BOOK TEN: 1812
14. CHAPTER XIV
(continued)
"How can you speak so!" he blushingly replied to Princess Mary's
expressions of gratitude for her deliverance, as she termed what had
occurred. "Any police officer would have done as much! If we had had
only peasants to fight, we should not have let the enemy come so far,"
said he with a sense of shame and wishing to change the subject. "I am
only happy to have had the opportunity of making your acquaintance.
Good-by, Princess. I wish you happiness and consolation and hope to
meet you again in happier circumstances. If you don't want to make
me blush, please don't thank me!"
But the princess, if she did not again thank him in words, thanked
him with the whole expression of her face, radiant with gratitude
and tenderness. She could not believe that there was nothing to
thank him for. On the contrary, it seemed to her certain that had he
not been there she would have perished at the hands of the mutineers
and of the French, and that he had exposed himself to terrible and
obvious danger to save her, and even more certain was it that he was a
man of lofty and noble soul, able to understand her position and her
sorrow. His kind, honest eyes, with the tears rising in them when
she herself had begun to cry as she spoke of her loss, did leave her
memory.
When she had taken leave of him and remained alone she suddenly felt
her eyes filling with tears, and then not for the first time the
strange question presented itself to her: did she love him?
On the rest of the way to Moscow, though the princess' position
was not a cheerful one, Dunyasha, who went with her in the carriage,
more than once noticed that her mistress leaned out of the window
and smiled at something with an expression of mingled joy and sorrow.
"Well, supposing I do love him?" thought Princess Mary.
Ashamed as she was of acknowledging to herself that she had fallen
in love with a man who would perhaps never love her, she comforted
herself with the thought that no one would ever know it and that she
would not be to blame if, without ever speaking of it to anyone, she
continued to the end of her life to love the man with whom she had
fallen in love for the first and last time in her life.
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