"I didn't know. If there was money, I should have gotten it after his
death. It is not possible that he spent it all at once. Well, I don't
know, I didn't get any. I suppose the jailers and guards were on to it."
"I'm not asking for it, uncle. I just mentioned it while we were on the
subject. It's awful, uncle, for a man to perish on account of three
thousand rubles."
"It wasn't all on account of the three thousand. Haven't you something
else to say than to keep on repeating 'three thousand, three thousand?'
But God----"
Yudushka had got his cue and was about to explain in detail
how God--Providence--by unseen ways--and all that, but Anninka
unceremoniously yawned and said:
"Oh, uncle, how boring it is here."
This time Porfiry Vladimirych was truly offended and became silent.
For a long time they both paced up and down the dining room. Anninka
yawned, Porfiry Vladimirych crossed himself at every step. At last the
carriage was announced and the usual comedy of seeing relations off
began. Golovliov put on his fur coat, went out on the porch, kissed
Anninka and shouted to the servants, "Her feet! Wrap up her feet well!"
and "What about the blankets, have you taken the blankets along? See
you don't forget them!" all the while making signs of the cross in the
air.
Anninka visited her grandmother's grave, asked the priest to say the
mass, and when the choir began to chant the "Eternal memory," she cried
a bit. The background of the ceremony was rather sad. The church near
which Arina Petrovna had been buried was of the poorest kind. In some
places the plaster had fallen off its walls and exposed large patches
of brick. The sound of the bells was feeble and hollow, the priest's
robe was threadbare. The cemetery was snowed under, so that the path to
the grave had to be shovelled clear. No monument had yet been placed.
Nothing but a plain white cross, even without an inscription, marked
the grave. The cemetery was in a lonely spot removed from any dwelling.
Not far from the church stood the houses of the priest and the church
officials and all around the cheerless, snow-covered plains stretched
as far as the eye could reach. Here and there one could see brushwood
jutting out from the snow. A sharp March wind was sweeping over the
churchyard, wafting away the chanting of the churchmen and lashing the
priest's robe.
"Who would have thought, madam, that the richest landlady in the
district would rest here under this modest cross in our poor parish?"
said the priest when he was through with the requiem.
At these words Anninka cried again. She recalled the poet's line:
"Where feasts once reigned a hearse now stands!" And the tears kept
streaming down her cheeks. Then she went to the priest's house, had tea
there, and talked with his wife. Another line came back to her: "And
pallid death on all doth stare," and again she wept, long and bitterly.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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