His skull had been fractured by the beam and his ribs injured, as it appeared at the post-mortem examination. XXIX What had he wanted to say to her as he lay dying? I asked myself as I went home on my cob: ‘I do not … forgive,’ or ‘do not … pardon.’ The rain had come on again, but I rode at a walking pace. I wanted to be alone as long as possible; I wanted to give myself up to my reflections, unchecked. Souvenir had gone back in one of the carts that had come with Kvitsinsky. Young and frivolous as I was at that time, the sudden sweeping change (not in mere details only) that is invariably called forth in all hearts by the coming of death--expected or unexpected, it makes no difference!--its majesty, its gravity, and its truthfulness could not fail to impress me. I was impressed too, … but for all that, my troubled, childish eyes noted many things at once; they noted how Sletkin, hurriedly and furtively, as though it were something stolen, popped the gun out of sight; how he and his wife became, both of them, instantly the object of a sort of unspoken but universal aloofness. To Evlampia, though her fault was probably no less than her sister’s, this aloofness did not extend. She even aroused a certain sympathy, when she fell at her dead father’s feet. But that she too was guilty, that was none the less felt by all. ‘The old man was wronged,’ said a grey-haired peasant with a big head, leaning, like some ancient judge, with both hands and his beard on a long staff; ‘on your soul lies the sin! You wronged him!’ That saying was at once accepted by every one as the final judgment. The peasants’ sense of justice found expression in it, I felt that at once. I noticed too that, at the first, Sletkin did not _dare_ to give directions. Without him, they lifted up the body and carried it into the other house. Without asking him, the priest went for everything needful to the church, while the village elder ran to the village to send off a cart and horse to the town. Even Anna Martinovna did not venture to use her ordinary imperious tone in ordering the samovar to be brought, ‘for hot water, to wash the deceased.’ Her orders were more like an entreaty, and she was answered rudely.… I was absorbed all the while by the question, What was it exactly he wanted to say to his daughter? Did he want to forgive her or to curse her? Finally I decided that it was--forgiveness.