War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [617]
“The thing is, to tell you the truth, ma tante…”
“What is it, what is it, my friend; let’s go and sit down there.”
Nikolai suddenly felt a desire and a need to tell all his innermost thoughts (such as he would not have told to his mother, sister, or friend) to this woman who was almost a stranger to him. Later, when he recalled this impulse of unprovoked, inexplicable candor, which, however, had very important consequences for him, it seemed to Nikolai (as it always seems to people) that it had been just a stupid whimsy; and yet this impulse of candor, along with other small events, had enormous consequences for him and for the whole family.
“Here’s the thing, ma tante. Maman has long wanted me to marry a rich girl, but the very thought of marrying for money is repugnant to me.”
“Oh, yes, I understand,” said the governor’s wife.
“But Princess Bolkonsky is another thing. First, to tell you the truth, I like her very much, she’s a girl after my heart, and then, since I met her in such circumstances, so strangely, it has often occurred to me that it was fate. Especially if you consider that maman has long been thinking of it, but I never happened to meet her before, it just happened that we kept not meeting. And at the time when Natasha was engaged to her brother, it was impossible for me to think of marrying her. It had to be that I met her precisely when Natasha’s engagement broke up, well, and then it all…But here’s the thing. I’ve never told this to anyone and never will. Only to you.”
The governor’s wife gratefully pressed his elbow.
“You know Sophie, my cousin? I love her, I’ve promised to marry her, and will marry her…So you see, there can be no talk of it,” Nikolai said incoherently and blushing.
“Mon cher, mon cher, how can you reason that way? Sophie has nothing, and you said yourself that your father’s affairs are in disorder. And your maman? It will kill her, for one thing. Then Sophie, if she’s a girl with a heart, what sort of life will it be for her? The mother in despair, affairs in disorder…No, mon cher, you and Sophie ought to understand that.”
Nikolai was silent. It was pleasant for him to hear these conclusions.
“All the same, ma tante, it cannot be,” he said with a sigh, after a brief pause. “And would the princess marry me? And then, too, she’s in mourning now. Can there be any thought of it?”
“You’re not thinking that I’ll marry you off at once? Il y a manière et manière,”*669 said the governor’s wife.
“What a matchmaker you are, ma tante…” said Nikolai, kissing her plump little hand.
VI
On arriving in Moscow after her meeting with Rostov, Princess Marya had found her nephew there with his tutor and a letter from Prince Andrei, who instructed them to proceed to Voronezh, to their aunt, Mrs. Malvintsev. The cares of moving, worry about her brother, organizing life in a new home, new faces, her nephew’s upbringing—all this stifled in Princess Marya’s soul that feeling of temptation, as it were, which had tormented her during the illness and after the death of her father, and especially after meeting Rostov. She was sad. Now, after a month spent in quiet conditions of life, the impression of the loss of her father, combined in her soul with the perishing of Russia, made itself felt in her more and more strongly. She was anxious: the thought of the dangers to which her brother—the only close person she had left—was exposed, tormented her ceaselessly. She was worried about the upbringing of her nephew, a task to which she constantly felt herself unequal. But in the depths of her soul there was a harmony with herself, coming from the consciousness that she had suppressed in herself the personal dreams and hopes that had begun to arise in her with the appearance of Rostov.
When the governor’s wife went to Mrs. Malvintsev’s the day after her soirée and, having talked over her plans with the aunt (mentioning that, though under the circumstances it was impossible even to think of a formal engagement, still the