The axes rang over Antipa's head, the boards split and fell to the ground, the dull echo of the blows sounded through the wood, the birds terrified by the noise fluttered uneasily round the cell, and the leaves trembled on the trees. But the old man prayed on as though he neither saw nor heard. They began to break up the flooring of the hut, and still its owner knelt undisturbed, and only when the last timbers were thrown aside and the captain himself went up to Antipa and caught him by the hair, only then did he speak, his eyes lifted to heaven, quietly, to God, "Merciful Father, forgive them."
When this happened, Jakov, the eldest son of Antipa, was twenty-three years old, and Terenti, the youngest, eighteen. Jakov, handsome and strong, gained the name of "scatter-brain," while still a youngster, and by the time his father died, was already the chief loafer and bully in the country-side. All complained of him--his mother, the Starost, the neighbours: he was imprisoned, he was whipped, with and without legal condemnation, but nothing tamed his wild disposition, and day by day he felt more stifled and constrained in the village among the pious people, busy and hard working as moles, scorners of every new thing, holding fast to the precepts of their ancient faith. Jakov smoked tobacco, drank brandy, wore clothes of German cut, and went to no prayers or religious services, and if decent folk admonished him and reminded him of his father, he would say scornfully, "Wait a bit, good people, all in good time. When I have sinned enough, I will think of repentance. It's too early yet; you need not hold up my father as an example to me--he sinned for fifty years, and repented only for eight after all. My sins now are nothing but as the down on the young bird, but when my full feathers are grown, then I may think of repentance."
"An evil heretic," was Jakov Lunev's name in the village, where they hated and feared him.
Some two years after his father's death, he married. The farm that his father established by thirty years strenuous labour, he had thoroughly ruined by his spendthrift life, and no one in the village would give him a daughter in marriage. But somewhere in a distant village he found a pretty orphan-girl, and he sold a pair of horses and his father's bee-farm, to raise the money to celebrate his wedding. His brother Terenti, a timid, silent, humpbacked youth, with unusually long arms, was no hindrance to his mode of life; his mother lay sick on the stove, and from there only called to him with hoarse foreboding voice, "Accursed one! Take heed to your soul. Come to your senses."