“You saw my schooner pass in not two hours ago? Do you know why I am
here before, so to speak, my anchor has fairly bitten into the ground of
this port of Sulaco?”
“You are welcome like a son,” the old man declared, quietly, staring
away upon the sea.
“Ah! thy son. I know. I am what thy son would have been. It is well,
viejo. It is a very good welcome. Listen, I have come to ask you
for----”
A sudden dread came upon the fearless and incorruptible Nostromo. He
dared not utter the name in his mind. The slight pause only imparted a
marked weight and solemnity to the changed end of the phrase.
“For my wife!” . . . His heart was beating fast. “It is time you----”
The Garibaldino arrested him with an extended arm. “That was left for
you to judge.”
He got up slowly. His beard, unclipped since Teresa’s death, thick,
snow-white, covered his powerful chest. He turned his head to the door,
and called out in his strong voice--
“Linda.”
Her answer came sharp and faint from within; and the appalled Nostromo
stood up, too, but remained mute, gazing at the door. He was afraid. He
was not afraid of being refused the girl he loved--no mere refusal could
stand between him and a woman he desired--but the shining spectre of
the treasure rose before him, claiming his allegiance in a silence that
could not be gainsaid. He was afraid, because, neither dead nor
alive, like the Gringos on Azuera, he belonged body and soul to the
unlawfulness of his audacity. He was afraid of being forbidden the
island. He was afraid, and said nothing.
Seeing the two men standing up side by side to await her, Linda stopped
in the doorway. Nothing could alter the passionate dead whiteness of her
face; but her black eyes seemed to catch and concentrate all the light
of the low sun in a flaming spark within the black depths, covered at
once by the slow descent of heavy eyelids.
“Behold thy husband, master, and benefactor.” Old Viola’s voice
resounded with a force that seemed to fill the whole gulf.
She stepped forward with her eyes nearly closed, like a sleep-walker in
a beatific dream.
Nostromo made a superhuman effort. “It is time, Linda, we two were
betrothed,” he said, steadily, in his level, careless, unbending tone.
She put her hand into his offered palm, lowering her head, dark with
bronze glints, upon which her father’s hand rested for a moment.
“And so the soul of the dead is satisfied.”
This came from Giorgio Viola, who went on talking for a while of his
dead wife; while the two, sitting side by side, never looked at each
other. Then the old man ceased; and Linda, motionless, began to speak.
“Ever since I felt I lived in the world, I have lived for you alone,
Gian’ Battista. And that you knew! You knew it . . . Battistino.”
She pronounced the name exactly with her mother’s intonation. A gloom as
of the grave covered Nostromo’s heart.
“Yes. I knew,” he said.
The heroic Garibaldino sat on the same bench bowing his hoary head, his
old soul dwelling alone with its memories, tender and violent, terrible
and dreary--solitary on the earth full of men.
And Linda, his best-loved daughter, was saying, “I was yours ever since
I can remember. I had only to think of you for the earth to become empty
to my eyes. When you were there, I could see no one else. I was yours.
Nothing is changed. The world belongs to you, and you let me live in
it.” . . . She dropped her low, vibrating voice to a still lower note,
and found other things to say--torturing for the man at her side. Her
murmur ran on ardent and voluble. She did not seem to see her sister,
who came out with an altar-cloth she was embroidering in her hands, and
passed in front of them, silent, fresh, fair, with a quick glance and a
faint smile, to sit a little away on the other side of Nostromo.
The evening was still. The sun sank almost to the edge of a purple
ocean; and the white lighthouse, livid against the background of clouds
filling the head of the gulf, bore the lantern red and glowing, like a
live ember kindled by the fire of the sky. Giselle, indolent and demure,
raised the altar-cloth from time to time to hide nervous yawns, as of a
young panther.
Suddenly Linda rushed at her sister, and seizing her head, covered her
face with kisses. Nostromo’s brain reeled. When she left her, as if
stunned by the violent caresses, with her hands lying in her lap, the
slave of the treasure felt as if he could shoot that woman. Old Giorgio
lifted his leonine head.
“Where are you going, Linda?”
“To the light, padre mio.”
“Si, si--to your duty.”
He got up, too, looked after his eldest daughter; then, in a tone whose
festive note seemed the echo of a mood lost in the night of ages--
“I am going in to cook something. Aha! Son! The old man knows where to
find a bottle of wine, too.”
He turned to Giselle, with a change to austere tenderness.
“And you, little one, pray not to the God of priests and slaves, but to
the God of orphans, of the oppressed, of the poor, of little children,
to give thee a man like this one for a husband.”
His hand rested heavily for a moment on Nostromo’s shoulder; then he
went in. The hopeless slave of the San Tome silver felt at these words
the venomous fangs of jealousy biting deep into his heart. He was
appalled by the novelty of the experience, by its force, by its physical
intimacy. A husband! A husband for her! And yet it was natural that
Giselle should have a husband at some time or other. He had never
realized that before. In discovering that her beauty could belong
to another he felt as though he could kill this one of old Giorgio’s
daughters also. He muttered moodily--
“They say you love Ramirez.”
She shook her head without looking at him. Coppery glints rippled to and
fro on the wealth of her gold hair. Her smooth forehead had the soft,
pure sheen of a priceless pearl in the splendour of the sunset, mingling
the gloom of starry spaces, the purple of the sea, and the crimson of
the sky in a magnificent stillness.
“No,” she said, slowly. “I never loved him. I think I never . . . He
loves me--perhaps.”
The seduction of her slow voice died out of the air, and her raised eyes
remained fixed on nothing, as if indifferent and without thought.
“Ramirez told you he loved you?” asked Nostromo, restraining himself.
“Ah! once--one evening . . .”
“The miserable . . . Ha!”
He had jumped up as if stung by a gad-fly, and stood before her mute
with anger.
“Misericordia Divina! You, too, Gian’ Battista! Poor wretch that I am!”
she lamented in ingenuous tones. “I told Linda, and she scolded--she
scolded. Am I to live blind, dumb, and deaf in this world? And she told
father, who took down his gun and cleaned it. Poor Ramirez! Then you
came, and she told you.”
He looked at her. He fastened his eyes upon the hollow of her white
throat, which had the invincible charm of things young, palpitating,
delicate, and alive. Was this the child he had known? Was it possible?
It dawned upon him that in these last years he had really seen very
little--nothing--of her. Nothing. She had come into the world like
a thing unknown. She had come upon him unawares. She was a danger. A
frightful danger. The instinctive mood of fierce determination that had
never failed him before the perils of this life added its steady force
to the violence of his passion. She, in a voice that recalled to him the
song of running water, the tinkling of a silver bell, continued--
“And between you three you have brought me here into this captivity to
the sky and water. Nothing else. Sky and water. Oh, Sanctissima Madre.
My hair shall turn grey on this tedious island. I could hate you, Gian’
Battista!”
He laughed loudly. Her voice enveloped him like a caress. She bemoaned
her fate, spreading unconsciously, like a flower its perfume in the
coolness of the evening, the indefinable seduction of her person. Was
it her fault that nobody ever had admired Linda? Even when they were
little, going out with their mother to Mass, she remembered that people
took no notice of Linda, who was fearless, and chose instead to frighten
her, who was timid, with their attention. It was her hair like gold, she
supposed.