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By Root 3889 0

and he cried: ‘Fool.’ It was hard for him. I heard from outside the door how he lay down, groaning, on his bed and cried loudly, ‘My God!’ Why didn’t I go in then? What would he have done to me? What would I have lost? And perhaps then he would have been comforted and would have told me his word.” And Princess Marya said aloud the endearing words he had said to her on the day of his death: “De-ear he-eart!” Princess Marya repeated the words and sobbed with tears that eased her soul. She now saw his face before her. Not the face she had known ever since she could remember, and which she had always seen from a distance, but the face—timid and weak—which on the last day, as she bent close to his mouth to hear what he said, she had seen for the first time close up, with all its wrinkles and details.

“Dear heart,” she repeated.

“What was he thinking when he said those words? What is he thinking now?” the question suddenly came to her, and in response to it she saw him before her with the expression he had had in the coffin, on his face bound with a white handkerchief. And the horror that had seized her then, when she had touched him and become convinced not only that this was not he, but that it was something mysterious and repugnant, seized her now. She wanted to think about other things, wanted to pray, and could do nothing. She stared wide-eyed at the moonlight and shadows, expected every second to see his dead face, and felt that the silence that hung over the house and within it held her fast.

“Dunyasha!” she whispered. “Dunyasha!” she cried in a wild voice, and tearing free of the silence, she ran to the maids’ room, towards the nanny and maids who came running to her.

XIII

On the seventeenth of August, Rostov and Ilyin, accompanied by Lavrushka, who had just returned from captivity, and a hussar orderly, leaving their camp in Yankovo, ten miles from Bogucharovo, went for a ride—to try out a horse Ilyin had just bought, and to see if there was any hay in the villages.

For the past three days, Bogucharovo had been between two enemy armies, so that the Russian rear guard could get there as easily as the French vanguard, and therefore Rostov, as a thoughtful squadron commander, wanted to avail himself of whatever provisions had been left in Bogucharovo before the French got there.

Rostov and Ilyin were in the most cheerful mood. On the way to Bogucharovo, a princely estate with a manor house, where they hoped to find a large staff and some pretty girls, they either questioned Lavrushka about Napoleon and laughed at his stories, or raced each other, trying out Ilyin’s horse.

Rostov had no idea that the village he was going to was the estate of that Bolkonsky who used to be his sister’s fiancé.

Rostov and Ilyin sent their horses into a last race down the slope before Bogucharovo, and Rostov, getting ahead of Ilyin, was the first to gallop into the street of the village.

“You came out ahead,” said the flushed Ilyin.

“Yes, always ahead, both in the meadow and here,” Rostov replied, stroking his lathered Don horse with his hand.

“And I’d have outraced you on this Frenchman, Your Excellency,” Lavrushka said from behind, calling his scrubby cart horse a Frenchman, “but I didn’t want to shame you.”

They rode at a walk towards a barn, by which a large crowd of muzhiks was standing.

Some of the muzhiks took off their hats, some, without taking off their hats, looked at the approaching officers. Two tall old muzhiks, with wrinkled faces and sparse beards, came out of the pot-house and, smiling, swaying, and singing some nonsensical song, went up to the officers.

“Fine lads!” said Rostov, laughing. “Got any hay?”

“And so alike…” said Ilyin.

“A ve-e-ery me-e-erry ta-a-alk…” the muzhiks sang away with blissful smiles.

One muzhik stepped out of the crowd and approached Rostov.

“Whose might you be?” he asked.

“Frenchmen,” Ilyin replied, laughing. “Here’s Napoleon himself,” he said, pointing to Lavrushka.

“So you’d be Russians?” the muzhik asked again.

“Have you got many forces here?” asked another rather short muzhik,