glanced round at the door again as it creaked and the second princess, who had prepared the drink indicated by Lorrain, carried it in to the sick man. The German doctor approached Lorrain.
“Can he hold on until tomorrow morning?” the German asked, speaking in badly pronounced French.
Lorrain, pursing his lips, wagged his finger severely in front of his nose in a gesture of denial.
“Tonight and no later,” he said quietly with a decorous smile of self-satisfaction at his own ability to understand and convey the patient’s condition clearly, and walked away.
Meanwhile Prince Vasily opened the door into the eldest princess’s room. The room was in semi-darkness, there were only two icon lamps burning in front of the icons and there was a pleasant smell of incense and flowers. The entire room was crammed with little chiffoniers, closets and tables. The white coverlets of a high feather bed could be seen behind a screen. A little dog began barking.
“Ah, it is you, cousin.”
She stood up and arranged her hair, which was always, even now, so uncommonly smooth that it seemed to have been made in a single piece with her head and covered with lacquer.
“What is it, has something happened?” she asked. “I am so frightened already.”
“Nothing, everything is still the same, I only came to finish talking business with you, Katish,” said the prince, seating himself wearily in the armchair from which she had just risen. “My, how you have warmed it,” he said, “come, sit here, let us talk.”
“I thought something might have happened,” said the princess, and with her unvarying calm, strict, stony decorum she sat facing the prince, preparing to listen.
“Well then, my dear?” said Prince Vasily, taking the princess’s hand and by force of habit pulling it downwards.
It was obvious that this “well then” concerned many things that they both understood without naming them.
The princess, with her stiff, straight waist that was absurdly long for her legs, looked directly and fearlessly at the prince with her prominent grey eyes.
She shook her head and looked at an icon with a sigh. Her gesture could have been taken either as an expression of grief-stricken devotion or an expression of weariness and hope to rest soon. Prince Vasily took the gesture as an expression of weariness.
“Do you think,” he said, “it is any easier for me? I am as exhausted as a post horse, but even so I have to talk to you, Katish, and very seriously too.”
Prince Vasily stopped speaking and his cheeks began twitching nervously, first on one side, then on the other, lending his face an unpleasant expression such as never appeared on Prince Vasily’s face when he was in society drawing rooms. His eyes were also not the same as usual: they either glared with facetious insolence or gazed around in fright.
The princess, holding the little dog on her knees with her dry, thin hands, looked attentively into Prince Vasily’s eyes, but it was clear that she would not break the silence with a question, even if she had to remain silent until morning. The princess had one of those faces on which the expression remains the same, regardless of how the expression changes on another person’s face.
“Well, you see, my dear princess and cousin, Ekaterina Semyonovna,” Prince Vasily continued, evidently resuming what he had been saying with a certain inward struggle, “at moments such as this, one has to think of everything. We have to think about the future, about you … I love all of you like my own children, you know that.”
The princess gazed at him as drearily and rigidly as ever.
“Finally, I have to think about my family too,” Prince Vasily continued, angrily pushing the little table away from him and not looking at her, “you know, Katish, that you three Mamontov sisters, together with my wife, we are the count’s only direct heirs. I know how painful it is for you to talk and think of such things. And it is no easier for me, my friend, I am over fifty and I have to be prepared for anything. Do you know that I have sent for Pierre and that the count pointed directly at his portrait and demanded that he be brought to him?”
Prince Vasily looked enquiringly at the princess, but could not tell whether she understood what he had just said or was simply looking at him.
“I never cease praying to God for one thing,” she replied, “that He will have mercy on him and allow his noble soul to depart in peace from …”
“Yes, yes, quite so,” Prince Vasily interrupted impatiently, wiping his bald patch and angrily moving back towards himself the little table that he had pushed away, “but ultimately … ultimately the point is, you know yourself that last winter the count wrote a will in which he left the entire estate, bypassing the direct heirs and us, to Pierre.”
“It doesn’t matter how many wills he wrote!” the princess said calmly. “He could not leave anything to Pierre. Pierre is illegitimate.”
“My dear,” Prince Vasily said abruptly, hugging the little table close to him, becoming more animated and starting to speak more rapidly, “but what if a letter was written to His Majesty and the count had asked to adopt Pierre? You realise that in reward for the count’s services his request would be granted …”
The princess smiled as people smile when they think they know some matter better than those with whom they are speaking.
“I shall tell you more,” Prince Vasily continued, seizing hold of her hand, “the letter was written, although not sent, and His Majesty knew of it. It is only a question of whether it has been destroyed or not. If not, then as soon as it is all over” – Prince Vasily sighed, in this way making it clear what he meant by “all over” – “and they open the count’s documents, the will and the letter will be sent to His Majesty and his request will probably be granted. Pierre, as the legitimate son, will receive everything.”
“And our part?” the princess asked, smiling ironically, as though anything at all but that could happen.
“But, my dear Katish, it is as clear as day. He is then the sole legitimate heir to everything, and you will not receive even that much. You must know, my dear, whether the will and the letter were written and whether they have been destroyed. And if for some reason they have been forgotten, then you must know where they are, and find them, because …”
“This is just too much!” the princess interrupted him, smiling sardonically without changing the expression of her eyes. “I am a woman, you think that we are all stupid, but I know this much, that an illegitimate son cannot inherit … Un bâtard,” she added, hoping that this translation would finally demonstrate to the prince that his argument was groundless.
“But after all, why can you not understand, Katish! You are so intelligent: why can you not understand that if the count has written His Majesty a letter in which he requests him to declare his son legitimate, in that case Pierre will no longer be Pierre, but Count Bezukhov, and then under the will he will receive everything? And if the will and the letter have not been destroyed then, apart from the consolation of having been virtuous and everything that follows from that, you will be left with nothing. That is certain.”
“I know that the will was written, but I also know that it is invalid, and you seem to take me for a complete fool,” the princess said with the expression that women assume when they believe that they have said something witty and insulting.
“My dear princess, Ekaterina Semyonovna,” Prince Vasily began impatiently, “I did not come here in order to swap insults with you, but in order to speak with a dear, good, kind, truly dear friend about your own interests. I tell you for the tenth time that if the letter to the sovereign and the will in favour of Pierre are among the count’s papers, then you, my dearest, and your sisters too, are not the heirs. If you do not believe me, then believe people who know these things: I have just been speaking with Dmitri Onufrievich,” (he was the family lawyer), “and he said the same.”
Something