Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard
me to anybody. It is more as if she could not forgive me for being alive, and such a man, too, as she would have liked her son to be."
"Maybe!" exclaimed a mournful deep voice near them. "Women have their own ways of tormenting themselves." Giorgio Viola had come out of the house. He threw a heavy black shadow in the torch- light, and the glare fell on his big face, on the great bushy head of white hair. He motioned the capataz in-doors with his extended arm.
Dr. Monygham, after busying himself with a little medicament-box of polished wood on the seat of the landau, turned to old Giorgio and thrust into his big trembling hand one of the glass-stoppered bottles out of the case.
"Give her a spoonful of this now and then, in water," he said. "It will make her easier."
"And there is nothing more for her?" asked the old man patiently.
"No. Not on earth," said the doctor, with his back to him, clicking the lock of the medicine-case.
Nostromo slowly crossed the large kitchen, all dark but for the glow of a heap of charcoal under the heavy mantel of the cooking-range, where water was boiling in an iron pot with a loud, bubbling sound. Between the two walls of a narrow staircase a bright light
streamed from the sick-room above; and the magnificent capataz de cargadores stepping noiselessly in soft leather sandals, bushy whiskered, his muscular neck and bronzed chest bare in the open checked shirt, resembled a Mediterranean sailor just come ashore from some wine or fruit laden felucca. At the top he
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