Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART SECOND: THE ISABELS 7. CHAPTER SEVEN (continued)

"You never change, indeed," she said, bitterly. "Always thinking
of yourself and taking your pay out in fine words from those who
care nothing for you."

There was between them an intimacy of antagonism as close in its
way as the intimacy of accord and affection. He had not walked
along the way of Teresa's expectations. It was she who had
encouraged him to leave his ship, in the hope of securing a
friend and defender for the girls. The wife of old Giorgio was
aware of her precarious health, and was haunted by the fear of
her aged husband's loneliness and the unprotected state of the
children. She had wanted to annex that apparently quiet and
steady young man, affectionate and pliable, an orphan from his
tenderest age, as he had told her, with no ties in Italy except
an uncle, owner and master of a felucca, from whose ill-usage he
had run away before he was fourteen. He had seemed to her
courageous, a hard worker, determined to make his way in the
world. From gratitude and the ties of habit he would become like
a son to herself and Giorgio; and then, who knows, when Linda had
grown up. . . . Ten years' difference between husband and wife
was not so much. Her own great man was nearly twenty years older
than herself. Gian' Battista was an attractive young fellow,
besides; attractive to men, women, and children, just by that
profound quietness of personality which, like a serene twilight,
rendered more seductive the promise of his vigorous form and the
resolution of his conduct.

Old Giorgio, in profound ignorance of his wife's views and hopes,
had a great regard for his young countryman. "A man ought not to
be tame," he used to tell her, quoting the Spanish proverb in
defence of the splendid Capataz. She was growing jealous of his
success. He was escaping from her, she feared. She was practical,
and he seemed to her to be an absurd spendthrift of these
qualities which made him so valuable. He got too little for them.
He scattered them with both hands amongst too many people, she
thought. He laid no money by. She railed at his poverty, his
exploits, his adventures, his loves and his reputation; but in
her heart she had never given him up, as though, indeed, he had
been her son.