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His hands and feet were trembling too, and the whole huge figure of the "good-natured simpleton" looked somehow crushed and flattened. The comic man took a rapid glance round the room, but saw neither bottle nor flask nor any other suspicious vessel. "I say, Mishutka, you know you are ill!" he said in a flutter. "Strike me dead, you are ill! You don't look yourself!"
"A business agreement is beyond price. I am not going to give up Mishutka. . . ." "What Mishutka?" asked Groholsky. "My son." Groholsky and Liza looked at each other. Liza's eyes bulged, her cheeks flushed, and her lips twitched. . . . "Very well," she said. She thought of Mishutka's warm little cot.
And to make things worse, Bugrov would run across every morning and in a hissing whisper would give some quite unnecessary bulletin concerning the health of Father Pyotr. He bored them with those bulletins. "He slept well," he informed them. "Yesterday he was put out because I had no salted cucumbers. . . He has taken to Mishutka; he keeps patting him on the head."
Liza hid behind the verandah curtain, and fastened her eyes upon the members of her former family; her face was radiant with joy. "Misha!" she murmured, "Misha! Are you really here, Misha? The darling! And how he loves Vanya! Heavens!" And Liza went off into a giggle when Mishutka stirred his father's tea with a spoon. "And how Vanya loves Misha! My darlings!"
He got into the chaise with dignity, and told the footmen standing round the chaise to give him Mishutka and the fishing tackle they had brought. Setting Mishutka beside him, and putting his left arm round him, he held the reins and drove off. "Ge-ee up!" shouted Mishutka. Liza, unaware of what she was doing, waved her handkerchief after them.
Groholsky led Liza on to the verandah, and pointed to the villa opposite. They both held their sides, and roared with laughter. It was funny. Ivan Petrovitch was standing on the verandah of the villa opposite, smiling. Two dark-haired ladies and Mishutka were standing below, under the verandah. The ladies were laughing, and loudly talking French. "French women," observed Groholsky.
All too soon he paid for his egoism. At the beginning of May when the very air seemed to be in love and faint with happiness, Groholsky lost everything; the woman he loved and. . . That year Bugrov, too, visited the Crimea. He did not take the villa opposite, but pottered about, going from one town to another with Mishutka. He spent his time eating, drinking, sleeping, and playing cards.
When towards two o'clock in the morning he had drunk too much vodka and champagne, he would take Mishutka in his arms, and weeping, say to him, before Groholsky and Liza: "Mihail, my son, what am I? I . . . am a scoundrel. I have sold your mother! Sold her for thirty pieces of silver, may the Lord punish me! Mihail Ivanitch, little sucking pig, where is your mother? Lost! Gone! Sold into slavery!
I have a child to bring up. . . . Well, thank God that you will buy my furniture. . . . That will be a little more in hand, or I should have been regularly bankrupt. . . ." Groholsky got up, took leave of Bugrov, and went home rejoicing. In the evening he sent him ten thousand roubles. Early next morning Bugrov and Mishutka were already at Feodosia. Several months had passed; spring had come.
The servants won't do what they are told, the climate is horrible, everything is expensive. . . . Stop your noise," Bugrov shouted, suddenly coming to a halt before Mishutka; "stop it, I tell you! Little beast, won't you stop it?" And Bugrov pulled Mishutka's ear. "That's revolting, Ivan Petrovitch," said Groholsky in a tearful voice. "How can you treat a tiny child like that? You really are. . ."
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