Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 01.djvu/154

122 so majestic, and expressing such an unearthly calm that a cold chill passed over my back and hair, as I looked at her?

I looked, and felt that a certain incomprehensible, irresistible power was attracting my eyes to that lifeless face. I riveted my gaze upon it, and my imagination painted for me pictures abloom with life and happiness. I forgot that the dead body, which was lying before me and at which I was looking meaninglessly, as at an object which had nothing in common with my memories, was she. I imagined her now in one, now in another situation: alive, merry, smiling; then I was suddenly struck by some feature in her pale face, upon which my eyes were resting; I recalled the terrible reality, and shuddered, but did not cease looking at it. And again dreams took the place of reality, and again the consciousness of reality destroyed my dreams. Finally my imagination grew tired, it no longer deceived me. The consciousness of reality also disappeared, and I completely forgot myself. I do not know how long I remained in that condition, and I do not know what it really was; I know only that I lost, for some time, the consciousness of my whole existence, and experienced some elevated, inexpressibly pleasant and sad sensation.

Maybe, as she was flying away to a better world, her beautiful soul looked back in sorrow at the one in which she left us. She noticed my sadness, took pity on me, and upon pinions of love, with a heavenly smile of sympathy, winged her way to earth, in order to console and bless me.

The door creaked, and another sexton entered the room to take the place of the first. That noise woke me, and the first thought that came to me was that inasmuch as I was not weeping, and was standing upon the chair in an attitude which had in it nothing of a touching nature, the sexton might take me for an unfeeling boy, who had