Plis face was radiant with happiness and self-satisfaction.
The soldiers, who had been carrying Prince Andrey, had come across the golden relic Princess Marya had hung upon her brother’s neck, and taken it off him, but seeing the graciousness the Emperor had shown to the prisoners, they made haste to restore the holy image.
Prince Andrey did not see who put it on him again, nor how it was replaced, but all at once he found the locket on its delicate gold'chain on his chest outside his uniform.
‘How good it would be,’ thought Prince Andrey, as he glanced at the image which his sister had hung round his neck with such emotion and reverence, ‘how good it would be if all were as clear and simple as it seems to Marie. How good to know where to seek aid in this life and what to expect after it, there, beyond the grave!’
‘How happy and at peace I should be, if I could say now, “Lord, have mercy on me! . . .” But to whom am I to say that? Either a Power infinite, inconceivable, to which I cannot appeal, which I cannot even put into words, the great whole, or nothing,’ he said to himself, ‘or that God, who has been sewn up here in this locket by Marie? There is nothing, nothing certain but the nothingness of all that is comprehensible to us, and the grandeur of something incomprehensible, but more important!’
The stretchers began to be moved. At every jolt he felt intolerable pain again. The fever became higher, and he fell into delirium. Visions of his father, his wife, his sister, and his future son, and the tenderness he had felt for them on the night before the battle, the figure of that little, petty Napoleon, and over all these the lofty sky, formed the chief substance of his delirious dreams. The quiet home life and peaceful happiness of Bleak Hills passed before his imagination. He was enjoying that happiness when suddenly there appeared that little Napoleon with his callous, narrow look of happiness in the misery of others, and there came doubts and torments, and only the sky promised peace. Towards morning all his dreams mingled and melted away in the chaos and darkness of
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unconsciousness and oblivion, far more likely, in the opinion of Napoleon’s doctor, Larrey, to be ended by death than by recovery,
‘He is a nervous, bilious subject,’ said Larrey; ‘he won’t recover.’ Prince Andrey, with the rest of the hopeless cases, was handed over to the care of the inhabitants of the district.
PART IV
I
At the beginning of the year 1806, Nikolay Rostov was coming home on leave. Denisov, too, was going home to Voronezh, and Rostov persuaded him to go with him to Moscow and to pay him a visit there. Denisov met his comrade at the last posting station but one, drank three bottles of .wine with him, and, in spite of the jolting of the road on the journey to Moscow, slept soundly lying at the bottom of the posting sledge beside Rostov, who grew more and more impatient, as they got nearer to Moscow.
‘Will it come soon? Soon? Oh, these insufferable streets, bunshops, street lamps, and sledge drivers!’ thought Rostov, when they had presented their papers at the town gates and were driving into Moscow.
‘Denisov, we’re here! Asleep! ’ he kept saying, flinging his whole person forward as though by that position he hoped to hasten the progress of the sledge. Denisov made no response.
‘Here’s the corner of the cross-roads, where Zahar the sledge-driver used to stand; and here is Zahar, too, and still the same horse. And here’s the little shop where we used to buy cakes. Make haste! Nov/!’
‘Which house is it?’ asked the driver.
‘Over there, at the end, the big one; how is it you don’t see it? That’s our house,’ Rostov kept saying; ‘that’s our house, of course.’
‘Denisov! Denisov! we shall be there in a minute.’
Denisov raised his head, cleared his throat, and said nothing.
‘Dmitry,’ said Rostov to his valet on the box, ‘surely that light is home?’
‘To be sure it is; it’s the light in your papa’s study, too.’
‘They’ve not gone to bed yet? Eh? What do you think?’
‘Mind now, don’t forget to get me out my new tunic,’ added Rostov, fingering his new moustaches.
‘Come, get on,’ he shouted to the driver. ‘And do wake up, Vasya,’ he said to Denisov, who had begun nodding again.
‘Come, get on, three silver roubles for vodka—get on! ’ shouted Rostov, when they were only three houses from the entrance. It seemed to him that the horses were not moving. At last the sledge turned to the right into the approach, Rostov saw the familiar cornice with the broken plaster overhead, the steps, the lamp-post. He jumped out of the sledge while it was moving and ran into the porch. The house stood so inhospitably, as though it were no concern of its who had come into it. There was no one in the porch. ‘My God! is everything all right?’ wondered Rostov, stopping for a moment with a sinking heart, and then running
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