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

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One day, Yereméich, the beekeeper, an old man of eighty years, who lodged in their garden, was captured by the royal commissioners at the town gate; they forcibly shaved off his beard and cut short the lappets of his coat according to the regulation measure. The old man returned sobbing like a child, fell ill and shortly died of grief. Tichon loved the old man and was sorry for him, yet when he first caught sight of him, clean-shaven, with his coat shortened, sobbing most piteously, the boy burst into a laugh, but one so strange and unnatural that Pahómitch dreaded another fit. In this laugh, too, there was the fear of the end of the world.

Once in winter a comet appeared, “a star with a tail,” so Pahómitch called it. The boy all the time longed to see it, yet did not dare to look; he used to purposely turn away his head, and close his eyes. But one night he saw it quite unexpectedly, when Pahómitch was carrying him across a snowdrifted lane to the bath-house. At the end of this lane between the black log-houses, rising just above the white snow, at the very edge of the dark blue sky, sparkled a large, delicately transparent star; it seemed to be gliding away, as it were, into infinite space. It was not terrible, on the contrary so familiar, so welcome, so fair, that he gazed and could not gaze enough. The old feeling, stronger than ever, clutched his heart with unendurable terror and delight. He stretched himself towards the star, as if now only awakening, with a tender, dreamy smile. At the same time Pahómitch felt terrible convulsions shake the little body. A cry escaped the boy; he had his second epileptic fit.