"You don't mean to say you really did not know?" he faltered mistrustfully, looking with a forced smile into his eyes.
Ivan still gazed at him, and seemed unable to speak.
Ach, Vanka's gone to Petersburg; I won't wait till he comes back,
suddenly echoed in his head.
"Do you know, I am afraid that you are a dream, a phantom sitting before me," he muttered.
"There's no phantom here, but only us two and one other.
No doubt he is here, that third, between us."
"Who is he?
Who is here?
What third person?" Ivan cried in alarm, looking about him, his eyes hastily searching in every corner.
"That third is God Himself- Providence. He is the third beside us now. Only don't look for Him, you won't find him."
"It's a lie that you killed him!" Ivan cried madly. "You are mad, or teasing me again!"
Smerdyakov, as before, watched him curiously, with no sign of fear.
He could still scarcely get over his incredulity; he still fancied that Ivan knew everything and was trying to "throw it all on him to his face."
"Wait a minute," he said at last in a weak voice, and suddenly bringing up his left leg from under the table, he began turning up his trouser leg.
He was wearing long white stockings and slippers.
Slowly he took off his garter and fumbled to the bottom of his stocking.
Ivan gazed at him, and suddenly shuddered in a paroxysm of terror.
"He's mad!" he cried, and rapidly jumping up, he drew back, so that he knocked his back against the wall and stood up against it, stiff and straight.
He looked with insane terror at Smerdyakov, who, entirely unaffected by his terror, continued fumbling in his stocking, as though he were making an effort to get hold of something with his fingers and pull it out.
At last he got hold of it and began pulling it out.
Ivan saw that it was a piece of paper, or perhaps a roll of papers.
Smerdyakov pulled it out and laid it on the table.
"Here," he said quietly.
"What is it?" asked Ivan, trembling.
"Kindly look at it," Smerdyakov answered, still in the same low tone.
Ivan stepped up to the table, took up the roll of paper and began unfolding it, but suddenly drew back his fingers, as though from contact with a loathsome reptile.
"Your hands keep twitching," observed Smerdyakov, and he deliberately unfolded the bundle himself.
Under the wrapper were three packets of hundred-rouble notes.
"They are all here, all the three thousand roubles; you need not count them.
Take them," Smerdyakov suggested to Ivan, nodding at the notes.
Ivan sank back in his chair.
He was as white as a handkerchief.
"You frightened me... with your stocking," he said, with a strange grin.
"Can you really not have known till now?" Smerdyakov asked once more.
"No, I did not know.
I kept thinking of Dmitri.
Brother, brother!
Ach!" He suddenly clutched his head in both hands. "Listen. Did you kill him alone?
With my brother's help or without?"
"It was only with you, with your help, I killed him, and Dmitri Fyodorovitch is quite innocent."
"All right, all right. Talk about me later.
Why do I keep on trembling? I can't speak properly."
"You were bold enough then. You said 'everything was lawful,' and how frightened you are now," Smerdyakov muttered in surprise. "Won't you have some lemonade? I'll ask for some at once.
It's very refreshing.
Only I must hide this first."
And again he motioned at the notes.
He was just going to get up and call at the door to Marya Kondratyevna to make some lemonade and bring it them, but, looking for something to cover up the notes that she might not see them, he first took out his handkerchief, and as it turned out to be very dirty, took up the big yellow book that Ivan had noticed at first lying on the table, and put it over the notes.
The book was The Sayings of the Holy Father Isaac the Syrian.
Ivan read it mechanically.