“Tichon, Tichon dear, don’t you wish for the Red Death, or do you dread it?” she repeated with a caressing whisper.
“I am afraid to do wrong, Sophia. Surely it cannot be God’s will that men should perish so? Are you certain that it is not the lure of Satan?”
“What are we to do, then? We are driven to it by necessity!” She clasped her thin, pale hands, the hands of a child.
“We cannot escape, we cannot hide ourselves from the dragon, neither in the mountains nor in caverns, nor in the chasms of the earth; he hath empoisoned the earth, the water, the air. Everything is defiled, and accursed.”
The night was still. The stars shone like the innocent eyes of children; the crescent of the waning moon rested upon the black tips of the fir trees. The soothing cry of the night-jar rose through the mist from the bog below. The pine forest exhaled a dry, warm, resinous perfume. Near the fire a lilac harebell, lit up by the red glare of the flames, bent on its stalk as if nodding its delicate, drowsy little head.
The moths continued to flutter round the fire and perish in the flames.
Tichon closed his eyes, wearied by the fire-glow. He remembered one summer’s noon, that scent of the pines, in which the fresh smell of apples seemed mingled with the aroma of myrrh; a glade, sunshine, bees buzzing round clover, snail-trefoil, and pink silene; in the middle of the fine glade stood a weather-beaten, half-rotten, wooden cross, probably indicating the last resting-place of a saintly hermit. “Fair Mother Solitude”—he began to repeat his favourite poem. God had answered his prayers. He had brought him to this quiet resting-place. He knelt, and burying his head in the tall grass, kissed the ground and prayed:—
Oh, wondrous Queen, Mother of God!
Earth, thou bountiful mother of all.
and, looking up towards the sky, he continued:—