“Very good, very good, my child.  When the holy Easter comes, we will talk it over. . . .  I will help you. . . .  I will help you. . . .”

His mother came in quietly, timidly, and prayed before the ikon.  Noticing that he was not sleeping, she said: 

“Won’t you have a drop of soup?”

“No, thank you,” he answered, “I am not hungry.”

“You seem to be unwell, now I look at you.  I should think so; you may well be ill!  The whole day on your legs, the whole day. . . .  And, my goodness, it makes one’s heart ache even to look at you!  Well, Easter is not far off; you will rest then, please God.  Then we will have a talk, too, but now I’m not going to disturb you with my chatter.  Come along, Katya; let his holiness sleep a little.”

And he remembered how once very long ago, when he was a boy, she had spoken exactly like that, in the same jestingly respectful tone, with a Church dignitary. . . .  Only from her extraordinarily kind eyes and the timid, anxious glance she stole at him as she went out of the room could one have guessed that this was his mother.  He shut his eyes and seemed to sleep, but twice heard the clock strike and Father Sisoy coughing the other side of the wall.  And once more his mother came in and looked timidly at him for a minute.  Someone drove up to the steps, as he could hear, in a coach or in a chaise.  Suddenly a knock, the door slammed, the lay brother came into the bedroom.

“Your holiness,” he called.

“Well?”

“The horses are here; it’s time for the evening service.”

“What o’clock is it?”

“A quarter past seven.”

He dressed and drove to the cathedral.  During all the “Twelve Gospels” he had to stand in the middle of the church without moving, and the first gospel, the longest and the most beautiful, he read himself.  A mood of confidence and courage came over him.  That first gospel, “Now is the Son of Man glorified,” he knew by heart; and as he read he raised his eyes from time to time, and saw on both sides a perfect sea of lights and heard the splutter of candles, but, as in past years, he could not see the people, and it seemed as though these were all the same people as had been round him in those days, in his childhood and his youth; that they would always be the same every year and till such time as God only knew.

His father had been a deacon, his grandfather a priest, his great-grandfather a deacon, and his whole family, perhaps from the days when Christianity had been accepted in Russia, had belonged to the priesthood; and his love for the Church services, for the priesthood, for the peal of the bells, was deep in him, ineradicable, innate.  In church, particularly when he took part in the service, he felt vigorous, of good cheer, happy.  So it was now.  Only when the eighth gospel had been read, he felt that his voice had grown weak, even his cough was inaudible.  His head had begun to ache intensely, and he was troubled by a fear that he might fall down.  And his legs were indeed quite numb, so that by degrees he ceased to feel them and could not understand how or on what he was standing, and why he did not fall. . . .