excellent cigars, while Lebedyev produced a delicious liqueur, which was brought in by Vera. Then the doctor, who was a married man and pater-familias, overflowed with such compliments to Vera that he excited her intense indignation. They parted friends. On leaving Myshkin the doctor said to Lebedyev, if every one like that were to be put under control, who would be left to control them? In reply to Lebedyev’s tragic description of the imminent event, the doctor shook his head slyly and cunningly, and observed at last that, even apart from the fact that “there’s nobody a man may not marry,” the fascinating lady, besides being of incomparable beauty, which alone might well attract a wealthy man, was also — so he, at least, had heard— “possessed of a fortune that had come to her from Totsky and Rogozhin, pearls and diamonds, shawls and furniture; and therefore the dear prince’s choice, far from being a proof of peculiar, so to say, glaring foolishness, was rather a testimony to the shrewdness of his worldly wisdom and prudence, and therefore tended to the very opposite conclusion, completely in the prince’s favour, in fact….”
This idea struck Lebedyev too, and he did not go beyond it. “And now,” he added to Myshkin, “you will see nothing from me but devotion and readiness to shed my blood for you, and I’ve come to tell you so.”
Ippolit too had distracted Myshkin’s mind during those days; he sent for him only too often. The family was living in a little house not far off. The little ones, Ippolit’s brother and sister, were glad to be at Pavlovsk, if only because they could escape from the invalid into the garden. The poor captain’s widow was left at his mercy and was completely his victim. Myshkin was obliged to intervene and make peace between them every day, and the invalid still called him his “nurse,” though at the same time he seemed to feel bound to despise him for playing the part of peacemaker. He was in high dudgeon against Kolya because the latter had scarcely visited him of late, having stayed at first beside his dying father and afterwards with his widowed mother. At last he made Myshkin’s approaching marriage to Nastasya Filippovna the butt of his gibes, and ended by offending the prince and making him really angry at last. Myshkin gave up visiting him. Two days later the captain’s widow trotted round in the morning and begged Myshkin, with tears, to come to them or “that fellow would be the death of her.” She added that the invalid wanted to tell him a great secret. Myshkin went.
Ippolit wanted to make it up, wept, and after his tears, of course, felt more spiteful than ever, but was afraid to show his spite. He was very ill, and there was every sign that the end was close at hand. He had no secret to tell him, except some earnest requests — breathless, so to say, with emotion (possibly shammed)— “to beware of Rogozhin.”
“He is a man who will never give up his object. He’s not like you and me, prince; if he wants a thing, nothing will shake him,” &c. &c.
Myshkin began questioning him more in detail, tried to get at facts of some sort. But there were no facts except Ippolit’s personal sentiments and impressions. To his intense gratification, Ippolit did, however, at last succeed in scaring Myshkin thoroughly. At first he was unwilling to respond to some of Ippolit’s questions, and only smiled at his advice “to go abroad; there were Russian priests everywhere, and he could be married there.” But Ippolit ended at last with the suggestion: “It’s for Aglaia Ivanovna I am afraid, you know; Rogozhin knows how you love her. It’s a case of love for love. “Vbu have robbed him of Nastasya Filippovna, he will kill Aglaia Ivanovna; though she’s not yours now, still you’d feel it, wouldn’t you?”
He attained his object. Myshkin left him almost beside himself.
These warnings about Rogozhin came the day before the wedding. Myshkin saw Nastasya Filippovna that evening for the last time before the wedding. But she was not in a state to reassure him. On the contrary, she had of late made him more and more uneasy. Till then, that is a few days before, when she saw him she made every effort to cheer him up, and was dreadfully afraid of his looking sad. She even tried sinqinq to him; most frequently she would tell him everything amusing she could think of. Myshkin almost always pretended to laugh heartily. Sometimes he did really laugh at the brilliant wit and genuine feeling with which she sometimes told stories, when she was carried away by her subject, as she often was. Seeing Myshkin’s mirth, seeing the impression made on him, she was delighted, and began to feel proud of herself. But now her melancholy and brooding grew more marked every hour. His conviction of Nastasya Filippovna’s condition did not waver; but for that conviction all her behaviour now would have seemed to him enigmatic and unaccountable. But he genuinely believed that her recovery was possible. He had been quite truthful in telling Yevgeny Pavlovitch that he loved her truly and sincerely, and in his love for her there was an element of the tenderness for some sick, unhappy child who could not be left to shift for itself. He did not explain to anyone his feeling for her, and, in fact, disliked speaking of it, when he found it impossible to avoid the subject. When they were together, they never discussed their “feelings,” as though they had taken a vow not to do so. Anyone might have taken part in their everyday gay and lively conversation. Darya Alexeyevna used to say afterwards that she had done nothing all this time, but wonder and rejoice, as she looked at them.
But his view of Nastasya Filippovna’s spiritual and mental condition to some extent saved him from many perplexities. Now she was completely different from the woman he had known three months before. He no longer wondered, for instance, why she had run away from marrying him then with tears, with curses and reproaches, yet now she was herself insisting on the marriage. So she was no longer afraid that marriage with her would be misery for him, thought Myshkin. Such a rapid growth of self-confidence could not be natural in her, in his opinion. But, again, this self-confidence could not be due simply to her hatred for Aglaia. Nastasya Filippovna was capable of feeling too deeply for that. It could not come from dread of her fate with Rogozhin. All these causes as well as others might indeed enter into it. But what was clearest to his mind was what he had suspected long ago — that is, that the poor sick soul had broken down. Though all this saved him in one way from perplexity, it could not give him any peace or rest all that time. At times he tried, as it were, not to think of anything. He seemed really to look on his marriage as some insignificant formality, he held his own future so cheap. As for protests, conversations like the one with “Vfevgeny Pavlovitch, he was utterly unable to answer them, and felt himself absolutely incompetent, and so avoided all talk of the kind.
He noticed, however, that Nastasya Filippovna knew and understood quite well what Aglaia meant for him. She did not speak, but he saw her “face,” when she found him sometimes preparing to go to the Epanchins’. When the Epanchins left Pavlovsk, she was positively radiant. Unobservant and unsuspicious as he was, he had begun to be worried by the thought that Nastasya Filippovna might make up her mind to some public scandal to get Aglaia out of Pavlovsk. The talk and commotion about the wedding in all the villas was no doubt partly kept up by Nastasya Filippovna in order to irritate her rival. As it was difficult to meet the Epanchins, Nastasya Filippovna arranged to drive right in front of their windows with the prince in her carriage beside her. This was a horrible surprise for Myshkin. He realised it, as he usually did, when it was too late to set things right, when the carriage was actually passing the windows. He said nothing, but he was ill for two days afterwards. She did not repeat the experiment. During the last few days before the wedding she had frequent fits of brooding. She always ended by overcoming her melancholy, and became cheerful again, but more gently, not so noisily, not so happily cheerful as she had been of late. Myshkin redoubled his attention. It struck him as curious that she never spoke of Rogozhin. Only once, five days before the wedding, a message was suddenly brought him from Darya Alexeyevna to come at once, as Nastasya Filippovna was in a terrible state. He found her in a condition approaching complete madness. She kept screaming, shuddering, and crying out that Rogozhin was hidden in the garden, in their house, that she had seen him just now, that he would kill her in the night, that he would cut her throat! She could not be calmed all day. But that evening when Myshkin looked in on Ippolit for a moment, the captain’s widow, who had only just returned from the town where she had been on some little affair of her own, told him that Roqozhin had been to her lodqinq that day at Petersburg and had questioned her about Pavlovsk. In