Читать книгу Peter and Alexis. The Romance of Peter the Great онлайн

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After the conversation on the raft, Elena returned to her cell on the barge, and when she recalled all she had heard that night about the Tsar, she for the first time asked herself whether after all it was not true, that God could not be moved for such a Tsar.

For a long time she lay motionless in the oppressive darkness of her cabin cell, her eyes wide open, bathed in cold sweat. At last she got up, lit a remnant of a wax church taper and placed it in the corner of the closet before the icon of the Virgin, hung on the wooden partition. It was the same Virgin whom Peter had been exhibiting at the foot of Venus. She knelt, bowed to the ground three hundred times and began to recite with tears and sighs that same forlorn prayer, now sewn into the cover of the icon, at the church of the Assumption.

“Hear me, thou Holy Church, with all the hosts of Cherubim and Seraphim, with all the companies of prophets, patriarchs, saints and martyrs, the Gospels, and all the sacred words that compose the Gospel, remember ye our Tsar Peter! Hear me, Holy Apostolic Church, together with all local images and little icons, with all apostolic books and holy lamps, the censers and candles, the sacred coverings and goodly palls, the stone walls and iron slabs, all fruitful trees and flowers! I implore thee, beautiful sun, pray thou the Lord for our Tsar Peter, and thou young moon with thy stars! O sky and thy mists! O terrible clouds and stormy winds and breezes! O fowls of the air! blue sea, great rivers, small brooks and lakes! pray ye the heavenly King for our Tsar Peter! Fish of the sea, cattle in the fields, beasts of the wood, meadows, forests, mountains all the earth’s increase, pray ye the heavenly King for our Tsar Peter!”