War and peace ( Constance Garnett-1900)

Prince Vassily pondered and frowned. Anna Mihalovna saw he was afraid of finding in her a rival with claims on Count Bezuhov’s will. She hastened to reassure him. ‘If it were not for my genuine love and devotion for uncle,’ she said, uttering the last word with peculiar assurance and carelessness, ‘I know his character,—generous, upright; but with only the princesses about him. . . . They are young. . . .’ She bent her head and added in a whisper: ‘Has he performed his last duties, prince? How priceless are these last moments! He is as bad as he could be, it seems: it is absolutely necessary to prepare him, if he is so ill. We women, prince,’ she smiled tenderly, ‘always know how to say these things. I absolutely must see him. Hard as it will be for me, I am used to suffering.’

The prince evidently understood, and understood too, as he had at Anna Pavlovna’s, that it was no easy task to get rid of Anna Mihalovna.

‘Would not this interview be trying for him, chere Anna Mihalovna,’ he said. ‘Let us wait till the evening; the doctors have predicted a crisis.’

‘But waiting’s out of the question, prince, at such a moment. Think, it is a question of saving his soul. Ah! how terrible, the duties of a Christian. . . .’

The door from the inner rooms opened, and one of the count’s nieces entered with a cold and forbidding face, and a long waist strikingly out of proportion with the shortness of her legs.

Prince Vassily turned to her. ‘Well, how is he?’

‘Still the same. What can you expect with this noise? . . said the princess, scanning Anna Mihalovna, as a stranger.

‘Ah, dear, I did not recognise you,’ said Anna Mihalovna, with a delighted smile, and she ambled lightly up to the count’s niece. ‘I have just come, and I am at your service to help in nursing my uncle. I

imagine what you have been suffering,’ she added, sympathetically turning her eyes up.

The princess made no reply, she did not even smile, but walked straight away. Anna Mihalovna took off her gloves, and entrenched herself as it were in an armchair, inviting Prince Vassily to sit down beside her.

‘Boris!’ she said to her son, and she smiled at him, ‘I am going in to the count, to poor uncle, and you can go to Pierre, vion ami, meanwhile, and don’t forget to give him the Rostovs’ invitation. They ask him to dinner. I suppose he won’t go?’ she said to the prince.

‘On the contrary,’ said the prince, visibly cast down. ‘I should be very glad if you would take that young man off my hands. ... He sticks on here. The count has not once asked for him.’

He shrugged his shoulders. A footman conducted the youth downstairs and up another staircase to the apartments of Pyotr Kirillovitch,

XIII

Pierre had not succeeded in fixing upon a career in Petersburg, and really had been banished to Moscow for disorderly conduct. The story told about him at Count Rostov’s was true. 6 Pierre had assisted in tying the police officer to the bear. He had arrived a few days previously, stop- 1 ping as he always did at his father’s house. Though he had assumed that his story would be already known at Moscow, and that the ladies who were about his father, always unfavourably disposed to him, would profit by this opportunity of turning the count against him, he went on the day of his arrival to his father’s part of the house. Going into the | drawing-room, where the princesses usually sat, he greeted the ladies, two of whom were sitting at their embroidery frames, while one read | aloud. There were three of them. The eldest, a trim, long-waisted, severe maiden-lady, the one who had come out to Anna Mihalovna, was reading. The younger ones, both rosy and pretty, were only to be distinguished by the fact that one of them had a little mole which made her much prettier. They were both working at their embroidery frames. Pierre was received like a man risen from the dead or stricken with plague. The eldest princess paused in her reading and stared at him in silence with dismay in her eyes. The second assumed precisely the same expression. The youngest, the one with the mole, who was of a mirthful and laughing disposition, bent over her frame, to conceal a smile, prob- ably evoked by the amusing scene she foresaw coming. She pulled her embroidery wool out below, and bent down as though examining the pattern, hardly able to suppress her laughter.

‘Good morning, cousin,’ said Pierre. ‘You don’t know me?’

‘I know you only too well, only too well.’

‘How is the count? Can I see him?’ Pierre asked, awkwardly as always, but not disconcerted. r

WARANDPEACE 45

‘The count is suffering both physically and morally, and your only anxiety seems to be to occasion him as much suffering as possible.’

‘Can I see the count?’ repeated Pierre.