There she sits and shakes with terror, and he hears how she is sobbing. “Dear signora, dear signora!” he says. “Light a candle that I can see where you are,” she cries. He scratches a new match, lifts the shade and chimney off the lamp, and lights it as neatly as a servant. He places himself again by the door, as far from her as possible. Suddenly he goes out on the balcony with his gun. “Now the signora cannot be afraid any longer.”
But when she does not cease weeping he says: “Signora, I am Passafiore; I come with a message to you from Falco. He no longer wishes to destroy your railway.”
“Have you come to jest with me?” she says.
Then the man answers, almost weeping: “Would God that it were a jest! God! that Falco were the man he has been!”
He tells her how Falco went up Mongibello and crowned its top. But the mountain had not liked it; it had now overthrown Falco. A single little piece of pumice-stone from Mongibello had been enough to overthrow him.
“It is all over with Falco,” says Passafiore. “He goes about in the quarry, and waits to fall ill. For a week he has neither slept nor eaten. He is not sick yet, but the wound in his hand does not heal either. He thinks that he has the poison in his body. ‘Soon I shall be a mad dog,’ he says. No wine nor food tempt him. He takes no pleasure in my praising his deeds. ‘What is that to talk about?’ he says. ‘I shall end my life like a mad dog.’”
Donna Micaela looked sharply at Passafiore. “What do you wish me to do about it? You cannot mean that I am to go down into the quarry to Falco Falcone?”
Passafiore looks down and dares not answer anything.
She explains to him what that same Falco has made her suffer. He has frightened away her workmen. He has set himself against her dearest wish.
All of a sudden Passafiore falls on his knees. He dares not go a step nearer to her than he is, but he falls on his knees.
He implores her to understand the importance of it. She does not know, she does not understand who Falco is. Falco is a great man. Ever since Passafiore was a little child he has heard of him. All his life long he has longed to come out to the quarry and live with him. All his cousins went to Falco; his whole race were with him. But the priest had set his heart that Passafiore should not go. He apprenticed him to a tailor; only think, to a tailor! He talked to him, and said that he should not go. It was such a terrible sin to live like Falco. Passafiore had also struggled against it for many years for Don Matteo’s sake. But at last he had not been able to resist; he had gone to the quarry. And now he has not been with Falco more than a year before the latter is quite destroyed. It is as if the sun had gone out in the sky. His whole life is ruined.