Page 76 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

a personal point of view, too, as one would study the varied
characters of men. He visited them as one goes with cu-
riosity to call upon remarkable persons. He visited mines
in Germany, in Spain, in Cornwall. Abandoned workings
had for him strong fascination. Their desolation appealed
to him like the sight of human misery, whose causes are
varied and profound. They might have been worthless, but
also they might have been misunderstood. His future wife
was the first, and perhaps the only person to detect this se-
cret mood which governed the profoundly sensible, almost
voiceless attitude of this man towards the world of material
things. And at once her delight in him, lingering with half-
open wings like those birds that cannot rise easily from a
flat level, found a pinnacle from which to soar up into the
skies.
They had become acquainted in Italy, where the future
Mrs. Gould was staying with an old and pale aunt who,
years before, had married a middle-aged, impoverished Ital-
ian marquis. She now mourned that man, who had known
how to give up his life to the independence and unity of his
country, who had known how to be as enthusiastic in his
generosity as the youngest of those who fell for that very
cause of which old Giorgio Viola was a drifting relic, as a
broken spar is suffered to float away disregarded after a na-
val victory. The Marchesa led a still, whispering existence,
nun-like in her black robes and a white band over the fore-
head, in a corner of the first floor of an ancient and ruinous
palace, whose big, empty halls downstairs sheltered under
their painted ceilings the harvests, the fowls, and even the