Tiny granny, sitting on a bench, picks through dried onions, choosing golden husks, and puts the bulbs in a basket suspended from a low branch of an apple tree, which spreads its shadow over us and over most of the small courtyard.
- So you say you know who built the chapel in the forest? - I'm starting the conversation.
"I don't know why. When they told me this, I was very young, but I remember something, and then my mother told me something. Listen, if you're interested.
A young gentleman from the local estate had a very beautiful young wife who died. During a difficult birth, the child was saved, but the lady died. Maybe they were relatives, maybe just kind people who helped the young master raise the girl. And after a while, an angelic creature was already running around the manor and happily chirping.
The grief of loss began to slowly recede. I spent a long time healing a young man's mental wound. Soon they began to say that there was a beautiful bride on the neighboring estate, and her parents had spared no money for education. They began to woo the widower to this girl. Once the young people met, they liked each other and quickly began to meet more often. And since the road from one estate to another did not take much time, the young gentleman harnessed the horses to the chaise and visited the young lady. And I must say that a good part of this road ran through a pine forest, and the master returned most often well after midnight, or even in the morning.
And one day, returning home late, the master drove along the road through the forest, and it seemed to him that a woman in a white dress was kneeling on the side of the road and praying. But what is surprising is that they are facing not the road, but the forest, that is, with their backs to the chaise. Pan stopped the horses and returned to the spot by the side of the road where he had just seen the woman on her knees. But there was no one in that place or nearby. The man decided that he had imagined everything. And after a while, he even began to forget about this incident, when one day everything happened again. And in the kneeling ghost's camp, the widower began to recognize his dead wife. A prayer service was ordered for the deceased, and the place was consecrated, and prayers were read to the priests brought to the forest, but the ghost did not disappear. And people from the widower's estate began to say that the mother's heart from the other world feels something is wrong in the future marriage of the girl's father and tries to give a sign to protect the child from the bad things that the stepmother may bring to the house. And in order to please the deceased, the master must interrupt a new acquaintance, and at the place of his wife's appearance, put up a chapel with a sculpture of the kneeling Mother of God.
The girl's father listened to the advice of his confessor and fellow believers, because most of all he loved his own child, his little daughter, who was becoming more and more like her dead mother every day. The young gentleman no longer traveled to the neighboring estate, and soon a chapel appeared in the woods by the road. The sculptor was ordered a figure of the Virgin Mary, but it was not necessary to install it – the year 1812 came.…
Since the young landowner fought on the side of Napoleon, the Russian government seized his estate, and he was forced to leave his homeland during the retreat of the French army. On the way, he managed to say goodbye to his family and take his daughter with him. How their fate turned out is almost unknown. But after a while, rumors came from France that the father and daughter were doing well, that they had built a small house in a distant country, where they were still living together, and that the daughter was very talented, engaged in music and very similar to her mother.
If you drive fast and don't look around, you might not notice a modest chapel on the edge of the road in the woods, still without a cross and a sculpture of the kneeling Mother of God.
My interlocutor also remembered that after the Second World War, a young couple with a little girl came to this chapel from abroad.
"Most likely the relatives of that deceased lady," the old woman added with a sigh. - It's good that after all this time they remember. It's parenting, that's how it should be…