I shall kill myself, but first of all that cur.
I shall tear three thousand from him and fling it to you.
Though I've been a scoundrel to you, I am not a thief!
You can expect three thousand.
The cur keeps it under his mattress, in pink ribbon.
I am not a thief, but I'll murder my thief.
Katya, don't look disdainful. Dmitri is not a thief! but a murderer!
He has murdered his father and ruined himself to hold his ground, rather than endure your pride.
And he doesn't love you.
P.P.S.- I kiss your feet, farewel!
P.P.P.S.- Katya, pray to God that someone'll give me the money.
Then I shall not be steeped in gore, and if no one does- I shall!
Kill me!
Your slave and enemy,
D. KARAMAZOV
When Ivan read this "document" he was convinced.
So then it was his brother, not Smerdyakov.
And if not Smerdyakov, then not he, Ivan.
This letter at once assumed in his eyes the aspect of a logical proof.
There could be no longer the slightest doubt of Mitya's guilt.
The suspicion never occurred to Ivan, by the way, that Mitya might have committed the murder in conjunction with Smerdyakov, and, indeed, such a theory did not fit in with the facts.
Ivan was completely reassured.
The next morning he only thought of Smerdyakov and his gibes with contempt.
A few days later he positively wondered how he could have been so horribly distressed at his suspicions.
He resolved to dismiss him with contempt and forget him.
So passed a month.
He made no further inquiry about Smerdyakov, but twice he happened to hear that he was very ill and out of his mind.
"He'll end in madness," the young doctor Varvinsky observed about him, and Ivan remembered this.
During the last week of that month Ivan himself began to feel very ill.
He went to consult the Moscow doctor who had been sent for by Katerina Ivanovna just before the trial.
And just at that time his relations with Katerina Ivanovna became acutely strained.
They were like two enemies in love with one another.
Katerina Ivanovna's "returns" to Mitya, that is, her brief but violent revulsions of feeling in his favour, drove Ivan to perfect frenzy.
Strange to say, until that last scene described above, when Alyosha came from Mitya to Katerina Ivanovna, Ivan had never once, during that month, heard her express a doubt of Mitya's guilt, in spite of those "returns" that were so hateful to him.
It is remarkable, too, that while he felt that he hated Mitya more and more every day, he realised that it was not on account of Katya's "returns" that he hated him, but just because he was the murderer of his father.
He was conscious of this and fully recognised it to himself
Nevertheless, he went to see Mitya ten days before the trial and proposed to him a plan of escape- a plan he had obviously thought over a long time.
He was partly impelled to do this by a sore place still left in his heart from a phrase of Smerdyakov's, that it was to his, Ivan's, advantage that his brother should be convicted, as that would increase his inheritance and Alyosha's from forty to sixty thousand roubles.
He determined to sacrifice thirty thousand on arranging Mitya's escape.
On his return from seeing him, he was very mournful and dispirited; he suddenly began to feel that he was anxious for Mitya's escape, not only to heal that sore place by sacrificing thirty thousand, but for another reason.
"Is it because I am as much a murderer at heart?" he asked himself.
Something very deep down seemed burning and rankling in his soul.
His pride above all suffered cruelly all that month. But of that later.... When, after his conversation with Alyosha, Ivan suddenly decided with his hand on the bell of his lodging to go to Smerdyakov, he obeyed a sudden and peculiar impulse of indignation.
He suddenly remembered how Katerina Ivanovna had only just cried out to him in Alyosha's presence:
"It was you, you, persuaded me of his" (that is, Mitya's) "guilt!"
Ivan was thunderstruck when he recalled it. He had never once tried to persuade her that Mitya was the murderer; on the contrary, he had suspected himself in her presence, that time when he came back from Smerdyakov.
It was she, she, who had produced that "document" and proved his brother's guilt.
And now she suddenly exclaimed:
"I've been at Smerdyakov's myself!"
When had she been there?