“You are too good. I do not know how to properly express my gratitude. Do not fear you are not understood. I both understand and admire you. I feel myself greatly honored by your offer, and if it remained with me—but let me assure you I will do all in my power. Do not despair.”
He rose and rolled up the pardon, looking at it with ill-concealed bitterness as he towered over the small person of the Direttore, who approached with extended hand to express his thanks. He asked permission to return to his cell and unroll his bed. Everything was granted him. As he threw himself on his comfortless cot he groaned in agony. Paola was not his sister, but his fiancée. For her he had soiled his honor, compromised his future, and broken with his family. She alone remained to him. She had feigned to be his sister in order that she might write to him. And must he lose her now? That other possessed a splendid position, was good and noble. Had he a right to snatch such a brilliant future from Paola? He had sacrificed to her his honor and well-nigh two years of liberty, but she had not asked the sacrifice of him, and was it right that in exchange he should ask for her whole life? In any case she must decide for herself, and at the bottom of his heart he felt secure of her—but it made him wretched to think he had deceived and was still deceiving so noble and excellent a man.
“I will tell him everything, come what may,” he decided after an hour of anxious thought, then uncertainty took possession of him once more. “No, I will say nothing. After all he has no right to know, and I will write when I reach home. After all he did it only because he wanted to on his own account. His cat-like eyes fill me with distrust; perhaps he would do me some harm.”
Later he grew ashamed of his distrust, and cried out loud in his lonely cell, “Am I indeed vile?”
Approaching the grating, he stood gazing at the white, diaphanous clouds piled up on the horizon; they had assumed the shape and coloring of an alabaster staircase whose luminous steps disappeared into the unsealed heights. Cassio, as he looked, was overwhelmed with an intense homesickness, and suddenly he felt good and pure, as if he had indeed mounted to the last step of those silver stairs and caught from that height a glimpse of his beloved native land. He murmured:
“Had it not been for him I should have languished here for yet a weary time. I might have died or committed some madness. I will tell everything, let the result be what it may.”
He waited anxiously the hour when it would be possible for him to see the Direttore, then addressed him in clear tones:
“See, Signore Direttore, I have been thinking of what you were very good enough to tell me this morning.”
“Very well,” answered the other, though he feared for the result.
“Before entering upon the subject, please allow me to tell you in a few words of the strange circumstances of my condemnation for,” he added, smiling sadly, “I am bold enough to believe you do not think me guilty.”