He was heard with silent attention. They inquired particularly into the circumstance of his having a place of ambush in Marya Kondratyevna’s house at the back of Fyodor Pavlovitch’s garden to keep watch on Grushenka, and of Smerdyakov’s bringing him information. They laid particular stress on this, and noted it down. Of his jealousy he spoke warmly and at length, and though inwardly ashamed at exposing his most intimate feelings to “public ignominy,” so to speak, he evidently overcame his shame in order to tell the truth. The frigid severity, with which the investigating lawyer, and still more the prosecutor, stared intently at him as he told his story, disconcerted him at last considerably.
“That boy, Nikolay Parfenovitch, to whom I was talking nonsense about women only a few days ago, and that sickly prosecutor are not worth my telling this to,” he reflected mournfully. “It’s ignominious. ‘Be patient, humble, hold thy peace.’ ” He wound up his reflections with that line. But he pulled himself together to go on again. When he came to telling of his visit to Madame Hohlakov, he regained his spirits and even wished to tell a little anecdote of that lady which had nothing to do with the case. But the investigating lawyer stopped him, and civilly suggested that he should pass on to “more essential matters.” At last, when he described his despair and told them how, when he left Madame Hohlakov’s, he thought that he’d “get three thousand if he had to murder some one to do it,” they stopped him again and noted down that he had “meant to murder some one.” Mitya let them write it without protest. At last he reached the point in his story when he learned that Grushenka had deceived him and had returned from Samsonov’s as soon as he left her there, though she had said that she would stay there till midnight.
“If I didn’t kill Fenya then, gentlemen, it was only because I hadn’t time,” broke from him suddenly at that point in his story. That, too, was carefully written down. Mitya waited gloomily, and was beginning to tell how he ran into his father’s garden when the investigating lawyer suddenly stopped him, and opening the big portfolio that lay on the sofa beside him he brought out the brass pestle.
“Do you recognize this object?” he asked, showing it to Mitya.
“Oh, yes,” he laughed gloomily. “Of course I recognize it. Let me have a look at it.... Damn it, never mind!”
“You have forgotten to mention it,” observed the investigating lawyer.
“Hang it all, I shouldn’t have concealed it from you. Do you suppose I could have managed without it? It simply escaped my memory.”
“Be so good as to tell us precisely how you came to arm yourself with it.”
“Certainly I will be so good, gentlemen.”
And Mitya described how he took the pestle and ran.