It was late at night and the second cocks had crowed.
Lent had arrived. The muffled church-bell commenced its monotonous tinkle, but its wan, melancholy, modest sounds of summons could not dispel the wintry stillness which was lying over snow-covered fields. Timidly they leaped from the belfry into the misty air below, and sank and died, and for a long time nobody came to the little church in response to its appeal—faint at first, but persistent and growing more imperious every day.
Towards the end of the first week of Lent two old women came to church—hoary they were, hazy and deaf like the very air of the dying winter, and for a long time they mumbled with toothless mouths, repeating, forever over and over repeating their dull, uncouth plaints which had no beginning and knew no end. Their very words and tears seemed to have grown aged in service and ready for rest. They had received absolution, but they failed to realize it, and were still praying for something, deaf and hazy like fragments of a vapid dream. But in their wake came a throng of people, and many youthful, fervid tears, many youthful words, pointed and gleaming, cut their way into Father Vassily’s heart.
When Semen Mossyagin, a peasant, had thrice bowed to the ground, and cautiously advanced towards the priest, the latter gazed upon him sharply and fixedly, but the pose which he maintained did not seem to befit the occasion.
With his neck extended, his hands folded across his chest, he was tugging at the end of his beard with the fingers of one hand. Mossyagin walked up to the priest and was astounded: the priest was watching him and smiling softly with nostrils distended like a horse.
“I have been waiting for thee for a long time,” said the priest with a snicker. “Why hast thou come, Mossyagin?”
“For confession,” quickly and eagerly replied Mossyagin and with a friendly grin exposed his white teeth—they were white and even like a string of pearls.
“Wilt thou feel better after confession?” continued the priest, smiling, as it seemed to the peasant, in a merry and friendly fashion.
“And is it true that thou hast sold thy horse and the last sheep and mortgaged thy wagon?”
Mossyagin looked at the priest seriously and with a show of annoyance: the priest’s face was stolid, his eyes were downcast. Neither broke the silence. Father Vassily turned slowly towards the lectern and commanded: