War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [321]
Mitenka’s wife and sisters-in-law stuck their frightened faces into the front hall from the door to their room, where a clean samovar was boiling and the steward’s bed rose up high under its patchwork quilt.
The young count, breathless, paying no attention to them, walked by with resolute strides and went into the house.
The countess, learning at once through the maids of what had happened in the wing, was, on the one hand, calmed by the reflection that their situation should now be set to rights, but, on the other hand, was troubled by the thought of how her son would put up with it. She tiptoed to his door several times, listening as he smoked one pipe after another.
The next day the old count called his son aside and told him with a timid smile:
“You know, dear heart, you needn’t have flown into a temper! Mitenka has told me everything.”
“I knew,” thought Nikolai, “that I’d never understand anything here in this foolish world.”
“You got angry that he hadn’t written down those seven hundred roubles. But he had carried them over, and you didn’t look at the next page.”
“Papa, he’s a blackguard and a thief, I know it. What’s done is done. But if you don’t want it, I won’t say anything to him.”
“No, dear heart.” (The count was also embarrassed. He felt he had managed his wife’s estate poorly and was guilty before his children, but he did not know how to set things to rights.) “No, I ask you to take care of things, I’m old, I…”
“No, papa, forgive me if I’ve caused you unpleasantness; I’m less capable than you are.”
“Devil take them, these muzhiks, and money, and carrying over to the next page,” he thought. “I used to understand something about doubling on a six-card run, but about carrying over on pages I know nothing,” he said to himself, and from then on he did not enter into the business anymore. Only once the countess summoned her son, informed him that she had a promissory note for two thousand from Anna Mikhailovna, and asked Nikolai how he thought of acting upon it.
“Here’s how,” Nikolai replied. “You told me it depends on me. I don’t like Anna Mikhailovna, and I don’t like Boris, but they’ve been our friends and they’re poor. So here’s how!” and he tore up the note, and this action caused the old countess to burst into tears of joy. After that the young Rostov, not entering into such business anymore, with passionate enthusiasm took up the occupation, new for him, of hunting with dogs, which the old count managed on a grand scale.
III
It was already turning winter, morning frosts gripped the earth moistened by autumn rains, the winter wheat was already tufting up and stood out bright green against the strips of brownish, cattle-trampled winter stubble and pale yellow summer stubble with red strips of buckwheat. The hilltops and woods, which at the end of August were still green islands among the black winter croplands and stubble, had become golden and bright red islands amidst the bright green winter crops. The hares had already half shed their summer coats, the fox cubs were beginning to disperse, and the young wolves were bigger than dogs. It was the best time for hunting. The dogs of the ardent young hunter Rostov had not only reached good hunting form, but were so footsore that at a general council of hunters it was decided to give the dogs a three-day rest and move off on the sixteenth of September, beginning in Oak Grove, where there was an intact family of wolves.
This was where things stood on the fourteenth of September.
All that day the hunt stayed at home; it was frosty and biting, but in the evening it became overcast and turned warmer. On the fifteenth of September, when young Rostov, in his dressing gown, glanced out the window in the morning, he saw a morning than which nothing could be better for hunting: it was as if the sky was melting and, without wind, descending to earth. The only movement in the air was the slow movement from above to below of descending microscopic drops of mist or fog. Transparent drops hung