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The Sufferings of a Soul.The First Ordeal
And so Mitya sat looking wildly at the people round him, not understanding what was said to him. Suddenly he got up, flung up his hands, and shouted aloud:
"I'm not guilty! I'm not guilty of that blood! I'm not guilty of my father's blood.... I meant to kill him. But I'm not guilty. Not I."
But he had hardly said this, before Grushenka rushed from behind the curtain and flung herself at the police captain's feet.
"It was my fault! Mine! My wickedness!" she cried, in a
heart-rending voice, bathed in tears, stretching out her clasped hands
towards them. "He did it through me. I tortured him and drove him to
it. I tortured that poor old man that's dead, too, in my wickedness, and brought him to this! It's my fault, mine first, mine most, my fault!"
"Yes, it's your fault! You're the chief criminal! You fury! You
harlot! You're the most to blame!" shouted the police captain, threatening her with his hand. But he was quickly and resolutely suppressed. The prosecutor positively seized hold of him.
"This is absolutely irregular, Mihail Makarovitch!" he cried. "You
are positively hindering the inquiry.... You're ruining the case." he almost gasped.
"Follow the regular course! Follow the regular course!" cried
Nikolay Parfenovitch, fearfully excited too, "otherwise it's
absolutely impossible!..."
"Judge us together!" Grushenka cried frantically, still
kneeling. "Punish us together. I will go with him now, if it's to
death!"
"Grusha, my life, my blood, my holy one!" Mitya fell on his
knees beside her and held her tight in his arms. "Don't believe
her," he cried, "she's not guilty of anything, of any blood, of
anything!"
He remembered afterwards that he was forcibly dragged away from
her by several men, and that she was led out, and that when he
recovered himself he was sitting at the table. Beside him and behind
him stood the men with metal plates. Facing him on the other side of
the table sat Nikolay Parfenovitch, the investigating lawyer. He
kept persuading him to drink a little water out of a glass that
stood on the table.
"That will refresh you, that will calm you. Be calm, don't be
frightened," he added, extremely politely. Mitya (he remembered it
afterwards) became suddenly intensely interested in his big rings, one
with an amethyst, and another with a transparent bright yellow
stone, of great brilliance. And long afterwards he remembered with
wonder how those rings had riveted his attention through all those
terrible hours of interrogation, so that he was utterly unable to tear
himself away from them and dismiss them, as things that had nothing to
do with his position. On Mitya's left side, in the place where Maximov
had been sitting at the beginning of the evening, the prosecutor was
now seated, and on Mitya's right hand, where Grushenka had been, was a
rosy-cheeked young man in a sort of shabby hunting-jacket, with ink
and paper before him. This was the secretary of the investigating
lawyer, who had brought him with him. The police captain was now
standing by the window at the other end of the room, beside
Kalganov, who was sitting there.
"Drink some water," said the investigating lawyer softly, for
the tenth time.
"I have drunk it, gentlemen, I have... but come gentlemen, crush
me, punish me, decide my fate!" cried Mitya, staring with terribly
fixed wide-open eyes at the investigating lawyer.
"So you positively declare that you are not guilty of the death of
your father, Fyodor Pavlovitch?" asked the investigating lawyer, softly but insistently.
"I am not guilty. I am guilty of the blood of another old man, but
not of my father's. And I weep for it! I killed, I killed the old
man and knocked him down.... But it's hard to have to answer for
that murder with another, a terrible murder of which I am not
guilty....It's a terrible accusation, gentlemen, a knockdown blow. But
who has killed my father, who has killed him? Who can have killed
him if I didn't? It's marvellous, extraordinary, impossible."
"Yes, who can have killed him?" the investigating lawyer was
beginning, but Ippolit Kirillovitch, the prosecutor, glancing at
him, addressed Mitya.