I. Проекты спасти Митю

She sat talking with him in the very same room where she had once received Grushenka; close by, in the next room, lay Ivan Fyodorovich, feverish and senseless.

Immediately after that scene in court, Katerina Ivanovna had ordered the sick, unconscious Ivan Fyodorovich carried to her own house, paying no heed to whatever future and unavoidable talk and censure society might raise.

Of the two female relatives who had been living with her, one left for Moscow the moment the scene in court was over; the other stayed.

But even had both gone, Katerina Ivanovna would not have altered her resolution, and would have stayed to nurse the sick man and to sit over him day and night.

He was attended by Varvinsky and Herzenstube; the Moscow doctor, for his part, had gone back to Moscow, refusing to pronounce his opinion on the possible outcome of the illness.

The doctors who remained kept up the spirits of Katerina Ivanovna and Alyosha, but it was plain they could not yet hold out any firm hope.

Alyosha looked in on his sick brother twice a day.

But this time he had a particular and most troublesome matter on his hands, and he foresaw how hard it would be to broach it, while at the same time he was in great haste: he had another urgent matter awaiting him that very morning in another place, and he had to hurry.

They had already been talking for a quarter of an hour or so.

Katerina Ivanovna was pale, badly worn out, and at the same time in a state of extraordinary, feverish agitation: she had a presentiment of why, among other things, Alyosha had come to her now.

"Don't worry about his decision," she said to Alyosha with firm insistence.

"One way or another, he will come round to this way out all the same: he must escape!"

"That unhappy man, that hero of honor and conscience — not him, not Dmitri Fyodorovich, but the one who lies behind that door there and who sacrificed himself for his brother," Katya added with flashing eyes, "long ago he confided to me this whole plan of escape.

You know, he had already entered into negotiations…

I have already told you something of it…

You see, in all likelihood it will happen at the third etape from here, when the party of convicts is marched to Siberia.

Oh, that is still a long way off.

Ivan Fyodorovich has already driven out to see the warden of the third etape.

Only there is no telling yet who will be the officer in charge of the party, and there is no way to learn that beforehand.

Tomorrow, perhaps, I will show you the whole plan in detail, the one Ivan Fyodorovich left with me on the eve of the trial, in case of anything…

That was the very time when — you remember — you came in that evening and found us quarreling: he was already going down the stairs, and I, catching sight of you, made him turn back — remember?

Do you know what we had quarreled about then?"

"No, I don't," said Alyosha.

"Of course, he kept it from you then: it was precisely over this plan of escape.

He had disclosed the whole of the main thing to me three days before — that was just when we began to quarrel, and we went on quarreling all three days after that.

We quarreled because, when he announced to me that, in the event of a conviction, Dmitri Fyodorovich would flee abroad together with that creature, I suddenly flew into a rage — I won't tell you why, I don't know myself why…

Oh, of course it was over the creature, over that creature, that I grew enraged then, and precisely because she too, along with Dmitri, would flee abroad!" Katerina Ivanovna suddenly exclaimed, her lips trembling with anger.

"The moment Ivan Fyodorovich saw that I was so enraged over that creature, he instantly imagined that I was jealous of her on Dmitri's account, and that I therefore still went on loving Dmitri.

That was how our first quarrel came about.

I would not give any explanations, I could not bring myself to beg his pardon; it weighed on me that such a man could suspect me of my former love for that one…

And that, when I myself, long before, had told him plainly that I do not love Dmitri, that I love him alone!

It was only out of spite at that creature that I grew enraged at him!"

"Three days later, that very evening you came in, he brought me a sealed envelope, for me to open at once should anything happen to him.

Oh, he had foreseen his own illness!

He disclosed to me that the envelope held the details of the escape, and that, in the event of his death or dangerous illness, I alone was to save Mitya.

At the same time he left money with me, nearly ten thousand — the very sum the prosecutor, having learned from someone that he had sent it out to be changed, alluded to in his speech.

It struck me with sudden terror that Ivan Fyodorovich, still jealous of me and still convinced that I love Mitya, had nonetheless not given up the thought of saving his brother, and was entrusting that very work of rescue to me, to me myself!

Oh, it was a sacrifice!

No, you cannot grasp the full measure of such self-sacrifice, Alexei Fyodorovich!

I was on the point of falling at his feet in reverence, but the instant it crossed my mind that he would take it merely as my joy that Mitya was being saved (and he certainly would have thought so!), I was so exasperated by the sheer possibility of so unjust a thought on his part that I flared up again, and instead of kissing his feet, made him another scene!

Oh, I am wretched!

Such is my character — a dreadful, wretched character!

Oh, you will see yet: I shall bring it about, I shall drive things to the point where he too abandons me for another woman with whom life comes easier, just as Dmitri did, but then… no, then I shall not bear it, I shall kill myself!

And when you came in that day and I called you over, and bade him turn back, then, as he entered with you, I was so seized by rage at the hateful, contemptuous look he suddenly shot at me that — you remember — I suddenly cried out to you that it was he, he alone, who had assured me that his brother Dmitri was the murderer!

I slandered him on purpose, to wound him once more, whereas he had never, never assured me that his brother was the murderer — on the contrary, in that it was I, I myself, who had been assuring him!

Oh, the cause of it all, of everything, was my own frenzy!

It was I, I who got up that accursed scene in court!

He wanted to prove to me that he was honorable, and that, though I might love his brother, he would not for all that ruin him out of vengeance and jealousy.

So he came out with it in court…

I am the cause of it all, I alone am to blame!"

Never before had Katya made such confessions to Alyosha, and he felt that she was now precisely at that pitch of unendurable suffering when the proudest heart shatters its own pride in pain and falls, vanquished by grief.

Oh, Alyosha knew yet another terrible cause of her present torment, however she had hidden it from him through all these days since Mitya's conviction; but for some reason it would have been too painful for him if she had brought herself to the point of falling prostrate and had spoken to him of her own accord, now, this very moment, about that cause as well.

She was suffering over her "betrayal" at the trial, and Alyosha had a presentiment that her conscience was driving her to confess, precisely to him, to Alyosha, with tears, with shrieks, with hysterics, with beating herself against the floor.

But he dreaded that moment and longed to spare the suffering woman.

All the harder, then, grew the errand on which he had come.

He spoke again of Mitya.

"Never mind, never mind, don't be afraid for him!" Katya began again, stubbornly and sharply. "All this with him is only for a moment, I know him, I know that heart far too well.

Rest assured, he will consent to escape.

And the main thing is, it is not for now; there will still be time for him to make up his mind.

Ivan Fyodorovich will have recovered by then and will manage everything himself, so that I shall have nothing to do.

Don't worry, he will consent to escape.

Why, he has already consented: how could he abandon his creature?

And they won't let her into penal servitude, so how can he not escape?

Above all, he is afraid of you — afraid that you will not approve of the escape on moral grounds, but you must magnanimously grant him this leave, if your sanction is so indispensable here," Katya added venomously.