…or – or the old man had been laughing at him! 

Alas! That latter notion was the only correct one. Later, long afterwards, when the entire catastrophe had been enacted, old Samsonov himself would admit, laughing, that he had indeed exposed the ‘captain’ to ridicule. This was a malicious, cold and mocking individual, who was, moreover, possessed of certain morbid antipathies. It may have been the captain’s look of ecstasy, or the foolish conviction of this prodigal and waster’ that he, Samsonov, might fall for such rubbish as his ‘plan’, or it may have been an emotion of jealousy on account of Grushenka, in whose name ‘that terror’ had come to him with some kind of rubbish for money – I do not know exactly what it was that prompted the old man at the time, but at the moment Mitya stood before him, feeling his legs turn to jelly, and inanely exclaiming that he was lost – at that moment the old man looked at him with infinite malice and took it into his head to make fun of him. When Mitya had left, Kuzma Kuzmich, pale with malice, turned to his son and instructed him to see to it that in future ‘that ragamuffin’ never set foot in his house again nor even his yard, or he would….

He did not actually say what he threatened to do, but even his son who had frequently witnessed his wrath, stared with fear. For a whole hour thereafter the old man positively shook all over with malice, and when evening came he fell ill and sent for the ‘leech’.

Dostoevsky ‘The Brother Karamazov’ translated by David McDuff