11 The Brothers Karamazovhim. In that capacity he deceived his master, revealing to
the prisoner the existence of the envelope with the notes in
it and the signals by means of which he could get into the
house. How could he help telling him, indeed? ‘He would
have killed me, I could see that he would have killed me,’ he
said at the inquiry, trembling and shaking even before us,
though his tormentor was by that time arrested and could
do him no harm. ‘He suspected me at every instant. In fear
and trembling I hastened to tell him every secret to pacify
him, that he might see that I had not deceived him and let
me off alive.’ Those are his own words. I wrote them down
and I remember them. ‘When he began shouting at me, I
would fall on my knees.’
‘He was naturally very honest and enjoyed the complete
confidence of his master, ever since he had restored him
some money he had lost. So it may be supposed that the
poor fellow suffered pangs of remorse at having deceived
his master, whom he loved as his benefactor. Persons se-
verely afflicted with epilepsy are, so the most skilful doctors
tell us, always prone to continual and morbid self-reproach.
They worry over their ‘wickedness,’ they are tormented by
pangs of conscience, often entirely without cause; they ex-
aggerate and often invent all sorts of faults and crimes. And
here we have a man of that type who had really been driven
to wrongdoing by terror and intimidation.
‘He had, besides, a strong presentiment that something
terrible would be the outcome of the situation that was
developing before his eyes. When Ivan Fyodorovitch was
leaving for Moscow, just before the catastrophe, Smerdya-