stand nothing, mother! Nothing!"

"Well--well--all right! Do you feel--cold?"

"Cold!" Vasily answered bluntly, and again began to pace the room,
looking at his mother askance, as if annoyed.

"Perhaps you have caught cold?"

"Oh, mother what is a cold, when--" and he waved his hand helplessly.

The old woman was about to say: "And your father ordered wheat cakes
beginning with Monday," but she was frightened, and said:

"I told him: 'It is your son, you should go, give him your blessing.'
No, the old beast persisted--"

"Let him go to the devil! What sort of father has he been to me? He has
been a scoundrel all his life, and remains a scoundrel!"

"Vasenka! Do you speak of your father like this?" said the old woman
reproachfully, straightening herself.

"About my father!"

"About your own father?"

"He is no father to me!"

It was strange and absurd. Before him was the thought of death, while
here something small, empty and trivial arose, and his words
cracked like the shells of nuts under foot. And almost crying with
sorrow--because of the eternal misunderstanding which all his life long
had stood like a wall between him and those nearest to him, and which
even now, in the last hour before death, peered at him stupidly and
strangely through small, widely opened eyes--Vasily exclaimed:

"Don't you understand that I am to be hanged soon? Hanged! Do you
understand it? Hanged!"

"You shouldn't have harmed anybody and nobody would--" cried the old
woman.

"My God! What is this? Even beasts do not act like this! Am I not your
son?"

He began to cry, and seated himself in a corner. The old woman also
burst out crying in her corner. Powerless, even for an instant, to blend
in a feeling of love and to offset by it the horror of impending death,
they wept their cold tears of loneliness which did not warm their
hearts. The mother said:

"You ask whether I am a mother to you? You reproach me! And I have grown
completely gray during these days. I have become an old woman. And yet
you say--you reproach me!"

"Well, mother, it is all right. Forgive me. It is time for you to go.
Kiss my brothers for me."

"Am I not your mother? Do I not feel sorry?"

At last she went away. She wept bitterly, wiping her face with the edges
of her kerchief, and she did not see the road. And the farther she got
from the prison the more bitterly she wept. She retraced her steps to
the prison, and then she strangely lost her way