‘Why have they taken a baby in there?’ Prince Andrey wondered for a split-second. ‘A baby? Whose baby is it? . . . What’s a baby doing in there? Has it been born?’
When the delightful meaning of the baby’s wail dawned on him he choked with tears, leant on the window-sill with both elbows and cried like a child sobbing his heart out. The door opened. The doctor came out of the room with no coat on and his shirt-sleeves rolled up; he looked pale and his jaw was trembling. Prince Andrey turned to speak to him, but the doctor walked past with a far-away look in his eye and said nothing. A woman came running out and stopped in the doorway, hesitating, when she saw Prince Andrey. He went into his wife’s room. She was dead, still lying in the same position he had seen her in five minutes earlier, and despite the staring eyes and the white cheeks the same expression still haunted that lovely, shy little girl’s face with its tiny upper lip covered with fine dark hair. ‘I loved all of you, I never hurt anybody, and look what you have done to me, just look what you have done to me,’ was the message on her dead face in all its pitiful beauty. In one corner of the room something small and red lay mewling and snuffling in the trembling white hands of Marya Bogdanovna.
Two hours later Prince Andrey walked quietly in to see his father. The old man knew what had happened. He was standing near the door, and the moment it opened he put his rough old arms round his son’s neck in a vice-like grip, and without a word sobbed like a child.
Three days later at the little princess’s funeral, Prince Andrey climbed the steps of the bier to say a last goodbye to her. Even in the coffin her face was the same, though the eyes were closed. ‘Look what you have done to me,’ was still the message for Prince Andrey and something seemed to rend his soul; he felt guilty of a crime that he could neither expiate nor ever forget. He was incapable of tears. The old man came in too and kissed the little waxen hand that lay so peacefully and prominently crossed over the other one, and to him too her face said, ‘Look what you have done to me. Why did you do it?’ And the old man turned away angrily when he saw the look on her face.
Another five days passed and the young prince, Nikolay Andreyevich, was christened. The wet-nurse bunched up his swaddling-clothes under her chin while the priest took a goose feather and anointed the baby’s red and wrinkled little palms and soles.
His grandfather, who was his godfather, all shaky and afraid of dropping the baby, carried him around the battered tin font and handed him over with great care to his godmother, Princess Marya. Prince Andrey sat in the next room waiting for the ceremony to end, beside himself with fear that they might drown the baby. He looked at his son with great delight when the nurse brought him out, and nodded approvingly as she informed him that when they had dropped some of the baby’s hair in a piece of wax into the font, it hadn’t sunk but had floated on the surface of the water.8
CHAPTER 10
Rostov’s involvement in the duel between Dolokhov and Bezukhov had been hushed up by the old count, and instead of being reduced to the ranks as expected he had been appointed adjutant to the governor-general of Moscow. As a result he was unable to go to the country with the rest of the family, and spent the whole summer in Moscow busy with his new duties. Dolokhov recovered, and Rostov became close to him during his convalescence, when Dolokhov lay ill in the house of his passionately doting mother, Marya Ivanovna. She took to Rostov because of his friendship with her Fedya and often talked about her son.
