The Brothers Karamazov

(coco) #1

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his whole head out.
‘Grushenka, is it you? Is it you?’ he said, in a sort of trem-
bling half-whisper. ‘Where are you, my angel, where are
you?’ He was fearfully agitated and breathless.
‘He’s alone,’ Mitya decided.
‘Where are you?’ cried the old man again; and he thrust
his head out farther, thrust it out to the shoulders, gazing in
all directions, right and left. ‘Come here, I’ve a little present
for you. Come, I’ll show you..’
‘He means the three thousand,’ thought Mitya.
‘But where are you? Are you at the door? I’ll open it di-
rectly.’
And the old man almost climbed out of the window,
peering out to the right, where there was a door into the
garden, trying to see into the darkness. In another second
he would certainly have run out to open the door without
waiting for Grushenka’s answer.
Mitya looked at him from the side without stirring. The
old man’s profile that he loathed so, his pendent Adam’s
apple, his hooked nose, his lips that smiled in greedy expec-
tation, were all brightly lighted up by the slanting lamplight
falling on the left from the room. A horrible fury of hatred
suddenly surged up in Mitya’s heart: ‘There he was, his ri-
val, the man who had tormented him, had ruined his life!’
It was a rush of that sudden, furious, revengeful anger of
which he had spoken, as though foreseeing it, to Alyosha,
four days ago in the arbour, when, in answer to Alyosha’s
question, ‘How can you say you’ll kill our father?’ ‘I don’t
know, I don’t know,’ he had said then. ‘Perhaps I shall not

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