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Updated: June 21, 2025
Suddenly her door opened softly and her old nurse, Praskovya Savishna, who hardly ever came to that room as the old prince had forbidden it, appeared on the threshold with a shawl round her head. "I've come to sit with you a bit, Masha," said the nurse, "and here I've brought the prince's wedding candles to light before his saint, my angel," she said with a sigh. "Oh, nurse, I'm so glad!"
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.
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.
Yet ever and again something would recall her to my memory. I remembered too how, the evening before, I had found a mushroom under the birch-trees, how Lubotshka had quarrelled with Katenka as to whose it should be, and how they had both of them wept when taking leave of us. I felt sorry to be parted from them, and from Natalia Savishna, and from the birch-tree avenue, and from Foka.
The two windows on the right were curtained over, and close to them was seated, Natalia Savishna, spectacles on nose and engaged in darning stockings. She did not approach us to kiss me as she had been used to do, but just rose and looked at us, her tears beginning to flow afresh. Somehow it frightened me to see every one, on beholding us, begin to cry, although they had been calm enough before.
Likewise, recollecting what Natalia Savishna had told me of the forty days during which the souls of the departed must hover around their earthly home, I imagined myself flying through the rooms of Grandmamma's house, and seeing Lubotshka's bitter tears, and hearing Grandmamma's lamentations, and listening to Papa and St. Jerome talking together.
Next, as I listened to the sounds of the music wafted from the salon, and to the creaking of gates and the voices of the peasant women when the cattle returned to the village, I would suddenly bethink me of Natalia Savishna and of Mamma and of Karl Ivanitch, and become momentarily sad.
One thing remains to be done; do thou make thy confession and receive the communion; and then, with God's blessing, we will go our way, and after having got duly rested, and worked a bit on the farm to increase thy strength, thou mayest bestir thyself and find a place and Márfa Sávishna will certainly help us in that," I said. "No," said Yákoff, "why should we trouble her?
We have no gloves," I thought to myself. "I must go upstairs and search about." However, I put it on not without some diffident contemplation of the blank left by the middle finger and of the ink-stained edges round the vacant space. "If only Natalia Savishna had been here," I reflected, "we should certainly have found some gloves. I can't go downstairs in this condition.
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