“But again you are forgetting one circumstance,” the prosecutor observed, still with the same restraint, but now, as it were, triumphantly, “that there was no need to give the signals if the door was already open, when you were still there, while you were still in the garden...”
“The door, the door,” Mitya muttered, staring speechlessly at the prosecutor, and he sank down weakly on his chair again. Everyone fell silent.
“Yes, the door . . .! It’s a phantom! God is against me!” he exclaimed, staring before him with an altogether vacant look. “So you see,” the prosecutor spoke imposingly, “and judge for yourself now, Dmitri Fyodorovich: on one side there is this evidence of the open door from which you ran out, which overwhelms both you and us. And, on the other side, your inexplicable, persistent, and almost obdurate silence with regard to the source of the money that suddenly appeared in your hands, when only three hours prior to that sum, according to your own testimony, you pawned your pistols to get a mere ten roubles! In view of all this, decide for yourself: what should we believe, and where does it leave us? And do not hold a grudge against us for being ‘cold cynics and scoffers’ who are incapable of believing in the noble impulses of your soul ... Try, on the contrary, to understand our position as well ...”
Mitya was inconceivably agitated; he turned pale.
“All right!” he suddenly exclaimed, “I will reveal my secret to you, reveal where I got the money . . .! I will reveal my disgrace, so as not to blame either you or myself later on ...”
“And you may believe, Dmitri Fyodorovich,” Nikolai Parfenovich added, in a sort of tenderly joyful little voice, “that any sincere and full confession you make precisely at this moment, may afterwards contribute towards an immeasurable alleviation of your fate, and, moreover, may even ...”
But the prosecutor nudged him slightly under the table, and he managed to stop himself in time. Mitya, to tell the truth, was not listening to him.
Chapter 7: Mitya’s Great Secret. Met with Hisses
“Gentlemen,” he began in the same agitation, “the money ... I want to confess completely ... the money was mine.”
The prosecutor and the district attorney even pulled long faces: this was not at all what they expected.
“How can that be,” murmured Nikolai Parfenovich, “when at five o’clock in the afternoon, by your own admission ...”
“Eh, devil take five o’clock in the afternoon and my own admission, that’s not the point now! The money was mine, mine, that is, my stolen money . . not mine, that is, but stolen, stolen by me, and it was fifteen hundred, and I had it with me, I had it with me all the while ...”
“But where did you get it?”
“From around my neck, gentlemen, I got it from around my neck, from this very neck of mine ... It was here on my neck, sewn up in a rag and hanging on my neck; for a long time, a month already, I was carrying it on my neck with shame and disgrace!”
“But who did you ... appropriate it from?”
“Were you about to say ‘steal’? Let’s not mince words now. Yes, I consider it the same as if I’d stolen it—’appropriated,’ indeed, if you wish, but in my view I stole it. And last evening I stole it altogether.”
“Last evening? But you just said it was a month ago that you ... obtained it!”
“Yes, but not from my father, not from my father, don’t worry, I stole it not from my father, but from her. Let me speak and don’t interrupt. It’s hard. You see: a month ago, Katerina Ivanovna Verkhovtsev, my former fiancée, sent for me ... Do you know her?”
“Of course, sir, good heavens!”
“I know you know her. The noblest soul, the noblest of the noble, but who has hated me for a long time, oh, a long, long time ... and rightly so, rightly so!”
“Katerina Ivanovna?” the district attorney asked in surprise. The prosecutor also stared terribly.
“Oh, do not utter her name in vain! I’m a scoundrel to bring her into it. Yes, I saw that she hated me ... long ago ... from the very first, from that time in my rooms, already then ... But enough, enough, you’re even unworthy to know of that, there’s no need at all ... All you need to know is that she sent for me a month ago, handed me three thousand to send to her sister and some other relative in Moscow (as if she couldn’t have sent it herself! ), and I ... it was precisely at that fatal moment of my life when I ... well, in a word, when I had just fallen in love with the other one, her, the present one, she’s sitting downstairs now, Grushenka ... I carried her off here, to Mokroye, and in two days here I squandered half of that cursed three thousand, that is, fifteen hundred, and the other half I kept on me. Well, so the fifteen hundred that I kept, I wore here on my neck, in place of an amulet, and yesterday I got it out and squandered it. The eight hundred roubles left are now in your hands, Nikolai Parfenovich, that’s what’s left of yesterday’s fifteen hundred.”
“I beg your pardon, but how can that be, when you squandered three thousand here a month ago, not fifteen hundred, and everyone knows it?”
“Who knows it? Who counted? Did I let anyone count it?”
“Good heavens, but you yourself told everyone that you squandered exactly three thousand then.”
“True, I said it. I said it to the whole town, and the whole town said it, and everyone thought so, and here in Mokroye everyone thought the same, that it was three thousand. Yet I only squandered fifteen hundred, not three thousand, and the other fifteen hundred I sewed into an amulet; that’s how it was, gentlemen, and that’s where yesterday’s money came from...”
“It’s almost miraculous ... ,” murmured Nikolai Parfenovich.
“Allow me to ask,” the prosecutor spoke finally, “if there is someone at least whom you informed of this circumstance ... that is, that you kept this fifteen hundred with you then, a month ago?”
“I told no one.”
“That’s strange. No one at all, can it really be?”
“No one at all. Nobody and no one.”
“But why such reticence? What moved you to make such a secret of it? Let me explain myself more precisely: you have finally told us your secret, so ‘disgraceful,’ as you say, though as a matter of fact—I mean, of course, only relatively speaking— this action—namely, that is, the appropriation of another person’s three thousand roubles, and, no doubt, only temporarily—this action, in my opinion at least, is simply a highly thoughtless action, but not so disgraceful, considering, moreover, your character ... Well, let us say it is even a highly discreditable action, I agree, but still discreditable is not disgraceful ... What I’m driving at, in fact, is that during this month many people have already guessed about Miss Verkhovtsev’s three thousand, which you have spent, even without your confession—I have heard this legend myself ... Mikhail Makarovich, for instance, has also heard it. So that, ultimately, it is almost not a legend anymore, but the gossip of the whole town. Moreover, there are signs that you yourself, if I am not mistaken, confessed it to someone or other—namely, that is, that this money came from Miss Verkhovtsev ... And therefore I am all the more surprised that until now, that is, until this very present moment, you have attached such extraordinary secrecy to this fifteen hundred, which, as you say, you set aside, even connecting this secret of yours with some kind of horror ... It is incredible that such a secret should cost you such torment in confessing it ... for you were just shouting that penal servitude would be better than confessing it...”