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“I think no one has been more courted than she,” she went on, “but till quite lately she never cared seriously for anyone. Now you know, Count,” she said to Pierre, “even our dear cousin Bors, who, between ourselves, was very far gone in the land of tenderness...” (alluding to a map of love much in vogue at that time).
Prince Andrew frowned and remained silent.
“You are friendly with Bors, aren’t you?” asked Vra.
“Yes, I know him....”
“I expect he has told you of his childish love for Natsha?”
“Oh, there was childish love?” suddenly asked Prince Andrew, blushing unexpectedly.
“Yes, you know between cousins intimacy often leads to love. Le cousinage est un dangereux voisinage. * Don’t you think so?”
* “Cousinhood is a dangerous neighborhood.”
“Oh, undoubtedly!” said Prince Andrew, and with sudden and unnatural liveliness he began chaffing Pierre about the need to be very careful with his fifty-year-old Moscow cousins, and in the midst of these jesting remarks he rose, taking Pierre by the arm, and drew him aside.
“Well?” asked Pierre, seeing his friend’s strange animation with surprise, and noticing the glance he turned on Natsha as he rose.
“I must... I must have a talk with you,” said Prince Andrew. “You know that pair of women’s gloves?” (He referred to the Masonic gloves given to a newly initiated Brother to present to the woman he loved.) “I... but no, I will talk to you later on,” and with a strange light in his eyes and restlessness in his movements, Prince Andrew approached Natsha and sat down beside her. Pierre saw how Prince Andrew asked her something and how she flushed as she replied.
But at that moment Berg came to Pierre and began insisting that he should take part in an argument between the general and the colonel on the affairs in Spain.
Berg was satisfied and happy. The smile of pleasure never left his face. The party was very successful and quite like other parties he had seen. Everything was similar: the ladies’ subtle talk, the cards, the general raising his voice at the card table, and the samovar and the tea cakes; only one thing was lacking that he had always seen at the evening parties he wished to imitate. They had not yet had a loud conversation among the men and a dispute about something important and clever. Now the general had begun such a discussion and so Berg drew Pierre to it.
Next day, having been invited by the count, Prince Andrew dined with the Rostvs and spent the rest of the day there.
Everyone in the house realized for whose sake Prince Andrew came, and without concealing it he tried to be with Natsha all day. Not only in the soul of the frightened yet happy and enraptured Natsha, but in the whole house, there was a feeling of awe at something important that was bound to happen. The countess looked with sad and sternly serious eyes at Prince Andrew when he talked to Natsha and timidly started some artificial conversation about trifles as soon as he looked her way. Snya was afraid to leave Natsha and afraid of being in the way when she was with them. Natsha grew pale, in a panic of expectation, when she remained alone with him for a moment. Prince Andrew surprised her by his timidity. She felt that he wanted to say something to her but could not bring himself to do so.
In the evening, when Prince Andrew had left, the countess went up to Natsha and whispered: “Well, what?”
“Mamma! For heaven’s sake don’t ask me anything now! One can’t talk about that,” said Natsha.
But all the same that night Natsha, now agitated and now frightened, lay a long time in her mother’s bed gazing straight before her. She told her how he had complimented her, how he told her he was going abroad, asked her where they were going to spend the summer, and then how he had asked her about Bors.
“But such a... such a... never happened to me before!” she said. “Only I feel afraid in his presence. I am always afraid when I’m with him. What does that mean? Does it mean that it’s the real thing? Yes? Mamma, are you asleep?”
“No, my love; I am frightened myself,” answered her mother. “Now go!”
“All the same I shan’t sleep. What silliness, to sleep! Mummy! Mummy! such a thing never happened to me before,” she said, surprised and alarmed at the feeling she was aware of in herself. “And could we ever have thought!...”
It seemed to Natsha that even at the time she first saw Prince Andrew at Otrdnoe she had fallen in love with him. It was as if she feared this strange, unexpected happiness of meeting again the very man she had then chosen (she was firmly convinced she had done so) and of finding him, as it seemed, not indifferent to her.
“And it had to happen that he should come specially to Petersburg while we are here. And it had to happen that we should meet at that ball. It is fate. Clearly it is fate that everything led up to this! Already then, directly I saw him I felt something peculiar.”
“What else did he say to you? What are those verses? Read them...” said her mother, thoughtfully, referring to some verses Prince Andrew had written in Natsha’s album.
“Mamma, one need not be ashamed of his being a widower?”
“Don’t, Natsha! Pray to God. ‘Marriages are made in heaven,’” said her mother.
“Darling Mummy, how I love you! How happy I am!” cried Natsha, shedding tears of joy and excitement and embracing her mother.
At that very time Prince Andrew was sitting with Pierre and telling him of his love for Natsha and his firm resolve to make her his wife.
That day Countess Hlne had a reception at her house. The French ambassador was there, and a foreign prince of the blood who had of late become a frequent visitor of hers, and many brilliant ladies and gentlemen. Pierre, who had come downstairs, walked through the rooms and struck everyone by his preoccupied, absent-minded, and morose air.
Since the ball he had felt the approach of a fit of nervous depression and had made desperate efforts to combat it. Since the intimacy of his wife with the royal prince, Pierre had unexpectedly been made a gentleman of the bedchamber, and from that time he had begun to feel oppressed and ashamed in court society, and dark thoughts of the vanity of all things human came to him oftener than before. At the same time the feeling he had noticed between his protge Natsha and Prince Andrew accentuated his gloom by the contrast between his own position and his friend’s. He tried equally to avoid thinking about his wife, and about Natsha and Prince Andrew; and again everything seemed to him insignificant in comparison with eternity; again the question: for what? presented itself; and he forced himself to work day and night at Masonic labors, hoping to drive away the evil spirit that threatened him. Toward midnight, after he had left the countess’ apartments, he was sitting upstairs in a shabby dressing gown, copying out the original transaction of the Scottish lodge of Freemasons at a table in his low room cloudy with tobacco smoke, when someone came in. It was Prince Andrew.
