Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 11 him, how did he do it? Alone or with the assistance of the
prisoner? Let us consider the first alternative — that he
did it alone. If he had killed him it must have been with
some object, for some advantage to himself. But not hav-
ing a shadow of the motive that the prisoner had for the
murder — hatred, jealousy, and so on — Smerdyakov could
only have murdered him for the sake of gain, in order to
appropriate the three thousand roubles he had seen his
master put in the envelope. And yet he tells another person
— and a person most closely interested, that is, the prisoner
— everything about the money and the signals, where the
envelope lay, what was written on it, what it was tied up
with, and, above all, told him of those signals by which he
could enter the house. Did he do this simply to betray him-
self, or to invite to the same enterprise one who would be
anxious to get that envelope for himself? ‘Yes,’ I shall be
told, ‘but he betrayed it from fear.’ But how do you explain
this? A man who could conceive such an audacious, savage
act, and carry it out, tells facts which are known to no one
else in the world, and which, if he held his tongue, no one
would ever have guessed!
‘No, however cowardly he might be, if he had plotted
such a crime, nothing would have induced him to tell any-
one about the envelope and the signals, for that was as good
as betraying himself beforehand. He would have invent-
ed something, he would have told some lie if he had been
forced to give information, but he would have been silent
about that. For, on the other hand, if he had said nothing
about the money, but had committed the murder and sto-