, death has indeed enlarged him!
Ah, well, so be it! Soon I too shall have to be stretching myself out.
Oh that it were now!"

Then with cautious movements of his deformed fingers he straightened
the folds of the lad's smock, and drew it over the legs. Whereafter he
pressed his flushed lips to the hem of the garment.

Said I to him at that moment:

"What is it that you have been wanting of him? Why is it that you have
been trying to teach him strange words?"

Straightening himself, and glancing at me with dim eyes, Antipa
repeated:

"What is it that I have been wanting of him?" To the repetition he
added with manifest sincerity, though also with a self-depreciatory
movement of the head:

"To tell the truth, I scarcely know WHAT it is that I have been wanting
of him. By God I do not. Yet, as one speaking the truth in the presence
of death, I say that never during my long lifetime had I so desired
aught else.... Yes, I have waited and waited for fortune to reveal
it to me; and ever has fortune remained mute and tongueless. Foolish
was it of me to have expected otherwise, to have expected, for
instance, that some day there might occur something marvellous,
something unlooked-for."

With a short laugh, he indicated the corpse with his eyes, and
continued more firmly:

"Yes, bootless was it to have expected anything from such a source as
that. Never, despite one's wishes, was anything possible of acquisition
thence... This is usually the case. Felitzata, as a clever woman
indeed (albeit one cold of heart), was for having her son accounted a
God's fool, and thereby gaining some provision against her old age."

"But you yourself were the person who suggested that? You yourself
wished it?"

"I?"

Presently, thrusting his hands up his sleeves, he added dully and
brokenly:

"Yes, I DID wish it. Why not, indeed, seeing that at least it would
have brought comfort to the poor people of this place? Sometimes I feel
very sorry for them with their bitter, troublous lives--lives which may
be the lives of rogues and villains, yet are lives which have produced
amongst us a pravednik," [A "just person," a human being without sin].

All the evening sky was now aflame. Upon the ear there fell the
mournful lament:

When snow has veiled the earth in white, The snowy plain the wild
wolves tread. They wail for the cheering warmth of spring As I bewail
the bairn that's dead.

Vologonov listened for a moment. Then he said fir