Old Jeremy's health began to fail soon after these events. He went out
collecting rags more and more seldom, and stayed at home most of the
time, moving languidly about the courtyard, or lying in bed in his dark
cabin.
The spring came on, and as the sun's rays streamed down from the blue
sky with more warmth, the old man would sit in a sunny corner and count
something on his fingers in an absorbed way, while his lips moved
soundlessly. More and more seldom could he tell the children stories,
his tongue moved with more and more difficulty. He had hardly begun to
speak before a fit of coughing stopped him. Something rattled hoarsely
in his chest, as though it wanted to be free.
"Please go on," Masha would command, who loved stories beyond
everything.
"Wait--wait!" the old man would reply, drawing his breath with
difficulty. "Wait--in a minute--it'll stop in a minute."
But the cough would not stop, but shook the exhausted frame more and
more fiercely.
Sometimes the children would go away without waiting for the end of
the story; as they went they would look at the old man with a strange
sorrowful expression.
Ilya observed that the rag-picker's illness caused unusual anxiety both
to the potman Petrusha and his uncle Terenti. Several times a day,
Petrusha would appear on the steps leading from the court to the bar,
take a look with his cunning grey eyes at the old man and ask:
"Now then, how goes it, grandfather? Better, eh?"
He would swagger about in his pink cotton shirt, his hands in the
pockets of his wide linen trousers, whose ends were tucked into
brilliantly polished boots. He was always chinking the money in his
pockets. His round head was beginning to go bald already above the
forehead, but there was still a good thick tuft of fair, curly hair
on it, and he loved to throw it back in a foppish way. Ilya had never
taken kindly to him, and now his feeling of aversion grew stronger
every day. He knew that Petrusha did not like Jeremy. One day he heard
the potman giving Terenti instructions concerning the old man.
"Keep an eye on him, Terenti! He's an old miser. He's got a pretty
store of cash sewed up in his pillow somewhere. Keep your eyes open! He
isn't long for this world, the old mole; you're a friend of his and he
hasn't a living soul left him in the world! Remember that, my boy!"
In the evenings Jeremy came into the bar to Terenti as before; he
conversed with the hunchback about God and Truth and the concerns of
mankind. Since he had lived in the town the hunchback had become still
more deformed; he seemed to have been bleached by his occupation.
His eyes had got a dull, shy expression, and his body was as though
melted in the hot vapours of the bar. His dirty shirt used to slip up
on to his hump and leave his naked loins visible. All the time he was
speaking with any one he kept both his hands behind his back, trying
constantly to draw his shirt into its place, and this habit gave him
the air of trying to stuff away his big hump.
When Jeremy sat outside in the courtyard, Terenti would come out
frequently on to the steps and look at him, and his eyes twitched as
he shaded them with his hand. The straw-coloured beard quivered on his
pointed face as he asked the old man in his weak voice, embarrassed as
from a guilty conscience, "Grandfather! do you want anything?"
"Many thanks. No--nothing. I don't need anything," the old man would
answer.
The hunchback turned slowly on his withered legs and went back into the
bar. But the old man felt himself growing weaker every day.
"It'll soon be all over with me," he said one day to Ilya, who was
sitting near him. "It's time for me to die--there's only one thing
still----"
He peered round the courtyard mistrustfully and went on in a whisper:
"I'm dying too soon, Ilyushka! My work is not done. I haven't had time.
I've stored up money--money. I've pinched and saved for seventeen
years; I wanted to build a church with it. I meant to make a temple for
the Lord in the village--my home. Ah! there's need of it--such need
for men to have a temple to God; our only refuge is with God. It's too
little, all I've saved, it won't do it, and what shall I do with what
I have? I don't know. O God! show me the way. And the ravens already
flutter about me, and croak and smell a fat morsel. Listen, Ilyushka,
I've got money; don't say a word to any one, but listen."
Ilya listened; he felt himself uplifted as the sharer of a great
important secret, and understood very well whom the old man spoke of as
the ravens.
A couple of days later when Ilya came back from school and went to
his accustomed corner, he heard strange sounds in the old man's room.
It was like some one murmuring--sobbing with a hoarse rattle in his
throat, as though he were being strangled. Every now and then a whisper
was audible.
"Ksch! Ksch! Go away!"
Full of anxiety the lad went to the door of the room, but it was fast
shut. Then he cried out in a trembling voice:
"Grandfather!"
Behind the door the only answer he heard was a painful breathless
whisper:
"Tsch! Ksch! O Lord, have mercy--have mercy--have mercy!"
And suddenly all was still. Ilya sprang back from the door, and
hesitated a moment what to do; then he went to part of the wooden
partition, and, quivering with excitement, looked through a crack in
it. It was dark and obscure in the old man's little room. The light
could hardly penetrate the little dirty window. The sound of a spring
shower was heard, as the rain drops struck the pane and the water ran
down into a hollow in the yard outside the window. Ilya looked closely
into the room and saw the old man lying in bed stretched out on his
back and fighting the air above him with his hands.
"Grandfather!" cried the boy again, full of terror.
The old man started, lifted his head, and murmured aloud:
"Ksch! Petrusha--let it alone, think of God, it belongs to Him! I must
build Him a temple with it. Ksch! Go away! Off! you raven. O God! it is
Thine--Thine--guard it, take it for Thyself. Have mercy! have mercy!"
Ilya shivered with fear and was unable to stir from the spot. He saw
Jeremy's black, withered hands move feebly in the air, and threaten
some invisible person with his crooked fingers.
"See! it belongs to God, don't touch it!" and then the old man raised
himself up and his hair bristled. Suddenly he sat upright in his bed.
His white beard quivered like the wings of a flying dove. He stretched
out his arms, as if to thrust some one away from him with a last
effort, and fell on the ground.