War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (ebook reader for pc TXT) 📕

no one with him except the young princesses.⁠ ⁠… They are still young.⁠ ⁠…” She bent her head and continued in a whisper: “Has he performed his final duty, Prince? How priceless are those last moments! It can make things no worse, and it is absolutely necessary to prepare him if he is so ill. We women, Prince,” and she smiled tenderly, “always know how to say these things. I absolutely must see him, however painful it may be for me. I am used to suffering.”

Evidently the prince understood her, and also understood, as he had done at Anna Pávlovna’s, that it would be difficult to get rid of Anna Mikháylovna.

“Would not such a meeting be too trying for him, dear Anna Mikháylovna?” said he. “Let us wait until evening. The doctors are expecting a crisis.”

“But one cannot delay, Prince, at such a moment! Consider that the welfare of his soul is at stake. Ah, it is awful: the duties of a Christian⁠ ⁠…”

A door of one of the inner rooms opened and one of the princesses, the count’s niece, entered with a cold, stern face. The length of her body was strikingly out of proportion to her short legs. Prince Vasíli turned to her.

“Well, how is he?”

“Still the same; but what can you expect, this noise⁠ ⁠…” said the princess, looking at Anna Mikháylovna as at a stranger.

“Ah, my dear, I hardly knew you,” said Anna Mikháylovna with a happy smile, ambling lightly up to the count’s niece. “I have come, and am at your service to help you nurse my uncle. I imagine what you have gone through,” and she sympathetically turned up her eyes.

The princess gave no reply and did not even smile, but left the room as Anna Mikháylovna took off her gloves and, occupying the position she had conquered, settled down in an armchair, inviting Prince Vasíli to take a seat beside her.

“Borís,” she said to her son with a smile, “I shall go in to see the count, my uncle; but you, my dear, had better go to Pierre meanwhile and don’t forget to give him the Rostóvs’ invitation. They ask him to dinner. I suppose he won’t go?” she continued, turning to the prince.

“On the contrary,” replied the prince, who had plainly become depressed, “I shall be only too glad if you relieve me of that young man.⁠ ⁠… Here he is, and the count has not once asked for him.”

He shrugged his shoulders. A footman conducted Borís down one flight of stairs and up another, to Pyotr Kirílovich’s rooms.

XVI

Pierre, after all, had not managed to choose a career for himself in Petersburg, and had been expelled from there for riotous conduct and sent to Moscow. The story told about him at Count Rostóv’s was true. Pierre had taken part in tying a policeman to a bear. He had now been for some days in Moscow and was staying as usual at his father’s house. Though he expected that the story of his escapade would be already known in Moscow and that the ladies about his father⁠—who were never favorably disposed toward him⁠—would have used it to turn the count against him, he nevertheless on the day of his arrival went to his father’s part of the house. Entering the drawing room, where the princesses spent most of their time, he greeted the ladies, two of whom were sitting at embroidery frames while a third read aloud. It was the eldest who was reading⁠—the one who had met Anna Mikháylovna. The two younger ones were embroidering: both were rosy and pretty and they differed only in that one had a little mole on her lip which made her much prettier. Pierre was received as if he were a corpse or a leper. The eldest princess paused in her reading and silently stared at him with frightened eyes; the second assumed precisely the same expression; while the youngest, the one with the mole, who was of a cheerful and lively disposition, bent over her frame to hide a smile probably evoked by the amusing scene she foresaw. She drew her wool down through the canvas and, scarcely able to refrain from laughing, stooped as if trying to make out the pattern.

“How do you do, cousin?” said Pierre. “You don’t recognize me?”

“I recognize you only too well, too well.”

“How is the count? Can I see him?” asked Pierre, awkwardly as usual, but unabashed.

“The count is suffering physically and mentally, and apparently you have done your best to increase his mental sufferings.”

“Can I see the count?” Pierre again asked.

“Hm.⁠ ⁠… If you wish to kill him, to kill him outright, you can see him⁠ ⁠… Olga, go and see whether Uncle’s beef tea is ready⁠—it is almost time,” she added, giving Pierre to understand that they were busy, and busy making his father comfortable, while evidently he, Pierre, was only busy causing him annoyance.

Olga went out. Pierre stood looking at the sisters; then he bowed and said: “Then I will go to my rooms. You will let me know when I can see him.”

And he left the room, followed by the low but ringing laughter of the sister with the mole.

Next day Prince Vasíli had arrived and settled in the count’s house. He sent for Pierre and said to him: “My dear fellow, if you are going to behave here as you did in Petersburg, you will end very badly; that is all I have to say to you. The count is very, very ill, and you must not see him at all.”

Since then Pierre had not been disturbed and had spent the whole time in his rooms upstairs.

When Borís appeared at his door Pierre was pacing up and down his room, stopping occasionally at a corner to make menacing gestures at the wall, as if running a sword through an invisible foe, and glaring savagely over his spectacles, and then again resuming his walk, muttering indistinct words, shrugging his shoulders and gesticulating.

“England is done for,” said he, scowling