and so on up till midnight and even after midnight. And if Agrafena Alexandrovna doesn’t come (for very likely she does not mean to come at all) then he will be at me again tomorrow morning, ‘Why hasn’t she come? When will she come?’—as though I were to blame for it. On the other side it’s no better. As soon as it gets dark, or even before, your brother will appear with his gun in his hands: ‘Look out, you rogue, you soup-maker. If you miss her and don’t let me know she’s been—I’ll kill you before anyone.’ When the night’s over, in the morning, he, too, like Fyodor Pavlovitch, begins worrying me to death. ‘Why hasn’t she come? Will she come soon?’ And he, too, thinks me to blame because his lady hasn’t come. And every day and every hour they get angrier and angrier, so that I sometimes think I shall kill myself in a fright. I can’t depend upon them, sir.”
“And why have you meddled? Why did you begin to spy for Dmitri Fyodorovitch?” said Ivan irritably.
“How could I help meddling? Though, indeed, I haven’t meddled at all, if you want to know the truth of the matter. I kept quiet from the very beginning, not daring to answer; but he pitched on me to be his servant. He has had only one thing to say since: ‘I’ll kill you, you scoundrel, if you miss her.’ I feel certain, sir, that I shall have a long fit tomorrow.”
“What do you mean by ‘a long fit’?”
“A long fit, lasting a long time—several hours, or perhaps a day or two. Once it went on for three days. I fell from the garret that time. The struggling ceased and then began again, and for three days I couldn’t come back to my senses. Fyodor Pavlovitch sent for Herzenstube, the doctor here, and he put ice on my head and tried another remedy, too. … I might have died.”
“But they say one can’t tell with epilepsy when a fit is coming. What makes you say you will have one tomorrow?” Ivan inquired, with a peculiar, irritable curiosity.