Page 522 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

keen blade piercing his breast.
The rest of the night he made no sound. The darkness
turned to grey, and on the colourless, clear, glassy dawn the
jagged sierra stood out flat and opaque, as if cut out of pa-
per.
The enthusiastic and severe soul of Giorgio Viola, sailor,
champion of oppressed humanity, enemy of kings, and, by
the grace of Mrs. Gould, hotel-keeper of the Sulaco harbour,
had descended into the open abyss of desolation amongst
the shattered vestiges of his past. He remembered his wooing
between two campaigns, a single short week in the season
of gathering olives. Nothing approached the grave passion
of that time but the deep, passionate sense of his bereave-
ment. He discovered all the extent of his dependence upon
the silenced voice of that woman. It was her voice that he
missed. Abstracted, busy, lost in inward contemplation, he
seldom looked at his wife in those later years. The thought
of his girls was a matter of concern, not of consolation. It
was her voice that he would miss. And he remembered
the other child—the little boy who died at sea. Ah! a man
would have been something to lean upon. And, alas! even
Gian’ Battista—he of whom, and of Linda, his wife had spo-
ken to him so anxiously before she dropped off into her last
sleep on earth, he on whom she had called aloud to save the
children, just before she died—even he was dead!
And the old man, bent forward, his head in his hand, sat
through the day in immobility and solitude. He never heard
the brazen roar of the bells in town. When it ceased the
earthenware filter in the corner of the kitchen kept on its

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