It was Giuliana who gave me the information. With a courage that was almost stupendous she looked down into his face, then up into mine, which I doubt not was as livid.
“You have killed him,” she whispered. “He is dead.”
He was dead and I had killed him! My lips moved.
“He would have killed me,” I answered in a strangled voice, and knew that what I said was a sort of lie to cloak the foulness of my deed.
Old Busio uttered a long, croaking wail, and went down on his knees beside the master he had served so long--the master who would never more need servant in this world.
It was upon the wings of that pitiful cry that the full understanding of the thing I had done was borne in upon my soul. I bowed my head, and took my face in my hands. I saw myself in that moment for what I was. I accounted myself wholly and irrevocably damned, Be God never so clement, surely here was something for which even His illimitable clemency could find no pardon.
I had come to Fifanti's house as a student of humanities and divinities; all that I had learnt there had been devilries culminating in this hour's work. And all through no fault of that poor, mean, ugly pedant, who indeed had been my victim--whom I had robbed of honour and of life.
Never man felt self-horror as I felt it then, self-loathing and self-contempt. And then, whilst the burden of it all, the horror of it all was full upon me, a soft hand touched my shoulder, and a soft, quivering voice murmured urgently in my ear:
I plucked away my hands, and showed her a countenance before which she shrank in fear.
“We?” I snarled at her. “We?” I repeated still more fiercely, and drove her back before me as if I had done her a bodily hurt.
O, I should have imagined--had I had time in which to imagine anything--that already I had descended to the very bottom of the pit of infamy. But it seems that one more downward step remained me; and that step I took. Not by act, nor yet by speech, but just by thought.
For without the manliness to take the whole blame of this great crime upon myself, I must in my soul and mind fling the burden of it upon her. Like Adam of old, I blamed the woman, and charged her in my thoughts with having tempted me. Charging her thus, I loathed her as the cause of all this sin that had engulfed me; loathed her in that moment as a thing unclean and hideous; loathed her with a completeness of loathing such as I had never experienced before for any fellow-creature.
