless face. I could not
