Page 602 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

and the triumphant excitement of his mind, he struck out
for his freedom.
‘A treasure,’ he said. All was still. She did not understand.
‘A treasure. A treasure of silver to buy a gold crown for thy
brow.’
‘A treasure?’ she repeated in a faint voice, as if from the
depths of a dream. ‘What is it you say?’
She disengaged herself gently. He got up and looked
down at her, aware of her face, of her hair, her lips, the dim-
ples on her cheeks—seeing the fascination of her person in
the night of the gulf as if in the blaze of noonday. Her non-
chalant and seductive voice trembled with the excitement of
admiring awe and ungovernable curiosity.
‘A treasure of silver!’ she stammered out. Then pressed on
faster: ‘What? Where? How did you get it, Giovanni?’
He wrestled with the spell of captivity. It was as if striking
a heroic blow that he burst out—
‘Like a thief!’
The densest blackness of the Placid Gulf seemed to fall
upon his head. He could not see her now. She had vanished
into a long, obscure abysmal silence, whence her voice came
back to him after a time with a faint glimmer, which was
her face.
‘I love you! I love you!’
These words gave him an unwonted sense of freedom;
they cast a spell stronger than the accursed spell of the trea-
sure; they changed his weary subjection to that dead thing
into an exulting conviction of his power. He would cher-
ish her, he said, in a splendour as great as Dona Emilia’s.

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