War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [320]
“Not her at all,” he said.
“What, worse?”
“On the contrary, but there’s a sort of dignity. A princess?” he said to her in a whisper.
“Yes, yes, yes,” Natasha said joyfully.
Natasha told him about her romance with Prince Andrei, his visit to Otradnoe, and showed him his last letter.
“Well, are you glad?” aked Natasha. “I’m so calm and happy now.”
“Very glad,” Nikolai replied. “He’s an excellent man. Well, are you very much in love?”
“How shall I tell you,” Natasha replied. “I was in love with Boris, with my teacher, with Denisov, but this is not the same at all. I feel peaceful, firm. I know that there’s no one better than he, and I feel so calm, so good now. Not at all like before…”
Nikolai expressed his displeasure at the wedding being put off for a year; but Natasha fiercely attacked her brother, proving to him that it could not be otherwise, that it would be bad to enter the family against the father’s will, that she herself wanted it that way.
“You don’t understand at all, not at all,” she said. Nikolai fell silent and agreed with her.
Her brother often wondered, looking at her. It did not seem at all as if she was a loving fiancée separated from her future husband. She was level-headed, calm, altogether as cheerful as before. This surprised Nikolai, and it even made him look mistrustfully at this alliance with Bolkonsky. He did not believe that her fate was already decided, the less so as he had not seen her together with Prince Andrei. He kept thinking there was something wrong with this projected marriage.
“Why the postponement? Why no betrothal?” he thought. Talking with his mother once about his sister, he found, to his surprise and partly to his satisfaction, that deep in her heart his mother also sometimes looked mistrustfully at this marriage.
“Here he writes,” she said, showing her son Prince Andrei’s letter with that hidden feeling of ill-will a mother always has against her daughter’s future marital happiness, “he writes that he won’t come before December. What can be keeping him? It must be illness! His health is very weak. Don’t tell Natasha. Never mind her cheerfulness. She’s living out the last of her girlhood, but I know what happens to her each time a letter comes from him. But anyhow, God willing, all will be well,” she concluded each time. “He’s an excellent man.”
II
In the initial time of his visit Nikolai was serious and even dull. He suffered from the impending necessity of intervening in these stupid matters of estate management for which his mother had summoned him. To get the burden off his shoulders, on the third day of his visit, angry, scowling, not answering Natasha’s question of where he was going, he went to the wing to see Mitenka and demanded a full accounting from him. What this full accounting was, Nikolai knew still less than the frightened and bewildered Mitenka. The conversation and the accounting with Mitenka did not last long. The headman, the delegate, and the village clerk, who were waiting in the front hall of the wing, listened at first with fear and satisfaction to the sound of the young count’s rapping voice rising higher and higher, pouring out terrible and abusive words one after another.
“Robber! Ungrateful creature!…cut you to pieces like a dog…not dealing with papa…thievery…racaille!”*356
Then the same people, with undiminished satisfaction and fear, saw how the young count, all red, with bloodshot eyes, dragged Mitenka out by the scruff of the neck, chose a convenient moment between his words, applied foot and knee with great deftness to his rear end, and shouted: “Out, scoundrel, and don’t leave a trace behind!”
Mitenka flew headlong down the six steps and ran off into the flower garden. (This flower garden was a well-known place of refuge for wrongdoers in Otradnoe. Mitenka himself, when coming back drunk from town, hid in this flower garden, and many inhabitants of Otradnoe,