Page 285 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

cheek. ‘And why she wants to see you I cannot imagine.’
‘She has been like that before,’ suggested Nostromo, look-
ing away.
‘Well, Capataz, I can assure you she will never be like
that again,’ snarled Dr. Monygham. ‘You may go to her or
stay away. There is very little to be got from talking to the
dying. But she told Dona Emilia in my hearing that she has
been like a mother to you ever since you first set foot ashore
here.’
‘Si! And she never had a good word to say for me to any-
body. It is more as if she could not forgive me for being alive,
and such a man, too, as she would have liked her son to be.’
‘Maybe!’ exclaimed a mournful deep voice near them.
‘Women have their own ways of tormenting themselves.’
Giorgio Viola had come out of the house. He threw a heavy
black shadow in the torchlight, and the glare fell on his big
face, on the great bushy head of white hair. He motioned the
Capataz indoors with his extended arm.
Dr. Monygham, after busying himself with a little me-
dicament box of polished wood on the seat of the landau,
turned to old Giorgio and thrust into his big, trembling
hand one of the glass-stoppered bottles out of the case.
‘Give her a spoonful of this now and then, in water,’ he
said. ‘It will make her easier.’
‘And there is nothing more for her?’ asked the old man,
patiently.
‘No. Not on earth,’ said the doctor, with his back to him,
clicking the lock of the medicine case.
Nostromo slowly crossed the large kitchen, all dark but

Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard