The Ride on the Gravestone.[401]
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Ralston, William Ralston Shedden
With the bridge-building episode in this “legend” may be compared the opening of another Russian story. In it a merchant is described as having much money but no children. So he and his wife “began to pray to God, entreating him to give them a child—for solace in their youth, for support in their old age, for soul-remembrance[396] after death. And they took to feeding the poor and distributing alms. Besides all this, they resolved to build, for the use of all the faithful, a long bridge across swamps and where no man could find a footing. Much wealth did the merchant expend, but he built the bridge, and when the work was completed he sent his manager Fedor, saying—
“‘Go and sit under the bridge, and listen to what folks say about me—whether they bless me or revile me.’
“Fedor set off, sat under the bridge, and listened. Presently three Holy Elders went over the bridge, and said one to another—
“‘How ought the man who built this bridge to be rewarded?’ ‘Let there be born to him a fortunate son. Whatsoever that son says—it shall be done: whatsoever he desires—that will the Lord bestow!’”[397]
The rest of the story closely resembles the German tale of “The Pink.”[398] In the corresponding Bohemian story of “The Treacherous Servant,”[399] it may be observed, the bridge-building incident has been preserved.
But I will not dwell any longer on the story of the Fiddler, as I propose to give some account in the next chapter of several other tales of the same class, in most of which such descriptions of evil spirits are introduced as have manifestly been altered into what their narrators considered to be in accordance with Christian teaching. And so I will revert to those ideas about the dead, and about their abiding-place, which the modern Slavonians seem to have inherited from their heathen ancestors, and I will attempt to illustrate them by a few Russian ghost-stories. Those stories are, as a general rule, of a most ghastly nature, but there are a few into the composition of which the savage element does not enter. The “Dead Mother,” which has already been quoted,[400] belongs to the latter class; and so does the following tale—which, as it bears no title in the original, we may name,