Page 78 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

‘That’s different. I’ve been away ten years. Dad never had
such a long spell; and it was more than thirty years ago.’
She was the first person to whom he opened his lips after
receiving the news of his father’s death.
‘It has killed him!’ he said.
He had walked straight out of town with the news,
straight out before him in the noonday sun on the white
road, and his feet had brought him face to face with her in
the hall of the ruined palazzo, a room magnificent and na-
ked, with here and there a long strip of damask, black with
damp and age, hanging down on a bare panel of the wall. It
was furnished with exactly one gilt armchair, with a broken
back, and an octagon columnar stand bearing a heavy mar-
ble vase ornamented with sculptured masks and garlands
of flowers, and cracked from top to bottom. Charles Gould
was dusty with the white dust of the road lying on his boots,
on his shoulders, on his cap with two peaks. Water dripped
from under it all over his face, and he grasped a thick oaken
cudgel in his bare right hand.
She went very pale under the roses of her big straw hat,
gloved, swinging a clear sunshade, caught just as she was
going out to meet him at the bottom of the hill, where three
poplars stand near the wall of a vineyard.
‘It has killed him!’ he repeated. ‘He ought to have had
many years yet. We are a long-lived family.’
She was too startled to say anything; he was contemplat-
ing with a penetrating and motionless stare the cracked
marble urn as though he had resolved to fix its shape for
ever in his memory. It was only when, turning suddenly