Tichon woke up and listened. A nightingale was singing in the distance and her song echoed the moonlit night, the freshness of a dewy meadow, the perfume of a pine forest, freedom, voluptuousness, the bliss of life. And as in response to the nightingale’s song, strange whispers, rustles, sighs, resembling sighs and kisses of love, rose from the chapel floor. Plainly the fiend was still striving in man. Human passions were not quenched, but fanned, by the imminence of death.
Cornelius did not sleep. He was praying and neither saw nor heard anything, or if he did, he pardoned “his poor children.”
“God alone is without sin, man is weak; like dust he falls and rises like an angel. Not he who goes wrong with a maid or a widow is a sinner, but he who errs in his faith. We do not sin when our body takes liberties; but the church sins when it tolerates heresy.”
Suddenly Tichon felt that somebody was embracing and clinging to him. It was Sophia. He was frightened, but it flashed upon him, “The flames will purify all,” and feeling through the black habit the warmth and freshness of the innocent body, their ardent lips met.
And the caresses of these two children in the dark building, that common coffin, were as innocent as those of Daphnis and Chloe of old on the sunny plain of Lesbos.
Meanwhile, John the Simpleton, squatting on his heels, a candle in his hands waiting for the dawn, swayed gently to and fro and sang endlessly:—
You hollowed oaks will prove,
Fit house for us.
The nightingale sang on of liberty, voluptuousness, and the bliss of life. Her song seemed a delicate mockery of the song of the Simpleton.