Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 01.djvu/167

Rh and a cap for herself, and made the minutest arrangements for everything that would be needed for her funeral. She also went through the coffers of her master, and transferred everything, with the greatest precision, according to an invoice, to the wife of the business steward; then she took out two silk dresses and an ancient shawl, which had been given her at one time by grandmother, and grandfather's military uniform, with golden trappings, which had also been given into her full possession. Thanks to her care, the seams and the lace of the uniform were still fresh, and the cloth had not been touched by moths. Before her death she expressed her wish that one of the dresses — the rose-coloured one — should be given to Volódya for a dressing-gown or smoking-jacket, the other, — puce in checks, — to me, for similar use, and the shawl to Lyúbochka. The uniform she bequeathed to whichever of us became an officer first. The rest of her property and money, except forty roubles which she laid aside for her burial and mass, she left to her brother. Her brother, who had long ago been emancipated, was living in some distant Government, and leading a most riotous life, so she had no relations with him during her lifetime.

When Natálya Sávishna's brother appeared to get his inheritance, and the whole property of the deceased woman amounted only to twenty-five roubles, he was unwilling to believe it, and declared it was impossible that an old woman, who had lived for sixty years in a rich house, who had had everything in her hands, and all her life lived parsimoniously and quarrelled about every rag, should have left nothing. But it was really so.

Natálya Sávishna suffered two months from her disease, and bore her sufferings with truly Christian patience; she did not grumble, did not complain, but only, as was her custom, continually invoked God. An