Page 521 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

felt a box of matches under his fingers. He fancied he had
heard a quiet sigh. He listened for a moment, holding his
breath; then, with trembling hands, tried to strike a light.
The tiny piece of wood flamed up quite blindingly at the
end of his fingers, raised above his blinking eyes. A concen-
trated glare fell upon the leonine white head of old Giorgio
against the black fire-place—showed him leaning forward
in a chair in staring immobility, surrounded, overhung, by
great masses of shadow, his legs crossed, his cheek in his
hand, an empty pipe in the corner of his mouth. It seemed
hours before he attempted to turn his face; at the very mo-
ment the match went out, and he disappeared, overwhelmed
by the shadows, as if the walls and roof of the desolate house
had collapsed upon his white head in ghostly silence.
Nostromo heard him stir and utter dispassionately the
words—
‘It may have been a vision.’
‘No,’ he said, softly. ‘It is no vision, old man.’
A strong chest voice asked in the dark—
‘Is that you I hear, Giovann’ Battista?’
‘Si, viejo. Steady. Not so loud.’
After his release by Sotillo, Giorgio Viola, attended to the
very door by the good-natured engineer-in-chief, had reen-
tered his house, which he had been made to leave almost at
the very moment of his wife’s death. All was still. The lamp
above was burning. He nearly called out to her by name;
and the thought that no call from him would ever again
evoke the answer of her voice, made him drop heavily into
the chair with a loud groan, wrung out by the pain as of a

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