and please, just go!’
The letter shook in his hands; he didn’t want to open it in her presence: he felt like being alone with this letter. When Nastasya went out, he brought it quickly to his lips and kissed it; then he stared for a good long while at the address, at the small, sloping handwriting, so familiar and so dear, of his mother, who’d once taught him how to read and write. He delayed; he almost seemed scared. At last, he opened it: the letter was large and thick, double the standard weight; two large sheets were covered in a minuscule script.
‘My dearest Rodya,’ wrote his mother, ‘two months and more have already passed since I last conversed with you in writing, on account of which I have suffered and even lain awake at night, thinking. But I trust you will not blame me for this involuntary silence of mine. You know how much I love you; you are all Dunya and I have, you are everything to us, our hope, our comfort. How awful it was for me to hear that several months had already passed since you left university, being unable to support yourself,32 and that your lessons and other means of income had ceased! How was I to help with my pension of a hundred and twenty roubles a year? The fifteen roubles I sent you four months ago were borrowed, as you know yourself, on the strength of this same pension, from our local merchant Afanasy Ivanovich Vakhrushin. He’s a kind man and he was also a friend to your father. But having granted him the right to take the pension in my stead, I had to wait for the debt to be paid off, and only now has that come to pass, so I had nothing to send you all this time. But now, thank God, it seems I can send you some more, and, in fact, we even have cause to boast of our good fortune, as I hasten to inform you. First of all, dearest Rodya, your sister – fancy this! – has been living with me for a month and a half already, and never again shall we be parted. Her torments, God be praised, are behind her, but I’ll begin from the beginning, so that you may know how it all was and what we have kept from you until now. When you wrote to me, two months ago, that someone had told you that Dunya was suffering all manner of rudeness in the home of the Svidrigailovs and asked me for a precise explanation – well, what could I have replied? Had I written the whole truth, you might very well have dropped everything and come to see us, on foot if you had to, for I know both your character and your feelings, and I know that you would never allow your sister to be insulted. I was in despair myself, but what could I do? I didn’t know the whole truth myself at the time. The main difficulty was that Dunechka, on joining their household last year as governess, accepted an advance of a full one hundred roubles on condition of a monthly deduction from her salary, and so there was really no question of her leaving the post without having first repaid the debt. She took this sum (I can tell you everything now, my priceless Rodya) chiefly in order to send you sixty roubles, which you were in such need of at the time and which you did indeed receive from us last year. We deceived you when we wrote that it came out of Dunechka’s savings; that was not the case, and now I am telling you the whole truth, because now, by the will of God, everything has taken a sudden turn for the best, and because you should know how Dunya loves you and what a priceless heart she has. Mr Svidrigailov did indeed behave very rudely towards her at first, making all sorts of unseemly and mocking remarks to her at table . . . But I am loath to dwell on all these painful details, for fear of upsetting you needlessly, when all this is now behind us. In short, although Marfa Petrovna, Mr Svidrigailov’s wife, treated her kindly and honourably, as did all the household, life was very hard for Dunya, especially when Mr Svidrigailov, lapsing into his old army ways, succumbed to