Page 156 - the-brothers-karamazov

pression of still greater gravity.
He was perhaps predisposed to mysticism. And the birth
of his deformed child, and its death, had, as though by
special design, been accompanied by another strange and
marvellous event, which, as he said later, had left a ‘stamp’
upon his soul. It happened that, on the very night after the
burial of his child, Marfa was awakened by the wail of a
new-born baby. She was frightened and waked her husband.
He listened and said he thought it was more like someone
groaning, ‘it might be a woman.’ He got up and dressed. It
was a rather warm night in May. As he went down the steps,
he distinctly heard groans coming from the garden. But the
gate from the yard into the garden was locked at night, and
there was no other way of entering it, for it was enclosed all
round by a strong, high fence. Going back into the house,
Grigory lighted a lantern, took the garden key, and taking
no notice of the hysterical fears of his wife, who was still
persuaded that she heard a child crying, and that it was
her own baby crying and calling for her, went into the gar-
den in silence. There he heard at once that the groans came
from the bath-house that stood near the garden gate, and
that they were the groans of a woman. Opening the door
of the bath-house, he saw a sight which petrified him. An
idiot girl, who wandered about the streets and was known
to the whole town by the nickname of Lizaveta Smerdyast-
chaya (Stinking Lizaveta), had got into the bath-house and
had just given birth to a child. She lay dying with the baby
beside her. She said nothing, for she had never been able to
speak. But her story needs a chapter to itself.

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