“She cannot upset me.”
Signora Teresa found her voice.
“It is what I say. You have no heart--and you have no conscience, Gian’
Battista--”
They heard him wheel his horse away from the shutters. The party he led
were babbling excitedly in Italian and Spanish, inciting each other to
the pursuit. He put himself at their head, crying, “Avanti!”
“He has not stopped very long with us. There is no praise from strangers
to be got here,” Signora Teresa said tragically. “Avanti! Yes! That is
all he cares for. To be first somewhere--somehow--to be first with these
English. They will be showing him to everybody. ‘This is our Nostromo!’”
She laughed ominously. “What a name! What is that? Nostromo? He would
take a name that is properly no word from them.”
Meantime Giorgio, with tranquil movements, had been unfastening the
door; the flood of light fell on Signora Teresa, with her two girls
gathered to her side, a picturesque woman in a pose of maternal
exaltation. Behind her the wall was dazzlingly white, and the crude
colours of the Garibaldi lithograph paled in the sunshine.
Old Viola, at the door, moved his arm upwards as if referring all his
quick, fleeting thoughts to the picture of his old chief on the wall.
Even when he was cooking for the “Signori Inglesi”--the engineers (he
was a famous cook, though the kitchen was a dark place)--he was, as
it were, under the eye of the great man who had led him in a glorious
struggle where, under the walls of Gaeta, tyranny would have expired
for ever had it not been for that accursed Piedmontese race of kings
and ministers. When sometimes a frying-pan caught fire during a delicate
operation with some shredded onions, and the old man was seen backing
out of the doorway, swearing and coughing violently in an acrid cloud
of smoke, the name of Cavour--the arch intriguer sold to kings and
tyrants--could be heard involved in imprecations against the China
girls, cooking in general, and the brute of a country where he was
reduced to live for the love of liberty that traitor had strangled.
Then Signora Teresa, all in black, issuing from another door, advanced,
portly and anxious, inclining her fine, black-browed head, opening her
arms, and crying in a profound tone--
“Giorgio! thou passionate man! Misericordia Divina! In the sun like
this! He will make himself ill.”
At her feet the hens made off in all directions, with immense strides;
if there were any engineers from up the line staying in Sulaco, a young
English face or two would appear at the billiard-room occupying one end
of the house; but at the other end, in the cafe, Luis, the mulatto, took
good care not to show himself. The Indian girls, with hair like flowing
black manes, and dressed only in a shift and short petticoat, stared
dully from under the square-cut fringes on their foreheads; the noisy
frizzling of fat had stopped, the fumes floated upwards in sunshine,
a strong smell of burnt onions hung in the drowsy heat, enveloping the
house; and the eye lost itself in a vast flat expanse of grass to the
west, as if the plain between the Sierra overtopping Sulaco and the
coast range away there towards Esmeralda had been as big as half the
world.