They led him on to the scaffold, an officer following. The drums became silent, and the officer, in an unnatural tone, which sounded peculiarly weak amid the open fields and after the rattle of the drums, read the same stupid words of the sentence that had been read to him in court: about his being deprived of all his rights⁠—he whom they were about to kill!⁠—and about the near and more distant future. “Oh, why, why do they do all this?” thought Svetlogoúb. “What a pity it is that they don’t know, and that I can no longer tell them of it! But they will know⁠—everyone will know.⁠ ⁠…”

A lean priest, with thin long hair, in a lilac cassock, with a small gilt cross on his breast and a large silver one in his weak white thick-veined hand encircled by a black velvet cuff, drew near to Svetlogoúb.