In and out among all this vicious and terrible throng appeared the image of that woman who had come for Valia. Many people came and went in the house of Gregory Aristarchovich, and Valia did not remember their faces, but this face lived in his memory. It was such an elongated, thin, yellow face, and smiled with a sly, dissembling smile, from which two deep lines appeared at the two corners of the mouth. If this woman took Valia he would die.
“Listen,” Valia once said to his aunt, tearing himself away from his book for a moment. “Listen,” he repeated with his usual earnestness, and with a glance that gazed straight into the eyes of the person with whom he spoke: “I shall call you mama, not auntie. You talk nonsense when you say that the woman—is mama. You are mama, not she.”
“Why?” asked Nastasia Philippovna, blushing like a young girl who had just received a compliment. But along with her joy there could also be heard in her voice the sound of fear for Valia. He had become so strange of late, and timid; feared to sleep alone, as he used to do, raved in his sleep and cried.
“But, Valichka, it is true, she is your mother.”
“I really wonder where you get this habit of contradicting!” Valia said after some musing, imitating the tone of Gregory Aristarchovich.
Nastasia Philippovna laughed, but while preparing for bed that night she spoke for a considerable time with her husband, who boomed like a Turkish drum, abused the empty talkers, and frivolous, hair-brained women, and afterward went with his wife to see Valia.
They gazed long and silently into the face of the sleeping child. The flame of the candle swayed in the trembling hand of Gregory Aristarchovich and lent a fantastic, death-like coloring to the face of the boy, which was as white as the pillows on which it rested. It seemed as if a pair of stern, black eyes looked at them from the dark hollows, demanding a reply and threatening them with misfortune and unknown sorrow, and the lips twitched into a strange, ironic smile as if upon his helpless child-head lay a vague reflection of those cruel and mysterious spectre monsters that silently hovered over it.
“Valia!” whispered the frightened Nastasia. The boy sighed deeply but did not move, as if enchained in the sleep of death.
“Valia! Valia!” the deep, trembling voice of her husband was added to that of Nastasia Philippovna.
Valia opened his eyes, shaded by thick eyelashes; the light of the candle made him wink, and he sprang to his knees, pale and frightened. His uncovered, thin little arms, like a pearl necklace encircled his auntie’s full, rosy neck, and hiding his little head upon her breast and screwing up his eyes tight as if fearing that they would open of themselves, he whispered: “I am afraid, mama, I am afraid! Do not go!”