“Stay! And were you shamming all along, afterwards, and in the hospital?”
“No, not at all. Next day, in the morning, before they took me to the hospital, I had a real attack and a more violent one than I’ve had for years. For two days I was quite unconscious.”
“All right, all right. Go on.”
“They laid me on the bed. I knew I’d be the other side of the partition, for whenever I was ill, Marfa Ignatyevna used to put me there, near them. She’s always been very kind to me, from my birth up. At night I moaned, but quietly. I kept expecting Dmitri Fyodorovitch to come.”
“Expecting him? To come to you?”
“Not to me. I expected him to come into the house, for I’d no doubt that he’d come that night, for being without me and getting no news, he’d be sure to come and climb over the fence, as he used to, and do something.”
“And if he hadn’t come?”
“Then nothing would have happened. I should never have brought myself to it without him.”
“All right, all right … speak more intelligibly, don’t hurry; above all, don’t leave anything out!”
“I expected him to kill Fyodor Pavlovitch. I thought that was certain, for I had prepared him for it … during the last few days. … He knew about the knocks, that was the chief thing. With his suspiciousness and the fury which had been growing in him all those days, he was bound to get into the house by means of those taps. That was inevitable, so I was expecting him.”