Page 599 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

breathed her ambient seduction in the tumultuous heaving
of his breast. Before leaving the harbour he had thrown off
the store clothing of Captain Fidanza, for greater ease in the
long pull out to the islands. He stood before her in the red
sash and check shirt as he used to appear on the Compa-
ny’s wharf—a Mediterranean sailor come ashore to try his
luck in Costaguana. The dusk of purple and red enveloped
him, too—close, soft, profound, as no more than fifty yards
from that spot it had gathered evening after evening about
the self-destructive passion of Don Martin Decoud’s utter
scepticism, flaming up to death in solitude.
‘You have got to hear,’ he began at last, with perfect self-
control. ‘I shall say no word of love to your sister, to whom
I am betrothed from this evening, because it is you that I
love. It is you!’ …
The dusk let him see yet the tender and voluptuous smile
that came instinctively upon her lips shaped for love and
kisses, freeze hard in the drawn, haggard lines of terror. He
could not restrain himself any longer. While she shrank
from his approach, her arms went out to him, abandoned
and regal in the dignity of her languid surrender. He held
her head in his two hands, and showered rapid kisses upon
the upturned face that gleamed in the purple dusk. Master-
ful and tender, he was entering slowly upon the fulness of
his possession. And he perceived that she was crying. Then
the incomparable Capataz, the man of careless loves, be-
came gentle and caressing, like a woman to the grief of a
child. He murmured to her fondly. He sat down by her and
nursed her fair head on his breast. He called her his star and

Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard