"You haven't loaded it properly.
Never mind, you have another charge there.
Get it ready, I'll wait."
He stood facing her, two paces away, waiting and gazing at her with wild determination, with feverishly passionate, stubborn, set eyes.
Dounia saw that he would sooner die than let her go. "And... now, of course she would kill him, at two paces!"
Suddenly she flung away the revolver.
"She's dropped it!" said Svidrigailov with surprise, and he drew a deep breath.
A weight seemed to have rolled from his heart--perhaps not only the fear of death; indeed he may scarcely have felt it at that moment.
It was the deliverance from another feeling, darker and more bitter, which he could not himself have defined.
He went to Dounia and gently put his arm round her waist.
She did not resist, but, trembling like a leaf, looked at him with suppliant eyes.
He tried to say something, but his lips moved without being able to utter a sound.
"Let me go," Dounia implored.
Svidrigailov shuddered. Her voice now was quite different.
"Then you don't love me?" he asked softly.
Dounia shook her head.
"And... and you can't?
Never?" he whispered in despair.
"Never!"
There followed a moment of terrible, dumb struggle in the heart of Svidrigailov.
He looked at her with an indescribable gaze.
Suddenly he withdrew his arm, turned quickly to the window and stood facing it.
Another moment passed.
"Here's the key." He took it out of the left pocket of his coat and laid it on the table behind him, without turning or looking at Dounia. "Take it! Make haste!"
He looked stubbornly out of the window.
Dounia went up to the table to take the key.
"Make haste!
Make haste!" repeated Svidrigailov, still without turning or moving.
But there seemed a terrible significance in the tone of that "make haste."
Dounia understood it, snatched up the key, flew to the door, unlocked it quickly and rushed out of the room.
A minute later, beside herself, she ran out on to the canal bank in the direction of X. Bridge.
Svidrigailov remained three minutes standing at the window. At last he slowly turned, looked about him and passed his hand over his forehead.
A strange smile contorted his face, a pitiful, sad, weak smile, a smile of despair.
The blood, which was already getting dry, smeared his hand. He looked angrily at it, then wetted a towel and washed his temple.
The revolver which Dounia had flung away lay near the door and suddenly caught his eye.
He picked it up and examined it.
It was a little pocket three-barrel revolver of old-fashioned construction. There were still two charges and one capsule left in it.
It could be fired again.
He thought a little, put the revolver in his pocket, took his hat and went out.
CHAPTER VI
He spent that evening till ten o'clock going from one low haunt to another.
Katia too turned up and sang another gutter song, how a certain "villain and tyrant,"
"began kissing Katia."
Svidrigailov treated Katia and the organ-grinder and some singers and the waiters and two little clerks.
He was particularly drawn to these clerks by the fact that they both had crooked noses, one bent to the left and the other to the right.
They took him finally to a pleasure garden, where he paid for their entrance.
There was one lanky three-year-old pine-tree and three bushes in the garden, besides a "Vauxhall," which was in reality a drinking-bar where tea too was served, and there were a few green tables and chairs standing round it.
A chorus of wretched singers and a drunken but exceedingly depressed German clown from Munich with a red nose entertained the public.
The clerks quarrelled with some other clerks and a fight seemed imminent.
Svidrigailov was chosen to decide the dispute.