"Well?" whispered Vasili Ivanitch.
"He has gone to sleep," she replied in a voice that was scarcely audible.
But Bazarov was not fated to go to sleep. Rather, as night approached he sank into a state of coma, and, on the following day, expired. Father Alexis performed over him the last rites of religion, and at the moment when Extreme Unction was being administered, and the holy oil touched his breast, one of the dying man's eyelids raised itself, and over the face there seemed to flit something like an expression of distaste at the sight of the priest in his vestments, the smoking censer, and the candles before the ikon.
Finally, when Bazarov's last breath had been drawn, and there had arisen in the house the sound of "the general lamentation," something akin to frenzy came upon Vasili Ivanitch.
"I declare that I protest!" he cried with his face blazing and quivering with fury, and his fist beating the air as in menace of some one. "I declare that I protest, that I protest, that I protest!"
Upon that old Arina Vlasievna, suffused in tears, laid her arms around his neck, and the two sank forward upon the floor. Said Anfisushka later, when relating the story in the servants' quarters: "There they knelt together—side by side, their heads drooping like those of two sheep at midday."
Ah, but in time the heat of noontide passes, and to it there succeed nightfall and dusk, with a return to the quiet fold where for the weary and the heavy-laden there waits sleep, sweet sleep.
[1] Roast beef with horse-radish.