Page 621 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

looks as though father and sister had——‘
Mrs. Gould admitted that she felt in duty bound to do
her best for these girls.
‘I have a volante here,’ the doctor said. ‘If you don’t mind
getting into that——‘
He waited, all impatience, till Mrs. Gould reappeared,
having thrown over her dress a grey cloak with a deep
hood.
It was thus that, cloaked and monastically hooded over
her evening costume, this woman, full of endurance and
compassion, stood by the side of the bed on which the
splendid Capataz de Cargadores lay stretched out motion-
less on his back. The whiteness of sheets and pillows gave a
sombre and energetic relief to his bronzed. face, to the dark,
nervous hands, so good on a tiller, upon a bridle and on a
trigger, lying open and idle upon a white coverlet.
‘She is innocent,’ the Capataz was saying in a deep and
level voice, as though afraid that a louder word would break
the slender hold his spirit still kept upon his body. ‘She is in-
nocent. It is I alone. But no matter. For these things I would
answer to no man or woman alive.’
He paused. Mrs. Gould’s face, very white within the
shadow of the hood, bent over him with an invincible and
dreary sadness. And the low sobs of Giselle Viola, kneeling
at the end of the bed, her gold hair with coppery gleams
loose and scattered over the Capataz’s feet, hardly troubled
the silence of the room.
‘Ha! Old Giorgio—the guardian of thine honour! Fancy
the Vecchio coming upon me so light of foot, so steady of

0 Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard