BOOK TEN: 1812
8. CHAPTER VIII
(continued)
He was evidently suffering both physically and mentally. There was
no hope of recovery. It was impossible for him to travel, it would not
do to let him die on the road. "Would it not be better if the end
did come, the very end?" Princess Mary sometimes thought. Night and
day, hardly sleeping at all, she watched him and, terrible to say,
often watched him not with hope of finding signs of improvement but
wishing to find symptoms of the approach of the end.
Strange as it was to her to acknowledge this feeling in herself, yet
there it was. And what seemed still more terrible to her was that
since her father's illness began (perhaps even sooner, when she stayed
with him expecting something to happen), all the personal desires
and hopes that had been forgotten or sleeping within her had awakened.
Thoughts that had not entered her mind for years- thoughts of a life
free from the fear of her father, and even the possibility of love and
of family happiness- floated continually in her imagination like
temptations of the devil. Thrust them aside as she would, questions
continually recurred to her as to how she would order her life now,
after that. These were temptations of the devil and Princess Mary knew
it. She knew that the sole weapon against him was prayer, and she
tried to pray. She assumed an attitude of prayer, looked at the icons,
repeated the words of a prayer, but she could not pray. She felt
that a different world had now taken possession of her- the life of
a world of strenuous and free activity, quite opposed to the spiritual
world in which till now she had been confined and in which her
greatest comfort had been prayer. She could not pray, could not
weep, and worldly cares took possession of her.
It was becoming dangerous to remain in Bogucharovo. News of the
approach of the French came from all sides, and in one village, ten
miles from Bogucharovo, a homestead had been looted by French
marauders.
The doctor insisted on the necessity of moving the prince; the
provincial Marshal of the Nobility sent an official to Princess Mary
to persuade her to get away as quickly as possible, and the head of
the rural police having come to Bogucharovo urged the same thing,
saying that the French were only some twenty-five miles away, that
French proclamations were circulating in the villages, and that if the
princess did not take her father away before the fifteenth, he could
not answer for the consequences.
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