“In your landlady’s cap?”
“Yes, I took it from her.”
“How did you get it?”
“You see, I remember once taking a cap for a rag, perhaps to wipe my pen on. I took it without asking, because it was a worthless rag. I tore it up, and I took the notes and sewed them up in it. I believe it was in that very rag I sewed it. An old piece of calico, washed a thousand times.”
“And you remember that for certain now?”
“I don’t know whether for certain. I think it was in the cap. But, hang it, what does it matter?”
“In that case your landlady will remember that the thing was lost?”
“No, she won’t, she didn’t miss it. It was an old rag, I tell you, an old rag not worth a farthing.”
“And where did you get the needle and thread?”
“I’ll stop now. I won’t say any more. Enough of it!” said Mitya, losing his temper at last.
“It’s strange that you should have so completely forgotten where you threw the pieces in the market- place.”
“Give orders for the market-place to be swept to-morrow, and perhaps you’ll find it,” said Mitya sneering. “Enough, gentlemen, enough!” he decided, in an exhausted voice. “I see you don’t believe me! Not for a moment! It’s my fault, not yours. I ought not to have been so ready. Why, why did I degrade myself by confessing my secret to you? It’s a joke to you. I see that from your eyes. You led me on to it, prosecutor! Sing a hymn of triumph if you can.… Damn you, you torturers!”
He bent his head, and hid his face in his hands. The lawyers were silent. A minute later he raised his head and looked at them almost vacantly. His face expressed now complete, hopeless despair, and he sat mute and passive as though hardly conscious of what was happening. In the meantime they had to finish what they were about. They had immediately to begin examining the witnesses. It was by now eight o’clock in the morning. The lights had been extinguished long ago. Mihail Makarovitch and Kalganov, who had been continually in and out of the room all the while the interrogation had been going on, had now both gone out again. The lawyers, too, looked very tired. It was a wretched morning, the whole sky was over-cast, and the rain streamed down in bucketfuls. Mitya gazed blankly out of the window.
“May I look out of the window?” he asked Nikolay Parfenovitch, suddenly.
“Oh, as much as you like,” the latter replied.
Mitya got up and went to the window. The rain lashed against the little greenish panes of the window. He could see the muddy road just below the window, and further away, in the rainy mist, a row of poor, black, dismal huts, looking even blacker and poorer in the rain. Mitya thought of “Phoebus the golden- haired,” and how he had meant to shoot himself at his first ray. “Perhaps it would be even better on a morning like this,” he thought with a smile, and suddenly, flinging his hand downwards, he turned to his “torturers.”
“Gentlemen,” he cried, “I see that I am lost! But she? Tell me about her, I beseech you. Surely she need not be ruined with me? She’s innocent, you know, she was out of her mind when she cried last night ‘it’s all my fault!’ She’s done nothing, nothing! I’ve been grieving over her all night as I sat with you. … Can’t you, won’t you tell me what you are going to do with her now?”