The day after Nikolushka had left, the old prince dressed himself in the morning in full uniform, and prepared to make a call on the com- i mander-in-chief. The carriage was standing ready. Princess Marya saw him in his uniform, with all his orders on his breast, walk out of the house and go down the garden to inspect the armed peasants and house- serfs. Princess Marya sat at the window listening to his voice resounding from the garden. Suddenly several men came running up the avenue with panic-stricken faces.
Princess Marya ran out on to the steps, along the flower-bed path, and into the avenue. A great crowd of militiamen and servants were coming down it towards her, and in the middle of that crowd several men were holding up and dragging along a little old man in a uniform and decorations. Princess Marya ran towards him, and in the dancing,
tiny rings of light that filtered through the shade of the lime-tree avenue, she could form no distinct impression of the change in his face. The only thing she could see was that the stern and determined expression of his face had changed to a look of timidity and submission. On seeing his daughter, he tried to move his powerless lips, and uttered a hoarse sound. It was impossible to understand w'hat ha meant. He was lifted up, carried into his study, and laid on the couch, which had been such an object of dread to him of late.
The doctor, who was brought over the same night, bled him, and declared that the prince had had a stroke, paralysing his right side.
To remain at Bleak Hills was becoming more and more dangerous, and the next day they moved the prince to Bogutcharovo. The doctor travelled with him.
When they reached Bogutcharovo, they found Dessalle had already set off for Moscow with the little prince.
For three weeks the old prince lay stricken with paralysis, getting neither better nor worse, in the new house Prince Andrey had planned at Bogutcharovo. The old prince was unconscious; he lay like a deformed corpse. He muttered incessantly, twitching his eyebrows and lips, and it was impossible to tell whether he understood his surroundings or not. Only one thing could be said for certain: that was, that he was suffering, and had a craving to express something. But what that was no one could tell: whether it were some sick and half-crazy whim; whether it related to public affairs or family circumstances.
The doctor said that this uneasiness meant nothing; that it was due to physical causes. But Princess Marya believed (and the fact that her presence seemed to intensify the restlessness, confirmed her supposition) that he wanted to tell her something.
He was evidently suffering both physically and mentally. There was no hope of recovery. It was impossible to move him. What if he were to die on the road? ‘Wouldn’t it be better if it were over, if all were over?’ Princess Marya thought sometimes. Day and night, almost without sleep, she watched him, and, terrible to say, she watched him, not in the hope of finding symptoms of a change for the better, but often in the hope of seeing symptoms of the approaching end.
Strange as it was for the princess to own it to herself, she had this feeling in her heart. And what was still more horrible to Princess Marya was the fact that ever since her father’s illness (if not even before, when she resolved to stay with him, in vague expectation of something) all the forgotten hopes and desires slumbering within her had awakened. Ideas that had not entered her head for years—dreams of a life free from the terror of her father, even of the possibility of love and a happy married life, haunted her imagination like temptations of the devil. In vain she tried to drive away the thought; questions were continually in her mind how she would order her life now, after this. It was a temptation of the devil, and Princess Marya knew it. She knew that the sole weapon of avail against him was prayer, and she strove to pray. She threw herself
into the attitude of prayer, gazed at the holy pictures, repeated the words of the prayer, but still she could not pray. She felt herself carried off into a new world of real life, of labour and free activity, utterly opposed to the moral atmosphere in which she had been kept in bondage, and in which the one consolation was prayer. She could not pray and could not weep, and practical cares absorbed her mind.
