Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard
"She believed you would return," he said, solemnly.
Nostromo raised his head.
"She was a wise woman. How could I fail to come back?"
He finished the thought mentally: "Since she has prophesied for me an end of poverty, misery, and starvation." These words of Teresa's anger, from the circumstances in which they had been uttered, like the cry of a soul prevented from making its peace with God, stirred the obscure superstition of personal fortune from which even the greatest genius among men of adventure and action is seldom free. They reigned over Nostromo's mind with the force of a potent malediction. And what a curse it was, that which her words had laid upon him! He had been orphaned so young that he could remember no other woman whom he called mother. Henceforth there would be no enterprise in which he would not fail. The spell was working already. Death itself would elude him now . . . He said, violently :
"Come, viejo! Get me something to eat. I am hungry! Sangre de Dios! The emptiness of my belly makes me light-headed."
With his chin dropped again upon his bare breast above his folded arms, barefooted, watching from under a gloomy brow the movements of old Viola foraging among the cupboards, he seemed as if indeed fallen under a curse—a ruined and sinister capataz.
Old Viola walked out of a dark corner, and, without a word, emptied upon the table out of his hollowed palms a few dry crusts of bread and half a raw onion.
While the capataz began to devour this beggar's
526
