“You need not worry yourself about the old servant, Grigory Vasilyevitch. He is alive, he has recovered, and in spite of the terrible blows inflicted, according to his own and your evidence, by you, there seems no doubt that he will live, so the doctor says, at least.”
“Alive? He’s alive?” cried Mitya, flinging up his hands. His face beamed. “Lord, I thank Thee for the miracle Thou has wrought for me, a sinner and evildoer. That’s an answer to my prayer. I’ve been praying all night.” And he crossed himself three times. He was almost breathless.
“So from this Grigory we have received such important evidence concerning you, that-” The prosecutor would have continued, but Mitya suddenly jumped up from his chair.
“One minute, gentlemen, for God’s sake, one minute; I will run to her-”
“Excuse me, at this moment it’s quite impossible,” Nikolay Parfenovitch almost shrieked. He, too, leapt to his feet. Mitya was seized by the men with the metal plates, but he sat down of his own accord….
“Gentlemen, what a pity! I wanted to see her for one minute only; I wanted to tell her that it has been washed away, it has gone, that blood that was weighing on my heart all night, and that I am not a murderer now! Gentlemen, she is my betrothed!” he said ecstatically and reverently, looking round at them all. “Oh, thank you, gentlemen! Oh, in one minute you have given me new life, new heart!… That old man used to carry me in his arms, gentlemen. He used to wash me in the tub when I was a baby three years old, abandoned by everyone, he was like a father to me!…”
“And so you-” the investigating lawyer began.
“Allow me, gentlemen, allow me one minute more,” interposed Mitya, putting his elbows on the table and covering his face with his hands. “Let me have a moment to think, let me breathe, gentlemen. All this is horribly upsetting, horribly. A man is not a drum, gentlemen!”
“Drink a little more water,” murmured Nikolay Parfenovitch. Mitya took his hands from his face and laughed. His eyes were confident. He seemed completely transformed in a moment. His whole bearing was changed; he was once more the equal of these men, with all of whom he was acquainted, as though they had all met the day before, when nothing had happened, at some social gathering.
We may note in passing that, on his first arrival, Mitya had been made very welcome at the police captain’s, but later, during the last month especially, Mitya had hardly called at all, and when the police captain met him, in the street, for instance, Mitya noticed that he frowned and only bowed out of politeness. His acquaintance with the prosecutor was less intimate, though he sometimes paid his wife, a nervous and fanciful lady, visits of politeness, without quite knowing why, and she always received him graciously and had, for some reason, taken an interest in him up to the last.
He had not had time to get to know the investigating lawyer, though he had met him and talked to him twice, each time about the fair sex.
“You’re a most skilful lawyer, I see, Nikolay Parfenovitch,” cried Mitya, laughing gaily, “but I can help you now. Oh, gentlemen, I feel like a new man, and don’t be offended at my addressing you so simply and directly. I’m rather drunk, too, I’ll tell you that frankly.
I believe I’ve had the honour and pleasure of meeting you, Nikolay Parfenovitch, at my kinsman Miusov’s. Gentlemen, gentlemen, I don’t pretend to be on equal terms with you. I understand, of course, in what character I am sitting before you. Oh, of course, there’s a horrible suspicion… hanging over me… if Grigory has given evidence…. A horrible suspicion! It’s awful, awful, I understand that! But to business, gentlemen, I am ready, and we will make an end of it in one moment; for, listen, listen, gentlemen! Since I know I’m innocent, we can put an end to it in a minute. Can’t we? Can’t we?”
Mitya spoke much and quickly, nervously and effusively, as though he positively took his listeners to be his best friends.
“So, for the present, we will write that you absolutely deny the charge brought against you,” said Nikolay Parfenovitch, impressively, and bending down to the secretary he dictated to him in an undertone what to write.
“Write it down? You want to write that down? Well, write it; I consent, I give my full consent, gentlemen, only… do you see?… Stay, stay, write this. Of disorderly conduct I am guilty, of violence on a poor old man I am guilty. And there is something else at the bottom of my heart, of which I am guilty, too but that you need not write down” (he turned suddenly to the secretary); “that’s my personal life, gentlemen, that doesn’t concern you, the bottom of my heart, that’s to say…. But of the murder of my old father I’m not guilty. That’s a wild idea. It’s quite a wild idea!… I will prove you that and you’ll be convinced directly…. You will laugh, gentlemen. You’ll laugh yourselves at your suspicion!…”
“Be calm, Dmitri Fyodorovitch,” said the investigating lawyer evidently trying to allay Mitya’s excitement by his own composure. “Before we go on with our inquiry, I should like, if you will consent to answer, to hear you confirm the statement that you disliked your father, Fyodor Pavlovitch, that you were involved in continual disputes with him. Here at least, a quarter of an hour ago, you exclaimed that you wanted to kill him: ‘I didn’t kill him,’ you said,’but I wanted to kill him.’”
“Did I exclaim that? Ach, that may be so, gentlemen! Yes, unhappily, I did want to kill him… many times I wanted to… unhappily, unhappily!”
“You wanted to. Would you consent to explain what motives precisely led you to such a sentiment of hatred for your parent?”
“What is there to explain, gentlemen?” Mitya shrugged his shoulders sullenly, looking down. “I have never concealed my feelings. All the town knows about it — everyone knows in the tavern. Only lately I declared them in Father Zossima’s cell.
And the very same day, in the evening I beat my father. I nearly killed him, and I swore I’d come again and kill him, before witnesses…. Oh, a thousand witnesses! I’ve been shouting it aloud for the last month, anyone can tell you that!… The fact stares you in the face, it speaks for itself, it cries aloud, but feelings, gentlemen, feelings are another matter.
You see, gentlemen” — Mitya frowned— “it seemed to me that about feelings you’ve no right to question me. I know that you are bound by your office, I quite understand that, but that’s my affair, my private, intimate affair, yet… since I haven’t concealed my feelings in the past… in the tavern, for instance, I’ve talked to everyone, so… so I won’t make a secret of it now. You see, I understand, gentlemen, that there are terrible facts against me in this business.
I told everyone that I’d kill him, and now, all of a sudden, he’s been killed. So it must have been me! Ha ha! I can make allowances for you, gentlemen, I can quite make allowances. I’m struck all of a heap myself, for who can have murdered him, if not I? That’s what it comes to, isn’t it? If not I, who can it be, who? Gentlemen, I want to know, I insist on knowing!” he exclaimed suddenly. “Where was he murdered? How was he murdered? How, and with what? Tell me,” he asked quickly, looking at the two lawyers.
“We found him in his study, lying on his back on the floor, with his head battered in,” said the prosecutor.
“That’s horrible!” Mitya shuddered and, putting his elbows on the table, hid his face in his right hand.
“We will continue,” interposed Nikolay Parfenovitch. “So what was it that impelled you to this sentiment of hatred? You have asserted in public, I believe, that it was based upon jealousy?”
“Well, yes, jealousy. not only jealousy.”
“Disputes about money?”
“Yes, about money, too.”
“There was a dispute about three thousand roubles, I think, which you claimed as part of your inheritance?”
“Three thousand! More, more,” cried Mitya hotly; “more than six thousand, more than ten, perhaps. I told everyone so, shouted it at them. But I made up my mind to let it go at three thousand. I was desperately in need of that three thousand… so the bundle of notes for three thousand that I knew he kept under his pillow, ready for Grushenka, I considered as simply stolen from me. Yes, gentlemen, I looked upon it as mine, as my own property…”
The prosecutor looked significantly at the investigating lawyer, and had time to wink at him on the sly.
“We will return to that subject later,” said the lawyer promptly. “You will allow us to note that point and write it down; that you looked upon that money as your own property?”
“Write it down, by all means. I know that’s another fact that tells against me, but I’m not afraid of facts and I tell them against myself.
Do you hear? Do you know, gentlemen, you take me for a different sort of man from what I am,” he added, suddenly gloomy and dejected. “You have to deal with a man of honour, a man of the highest honour; above all don’t lose sight of it — a man who’s done a lot of nasty things, but has always
