Page 38 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

fumes floated upwards in sunshine, a strong smell of burnt
onions hung in the drowsy heat, enveloping the house; and
the eye lost itself in a vast flat expanse of grass to the west,
as if the plain between the Sierra overtopping Sulaco and
the coast range away there towards Esmeralda had been as
big as half the world.
Signora Teresa, after an impressive pause,
remonstrated—
‘Eh, Giorgio! Leave Cavour alone and take care of your-
self now we are lost in this country all alone with the two
children, because you cannot live under a king.’
And while she looked at him she would sometimes put
her hand hastily to her side with a short twitch of her fine
lips and a knitting of her black, straight eyebrows like a
flicker of angry pain or an angry thought on her handsome,
regular features.
It was pain; she suppressed the twinge. It had come to
her first a few years after they had left Italy to emigrate to
America and settle at last in Sulaco after wandering from
town to town, trying shopkeeping in a small way here and
there; and once an organized enterprise of fishing—in Mal-
donado—for Giorgio, like the great Garibaldi, had been a
sailor in his time.
Sometimes she had no patience with pain. For years its
gnawing had been part of the landscape embracing the glit-
ter of the harbour under the wooded spurs of the range; and
the sunshine itself was heavy and dull—heavy with pain—
not like the sunshine of her girlhood, in which middle-aged
Giorgio had wooed her gravely and passionately on the