“In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost!”
Then he took him in his hand and raised a knife over him.
Tichon lay prostrate on the ground, his face hid in his hands. Yet he looked through his fingers and saw everything. It seemed to him the body of the infant was radiant as the sun, that it was not Ivanoushka but the mysterious Lamb, slain from the beginning of the world, and the face of him who held the raised knife was the face of God. He was waiting in great terror, and was wishing with an intense desire for the knife to plunge into the white body and the living blood to be shed. Then everything would be accomplished; in the final terror there would be the final ecstasy.
Suddenly the child began to cry. The King smiled, and the smile transformed the face of the god into the face of the beast.
“The beast, Satan, Antichrist!——” flashed across Tichon’s brain, and a sudden intolerable, overwhelming anguish gripped his heart. At the same moment some one seemed to rouse him and the spell was broken. He jumped to his feet, rushed upon Averian Bespaly, caught hold of his hand and averted the stab.
All jumped up and threw themselves on Tichon. They would have torn him to pieces, had not heavy knocks at that moment sounded at the door. It was being battered from the outside. The double doors gave way with a crash, and fell forwards. In rushed Marioushka and, after her, men in green kaftans, three-cornered hats, with drawn swords; they were soldiers. To Tichon they seemed to be angels of God.
It grew dark before his eyes.
His shoulder felt heavy. He put up his hand and touched something warm and sticky. It was blood. He had been probably wounded in the scuffle.
He closed his eyes and saw the red flames of a burning house, the Red Death. White birds were flying into the red flames. He thought, “More terrible than the Red Death is the White Death,” and fell senseless to the ground.