Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard
The doctor remained still, in a submissive, disappointed silence. At last he ventured, very low:
"And there is that Viola girl, Giselle. What are we to do? It 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 gray 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 motionless on his back. The whiteness of sheets and pillows gave a sombre and energetic relief to his bronzed face, to the big, 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 innocent. It is I alone. But no matter. For these things I would answer to no man or woman alive."
lie 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.
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