第135章

"I...do you know...I murdered someone."He said this and smiled with a face as white as chalk."Why is it he is smiling?" The thought flashed through my mind before Irealised anything else.I too turned pale.

"What are you saying?" I cried.

"You see," he said, with a pale smile, "how much it has cost me to say the first word.Now I have said it, I feel I've taken the first step and shall go on."For a long while I could not believe him, and I did not believe him at that time, but only after he had been to see me three days running and told me all about it.I thought he was mad, but ended by being convinced, to my great grief and amazement.His crime was a great and terrible one.

Fourteen years before, he had murdered the widow of a landowner, a wealthy and handsome young woman who had a house in our town.He fell passionately in love with her, declared his feeling 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 in the service, who was at that time away at the front, though she was expecting him soon to return.She refused his offer and begged him not to come and see her.After he had ceased to visit her, he took advantage of his knowledge of the house to enter at night through the garden by the roof, at great risk of discovery.But, as often happens, a crime committed with extraordinary audacity is more successful than others.

Entering the garret through the skylight, he went down the ladder, knowing that the door at the bottom of it was sometimes, through the negligence of the servants, left unlocked.He hoped to find it so, and so it was.He made his way in the dark to her bedroom, where a light was burning.As though on purpose, both her maids had gone off to a birthday party in the same street, without asking leave.The other servants slept in the servants' quarters or in the kitchen on the ground floor.His passion flamed up at the sight of her asleep, and then vindictive, jealous anger took possession of his heart, and like a drunken man, beside himself, he thrust a knife into her heart, so that she did not even cry out.Then with devilish and criminal cunning he contrived that suspicion should fall on the servants.He was so base as to take her purse, to open her chest with keys from under her pillow, and to take some things from it, doing it all as it might have been done by an ignorant servant, leaving valuable papers and taking only money.He took some of the larger gold things, but left smaller articles that were ten times as valuable.He took with him, too, some things for himself as remembrances, but of that later.Having done this awful deed.he returned by the way he had come.

Neither the next day, when the alarm was raised, nor at any time after in his life, did anyone dream of suspecting that he was the criminal.No one indeed knew of his love for her, for he was always reserved and silent and had no friend to whom he would have opened his heart.He was looked upon simply as an acquaintance, and not a very intimate one, of the murdered woman, as for the previous fortnight he had not even visited her.A serf of hers called Pyotr was at once suspected, and every circumstance confirmed the suspicion.The man knew- indeed his mistress did not conceal the fact- that having to send one of her serfs as a recruit she had decided to send him, as he had no relations and his conduct was unsatisfactory.People had heard him angrily threatening to murder her when he was drunk in a tavern.Two days before her death, he had run away, staying no one knew where in the town.The day after the murder, he was found on the road leading out of the town, dead drunk, with a knife in his pocket, and his right hand happened to be stained with blood.He declared that his nose had been bleeding, but no one believed him.The maids confessed that they had gone to a party and that the street door had been left open till they returned.And a number of similar details came to light, throwing suspicion on the innocent servant.

They arrested him, and he was tried for the murder; but a week after the arrest, the prisoner fell sick of a fever and died unconscious in the hospital.There the matter ended and the judges and the authorities and everyone in the town remained convinced that the crime had been committed by no one but the servant who had died in the hospital.And after that the punishment began.

My mysterious visitor, now my friend, told me that at first he was not in the least troubled by pangs of conscience.He was miserable a long time, but not for that reason; only from regret that he had killed the woman he loved, that she was no more, that in killing her he had killed his love, while the fire of passion was still in his veins.But of the innocent blood he had shed, of the murder of a fellow creature, he scarcely thought.The thought that his victim might have become the wife of another man was insupportable to him, and so, for a long time, he was convinced in his conscience that he could not have acted otherwise.