War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [467]
There was no hope of recovery. To transport him was impossible. What would happen if he died on the road? “Wouldn’t the end, the final end, be better?” Princess Marya sometimes thought. She watched over him day and night, almost without sleeping, and, dreadful to say, she often watched over him not hoping to find signs of improvement, but wishing to find signs of the approaching end.
Strange as it was for the princess to be aware of this feeling within her, it was there. And still more terrible for Princess Marya was the fact that, since the time of her father’s illness (if not even earlier, when, expecting something, she had stayed with him), all her personal desires and hopes, forgotten and dormant in her, had reawakened. Things that had not entered her head for years—thoughts of a free life without the eternal fear of her father, even thoughts of the possibility of love and family happiness—ceaselessly flitted through her imagination, like temptations of the devil. Try as she might to push them away from her, questions constantly entered her head of how she would arrange her life now, after that. These were temptations of the devil, and Princess Marya knew it. She knew that the only weapon against them was prayer, and she attempted to pray. She stood in a prayerful position, looked at the icons, recited the words of a prayer, but was unable to pray. She felt that now another world had taken hold of her—of the difficult and free activity of everyday life, completely the opposite of the moral world in which she had previously been confined and in which the best consolation had been prayer. She could not pray and could not weep, and everyday cares took hold of her.
It was becoming dangerous to remain in Bogucharovo. There was talk on all sides about the approaching French, and in one village ten miles from Bogucharovo an estate had been looted by French marauders.
The doctor insisted that the prince be taken further away; the marshal of the nobility sent an official to Princess Marya to persuade her to leave as soon as possible. A police chief came to Bogucharovo and insisted on the same thing, saying that the French were twenty-five miles away, that French leaflets were going about the villages, and that if the princess and her father did not leave before the fifteenth, he could not answer for anything.
The princess decided to leave on the fifteenth. The cares of the preparations, of giving orders, for which everyone turned to her, occupied her the whole day before. The night of the fourteenth she spent, as usual, without undressing, in the room next to the one in which the prince lay. Several times, on waking up, she heard his groaning, muttering, the creaking of the bed, and the footsteps of Tikhon and the doctor as they turned him over. Several times she listened at the door, and it seemed to her that he muttered more loudly than usual that night and tossed more frequently. She could not sleep and went to the door several times, listening, wishing to go in and not daring to. Though he could not speak, Princess Marya saw and knew how unpleasant he found any sign of fear for him. She noticed with what displeasure he turned away from the intent gaze she sometimes involuntarily directed at him. She knew that her coming at night, at an unusual time, would irritate him.
But never had she felt so sorry for him, so frightened of losing him. She recalled all her life with him, and found in his every word, his every act, an expression of his love for her. From time to time, amidst these memories, the devil’s temptations would break in upon her imagination, the thoughts of what would happen after his death and how her new, free life would be arranged. But she drove those thoughts away with loathing. By morning he quieted down, and she fell asleep.
She woke up late. That sincerity which comes with waking showed her clearly what it was in her father’s illness that concerned her most. She woke up, listened