The doctor tried to stop her. She fended him off and ran to the door. ‘Why are they stopping me, all these people who look so scared? I don’t need them! What are they doing here?’ she thought. She opened the door, and as bright daylight flooded into a room that had been kept in semi-darkness, she was suddenly horrified. There were some women in there, including her old nurse. They all pulled back from the bed to let her through. He was still there lying on the bed, but the forbidding look on his calm face brought Princess Marya to a halt in the doorway.
‘No, he’s not dead. He can’t be!’ Princess Marya said to herself. She went over to him, and struggling against a surge of horror she pressed her lips to his cheek. But she recoiled immediately. In an instant all the warm affection she had been feeling for him was gone, replaced by a terrible fear of what lay ahead. ‘Oh, no! He’s gone! He’s gone, and here where he was, there is something different, something sinister, some ghastly, horrible, repulsive mystery!’ Burying her face in her hands, Princess Marya sank into the arms of the doctor, who held her up.
With Tikhon and the doctor looking on, the women washed what was left of the prince, tied a cloth round his head to stop his mouth stiffening while wide open, and tied another cloth round his sprawling legs. Then they dressed him in his uniform and medals, and his little desiccated body was laid out on the table. Heaven knows when all the arrangements had been made, or by whom; they seemed to take place of their own accord. By nightfall candles had been lit all around the coffin, a pall was spread over it, juniper had been strewn across the floor, a printed prayer had been tucked under the dead man’s withered head, and a deacon sat in a corner reading aloud from the Psalms.
Like shying, snorting horses crowding round over a dead horse a large group of people, outsiders and family, had gathered round the coffin in the drawing-room – the marshal, the village elder, some peasant women, all with darting eyes that settled into apprehensive stares as they crossed themselves and bowed down to kiss the old prince on his cold, stiff hand.
CHAPTER 9
Before Prince Andrey settled down there, Bogucharovo had never had an owner who lived on the estate, and the Bogucharovo peasants were very different from the peasants at Bald Hills. They differed in speech, dress and attitude. They claimed to be people from the steppe. The old prince applauded their stamina whenever they came over to Bald Hills to help out with the harvesting, or to dig ponds and ditches, but he didn’t like them because they were an uncivilized lot.
Prince Andrey’s last stay at Bogucharovo, and his innovations – hospitals, schools and rent reductions – far from mollifying them, had intensified those aspects of their character that the old prince had identified as uncivilized. Rumour-mongering was rife amongst them: one day they were all going to be enrolled as Cossacks, the next they were going to be forced into a new religion, then there was something about proclamations by the Tsar, or the oath of allegiance to Tsar Paul in 1797 (which was supposed to have given the peasants their freedom, only it was withdrawn later on by the gentry), or Tsar Peter Fyodorovich, who was expected to return to the throne in seven years’ time, ushering in an age of complete freedom with everything so straightforward that you wouldn’t need any government. Rumours about the war, Napoleon and his invasion became linked in their minds with vague notions of Antichrist, the end of the world and complete freedom.
