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kov besought him to remain, though he was too timid to tell
him plainly what he feared. He confined himself to hints,
but his hints were not understood.
‘It must be observed that he looked on Ivan Fyodorovitch
as a protector, whose presence in the house was a guarantee
that no harm would come to pass. Remember the phrase
in Dmitri Karamazov’s drunken letter, ‘I shall kill the old
man, if only Ivan goes away.’ So Ivan Fyodorovitch’s pres-
ence seemed to everyone a guarantee of peace and order in
the house.
‘But he went away, and within an hour of his young
master’s departure Smerdyakov was taken with an epilep-
tic fit. But that’s perfectly intelligible. Here I must mention
that Smerdyakov, oppressed by terror and despair of a sort,
had felt during those last few days that one of the fits from
which he had suffered before at moments of strain, might be
coming upon him again. The day and hour of such an attack
cannot, of course, be foreseen, but every epileptic can feel
beforehand that he is likely to have one. So the doctors tell
us. And so, as soon as Ivan Fyodorovitch had driven out of
the yard, Smerdyakov, depressed by his lonely and unpro-
tected position, went to the cellar. He went down the stairs
wondering if he would have a fit or not, and what if it were
to come upon him at once. And that very apprehension,
that very wonder, brought on the spasm in his throat that
always precedes such attacks, and he fell unconscious into
the cellar. And in this perfectly natural occurrence people
try to detect a suspicion, a hint that he was shamming an
attack on purpose. But, if it were on purpose, the question