War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [210]
The princess did not fall, did not feel faint. She had been pale to begin with, but when she heard these words, her face changed and something lit up in her luminous, beautiful eyes. It was as if joy, the supreme joy, independent of the sorrows and joys of this world, poured over the deep sorrow that was in her. She forgot all her fear of her father, went up to him, took him by the hand, pulled him to her, and embraced his dry, sinewy neck.
“Mon père,” she said. “Don’t turn away from me, let’s weep together.”
“Villains! Scoundrels!” cried the old man, pulling his face away from her. “To destroy an army, to destroy men! Why? Go, go and tell Liza.”
The princess sank strengthlessly into the armchair next to her father and wept. She now saw her brother at the moment when he had taken leave of her and Liza, with his tender and at the same time arrogant air, saw him at the moment when, tenderly and mockingly, he had put on the little icon. “Did he believe? Did he repent of his unbelief? Was he now there? There, in the place of eternal rest and bliss?” she wondered.
“Mon père, tell me how it happened?” she asked through her tears.
“Go, go; he was killed in a battle, into which they led the best of Russian men and Russian glory to be killed. Go, Princess Marya. Go and tell Liza. I’ll come.”
When Princess Marya came back from her father, the little princess was sitting over her work, and she looked at Princess Marya with that special expression of an inward and happily serene gaze that only pregnant women have. It was clear that she did not see Princess Marya, but was looking deep inside herself—into something happy and mysterious that was being accomplished in her.
“Marie,” she said, leaving the embroidery frame and throwing herself backwards, “give me your hand.” She took the princess’s hand and placed it on her belly.
Her eyes were smiling in expectation, her little lip with its mustache rose and remained raised in a childishly happy way.
Princess Marya knelt before her and hid her face in the folds of her sister-in-law’s dress.
“There, there—do you feel it? It’s so strange. And you know, Marie, I’ll love him very much,” said Liza, looking at her sister-in-law with shining, happy eyes. Princess Marya could not raise her head: she was weeping.
“What’s the matter, Masha?”
“Never mind…I just feel sad…sad about Andrei,” she said, wiping her tears on her sister-in-law’s knees. Several times in the course of the morning Princess Marya began to prepare her sister-in-law, and each time she began to weep. These tears, the reason for which the little princess did not understand, alarmed her, though she was little attentive. She did not say anything, but glanced around anxiously, as if looking for something. Before dinner the old prince, whom she had always been afraid of, came into her room, now with an especially uneasy, angry face, and left without saying a word. She looked at Princess Marya, then became thoughtful, with that expression of inward attention that pregnant women have, and suddenly began to cry.
“Have you received something from Andrei?” she asked.
“No, you know it’s still too early for any news, but mon père worries, and I’m frightened.”
“So there’s nothing?”
“Nothing,” said Princess Marya, looking firmly at her sister-in-law with her luminous eyes. She had decided not to tell her and persuaded her father to conceal the terrible news from her sister-in-law until her delivery, which was expected any day. Princess Marya and the old prince, in their own ways, bore with the grief and concealed it. The old prince did not want to hope: he decided that Prince Andrei had been killed, and though he sent an official to Austria to look for his son’s traces, he ordered a gravestone for him in Moscow, which he intended to put in his garden, and told everyone that his son had been killed. He tried to go on with his old way of life unchanged, but his strength failed him: he walked less, ate