Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard
to the very door by the good-natured engineer-in-chief, had re-entered his house, which he had been
made to leave almost at the very moment of his wife's
death. All was still. The lamp above was burning.
He nearly called out to her by name; and the thought
that no call from him would ever again evoke the answer of her voice made him drop heavily into the chair
with a loud groan, wrung out by the pain, as of a
keen blade piercing his breast.
The rest of the night he made no sound. The darkness turned to gray, and on the colorless, clear, glassy dawn the jagged sierra stood out flat and opaque, as if cut out of paper.
The enthusiastic and severe soul of Giorgio Viola, sailor, champion of oppressed humanity, enemy of kings, and, by the grace of Mrs. Gould, hotel-keeper of the Sulaco harbor, had descended into the open abyss of desolation among the shattered vestiges of his past. He remembered his wooing between two campaigns, a single short week in the season of gathering olives. Nothing approached the grave passion of that time but the deep, passionate sense of his bereavement. He discovered all the extent of his dependence upon the silenced voice of that woman. It was her voice that he missed. Abstracted, busy, lost in inward contemplation, he seldom looked at his wife in those later years. The thought of his girls was a matter of concern, not of consolation. It was her voice that he would miss. And he remembered the other child—the little boy who died at sea. Ah! a man would have been something to lean upon. And, alas! even Gian' Battista—he of whom and of Linda his
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