all and each of you!” he cried suddenly, “why the devil did I take you up? I don’t want to know you from this time forward. Go alone, there’s your road!”
And he turned abruptly into another street, leaving Alyosha alone in the dark.
Alyosha came out of the town and walked across the fields to the monastery.
IV
Cana of Galilee
It was very late, according to the monastery ideas, when Alyosha returned to the hermitage; the doorkeeper let him in by a special entrance. It had struck nine o’clock—the hour of rest and repose after a day of such agitation for all. Alyosha timidly opened the door and went into the elder’s cell where his coffin was now standing. There was no one in the cell but Father Païssy, reading the Gospel in solitude over the coffin, and the young novice Porfiry, who, exhausted by the previous night’s conversation and the disturbing incidents of the day, was sleeping the deep sound sleep of youth on the floor of the other room. Though Father Païssy heard Alyosha come in, he did not even look in his direction. Alyosha turned to the right from the door to the corner, fell on his knees and began to pray.
His soul was overflowing but with mingled feelings; no single sensation stood out distinctly; on the contrary, one drove out another in a slow, continual rotation. But there was a sweetness in his heart and, strange to say, Alyosha was not surprised at it. Again he saw that coffin before him, the hidden dead figure so precious to him, but the weeping and poignant grief of the morning was no longer aching in his soul. As soon as he came in, he fell down before the coffin as before a holy shrine, but joy, joy was glowing in his mind and