War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [376]
After breakfast Marya Dmitrievna (this was her best time) sat down in her armchair and called Natasha and the old count to her.
“Well, my friends, I’ve thought the whole matter over, and here’s my advice to you,” she began. “Yesterday, as you know, I called on Prince Nikolai; well, sir, and I talked with him…He took a notion to shout. But there’s no out-shouting me! I sang it all out for him!”
“And what about him?” asked the count.
“What about him? A madcap…doesn’t want to listen. Well, there’s no point talking, we’ve worn the poor girl out as it is,” said Marya Dmitrievna. “And my advice to you is to finish your business and go home to Otradnoe…and wait there…”
“Ah, no!” cried Natasha.
“No, go home,” said Marya Dmitrievna. “And wait there. If her fiancé comes here now, there’ll be no avoiding a quarrel, and here he can talk it over alone with the old man and then come to you.”
Ilya Andreich approved of this suggestion, grasping its good sense at once. If the old man softens, it will be all the better if they come to him in Moscow or Bald Hills afterwards; if not, then they could marry against his will only in Otradnoe.
“That’s the veritable truth,” he said. “And I regret that I went to see him and took her,” said the old count.
“No, what is there to regret? Being here, you couldn’t help paying your respects. And if he doesn’t want it, that’s his business,” said Marya Dmitrievna, looking for something in her reticule. “And the trousseau is ready, you have nothing else to wait for, and what isn’t ready, I’ll send to you. Though I’ll miss you, it’s better that you go with God.” Having found what she was looking for in the reticule, she gave it to Natasha. It was a letter from Princess Marya. “She writes to you. She’s suffering so, the poor thing! She’s afraid you’ll think she doesn’t love you.”
“But she doesn’t love me,” said Natasha.
“Don’t talk nonsense,” cried Marya Dmitrievna.
“I won’t believe anyone: I know she doesn’t love me,” Natasha said boldly, taking the letter, and her face showed a dry and spiteful resolution that made Marya Dmitrievna look at her more intently and frown.
“Don’t you answer me back like that, dearie,” she said. “What I’m saying is true. Write a reply.”
Natasha did not answer and went to her room to read Princess Marya’s letter.
Princess Marya wrote that she was in despair because of the misunderstanding that had occurred between them. Whatever her father’s feelings were, wrote Princess Marya, she asked Natasha to believe that she could not but love her as the one chosen by her brother, for whose happiness she was ready to sacrifice everything.
“However,” she wrote, “do not think that my father is ill-disposed towards you. He is an old and ailing man who ought to be excused; but he is kind, magnanimous, and will love the one who will make for his son’s happiness.” Princess Marya also asked Natasha to set a time when she could see her again.
Having read the letter, Natasha sat down at the desk to write a reply. “Chère Princesse!” she wrote quickly and mechanically, and stopped. What could she write after all that had happened yesterday? “Yes, yes, all that was, and now it’s all different,” she thought, sitting over the started letter. “Must I refuse him? Must I really? It’s terrible!…” And, so as not to think those dreadful thoughts, she went to Sonya and began sorting out patterns with her.
After dinner, Natasha went to her room and again took up Princess Marya’s letter. “Can it all be over already?” she wondered. “Can it all have happened so quickly and have destroyed all the former things?” She recalled her love for Prince Andrei with all its former force, and at the same time she felt that she loved Kuragin. She vividly imagined herself as Prince Andrei’s wife, imagined the picture of her happiness with him, repeated in her mind so many times, and together with that, burning with excitement, she pictured to herself all the details of yesterday’s meeting with Anatole.
“Why can’t it be both together?” she thought in moments of total darkening. “Only