Farewell, thou warm and sunny beam, How soon thy joys have faded, How soon thy joys have faded!]
While they were singing, Rocco once more tried to soften Pizarro's heart.
"Wilt thou not let the condemned prisoner live another day, your highness?" The request enraged Pizarro still more.
"Enough! Now have done with your whimpering. Take that youth of thine who is to help, and be about the job. Go! and let me hear no more." With that awful voice of revenge and cruelty in her ears, the unhappy Leonora followed Rocco to the dungeons, to dig her husband's grave.
Down in the very bowels of the earth, as it seemed to Leonora, was Florestan's dungeon. There he sat, manacled, despairing, with no ray of light to cheer him, and his thoughts occupied only with his visions of the beautiful home he had known, and of his wife, Leonora. When Leonora and Rocco entered the dungeon, Florestan had fallen, half sleeping, half dreaming upon the floor of his cell, and Leonora groped her way fearfully toward him, believing him to be dead.
"Oh, the awful chill of this vault," she sobbed. "Look! Is the man dead, already, Rocco?" Rocco went to look at the prisoner.
"No, he only sleeps. Come, that sunken well is near, and we have only to uncover it to have the job done. It is a hard thing for a youth like thee. Let us hurry." Rocco began searching for the disused well, into which he meant the body of Florestan to be dumped after the governor had killed him.
"Reach me that pickaxe," he directed Fidelio. "Are you afraid?"
"Well, make haste with the work, my boy, and it will warm you," Rocco urged. Then while he worked and urged Fidelio to do the same, she furtively watched the prisoner whose features she could not see in the gloom of the cell.
"If we do not hurry, the governor will be here. Haste, haste!" Rocco cried.
"Yes, yes," she answered, nearly fainting with grief and horror.
"Come, come, my boy. Help me lift this great stone which closes the mouth of the well." The despairing Fidelio lifted with all her poor strength.
"I'm lifting, I'm lifting," she sobbed, and she tugged and tugged, because she dared not shirk the work. Then the stone slowly rolled away. She was still uncertain as to the identity of the poor wretch who was so soon to be put out of existence. She peered at him continually.