"Accomplice?"
"Exactly. Beatrice Herz strangely helped me to kill Lilian," added Lucio, with a sneer in the gloom.
"Is she here in Venice?"
"Of course! How could my accomplice be elsewhere? Where I go, she goes; where she goes, I follow. We are inseparable, dearest Victor. Oh, it is touching!"
And a stridulous laugh of irony escaped him.
"Did she know all?" asked Vittorio in a low voice.
"From the first moment," resumed Lucio in a voice become dry and hard. "When I separated myself from Lilian, enamoured as I was, wildly in love, in fact, I had a mad hope, I believed in a generous madness, and told Beatrice Herz everything. Was she not at bottom a woman of heart? Had she not suffered atrociously for love? Had she not a very tender attachment for me? I believed in the superiority of her mind and her magnanimity; I asked for an heroic deed. I had loved and served her for ten years; I had given her my youth, and consumed my most beautiful hours and strength for her; I asked her to dismiss me as a good, loving, and true servant, who had accomplished his cycle of servitude, and at last wished to be free. Humbly and ardently I begged her, with tears in my eyes, turning to her as to a sacred image, to perform the miracle, to give me liberty, to allow me yet to live some years of good and happiness—the few that remained to me for love."
"Well?" asked Vittorio, with sad curiosity.
"I believed Beatrice Herz to be a heroine, capable of a great proof of altruism; I believed her capable of a sentimental miracle. On the contrary, she is a mean little woman, a wretched, egotistical creature, a puppet without thought or heart, in whom my love and my illusion had placed something of the sublime. She is nothing. She refused precisely; she was as arid as pumice-stone; she had not a moment's pity or a single trace of emotion. She sees nothing but herself and her social interests. Instead of giving me my freedom she abandoned herself to such scenes of jealousy, now ferocious, now trivial, from which I escaped each time worn-out and nauseated."
"Had you never the strength to break with her?"