Page 612 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

Linda had a good share of the Viola stoicism. She re-
solved to say nothing. But woman-like she put passion into
her stoicism. Giselle’s short answers, prompted by fearful
caution, drove her beside herself by their curtness that re-
sembled disdain. One day she flung herself upon the chair
in which her indolent sister was lying and impressed the
mark of her teeth at the base of the whitest neck in Sulaco.
Giselle cried out. But she had her share of the Viola hero-
ism. Ready to faint with terror, she only said, in a lazy voice,
‘Madre de Dios! Are you going to eat me alive, Linda?’ And
this outburst passed off leaving no trace upon the situation.
‘She knows nothing. She cannot know any thing,’ reflected
Giselle. ‘Perhaps it is not true. It cannot be true,’ Linda tried
to persuade herself.
But when she saw Captain Fidanza for the first time after
her meeting with the distracted Ramirez, the certitude of
her misfortune returned. She watched him from the door-
way go away to his boat, asking herself stoically, ‘Will they
meet to-night?’ She made up her mind not to leave the tower
for a second. When he had disappeared she came out and
sat down by her father.
The venerable Garibaldino felt, in his own words, ‘a
young man yet.’ In one way or another a good deal of talk
about Ramirez had reached him of late; and his contempt
and dislike of that man who obviously was not what his son
would have been, had made him restless. He slept very little
now; but for several nights past instead of reading—or only
sitting, with Mrs. Gould’s silver spectacles on his nose, be-
fore the open Bible, he had been prowling actively all about

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