Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard
"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 contemplating with a penetrating and motionless stare the cracked marble urn as though he had resolved to fix its shape forever in his memory. It was only when, turning suddenly to her, he blurted out twice, "I've come to you— I've come straight to you—" without being able to finish his phrase, that the great pitifulness of that lonely and tormented death in Costaguana came to her with the full force of its misery. He caught hold of her hand, raised it to his lips, and at that she dropped her parasol to pat him on the cheek, murmured "Poor boy," and began to dry her eyes under the downward curve of her hat-brim, very small in her simple, white frock, almost like a lost child crying in the degraded grandeur of the noble hall, while he stood by her, again perfectly motionless in the contemplation of the marble urn.
Afterwards they went out for a long walk, which was silent till he exclaimed, suddenly:
"Yes. But if he had only grappled with it in a proper way!"
And then they stopped. Everywhere there were long shadows lying on the hills, on the roads, on the enclosed fields of olive-trees; the shadows of poplars, of wide chestnuts, of farm-buildings, of stone walls; and in mid-air the sound of a bell, thin and alert, was like the throbbing pulse of the sunset glow. Her lips were slightly parted as though in surprise he should not be looking at her with his usual expression.
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