Текст книги "The Brothers Karamazov"
Автор книги: Федор Достоевский
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When Pyotr Ilyich entered the commissioner’s house, he was simply astounded: he suddenly saw that they knew everything already. Indeed, they had abandoned their cards, they all stood arguing, and even Nikolai Parfenovich came running from the young ladies with a most pugnacious and impetuous look on his face. Pyotr Ilyich was met with the astounding news that old Fyodor Pavlovich had really and truly been murdered in his house that evening, murdered and robbed. It had been learned just a moment before, in the following way.
Marfa Ignatievna—the wife of Grigory, who had been struck down at the fence—though she was fast asleep in her bed and might have gone on sleeping like that until morning, nevertheless suddenly woke up. Conducive to that end was a terrible epileptic scream from Smerdyakov, who lay unconscious in the next room—that scream with which his fits of falling sickness always began, and that always, all her life, frightened Marfa Ignatievna terribly and had a morbid effect on her. She simply never could get used to it. Half awake, she jumped up and, almost beside herself, rushed to Smerdyakov in his little room. It was dark there; she could only hear that the sick man had begun struggling and gasping horribly. Marfa Ignatievna screamed herself and began calling her husband, but suddenly realized that when she had gotten up Grigory seemed not to be in the bed. She ran back and felt in the bed again, but it was indeed empty. So he had gone out, but where? She ran to the porch and timidly called him. She got no answer, of course, but instead she heard, in the night’s silence, some groans, which seemed to be coming from somewhere far away in the garden. She listened; the groans were repeated, and it became clear that they were indeed coming from the garden. “Lord, just like with Stinking Lizaveta!” flashed through her distraught head. She went timidly down the steps and saw that the garden gate was open. “He must be there, the poor dear,” she thought, going up to the gate, and suddenly she clearly heard Grigory calling her, crying out: “Marfa, Marfa!” in a weak, wailing, woeful voice. “Lord, keep us from disaster,” Marfa Ignatievna whispered and rushed towards the voice, and in that way she found Grigory. But she found him not by the fence, not on the spot where he had been struck down, but about twenty paces away. Later it turned out that, having come to his senses, he had begun crawling, and probably crawled for a long while, losing consciousness and passing out several times more. She noticed at once that he was all covered with blood, and at that began screaming to high heaven. Grigory kept muttering softly and incoherently: “He killed ... father ... killed ... stop shouting, fool ... run, tell . . “But Marfa Ignatievna would not quiet down and went on screaming, and suddenly, seeing that the master’s window was open and there was light inside, she ran to it and began calling Fyodor Pavlovich. But, looking through the window, she saw a terrible sight: the master was lying on his back on the floor, not moving. The front of his light-colored dressing gown and his white shirt were soaked with blood. A candle on the table shed a bright light on the blood and on the motionless, dead face of Fyodor Pavlovich. Now horrified to the last degree, Marfa Ignatievna rushed away from the window, ran out of the garden, unlocked the gates, and ran like mad through the back lane to her neighbor, Maria Kondratievna. Both neighbors, mother and daughter, were asleep by then, but at Marfa Ignatievna’s urgent and frenzied shouting and knocking on the shutters, they woke up and jumped to the window. Marfa Ignatievna, shrieking and shouting, conveyed the essentials, however incoherently, and called for help. As it happened, that night the wandering Foma was staying with them. They roused him at once, and all three ran to the scene of the crime. On the way, Maria Kondratievna managed to recall that earlier, before nine o’clock, she had heard a terrible and piercing cry from their garden, which could be heard all over the neighborhood—and this certainly was precisely the cry of Grigory as he caught hold of the leg of Dmitri Fyodorovich, who was already sitting astride the fence, and cried out: “Parricide!” “Some one person shouted and suddenly stopped,” Maria Kondratievna testified as she ran. Having come to the place where Grigory lay, the two women, with the help of Foma, carried him to the cottage. They lighted a candle and saw that Smerdyakov had still not calmed down but was struggling in his little room, his eyes crossed and foam running from his lips. Grigory’s head was washed with water and vinegar; the water brought him back to his full senses, and he asked at once: “Has the master been killed?” The two women and Foma then went to the master’s and this time saw, as they entered the garden, that not only the window but the door to the garden was wide open, whereas for the whole past week the master had been locking himself up securely in the evening, every night, and would not allow even Grigory to knock for him under any circumstances. Seeing the door open, all of them, the two women and Foma, were afraid to go to the master’s room, “for fear something might come of it afterwards.” Grigory, when they came back, told them to run at once to the police commissioner himself. It was at this point that Maria Kondratievna ran and gave the alarm to everyone at the commissioner’s house. She preceded Pyotr Ilyich’s arrival by only five minutes, so that he came not just with his own guesses and conclusions, but as an obvious witness, whose story even further confirmed the general surmise as to the identity of the criminal (which he, by the way, in the bottom of his heart, till this last moment, still refused to believe).
It was decided to act energetically. The assistant police chief was immediately ordered to round up as many as four witnesses, and, following all the rules, which I am not going to describe here, they penetrated Fyodor Pavlovich’s house and carried out an investigation on the spot. The district doctor, a hot and new man, all but invited himself to accompany the commissioner, the prosecutor, and the district attorney. I will give only a brief outline: Fyodor Pavlovich turned out to be thoroughly murdered, his head having been smashed in, but with what?—most likely with the same weapon with which Grigory had also been struck later. And just then they found the weapon, having heard from Grigory, to whom all possible medical help was administered, a quite coherent, though weakly and falteringly uttered, account of how he had been struck down. They began searching near the fence with a lantern and found the brass pestle, thrown right on the garden path for all to see. No unusual disorder was noted in the room where Fyodor Pavlovich was lying, but behind the screen near his bed they picked up a big envelope from the floor, made of heavy paper, of official size, inscribed: “A little treat of three thousand roubles for my angel Grushenka, if she wants to come,” and below that was added, most likely later, by Fyodor Pavlovich himself: “And to my chicky.” There were three big seals of red wax on the envelope, but it had already been torn open and was empty: the money was gone. They also found on the floor a narrow pink ribbon with which the envelope had been tied. One circumstance among others in Pyotr Ilyich’s evidence made an extraordinary impression on the prosecutor and the district attorney: namely, his guess that Dmitri Fyodorovich would certainly shoot himself towards dawn, that he had resolved to do it, spoken of it to Pyotr Ilyich, loaded his pistol, and so on and so forth. And that when he, Pyotr Ilyich, still unwilling to believe him, had threatened to go and tell someone to prevent the suicide, Mitya had answered him, grinning: “You won’t have time.” It followed that they had to hurry there, to Mokroye, in order to catch the criminal before he perhaps really decided to shoot himself. “That’s clear, that’s clear!” the prosecutor kept repeating in great excitement, “that’s just how it is with such hotheads: tomorrow I’ll kill myself, but before I die—a spree!” The story of his taking a lot of wine and provisions from the shop aroused the prosecutor even more. “Do you remember, gentlemen, that fellow who killed the merchant Olsufyev, robbed him of fifteen hundred, and went at once to have his hair curled, and then, without even hiding the money very well, almost holding it in his hand in the same way, went to the girls?” They were detained, however, by the investigation, the search of Fyodor Pavlovich’s house, the paperwork, and so on. All this needed time, and therefore they sent to Mokroye, two hours ahead of them, the deputy commissioner, Mavriky Mavrikievich Shmertsov, who had come to town just the previous morning to collect his salary. Mavriky Mavrikievich was instructed to go to Mokroye and, without raising any alarm, to keep watch on the “criminal” tirelessly until the arrival of the proper authorities, as well as to procure witnesses, deputies, and so on and so forth. And all this Mavriky Mavrikievich did, preserving his incognito, and initiating only Trifon Borisovich, his old acquaintance, and then only partially, into the secret of the affair. This coincided precisely with the time when Mitya met the innkeeper in the darkness on the porch looking for him and at once noticed a sudden change in Trifon Borisovich’s face and tone. Thus neither Mitya nor anyone else knew that he was being watched; his case with the pistols had long since been spirited away by Trifon Borisovich and hidden in some safe place. And only after four o’clock in the morning, almost at dawn, did all the authorities arrive, the police commissioner, the prosecutor, and the district attorney, in two carriages drawn by two troikas. The doctor stayed behind in Fyodor Pavlovich’s house with the object of performing a postmortem in the morning on the body of the murdered man, but above all he had become particularly interested in the condition of the sick servant Smerdyakov: “Such severe and protracted fits of the falling sickness, recurring uninterruptedly over two days, are rarely met with: this case belongs to science,” he said excitedly to his departing companions, and they laughingly congratulated him on his find. At the same time the prosecutor and the district attorney remembered very clearly the doctor adding in a most definite tone that Smerdyakov would not live till morning.
Now, after a long but, I believe, necessary explanation, we have returned precisely to that moment of our story at which we stopped in the previous book.
Chapter 3: The Soul’s Journey through Torments. The First Torment
And so Mitya was sitting and staring around with wild eyes at those present, without understanding what was being said to him. [271]Suddenly he rose, threw up his hands, and cried loudly:
“Not guilty! Of that blood I am not guilty! Of my father’s blood I am not guilty ... I wanted to kill him, but I’m not guilty. Not me!”
But no sooner had he cried it than Grushenka jumped out from behind the curtains and simply collapsed at the feet of the police commissioner.
“It’s me, me, the cursed one, I am guilty!” she cried in a heartrending howl, all in tears, stretching her arms out to everyone, “it’s because of me that he killed him...! I tormented him and drove him to it! I tormented that poor old dead man, too, out of spite, and drove things to this! I am the guilty one, first and most of all, I am the guilty one!”
“Yes, you are the guilty one! You are the chief criminal! You are violent, you are depraved, you are the guilty one, you most of all,” screamed the commissioner, shaking his finger at her, but this time he was quickly and resolutely suppressed. The prosecutor even seized him with both arms.
“This is entirely out of order, Mikhail Makarovich,” he cried, “you are positively hindering the investigation ... ruining the whole thing ... ,”he was all but choking.
“Measures, measures, we must take measures!” Nikolai Parfenovich, too, began seething terribly, “otherwise it’s positively impossible...!”
“Judge us together!” Grushenka went on exclaiming frenziedly, still on her knees. “Punish us together, I’ll go with him now even to execution!”
“Grusha, my life, my blood, my holy one!” Mitya threw himself on his knees beside her and caught her tightly in his arms. “Don’t believe her,” he shouted, “she’s not guilty of anything, of any blood, or anything!”
He remembered afterwards that several men pulled him away from her by force, that she was suddenly taken out, and that when he came to his senses he was already sitting at the table. Beside him and behind him stood people with badges. On the sofa across the table from him, Nikolai Parfenovich, the district attorney, sat trying to persuade him to sip some water from a glass that stood on the table: “It will refresh you, it will calm you down, you needn’t be afraid, you needn’t worry,” he kept adding with extreme politeness. And Mitya, as he remembered, suddenly became terribly interested in his big rings, one with an amethyst, and another with a bright yellow stone, transparent and of a most wonderful brilliance. And for a long time afterwards he recalled with surprise how these rings irresistibly drew his eye even through all those terrible hours of interrogation, so that for some reason he was unable to tear himself away and forget them as something quite unsuitable in his position. On the left, at Mitya’s side, where Maximov had been sitting at the start of the evening, the prosecutor now sat down, and to Mitya’s right, where Grushenka had been, a pink-cheeked young man settled himself, dressed in a rather threadbare sort of hunting jacket, and in front of him appeared an inkstand and some paper. He turned out to be the district attorney’s clerk, who had come with him. The police commissioner now stood near the window, at the other end of the room, next to Kalganov, who was sitting in a chair by the same window.
“Drink some water!” the district attorney gently repeated for the tenth time.
“I drank some, gentlemen, I drank some ... but ... come, gentlemen, crush me, punish me, decide my fate!” Mitya exclaimed, staring with horribly fixed, bulging eyes at the district attorney.
“So you positively assert that you are not guilty of the death of your father, Fyodor Pavlovich?” the district attorney asked gently but insistently.
“Not guilty! I’m guilty of other blood, of another old man’s blood, but not of my father’s. And I weep for it! I killed, I killed the old man, killed him and struck him down ... But it’s hard to have to answer for that blood with this other blood, this terrible blood, which I’m not guilty of ... A terrible accusation, gentlemen, as if you’d stunned me on the head! But who killed my father, who killed him? Who could have killed him if not me? It’s a wonder, an absurdity, an impossibility . . .!”
“Yes, who could have killed him ... ,” the district attorney began, but the prosecutor, Ippolit Kirillovich (the deputy prosecutor, but for the sake of brevity we, too, shall call him the prosecutor), exchanging glances with the district attorney, said, turning to Mitya:
“You needn’t worry about the old servant, Grigory Vasiliev. I can tell you that he is alive, he has recovered, and despite the severe beating inflicted by you, according to his and now to your own evidence, it seems he will undoubtedly live, at least in the doctor’s opinion.”
“Alive? So he’s alive!” Mitya suddenly shouted, clasping his hands. His whole face lit up. “Lord, I thank you for this greatest miracle, which you have done for me, a sinner and evildoer, according to my prayer! Yes, yes, it’s according to my prayer, I was praying all night!” And he crossed himself three times. He was nearly breathless.
“And it is from this same Grigory that we have received such significant evidence regarding you, that ... ,” the prosecutor went on, but Mitya suddenly jumped up from his chair.
“One moment, gentlemen, for God’s sake, just one moment; I’ll run to her...”
“Sorry! Right now it’s quite impossible!” Nikolai Parfenovich almost shrieked, and he, too, jumped to his feet. The men with badges laid hold of Mitya; however, he sat down on the chair himself . . .
“What a pity, gentlemen! I wanted to see her for just one moment ... I wanted to announce to her that this blood that was gnawing at my heart all night has been washed away, has disappeared, and I am no longer a murderer! She is my fiancée, gentlemen!” he suddenly spoke ecstatically and reverently, looking around at them all. “Oh, thank you, gentlemen! Oh, how you’ve restored, how you’ve resurrected me in a moment ... ‘.That old man—he carried me in his arms, gentlemen, he washed me in a tub when I was a three-year-old child and abandoned by everyone, he was my own father . . .!”
“And so you ... ,” the district attorney began.
“Sorry, gentlemen, sorry, just one more minute,” Mitya interrupted, putting both elbows on the table and covering his face with his hands, “let me collect myself a little, let me catch my breath, gentlemen. It’s all terribly shocking, terribly—a man is not a drumskin, gentlemen!”
“Have some more water,” muttered Nikolai Parfenovich.
Mitya took his hands away from his face and laughed. His look was cheerful; he had quite changed, as it were, in a moment. And his whole tone was changed: here now sat a man once again the equal of all these men, of all these previous acquaintances of his, exactly as if they had all come together the day before, when nothing had happened yet, somewhere at a social gathering. Let us note, incidentally, that when he first came to our town, Mitya was warmly received at the commissioner’s house, but later, especially during the last month, Mitya hardly ever visited him, and the commissioner, meeting him in the street, for example, frowned deeply and bowed to him only out of politeness, which circumstance Mitya noted very well. His acquaintance with the prosecutor was even more distant, but to the prosecutor’s wife, a nervous and fantastic lady, he sometimes paid visits, most respectful visits, by the way, himself not even quite knowing why he was calling on her, and she always received him kindly, taking an interest in him for some reason, until quite recently. He had not yet had time to make the acquaintance of the district attorney, though he had met him and even spoken with him once or twice, both times about the female sex.
“You, Nikolai Parfenovich, are, I can see, a most skillful investigator,” Mitya suddenly laughed gaily, “but now I will help you myself. Oh, gentlemen, I am resurrected ... and do not take it amiss that I address you so casually and directly. Besides, I’m a little drunk, that I will frankly admit. I believe I had the honor ... the honor and the pleasure of meeting you, Nikolai Parfenovich, at the home of my relation, Miusov ... Gentlemen, gentlemen, I do not claim to be equal, I quite understand who I am now, as I sit here before you. A horrible suspicion hangs over me ... if Grigory has given evidence regardingme ... then of course, oh, of course it hangs over me! Horrible, horrible—I quite understand! But—to business, gentlemen, I’m ready, and now we’ll make short work of it, because, listen, listen, gentlemen. You see, if I know I am not guilty, then of course we can make short work of it! Can’t we? Can’t we?”
Mitya spoke much and quickly, nervously and expansively, and as if he decidedly took his listeners for his best friends.
“So, for the present we shall write down that you radically deny the accusation brought against you,” Nikolai Parfenovich pronounced imposingly, and, turning to the clerk, he dictated in a low voice what he was to write down.
“Write down? You want to write it down? Well, write it down then, I consent, I give my full consent, gentlemen ... Only, you see ... Wait, wait, write it down like this: ‘Of violence—guilty; of inflicting a savage beating on a poor old man—guilty.’ And then, within himself, too, inside, in the bottom of his heart, he is guilty—but there’s no need to write that down,” he turned suddenly to the clerk, “that is my private life, gentlemen, that doesn’t concern you now, the bottom of my heart, I mean ... But of the murder of his old father—not guilty! It’s a wild idea! It’s an utterly wild idea...! I’ll prove it to you and you’ll be convinced immediately. You’ll laugh, gentlemen, you’ll roar with laughter at your own suspicion...!”
“Calm yourself, Dmitri Fyodorovich,” the district attorney reminded him, apparently as if he wished to subdue the frenzied man with his own calmness. “Before continuing the interrogation, I should like, if only you will agree to answer, to hear from you a confirmation of the fact that you seem to have disliked the late Fyodor Pavlovich, and were in some sort of permanent dispute with him ... Here, in any case, a quarter of an hour ago, I believe you were pleased to say that you even wanted to kill him: ‘I did not kill him,’ you exclaimed, ‘but I wanted to kill him! ‘“
“I exclaimed that? Ah, maybe I did, gentlemen! Yes, unfortunately I wanted to kill him, wanted to many times ... unfortunately, unfortunately!”
“You wanted to. Would you be willing to explain what principles in fact guided you in this hatred for the person of your parent?”
“What’s there to explain, gentlemen!” Mitya shrugged gloomily, looking down. “I’ve never hidden my feelings, the whole town knows of it—everyone in the tavern knows. Recently, in the monastery, I announced it in the elder Zosima’s cell ... That same day, in the evening, I beat my father and nearly killed him, and swore in front of witnesses that I would come back and kill him ... Oh, there’s a thousand witnesses! I’ve been shouting for the whole month, everyone is a witness...! The fact is right there, the fact speaks, it cries out, but—feelings, gentlemen, feelings are something else. You see, gentlemen,” Mitya frowned, “it seems to me that you have no right to question me about my feelings. You are empowered, I understand that, but this is my business, my inner business, an intimate thing, but ... since I haven’t hidden my feelings before ... in the tavern, for instance, but have talked of it to all and sundry, so I won’t ... I won’t make a secret of it now, either. You see, gentlemen, I quite understand that in that case there is horrible evidence against me: I told everyone I would kill him, and suddenly he is killed: who else but me in that case? Ha, ha! I don’t blame you, gentlemen, I don’t blame you at all. I’m struck to the epidermis myself, because who, finally, did kill him in that case, if not me? Isn’t that so? If not me, then who, who? Gentlemen,” he suddenly exclaimed, “I want to know, I even demand it of you, gentlemen: where was he killed? How was he killed, with what and how? Tell me,” he asked quickly, looking around at the prosecutor and the district attorney.
“We found him lying on his back, on the floor of his study, with his head smashed in,” the prosecutor said.
“How horrible, gentlemen!” Mitya suddenly shuddered, and leaning his elbow on the table, he covered his face with his right hand.
“Let us continue,” Nikolai Parfenovich interrupted. “What, then, guided you in your feeling of hatred? I believe you have announced publicly that it was a feeling of jealousy?”
“Yes, jealousy, and not only jealousy.”
“Disputes about money?” ‘ “Yes, about money, too.”
“The dispute seems to have been over three thousand roubles, allegedly due you as part of your inheritance?”
“Three thousand, hah! It was more, more,” Mitya heaved himself up, “more than six, more than ten, maybe. I told everyone, I shouted it to everyone! But I decided to let it go, to settle for three thousand. I desperately needed that three thousand ... so the envelope with three thousand which I knew was under his pillow, waiting for Grushenka, I considered definitely as stolen from me, that’s what, gentlemen, I considered it mine, just as if it was my own property ...”
The prosecutor exchanged meaningful glances with the district attorney and managed to wink at him unobserved.
“We shall come back to that subject later,” the district attorney said at once. “For now, allow me to take note of precisely this little point and write it down: that you considered the money in that envelope as your own property.”
“Write it down, gentlemen, I quite understand that it is one more piece of evidence against me, but I’m not afraid of evidence and even testify against myself. Do you hear, against myself! You see, gentlemen, you seem to be taking me for quite a different man from what I am,” he suddenly added, glumly and sadly. “It is a noble man you are speaking with, a most noble person; above all—do not lose sight of this—a man who has done a world of mean things, but who always was and remained a most noble person, as a person, inside, in his depths, well, in short, I don’t know how to say it ... This is precisely what has tormented me all my life, that I thirsted for nobility, that I was, so to speak, a sufferer for nobility, seeking it with a lantern, Diogenes’ lantern, [272]and meanwhile all my life I’ve been doing only dirty things, as we all do, gentlemen ... I mean, me alone, gentlemen, not all but me alone, I made a mistake, me alone, alone . . .! Gentlemen, my head aches,” he winced with pain. “You see, gentlemen, I did not like his appearance, it was somehow dishonorable, boastful, trampling on all that’s holy, mockery and unbelief, loathsome, loathsome! But now that he’s dead, I think differently.”
“How differently?”
“Not differently, but I’m sorry I hated him so much.”
“You feel repentant?”
“No, not really repentant, don’t write that down. I’m not good myself, gentlemen, that’s the thing, I’m not so beautiful myself, and therefore I had no right to consider him repulsive, that’s the thing. Perhaps you can write that down.”
Having said this, Mitya suddenly became extremely sad. Gradually, for some time now, as he answered the district attorney’s questions, he had been growing more and more gloomy. And suddenly, just at that moment, another unexpected scene broke out. It so happened that, though Grushenka had been removed, she had not been taken very far, only to the third room down from the blue room in which the interrogation was now going on. It was a small room with one window, just beyond the big room where they had been dancing and feasting during the night. There she sat, and so far the only one with her was Maximov, who was terribly shocked, terribly frightened, and clung to her as if seeking salvation at her side. Some peasant with a badge on his chest stood at their door. Grushenka was weeping, and then suddenly, when the grief came too near her soul, she jumped up, clasped her hands, and, crying “Woe, woe is me!” in a loud wail, rushed out of the room to him, to her Mitya, so unexpectedly that no one had time to stop her. Mitya, hearing her wail, shuddered all over, jumped up, gave a shout, and, as if forgetting himself, rushed headlong to meet her. But again they were not allowed to come together, though they had already caught sight of each other. He was seized firmly by the arms: he struggled, tried to break loose, it took three or four men to hold him. She, too, was seized, and he saw her shouting and stretching out her arms to him as they drew her away. When the scene was over, he came to himself again in the same place, across the table from the district attorney, and was shouting at them:
“What do you want with her? Why do you torment her? She’s innocent, innocent...!”
The prosecutor and the district attorney were trying to talk sense into him. This took some time, about ten minutes; at last Mikhail Makarovich, who had stepped out, came hurriedly into the room, and in a loud, excited voice said to the prosecutor:
“She has been removed, she is downstairs; but will you permit me, gentlemen, to say just one word to this unfortunate man? In your presence, gentlemen, in your presence!”
“As you wish, Mikhail Makarovich,” the district attorney answered, “in the present case we have nothing to say against it.”
“Listen, Dmitri Fyodorovich, my dear fellow,” Mikhail Makarovich began, turning to Mitya, his whole troubled face expressing warm, almost fatherly compassion for the unfortunate man, “I myself took your Agrafena Alexandrovna downstairs and handed her over to the innkeeper’s daughters, and that old man, Maximov, is there and never leaves her now, and I talked with her, do you hear? I talked with her and calmed her down, I impressed upon her that you need to clear yourself and so she mustn’t interfere, mustn’t drive you to despair, otherwise you may get confused and give wrong evidence against yourself, you see? Well, in short, I talked with her and she saw. She’s a smart woman, brother, she’s kind, she wanted to kiss these old hands of mine, she asked me to help you. She sent me here herself to tell you that you mustn’t worry about her, and it would be a good thing, my dear, it would be a good thing if I went and told her that you’re not worried and are comforted about her. So you see, you mustn’t worry. I’m guilty before her, she’s a Christian soul, yes, gentlemen, she’s a meek soul and not guilty of anything. Well, what shall I tell her, Dmitri Fyodorovich, are you going to be quiet or not?”
The kindly man said much more than was necessary, but Grushenka’s grief, such human grief, had penetrated his kind soul, and tears even brimmed in his eyes. Mitya jumped up and rushed to him.
“Forgive me, gentlemen, allow me, oh, allow me!” he cried out. “You are an angelic soul, an angelic soul, Mikhail Makarovich, I thank you for her! I will, I will be quiet, I will be cheerful, tell her in the infinite kindness of your soul that I am cheerful, cheerful, I’ll even start laughing now, knowing that she has such a guardian angel as you. I’ll finish with all of this now, and the moment I’m free, I’ll go to her at once, she’ll see, she must wait! Gentlemen,” he suddenly turned to the prosecutor and the district attorney, “I will now open and pour out my whole soul to you, we will finish with this in a moment, finish it cheerfully—in the end we’ll have a good laugh, won’t we? But, gentlemen, this woman is the queen of my soul! Oh, allow me to say it, this is something I’m going to reveal to you ... I can see I’m with the noblest men: she is my light, my holy one, and if only you knew! Did you hear her cry: ‘I’ll go with you—even to execution’? And what have I, a naked beggar, given her, why such love for me, am I—a clumsy and shameful creature with a shameful face—worthy of such love, that she should go to hard labor with me? She just laid herself at your feet for me, she, a proud woman and not guilty of anything! How can I not adore her, not cry out, not long for her, as I do now? Oh, gentlemen, forgive me! But now, now I’m comforted!”
