“I’m being watched just like a sick man,” he thought spitefully.
His thoughts were constantly interrupted, and he was biting his lips. His mother remarked this at last, and she left the room.
But Volodya felt no relief. He was tormented with regret at showing his impatience. He tried to go on with his work but he could not. Then he went to his mother.
“Mamma, why did you leave me?” he asked timidly.
XXIV
It was the eve of a holiday. The little image-lamps burned before the ikons.
It was late and it was quiet. Volodya’s mother was not asleep. In the mysterious dark of her bedroom she fell on her knees, she prayed and she wept, sobbing out now and then like a child.
Her braids of hair trailed upon her white dress; her shoulders trembled. She raised her hands to her breast in a praying posture, and she looked with tearful eyes at the ikon. The image-lamp moved almost imperceptibly on its chains with her passionate breathing. The shadows rocked, they crowded in the corners, they stirred behind the reliquary, and they murmured mysteriously. There was a hopeless yearning in their murmurings and an incomprehensible sadness in their wavering movements.
At last she rose, looking pale, with strange, widely dilated eyes, and she reeled slightly on her benumbed legs.
She went quietly to Volodya. The shadows surrounded her, they rustled softly behind her back, they crept at her feet, and some of them, as fine as the threads of a spider’s web, fell upon her shoulders and, looking into her large eyes, murmured incomprehensibly.