“Yes, love （he thought again with perfect distinctness）, but not that love that loves for something, to gain something, or because of something, but that love that I felt for the first time, when dying, I saw my enemy and yet loved him. I knew that feeling of love which is the very essence of the soul, for which no object is needed. And I know that blissful feeling now too. To love one’s neighbours; to love one’s enemies. To love everything—to love God in all His manifestations. Some one dear to one can be loved with human love; but an enemy can only be loved with divine love. And that was why I felt such joy when I felt that I loved that man. What happened to him？ Is he alive？ … Loving with human love, one may pass from love to hatred; but divine love cannot change. Nothing, not even death, nothing can shatter it. It is the very nature of the soul. And how many people I have hated in my life. And of all people none I have loved and hated more than her.” And he vividly pictured Natasha to himself, not as he had pictured her in the past, only with the charm that had been a joy to him; for the first time he pictured to himself her soul. And he understood her feeling, her sufferings, her shame, and her penitence. Now, for the first time, he felt all the cruelty of his abandonment, saw all the cruelty of his rupture with her. “If it were only possible for me to see her once more … once, looking into those eyes, to say …”
Piti-piti-piti iti-ti, ipiti-piti—boom, the fly flapped … And his attention passed all at once into another world of reality and delirium, in which something peculiar was taking place. In that place the edifice was still rising, unshattered; something was still stretching out, the candle was still burning, with a red ring round it; the same shirt-sphinx still lay by the door. But beside all this, something creaked, there was a whiff of fresh air, and a new white sphinx appeared standing before the doorway. And that sphinx had the white face and shining eyes of that very Natasha he had been dreaming of just now.
“Oh, how wearisome this everlasting delirium is！” thought Prince Andrey, trying to dispel that face from his vision. But that face stood before him with the face of reality, and that face was coming closer. Prince Andrey tried to go back to the world of pure thought, but he could not, and he was drawn back into the realm of delirium. The soft murmuring voice kept up its rhythmic whisper, something was oppressing him, and rising up, and the strange face stood before him. Prince Andrey rallied all his forces to regain his senses; he stirred a little, and suddenly there was a ringing in his ears and a dimness before his eyes, and like a man sinking under water, he lost consciousness.
When he came to himself, Natasha, the very living Natasha, whom of all people in the world he most longed to love with that new, pure, divine love that had now been revealed to him, was on her knees before him. He knew that it was the real, living Natasha, and did not wonder, but quietly rejoiced. Natasha, on her knees, in terror, but without moving （she could not have moved）, gazed at him, restraining her sobs. Her face was white and rigid. There was only a sort of quiver in the lower part of it.
Prince Andrey drew a sigh of relief, smiled, and held out his hand.
“You？” he said. “What happiness！”
With a swift but circumspect movement, Natasha came nearer, still kneeling, and carefully taking his hand she bent her face over it and began kissing it, softly touching it with her lips.
“Forgive me！” she said in a whisper, lifting her head and glancing at him. “Forgive me！”
“I love you,” said Prince Andrey.
“Forgive …”
“Forgive what？” asked Prince Andrey.
“Forgive me for what I di … id,” Natasha murmured in a hardly audible, broken whisper, and again and again she softly put her lips to his hand.
“I love thee more, better than before,” said Prince Andrey, lifting her face with his hand so that he could look into her eyes.
Those eyes, swimming with happy tears, gazed at him with timid commiseration and joyful love. Natasha’s thin, pale face, with its swollen lips, was more than ugly—it looked terrible. But Prince Andrey did not see her face, he saw the shining eyes, which were beautiful. They heard talk behind them.
Pyotr, the valet, by now wide awake, had waked up the doctor. Timohin, who had not slept all night for the pain in his leg, had been long watching all that was happening, and huddled up on his bench, carefully wrapping his bare person up in the sheet.
“Why, what’s this？” said the doctor, getting up from his bed on the floor. “Kindly retire, madame.”
At that moment there was a knock at the door; a maid had been sent by the countess in search of her daughter.
Like a sleep-walker awakened in the midst of her trance, Natasha walked out of the room, and getting back to her hut, sank sobbing on her bed.
From that day at all the halts and resting-places on the remainder of the Rostovs’ journey, Natasha never left Bolkonsky’s side, and the doctor was forced to admit that he had not expected from a young girl so much fortitude, nor skill in nursing a wounded man.
Terrible as it was to the countess to think that Prince Andrey might （and very probably, too, from what the doctor said） die on the road in her daughter’s arms, she could not resist Natasha. Although with the renewal of affectionate relations between Prince Andrey and Natasha the idea did occur that in case he recovered their old engagement would be renewed, no one—least of all Natasha and Prince Andrey—spoke of this. The unsettled question of life and death hanging, not only over Prince Andrey, but over all Russia, shut off all other considerations.
