“Katya is dead. She died, I say—in the hospital.”
Again there was a long silence, so long indeed that Khinyakov felt a pain at his back; but he did not dare to move it, while the people there kept silence.
Then the stranger’s voice pronounced gently and without expression, the one word:
“Good-bye!”
But evidently she did not go away, since in the course of a minute Matryona asked: “What have you there? Have you brought something for Katya?”
Some one knelt down, striking her knees on the floor, and the stranger’s voice, convulsed with suppressed sobs, uttered quickly the words:
“Take it, take it! For the love of God, take it! And then I—I’ll go away.”
“But what is it?”
Again there was a long silence, and then a gentle weeping, broken, and hopeless. There was in it a deadly weariness, and a black despair, without a single gleam of hope. It was as though a hand had impotently drawn the bow across the over-tightened, the last remaining, string of an expensive instrument, and when the string snapped the soft wailing note had been silenced for ever.
“Why, you have nearly smothered it!” exclaimed Matryona in a rough, angry tone. “You see what sort of people undertake to bear children. How could you do it? Whoever would wrap up babies like that? Come now, come along; do, I say. How could you do such a thing?”