She's disgraced me enough . . ."
"Disgraced you?
How so?"
"As if he doesn't know!
She ran away with you 'from the foot of the altar,' you just said it yourself."
"But you don't believe that she ..."
"Didn't she disgrace me in Moscow, with that officer, that Zemtiuzhnikov?
I know for sure she did, and that's after she set the date for the wedding herself."
"It can't be!" cried the prince.
"I know for sure," Rogozhin said with conviction.
"What, she's not like that, or something?
There's no point, brother, in saying she's not like that.
It's pure nonsense.
With you she wouldn't be like that, and might be horrified at such a thing herself, but with me that's just what she's like.
So it is.
She looks at me like the worst scum.
The thing with Keller, that officer, the one who boxes, I know for sure, she made it up just to laugh at me . . . But you don't know yet what she pulled on me in Moscow!
And the money, the money I spent ..."
"But . . . how can you marry her now! . . .
How will it be afterwards?" the prince asked in horror.
Rogozhin gave the prince a heavy and terrible look and made no reply.
"For five days now I haven't gone to her," he went on, after a moment's silence. "I keep being afraid she'll drive me away.
'I'm still my own mistress,' she says, 'if I like, I'll drive you away for good and go abroad' (it was she who told me she'd go abroad," he observed as if in parenthesis and looked somehow peculiarly into the prince's eyes); "sometimes, it's true, she's just scaring me, she keeps laughing at me for some reason.
But at other times she really scowls, pouts, doesn't say a word; and that's what I'm afraid of.
The other day I thought: I shouldn't come empty-handed—but I just made her laugh and then she even got angry.
She gave her maid Katka such a shawl of mine that, even if she lived in luxury before, she maybe never saw the like.
And I can't make a peep about the time of the wedding.
What kind of bridegroom am I, if I'm afraid even to come for a visit?
So I sit here, and when I can't stand it any longer, I go on the sly and slink past her house or hide around the corner.
The other day I stood watch by her gates almost till daylight—I imagined something then.
And she must have spied me through the window: 'What would you do to me,' she says, 'if you saw me deceive you?'
I couldn't stand it and said, 'You know what.'"
"What does she know?"
"How should I know!" Rogozhin laughed spitefully.
"In Moscow then I couldn't catch her with anybody, though I tried a long time.
I confronted her once and said: 'You promised to marry me, you're entering an honest family, and do you know what you are now?
Here's what you are!' " "You said it to her?"
"Yes."
"Well?"
" 'I might not even take you as my lackey now,' she says, 'much less be your wife.'
'And I,' I say, 'am not leaving like that, once and for all.'
'And I,' she says, 'will now call Keller and tell him to throw you out the gate.'
I fell on her and beat her black and blue."
"It can't be!" cried the prince.
"I tell you: it happened," Rogozhin confirmed quietly, but with flashing eyes.
"For exactly a day and a half I didn't sleep, didn't eat, didn't drink, didn't leave her room, stood on my knees before her:
'I'll die,' I said, 'but I won't leave until you forgive me, and if you order me taken away, I'll drown myself; because what will I be now without you?'
She was like a crazy woman all that day, she wept, she wanted to stab me with a knife, she abused me.
She called Zalyozhev, Keller, Zemtiuzhnikov, and everybody, pointed at me, disgraced me.
'Gentlemen, let's all go to the theater tonight, let him stay here, since he doesn't want to leave, I'm not tied to him.