Agatha crossed herself, put out the candle, took a clean towel, and covered his face with it.
All that night Martha had not slept, but kept thinking about Kornéy. In the morning she put on her coat, threw a shawl over her head, and went to find out where the old man had gone to. She soon learnt that he was at Andréyevo. Martha took a stick from the fence and went towards Andréyevo. The farther she went, the more frightened she grew.
“I’ll make it up with him, and we’ll take him home. Let the sin be ended. Let him at least die at home, with his son near him,” thought she.
When Martha approached her daughter’s house, she saw a large crowd collected there. Some had entered the passage, others stood outside the windows. It had already got about that the well-known, rich Kornéy Vasílyef, who had been so much talked of in the district twenty years before, had died, a poor wanderer, in his daughter’s house. The house was full of people. The women whispered to one another, sighed and moaned.
When Martha entered, they made room for her to pass, and under the icons she saw the body—already washed, laid out, and covered with a piece of linen. At its side Philip Kanónitch (who had had some education) was chanting the words of a psalm in Slavonic, in a voice like a deacon’s.
Neither to forgive nor to ask forgiveness was any longer possible; and from the stern, beautiful old face of Kornéy she could not tell whether he had forgiven her or not.