Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 11 tavern. (Then followed the anecdote about Captain Snegiry-
ov.) Those who heard the prisoner began to think at last that
he might mean more than threats, and that such a frenzy
might turn threats into actions.’
Here the prosecutor described the meeting of the fam-
ily at the monastery, the conversations with Alyosha, and
the horrible scene of violence when the prisoner had rushed
into his father’s house just after dinner.
‘I cannot positively assert,’ the prosecutor continued,
‘that the prisoner fully intended to murder his father before
that incident. Yet the idea had several times presented it-
self to him, and he had deliberated on it — for that we have
facts, witnesses, and his own words. I confess, gentlemen of
the jury,’ he added, ‘that till to-day I have been uncertain
whether to attribute to the prisoner conscious premedita-
tion. I was firmly convinced that he had pictured the fatal
moment beforehand, but had only pictured it, contemplat-
ing it as a possibility. He had not definitely considered when
and how he might commit the crime.
‘But I was only uncertain till to-day, till that fatal docu-
ment was presented to the court just now. You yourselves
heard that young lady’s exclamation, ‘It is the plan, the
programme of the murder!’ That is how she defined that
miserable, drunken letter of the unhappy prisoner. And, in
fact, from that letter we see that the whole fact of the mur-
der was premeditated. It was written two days before, and
so we know now for a fact that, forty-eight hours before the
perpetration of his terrible design, the prisoner swore that,
if he could not get money next day, he would murder his