Like shadows they crouch about the fire, rub the freezing hands of the
children between their own, weep, groan, pray softly. One has prayer
boxes bound on his brow and on his arms and nods and bows unceasingly,
so that his shadow dances like a curious grotesque against the light
of the fire. The Cossacks laugh. He, too, has laughed, carelessly,
unconcerned.
Laughed until he has suddenly noticed the woman at the side of the
bearded Jew--with the slumbering child at her breast. Something in that
sight appealed to him strangely. But then they had summoned him before
the sotnik. And he had thought of it no more.
How sharply that whole picture stands before him now--and among the
other details especially these three: The man in prayer, the shivering
mother bent toward the fire, her head cloth like a veil drawn deep over
the unconscious, slumbering child.
"Bethlehem," he murmurs reverently, and crosses himself.
And he is going to take part to-day in this infamy--he, a Christian!
Then it must be true what they believe back home. That the Pravoslavine
is Anti-Christ. And he fights with him--for him--is part of his army.
Have they then altered the text of the Holy Books? So that some day
God's word of love will no longer be found in it--the Holy Word spoken
by Him who lay in the womb of a daughter of the House of David?
It must be so! It must be so! And if till to-day he has doubted it, now
all is clear. Only Anti-Christ can give such orders.
Shall he return to the camp? Stain his hands, too, with the blood of
these innocents?
"When the master speaks the servant must hearken," they say back home.
He must obey.
Something flashes in front of him like the flash of a gun.
"A bullet," he thinks.
"Would it were one!" he exclaims in the torment of his soul.
It is only a sun ray which suddenly shoots through the mist. But it has
shown a poor mortal the right way.
They found the Raskolnik just outside the village--in his breast his
own bullet, in his right hand the cross. On his lips the smile of peace
that passeth understanding.