Anna Sergyevna bent down to him. "Yevgeny Vassilyitch, I am here—"
He at once took his hand away, and raised himself.
"Good-by," he said with sudden force, and his eyes gleamed with their last light. "Good-by. Listen—you know I didn't kiss you then. Breathe on the dying lamp, and let it go out."
Anna Sergyevna put her lips to his forehead.
"Enough!" he murmured, and dropt back on to the pillow. "Now—darkness—"
Anna Sergyevna went softly out. "Well?" Vassily Ivanovitch asked her in a whisper.
"He has fallen asleep," she answered, scarce audibly. Bazarov was not fated to awaken. Toward evening he sank into complete unconsciousness, and the following day he died. Father Alexey performed the last rites of religion over him. When they anointed him with the last unction, when the holy oil touched his breast, one eye opened; and it seemed as tho at the sight of the priest in his vestments, the smoking censers, the light before the image, something like a shudder of horror passed over the death-stricken face. When at last he had breathed his last, and there arose a universal lamentation in the house, Vassily Ivanovitch was seized by a sudden frenzy. "I said I should rebel," he shrieked hoarsely, with his face inflamed and distorted, shaking his fist in the air, as tho threatening some one; "and I rebel, I rebel!" But Arina Vlasyevna, all in tears, hung upon his neck, and both fell on their faces together. "Side by side," Anfisushka related afterward in the servants' room, "they drooped their poor heads like lambs at noonday."
But the heat of noonday passes, and evening comes and night; and then, too, the return to the kindly refuge, where sleep is sweet for the weary and heavy-laden.
FOOTNOTES:
[50] From "Fathers and Children." Translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett.