Page:More Tales from Tolstoi.djvu/176

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

and some other acquaintances coming to the panikhida, and he saw a handsome young gentlewoman whom he also knew, the daughter of Ivan Il'ich. She was all in black. Her slim figure seemed slimmer than ever. She had a gloomy, resolute, almost angry look. She bowed to Peter Ivanovich as if he were to blame for something. Behind the daughter, with just the same aggrieved look, stood an acquaintance of Peter Ivanovich, a rich young man, employed in the Courts, her fiancé as Peter Ivanovich understood. He bowed to them with a dispirited expression, and was about to make his way into the dead man's room, when there appeared on the top of the staircase the figure of the son of the house, the gymnasiast, frightfully like Ivan Il'ich. It was Ivan Il'ich as a youth, as Peter Ivanovich remembered him when he was a law student. His eyes were all red with weeping, and just like the eyes of dirty little boys of thirteen or fourteen. The youth, on perceiving Peter Ivanovich, began to frown, half severely, half shamefacedly. Peter Ivanovich nodded to him, and proceeded into the dead man's room. The panikhida began — lights, groans, incense, tears, sobs. Peter Ivanovich stood there, with puckered brows, gazing in front of him at his feet. Not once did he look at the corpse, and to the very end did not once give way to softening influences, and was one of the first to go out. There was nobody in the antechamber. Gerasim, the butler's assistant, came running out of the room of the deceased, fumbled with his strong hands over all the pelisses in order to get at the pelisse of Peter Ivanovich, and handed it to him.