“Father, I can justify nothing. I only pray with tears for your gracious forgiveness and fatherly dispensation. I have no other hope save God and you; and I give myself up into your hands.”
Familiar steps approached the door. It opened. Peter came in.
Alexis jumped up, stumbled and would have fallen had not Tolstoi supported him.
As in the momentary metamorphosis of a were-wolf, two faces flashed before Alexis, a strange, terrible one like a death-mask, and also the familiar one, his father’s face as he remembered it in his earliest childhood.
The Tsarevitch came forward and was going to fall on his knees, but Peter stretched out his arms to meet him and pressed him to his bosom.
“Welcome, Aliósha, thank the Lord! thank the Lord! we have met at last——”
Alexis felt the familiar touch of his father’s plump, clean-shaven cheek, the old smell of strong tobacco and sweaty clothes; he saw the large, dark, lucid eyes, dear and yet so terrible; the winning, slightly cunning, smile on the thin, curved, almost feminine lips. Forgetting his long speech, he only stammered out:—
“Forgive me, father!”
And bursting into irrepressible sobs, he repeated again and again: “Forgive, forgive!”
His heart had melted suddenly, like ice before fire.