“Ye-es—go, boy, and say good-bye,” he answered tenderly, but with still the same shade of hesitation in his voice. “No, wait a minute; wait a minute, boy, please.”
He went into his bed-room and came back in a minute with a few bills which he thrust into my hand.
“Give these to Tiburtsi. Tell him that I beg him—do you understand?—that I beg him to accept this money—from you. Do you understand? And say, too,” added my father, “say that if he knows any one called Feodorovich he had better tell that Feodorovich to leave this town. And now run along boy, quickly.”
Panting and incoherent, I overtook Tiburtsi on the hill and gave him my father’s message.
“My father begs you to——” I said, and pressed the money which I had received into his hand.
I did not look at his face. He took the money, and gloomily listened to my message concerning Feodorovich.
In the crypt, on a bench in a dark corner, I found Marusia lying. The word death has little meaning for a child, but bitter tears choked me at the sight of her lifeless body. My little friend was lying there looking very serious and sad, and her tiny face was pitifully drawn. Her closed eyes were a little sunken and the blue circles around them were darker than before. Her little mouth was slightly open, and wore an expression of childish grief. This little grimace was Marusia’s answer to our tears.
The Professor was standing at her bedside, indifferently shaking his head. The Grenadier was hammering in a corner, making a coffin out of some old boards torn from the chapel roof. Lavrovski, sober and with a look of perfect understanding, was strewing Marusia’s body with autumn flowers which he himself had gathered. Valek was lying asleep in a corner, shuddering all over in his dreams, and crying out restlessly from time to time.
X
CONCLUSION