War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [602]
“Forgive me!” she said in a whisper, raising her head and glancing at him. “Forgive me!”
“I love you,” said Prince Andrei.
“Forgive…”
“Forgive what?” asked Prince Andrei.
“Forgive me for what I di…did,” Natasha said in a barely audible, faltering whisper, and she began to kiss his hand more quickly, barely touching it with her lips.
“I love you more, better, than before,” said Prince Andrei, raising her face with his hand so that he could see her eyes.
Those eyes filled with happy tears looked at him timidly, with compassion and joyful love. Natasha’s thin and pale face with its swollen lips was more than unattractive, it was frightful. But Prince Andrei did not see that face, he saw radiant eyes, which were beautiful. Behind them talking could be heard.
The valet Pyotr, now fully awake, aroused the doctor. Timokhin, who had not slept all that time because of the pain in his leg, had long been watching everything that was happening, and fidgeted on the bench, trying to keep his undressed body covered by the sheet.
“What is this?” said the doctor, getting up from his bed. “Kindly leave, young lady.”
Just then the maid, sent by the countess, who had found her daughter missing, knocked on the door.
Like a somnambulist awakened in the middle of her sleep, Natasha went out of the room and, returning to her side of the cottage, fell sobbing on her bed.
From that day on, through all the rest of the Rostovs’ journey, at every stopping or sleeping place, Natasha never left the wounded Bolkonsky, and the doctor had to admit that he had not expected from a young lady either such firmness or such skill in looking after a wounded man.
Terrible as the thought seemed to the countess that Prince Andrei might (and, according to the doctor, quite probably would) die in her daughter’s arms during the journey, she was unable to oppose Natasha. Though it was conceivable that, owing to the closeness now established between the wounded Prince Andrei and Natasha, their former engagement might be renewed in case he recovered, no one spoke of it, least of all Natasha and Prince Andrei; the unresolved question of life and death hanging not only over Bolkonsky but over Russia shut out all other conjectures.
XXXIII
Pierre woke up late on the third of September. His head ached, the clothes he had slept in without undressing felt heavy on his body, and on his soul lay a vague consciousness of something shameful committed the day before. This shameful thing was yesterday’s conversation with Captain Ramballe.
The clock showed eleven, but it seemed peculiarly overcast outside. Pierre got up, rubbed his eyes, and, seeing the pistol with its carved butt, which Gerasim had again placed on the writing table, he remembered where he was and precisely what lay before him that day.
“Am I already too late?” thought Pierre. “No, he would probably enter Moscow no earlier than noon.” Pierre did not allow himself to reflect on what lay before him, but hastened to act quickly.
Having straightened his clothes, Pierre took the pistol in his hand and was about to leave. But here the thought occurred to him for the first time of how he was to carry this weapon outside, if not in his hand. Even under a loose kaftan it was hard to hide a big pistol. Neither in his belt nor under his arm was it possible to carry it unnoticed. Besides, the pistol had been fired, and Pierre had not had time to reload it. “Never mind, there’s still the dagger,” Pierre said to himself, though more than once, in thinking about carrying out his intention, he had decided to himself that the chief mistake of the student in 1809 had consisted in wanting to kill Napoleon with a dagger. But as if his main goal consisted not in carrying out the thing he had in mind, but in proving to himself that he had not renounced his intention and was doing everything to carry it out, Pierre quickly took the dull, nicked dagger in the green scabbard, which he had bought at the Sukhareva tower along with the pistol, and hid it under his waistcoat.
Having belted his kaftan and pulled down