His face was uplifted, and he smiled as he echoed her words:

"Rest thee, Rest thee, thou God!"

With some difficulty he rose to his feet, and stumbled, heavily, into
the inner room, where Aphrodite gleamed through her incense cloud. Here,
with the air of one tired unto death, he sank down upon the leathern
couch. And so the heavy eyelids closed over his weary, weary eyes.

EPILOGUE

THE TRANSLATION

An hour went by. The form upon the couch had neither moved nor given any
sign of life; yet body and soul still held together. The mind was only
sunk into a stupor of complete unconsciousness. When it was that the
change began, none could have determined. After a few moments of a
faintly visible fluttering of the breath, a wider parting of the lips,
the feeble movement of a finger, Ivan's eyes suddenly flew wide open,
his jaw relaxed and dropped. He was immediately sensible that all the
heaviness of the opiate had passed from him; and that his being was
possessed by a singular lightness and freedom. Then he perceived that,
at his side, in close contact, indeed, with his new self, was his
mother: tenderness incarnate, as of old, yet with undoubted anxiety
about her.

"Smile for me, mother! Welcome me home!" he cried; filled now with a
deep, expanding joy, wholly new and wonderful.

Sophia, looking down upon him, smiled, indeed, but pitifully, and with
less of joy than of anxiety in her gentle look. Starting back from this,
he turned to look about him, and found himself surrounded by
shadow-shapes of many that he had known of old: Madame Dravikine,
Nicholas, Zaremba, and old Sosha: ay, even pallid Joseph, too, lurking
behind a little group of brethren of the spirit: in life unknown; in
death beloved. There was Mozart the beautiful; Beethoven, of lion-mien;
Schumann, Schubert, Wagner the tempestuous, and the melancholy Pole. But
none of them approached him closely, yearn as he might for welcome from
them, his familiars. Nor did Sophia's sweet seriousness brighten.

"Mother, what is it?" he whispered. "Why are we waiting?"

"For a decision, Ivan. You have come to us before your time."

"But not without reason," he answered, quietly, with a dignity that
seemed to her adequate. "There is a question I have died to ask."

"It shall be heard, then," said a voice: a voice inexplicable; resonant;
divine.

Immediately Sophia and all the silent throng melted away. Ivan, no
longer bound to the empty shell upon the c