Page 470 - the-brothers-karamazov

tioned before, was very small, so that there was scarcely
room for the four of them (in addition to Porfiry, the novice,
who stood) to sit round Father Zossima on chairs brought
from the sitting room. It was already beginning to get dark,
the room was lighted up by the lamps and the candles be-
fore the ikons.
Seeing Alyosha standing embarrassed in the doorway,
Father Zossima smiled at him joyfully and held out his
hand.
‘Welcome, my quiet one, welcome, my dear, here you are
too. I knew you would come.’
Alyosha went up to him, bowed down before him to the
ground and wept. Something surged up from his heart, his
soul was quivering, he wanted to sob.
‘Come, don’t weep over me yet,’ Father Zossima smiled,
laying his right hand on his head. ‘You see I am sitting up
talking; maybe I shall live another twenty years yet, as that
dear good woman from Vishegorye, with her little Lizave-
ta in her arms, wished me yesterday. God bless the mother
and the little girl Lizaveta,’ he crossed himself. ‘Porfiry, did
you take her offering where I told you?’
He meant the sixty copecks brought him the day before
by the good-humoured woman to be given ‘to someone
poorer than me.’ Such offerings, always of money gained by
personal toil, are made by way of penance voluntarily un-
dertaken. The elder had sent Porfiry the evening before to a
widow, whose house had been burnt down lately, and who
after the fire had gone with her children begging alms. Por-
firy hastened to reply that he had given the money, as he had