For a while I did not believe him, nor did I believe him at once, but only after he had come to me for three days and told me everything in detail. I thought he was mad, but ended finally by being convinced clearly, to my great grief and astonishment. He had committed a great and terrible crime fourteen years earlier, over a wealthy lady, young and beautiful, a landowner’s widow, who kept her own house in our town. Feeling great love for her, he made her a declaration of his love, and tried to persuade her to marry him. But she had already given her heart to another man, an officer of noble birth and high rank, who was then away on campaign, but whom she expected soon to return to her. She rejected his proposal and asked him to stop visiting her. He did stop visiting her, but knowing the layout of her house, he came to her by stealth one night from the garden, over the roof, with great boldness, risking discovery. But, as so often happens, crimes committed with extraordinary boldness are more likely to succeed than any others. Having entered the attic through a dormer window, he went down to her apartments by the little attic stairway, knowing that, because of the servants’ negligence, the door at the foot of the stairway was not always locked. He hoped for such carelessness this time, and was not disappointed. Stealing into her apartments, he made his way through the darkness to her bedroom, where an icon lamp was burning. Her two maids, as if on purpose, had gone secretly, without asking permission, to a birthday party at a neighbor’s house on the same street. The other menservants and maids slept in the servants’ quarters or in the kitchen on the ground floor. At the sight of the sleeping woman, passion flared up in him, and then his heart was seized by vengeful, jealous anger, and forgetting himself, like a drunk man, he went up to her and plunged a knife straight into her heart, so that she did not even cry out. Then, with infernal and criminal calculation, he arranged things so that the blame would fall on the servants: he did not scruple to take her purse; with her keys, taken from under her pillow, he opened her bureau and took certain things from it, precisely as an ignorant servant would have done, leaving the valuable papers and taking only money; he took some of the larger gold objects and neglected smaller objects that were ten times more valuable. He also took something for himself as a keepsake, but of that later. Having carried out this horrible deed, he left by the same way he had come. Neither the next day, when the alarm was raised, nor ever in his whole life afterwards, did it occur to anyone to suspect the real culprit! Besides, no one knew of his love for her, for he had always been of taciturn and unsociable character and had no friend to whom he confided his soul. He was considered merely an acquaintance of the murdered woman, and not a very close one at that, for he had not even called on her for the past two weeks. Her serf Pyotr was the immediate suspect, and circumstances all came together just then to confirm the suspicion, for this servant knew, and the dead woman had made no secret of it, that she intended to send him to the army, to fulfill her quota of peasant recruits, because he had no family and, besides, was badly behaved. He had been heard, angry and drunk, in a tavern, threatening to kill her. And two days before her death he had run away and lived somewhere in town, no one knew where. The very day after the murder, he was found on the road just outside town, dead drunk, with a knife in his pocket and, what’s more, with his right palm for some reason stained with blood. He insisted that his nose had been bleeding, but no one believed him. The maids confessed that they had gone to a party, and that the front door had been left unlocked until their return. And on top of that there were many similar indications, on the basis of which they seized the innocent servant. He was arrested, and proceedings were started, but just a week later the arrested man came down with a fever and died unconscious in the hospital. Thus the case was closed, handed over to the will of God, and everyone—the judges, the authorities, and society at large—remained convinced that the crime had been committed by no one other than the dead servant. And after that the punishment began.
