Page 572 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

know how really good you are. You will not let them know,
as if on purpose to annoy me, who have put my faith in your
good heart long ago.’
The doctor, with a lifting up of his upper lip, as though
he were longing to bite, bowed stiffly in his chair. With the
utter absorption of a man to whom love comes late, not as
the most splendid of illusions, but like an enlightening and
priceless misfortune, the sight of that woman (of whom he
had been deprived for nearly a year) suggested ideas of ado-
ration, of kissing the hem of her robe. And this excess of
feeling translated itself naturally into an augmented grim-
ness of speech.
‘I am afraid of being overwhelmed by too much grati-
tude. However, these people interest me. I went out several
times to the Great Isabel light to look after old Giorgio.’
He did not tell Mrs. Gould that it was because he found
there, in her absence, the relief of an atmosphere of conge-
nial sentiment in old Giorgio’s austere admiration for the
‘English signora—the benefactress”; in black-eyed Linda’s
voluble, torrential, passionate affection for ‘our Dona Emil-
ia—that angel”; in the white-throated, fair Giselle’s adoring
upward turn of the eyes, which then glided towards him
with a sidelong, half-arch, half-candid glance, which made
the doctor exclaim to himself mentally, ‘If I weren’t what I
am, old and ugly, I would think the minx is making eyes
at me. And perhaps she is. I dare say she would make eyes
at anybody.’ Dr. Monygham said nothing of this to Mrs.
Gould, the providence of the Viola family, but reverted to
what he called ‘our great Nostromo.’

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