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“This way--come along--I’ll show you.”

All this happened just before the second appearance of our hero upon the scene.

“Would you believe,” said the mistress of the house, suddenly addressing the
prince, “would you believe that that man has not even spared my orphan children?
He has stolen everything I possessed, sold everything, pawned everything; he has
left me nothing--nothing! What am I to do with your IOU’s, you cunning,
unscrupulous rogue? Answer, devourer! answer, heart of stone! How shall I feed
my orphans? with what shall I nourish them? And now he has come, he is drunk! He
can scarcely stand. How, oh how, have I offended the Almighty, that He should
bring this curse upon me! Answer, you worthless villain, answer!”

“Do you hear, prince?” said Nastasia Philipovna. “Do you hear how this moujik of
a fellow goes on bargaining for your bride?” “I don’t know absolutely for
certain; but in all probability it is so,” replied Hippolyte, looking round.
“Nastasia would hardly go to her; and they can’t meet at Gania’s, with a man
nearly dead in the house.”

“And this is the very day that they were to announce the engagement! What will
she do next?”

“Oh, dear!” cried the prince, confused, trying to hurry his words out, and
growing more and more eager every moment: “I’ve gone and said another stupid
thing. I don’t know what to say. I--I didn’t mean that, you know--I--I--he
really was such a splendid man, wasn’t he?”

“Is that all?” asked Aglaya.

Evgenie Pavlovitch stood on the steps like one struck by lightning. Mrs.
Epanchin stood still too, but not with the petrified expression of Evgenie. She
gazed haughtily at the audacious person who had addressed her companion, and
then turned a look of astonishment upon Evgenie himself.

“I wanted to see how the farce would end.”

“He is for me, undoubtedly!” thought the prince, with a smile. Colia also had
joined the party, and was talking with animation to Hippolyte, who listened with
a jeering smile on his lips.

“God forbid that he should share your ideas, Ivan Fedorovitch!” his wife flashed
back. “Or that he should be as gross and churlish as you!” “I’ll tell you. In
the first place he must immediately deliver up the pistol which he boasted of,
with all its appurtenances. If he does this I shall consent to his being allowed
to spend the night in this house--considering his feeble state of health, and of
course conditionally upon his being under proper supervision. But tomorrow he
must go elsewhere. Excuse me, prince! Should he refuse to deliver up his weapon,
then I shall instantly seize one of his arms and General Ivolgin the other, and
we shall hold him until the police arrive and take the matter into their own
hands. Mr. Ferdishenko will kindly fetch them.”
The girls could see that their mother concealed a great deal from them, and left
out large pieces of the letter in reading it to them.

“I have said already that the moment she comes in I go out, and I shall keep my
word,” remarked Varia.

“He never drinks much in the morning; if you have come to talk business with
him, do it now. It is the best time. He sometimes comes back drunk in the
evening; but just now he passes the greater part of the evening in tears, and
reads passages of Holy Scripture aloud, because our mother died five weeks ago.”

Lebedeff had his desire. He went off with the noisy group of Rogojin’s friends
towards the Voznesensky, while the prince’s route lay towards the Litaynaya. It
was damp and wet. The prince asked his way of passers-by, and finding that he
was a couple of miles or so from his destination, he determined to take a
droshky.

“No, certainly not, no more than yourself, though at first I thought I was.”

“Yes, you are, indeed.”

“Why so?” asked the prince uneasily.

“Why? Was there no one else to pay for you?” asked the black-haired one.

“I--I don’t quite know how to answer your question, Aglaya Ivanovna. What is
there to say to such a question? And--and must I answer?”

“It is not my intrigue!” cried Lebedeff, waving his hand.

Aglaya looked blackly at him.

“No--I will not sit down,--I am keeping you, I see,--another time!--I think I
may be permitted to congratulate you upon the realization of your heart’s best
wishes, is it not so?”

Evgenie Pavlovitch gazed at him in real surprise, and this time his expression
of face had no mockery in it whatever.

“What do I care if you are base or not? He thinks he has only to say, ‘I am
base,’ and there is an end of it. As to you, prince, are you not ashamed?--I
repeat, are you not ashamed, to mix with such riff-raff? I will never forgive
you!”
“Under the chair? Impossible! Why, you told me yourself that you had searched
every corner of the room? How could you not have looked in the most likely place
of all?”
“I leave Lebedeff’s house, my dear prince, because I have quarrelled with this
person. I broke with him last night, and am very sorry that I did not do so
before. I expect respect, prince, even from those to whom I give my heart, so to
speak. Prince, I have often given away my heart, and am nearly always deceived.
This person was quite unworthy of the gift.”

“Where did they tell you so,--at his door?”

“We have just used the expression ‘accidental case.’ This is a significant
phrase; we often hear it. Well, not long since everyone was talking and reading
about that terrible murder of six people on the part of a--young fellow, and of
the extraordinary speech of the counsel for the defence, who observed that in
the poverty-stricken condition of the criminal it must have come _naturally_
into his head to kill these six people. I do not quote his words, but that is
the sense of them, or something very like it. Now, in my opinion, the barrister
who put forward this extraordinary plea was probably absolutely convinced that
he was stating the most liberal, the most humane, the most enlightened view of
the case that could possibly be brought forward in these days. Now, was this
distortion, this capacity for a perverted way of viewing things, a special or
accidental case, or is such a general rule?”

As he spoke his last words he had risen suddenly from his seat with a wave of
his arm, and there was a general cry of horror.

“Well!--and what’s the meaning of the ‘poor knight,’ eh?”
“Lef Nicolaievitch, my friend, come along with me.” It was Rogojin.
“Aglaya, make a note of ‘Pafnute,’ or we shall forget him. H’m! and where is
this signature?”

“Tell me, prince, why on earth did this boy intrude himself upon you?” he asked,
with such annoyance and irritation in his voice that the prince was quite
surprised. “I wouldn’t mind laying odds that he is up to some mischief.”

“I wrote this yesterday, myself, just after I saw you, prince, and told you I
would come down here. I wrote all day and all night, and finished it this
morning early. Afterwards I had a dream.”

“But I ask you, my dear sir, how can there be anything in common between Evgenie
Pavlovitch, and--her, and again Rogojin? I tell you he is a man of immense
wealth--as I know for a fact; and he has further expectations from his uncle.
Simply Nastasia Philipovna--”

“You cannot really feel like that! You don’t mean what you say. It is not true,”
he murmured.
“I should think it would be very foolish indeed, unless it happened to come in
appropriately.”

Today, as I have said, she returned from their house with a heavy feeling of
dejection. There was a sensation of bitterness, a sort of mocking contempt,
mingled with it.

“Oh, don’t apologize. No, I don’t think I have either talents or special
abilities of any kind; on the contrary. I have always been an invalid and unable
to learn much. As for bread, I should think--”

“Wait! What do you intend to do now, Parfen?”

“No, Varia, I shall sit it out to the end.” “Had I been the publisher I should
not have printed it. As to the evidence of eye-witnesses, in these days people
prefer impudent lies to the stories of men of worth and long service. I know of
some notes of the year 1812, which--I have determined, prince, to leave this
house, Mr. Lebedeff’s house.”

“He has told me already that he hates you,” murmured Aglaya, scarcely audibly.

On a sheet of thick writing-paper the prince had written in medieval characters
the legend:

“Ready--keep your distance, all of you!”

“Dear me, general,” said Nastasia Philipovna, absently, “I really never imagined
you had such a good heart.”

“So, so--the son of my old, I may say my childhood’s friend, Nicolai
Petrovitch.”

A week had elapsed since the rendezvous of our two friends on the green bench in
the park, when, one fine morning at about half-past ten o’clock, Varvara
Ardalionovna, otherwise Mrs. Ptitsin, who had been out to visit a friend,
returned home in a state of considerable mental depression.

“Yes, but he died at Elizabethgrad, not at Tver,” said the prince, rather
timidly. “So Pavlicheff told me.”

“What sort of a face was I to draw? I couldn’t draw a mask.”

“It was--about--you saw her--”

“I rather think I pitched into you, too, didn’t I? Forgive me--do! Who is he,
did you say? What prince? Muishkin?” she added, addressing Gania.
That month in the provinces, when he had seen this woman nearly every day, had
affected him so deeply that he could not now look back upon it calmly. In the
very look of this woman there was something which tortured him. In conversation
with Rogojin he had attributed this sensation to pity--immeasurable pity, and
this was the truth. The sight of the portrait face alone had filled his heart
full of the agony of real sympathy; and this feeling of sympathy, nay, of actual
_suffering_, for her, had never left his heart since that hour, and was still in
full force. Oh yes, and more powerful than ever!
“What am I doing? What am I doing to you?” she sobbed convulsively, embracing
his knees.
“What? Would you go to her--to her?”

“Burning for nothing,” shouted others.

“Do you mean to say,” cried Gania, from the other corner, “do you mean to say
that railways are accursed inventions, that they are a source of ruin to
humanity, a poison poured upon the earth to corrupt the springs of life?”

“I don’t know--perhaps you are right in much that you have said, Evgenie
Pavlovitch. You are very wise, Evgenie Pavlovitch--oh! how my head is beginning
to ache again! Come to her, quick--for God’s sake, come!”

“Allow me!”

The prince, returning home from the interview with Aglaya, had sat gloomy and
depressed for half an hour. He was almost in despair when Colia arrived with the
hedgehog.

“But why, _why?_ Devil take it, what did you do in there? Why did they fancy
you? Look here, can’t you remember exactly what you said to them, from the very
beginning? Can’t you remember?”

And it was at this moment that General Epanchin began to play so large and
important a part in the story.

Gania began, but did not finish. The two--father and son--stood before one
another, both unspeakably agitated, especially Gania.

“So I had decided, my friend; not to give her up to anyone,” continued Rogojin.
“We’ll be very quiet. I have only been out of the house one hour all day, all
the rest of the time I have been with her. I dare say the air is very bad here.
It is so hot. Do you find it bad?”

“Excellency! Have you read that account of the murder of the Zemarin family, in
the newspaper?” cried Lebedeff, all of a sudden.

“Had I been the publisher I should not have printed it. As to the evidence of
eye-witnesses, in these days people prefer impudent lies to the stories of men
of worth and long service. I know of some notes of the year 1812, which--I have
determined, prince, to leave this house, Mr. Lebedeff’s house.”

“Yes!”

“Who may that be? a clerk?”

“Father, your dinner is ready,” said Varvara at this point, putting her head in
at the door.

“H’m! and instead of a bad action, your excellency has detailed one of your
noblest deeds,” said Ferdishenko. “Ferdishenko is ‘done.’”

He jumped up and hurried off, remembering suddenly that he was wanted at his
father’s bedside; but before he went out of the room he inquired hastily after
the prince’s health, and receiving the latter’s reply, added:
Nature loves and favours such people. Ptitsin will certainly have his reward,
not three houses, but four, precisely because from childhood up he had realized
that he would never be a Rothschild. That will be the limit of Ptitsin’s
fortune, and, come what may, he will never have more than four houses.

“Was it you?” he muttered, at last, motioning with his head towards the curtain.

“Forty thousand, then--forty thousand roubles instead of eighteen! Ptitsin and
another have promised to find me forty thousand roubles by seven o’clock
tonight. Forty thousand roubles--paid down on the nail!”

Mrs. Epanchin misunderstood the observation, and rising from her place she left
the room in majestic wrath. In the evening, however, Colia came with the story
of the prince’s adventures, so far as he knew them. Mrs. Epanchin was
triumphant; although Colia had to listen to a long lecture. “He idles about here
the whole day long, one can’t get rid of him; and then when he is wanted he does
not come. He might have sent a line if he did not wish to inconvenience
himself.”

Silence immediately fell on the room; all looked at the prince as though they
neither understood, nor hoped to understand. Gania was motionless with horror.

“They are quarrelling,” said the prince, and entered the drawing-room, just as
matters in there had almost reached a crisis. Nina Alexandrovna had forgotten
that she had “submitted to everything!” She was defending Varia. Ptitsin was
taking her part, too. Not that Varia was afraid of standing up for herself. She
was by no means that sort of a girl; but her brother was becoming ruder and more
intolerable every moment. Her usual practice in such cases as the present was to
say nothing, but stare at him, without taking her eyes off his face for an
instant. This manoeuvre, as she well knew, could drive Gania distracted.