If Pavel Pavlovitch arrived at murdering point accidentally, had he ever seriously thought of murder even for a single evil instant before? Velchaninoff decided the question strangely enough: Pavel Pavlovitch had the desire to murder him, but did not himself know of the existence of this desire.
“It seems an absurd conclusion; but so it is!” thought Velchaninoff.
Pavel Pavlovitch did not come to Petersburg to look out for a new appointment, nor did he come for the sake of finding Bagantoff, in spite of his rage when the latter died. No! he despised Bagantoff thoroughly. Pavel Pavlovitch had come to St. Petersburg for him, and had brought Liza with him, for him alone, Velchaninoff.
“Did I expect to have my throat cut?” Velchaninoff decided that he had expected it, from the moment when he saw Pavel Pavlovitch in the carriage following in Bagantoff's funeral procession. “That is I expected something—of course, not exactly to have my throat cut! And surely—surely, it was not all bonâ fide yesterday,” he reflected, raising his head from the pillow in the excitement of the idea. “Surely it cannot have been all in good faith that that fellow assured me of his love for me, beating his breast, and with his under lip trembling, as he spoke!
“Yes, it was absolutely bonâ fide!” he decided. “This quasimodo of T—— was quite good enough and generous enough to fall in love with his wife's lover—his wife in whom he never observed 'anything' during the twenty years of their married life.
“He respected and loved me for nine years, and remembered both me and my sayings. My goodness, to think of that! and I knew nothing whatever of all this! Oh, no! he was not lying yesterday! But did he love me while he declared his love for me, and said that we must be ‘quits!’ Yes, he did, he loved me spitefully—and spiteful love is sometimes the strongest of all.
“I daresay I made a colossal impression upon him down at T——, for it is just upon such Schiller-like men that one is liable to make a colossal impression. He exaggerated my value a thousand fold; perhaps it was my ‘philosophical retirement’ that struck him! It would be curious to discover precisely what it was that made so great an impression upon him. Who knows, it may have been that I wore a good pair of gloves, and knew how to put them on. These quasimodo fellows love æstheticism to distraction! Give them a start in the direction of admiration for yourself, and they will do all the rest, and give you a thousand times more than your due of every virtue that exists; will fight to the death for you with pleasure, if you ask it of them. How high he must have held my aptitude for illusionizing others; perhaps that has struck him as much as anything else! for he remarked: ‘If this man deceived me, whom am I ever to trust again!’
“After such a cry as that a man may well turn wild beast.
“And he came here to 'embrace and weep over me,' as he expressed it. H'm! that means he came to cut my throat, and thought that he came to embrace and weep over me. He brought Liza with him, too.
“What if I had wept with him and embraced him? Perhaps he really would have fully and entirely forgiven me—for he was yearning to forgive me, I could see that! And all this turned to drunkenness and bestiality at the first check. Yes, Pavel Pavlovitch, the most deformed of all deformities is the abortion with noble feelings. And this man was foolish enough to take me down to see his ‘bride.’ My goodness! his bride! Only such a lunatic of a fellow could ever have developed so wild an idea as a ‘new existence’ to be inaugurated by an alliance between himself and Nadia. But you are not to blame, Pavel Pavlovitch, you are a deformity, and all your ideas and actions and aspirations must of necessity be deformed. But deformity though he be, why in the world was my sanction, my blessing, as it were, necessary to his union with Miss Zachlebnikoff? Perhaps he sincerely hoped that there, with so much sweet innocence and charm around us, we should fall into each other's arms in some leafy spot, and weep out our differences on each other's shoulders?