Page 605 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

The heroic Garibaldino accepted Nostromo’s abrupt de-
parture with a sagacious indulgence. He remembered his
own feelings, and exhibited a masculine penetration of the
true state of the case.
‘Va bene. Let him go. Ha! ha! No matter how fair the
woman, it galls a little. Liberty, liberty. There’s more than
one kind! He has said the great word, and son Gian’ Battista
is not tame.’ He seemed to be instructing the motionless
and scared Giselle. … ‘A man should not be tame,’ he added,
dogmatically out of the doorway. Her stillness and silence
seemed to displease him. ‘Do not give way to the envious-
ness of your sister’s lot,’ he admonished her, very grave, in
his deep voice.
Presently he had to come to the door again to call in his
younger daughter. It was late. He shouted her name three
times before she even moved her head. Left alone, she had
become the helpless prey of astonishment. She walked into
the bedroom she shared with Linda like a person profound-
ly asleep. That aspect was so marked that even old Giorgio,
spectacled, raising his eyes from the Bible, shook his head
as she shut the door behind her.
She walked right across the room without looking at
anything, and sat down at once by the open window. Linda,
stealing down from the tower in the exuberance of her hap-
piness, found her with a lighted candle at her back, facing
the black night full of sighing gusts of wind and the sound
of distant showers—a true night of the gulf, too dense for
the eye of God and the wiles of the devil. She did not turn
her head at the opening of the door.

0 Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard