Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com Madame Hohlakov. The prosecutor positively smiled at the
‘innocence of this subterfuge.’
‘And you imagine he would have accepted such a deed
as a substitute for two thousand three hundred roubles in
cash?’
‘He certainly would have accepted it,’ Mitya declared
warmly. ‘Why, look here, he might have grabbed not two
thousand, but four or six, for it. He would have put his law-
yers, Poles and Jews, on to the job, and might have got, not
three thousand, but the whole property out of the old man.’
The evidence of Pan Mussyalovitch was, of course, en-
tered in the protocol in the fullest detail. Then they let the
Poles go. The incident of the cheating at cards was hardly
touched upon. Nikolay Parfenovitch was too well pleased
with them, as it was, and did not want to worry them with
trifles, moreover, it was nothing but a foolish, drunken
quarrel over cards. There had been drinking and disorder
enough, that night.... So the two hundred roubles remained
in the pockets of the Poles.
Then old Maximov was summoned. He came in timidly,
approached with little steps, looking very dishevelled and
depressed. He had, all this time, taken refuge below with
Grushenka, sitting dumbly beside her, and ‘now and then
he’d begin blubbering over her and wiping his eyes with a
blue check handkerchief,’ as Mihail Makarovitch described
afterwards. So that she herself began trying to pacify and
comfort him. The old man at once confessed that he had
done wrong, that he had borrowed ‘ten roubles in my pov-
erty,’ from Dmitri Fyodorovitch, and that he was ready to