When the robber gets the match lighted, he sees her instantly. He coughs to wake her. As she remains motionless, he creeps over to her and carefully stretches out a finger towards her arm. “Do not touch me! do not touch me!” she screams, and can no longer sit still. The man draws back instantly. “Dear Donna Micaela, I only wanted to wake you.”
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.