Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace

BOOK ELEVEN: 1812 32. CHAPTER XXXII (continued)

Those eyes, filled with happy tears, gazed at him timidly, compassionately, and with joyous love. Natasha's thin pale face, with its swollen lips, was more than plain- it was dreadful. But Prince Andrew did not see that, he saw her shining eyes which were beautiful. They heard the sound of voices behind them.

Peter the valet, who was now wide awake, had roused the doctor. Timokhin, who had not slept at all because of the pain in his leg, had long been watching all that was going on, carefully covering his bare body with the sheet as he huddled up on his bench.

"What's this?" said the doctor, rising from his bed. "Please go away, madam!"

At that moment a maid sent by the countess, who had noticed her daughter's absence, knocked at the door.

Like a somnambulist aroused from her sleep Natasha went out of the room and, returning to her hut, fell sobbing on her bed.

From that time, during all the rest of the Rostovs' journey, at every halting place and wherever they spent a night, Natasha never left the wounded Bolkonski, and the doctor had to admit that he had not expected from a young girl either such firmness or such skill in nursing a wounded man.

Dreadful as the countess imagined it would be should Prince Andrew die in her daughter's arms during the journey- as, judging by what the doctor said, it seemed might easily happen- she could not oppose Natasha. Though with the intimacy now established between the wounded man and Natasha the thought occurred that should he recover their former engagement would be renewed, no one- least of all Natasha and Prince Andrew- spoke of this: the unsettled question of life and death, which hung not only over Bolkonski but over all Russia, shut out all other considerations.