Page 384 - the-idiot

province, he came to the capital in search of pupils. By dint
of daily toil he earned enough to enable him to follow the
college courses, and at last to enter the university. But what
can one earn by teaching the children of Russian merchants
at ten copecks a lesson, especially with an invalid mother to
keep? Even her death did not much diminish the hardships
of the young man’s struggle for existence. Now this is the
question: how, in the name of justice, should our scion have
argued the case? Our readers will think, no doubt, that he
would say to himself: ‘P— showered benefits upon me all
my life; he spent tens of thousands of roubles to educate
me, to provide me with governesses, and to keep me un-
der treatment in Switzerland. Now I am a millionaire, and
P—‘s son, a noble young man who is not responsible for the
faults of his careless and forgetful father, is wearing himself
out giving ill-paid lessons. According to justice, all that was
done for me ought to have been done for him. The enor-
mous sums spent upon me were not really mine; they came
to me by an error of blind Fortune, when they ought to have
gone to P—‘s son. They should have gone to benefit him, not
me, in whom P— interested himself by a mere caprice, in-
stead of doing his duty as a father. If I wished to behave
nobly, justly, and with delicacy, I ought to bestow half my
fortune upon the son of my benefactor; but as economy is
my favourite virtue, and I know this is not a case in which
the law can intervene, I will not give up half my millions.
But it would be too openly vile, too flagrantly infamous, if
I did not at least restore to P—‘s son the tens of thousands
of roubles spent in curing my idiocy. This is simply a case