He was not sorry to die, but at home, as soon as he saw his fiddle, it sent a pang to his heart and he felt sorry.  He could not take the fiddle with him to the grave, and now it would be left forlorn, and the same thing would happen to it as to the birch copse and the pine forest.  Everything in this world was wasted and would be wasted!  Yakov went out of the hut and sat in the doorway, pressing the fiddle to his bosom.  Thinking of his wasted, profitless life, he began to play, he did not know what, but it was plaintive and touching, and tears trickled down his cheeks.  And the harder he thought, the more mournfully the fiddle wailed.

The latch clicked once and again, and Rothschild appeared at the gate.  He walked across half the yard boldly, but seeing Yakov he stopped short, and seemed to shrink together, and probably from terror, began making signs with his hands as though he wanted to show on his fingers what o’clock it was.

“Come along, it’s all right,” said Yakov in a friendly tone, and he beckoned him to come up.  “Come along!”

Looking at him mistrustfully and apprehensively, Rothschild began to advance, and stopped seven feet off.

“Be so good as not to beat me,” he said, ducking.  “Moisey Ilyitch has sent me again.  ‘Don’t be afraid,’ he said; ’go to Yakov again and tell him,’ he said, ‘we can’t get on without him.’  There is a wedding on Wednesday. . . .  Ye—–­es!  Mr. Shapovalov is marrying his daughter to a good man. . . .  And it will be a grand wedding, oo-oo!” added the Jew, screwing up one eye.

“I can’t come,” said Yakov, breathing hard.  “I’m ill, brother.”

And he began playing again, and the tears gushed from his eyes on to the fiddle.  Rothschild listened attentively, standing sideways to him and folding his arms on his chest.  The scared and perplexed expression on his face, little by little, changed to a look of woe and suffering; he rolled his eyes as though he were experiencing an agonizing ecstasy, and articulated, “Vachhh!” and tears slowly ran down his cheeks and trickled on his greenish coat.

And Yakov lay in bed all the rest of the day grieving.  In the evening, when the priest confessing him asked, Did he remember any special sin he had committed? straining his failing memory he thought again of Marfa’s unhappy face, and the despairing shriek of the Jew when the dog bit him, and said, hardly audibly, “Give the fiddle to Rothschild.”

“Very well,” answered the priest.

And now everyone in the town asks where Rothschild got such a fine fiddle.  Did he buy it or steal it?  Or perhaps it had come to him as a pledge.  He gave up the flute long ago, and now plays nothing but the fiddle.  As plaintive sounds flow now from his bow, as came once from his flute, but when he tries to repeat what Yakov played, sitting in the doorway, the effect is something so sad and sorrowful that his audience weep, and he himself rolls his eyes and articulates “Vachhh! . . .”  And this new air was so much liked in the town that the merchants and officials used to be continually sending for Rothschild and making him play it over and over again a dozen times.