Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART THIRD: THE LIGHTHOUSE 9. CHAPTER NINE (continued)

On the threshold he called out "Giorgio!" in an undertone. Nobody
answered. He stepped in. "Ola! viejo! Are you there? . . ." In
the impenetrable darkness his head swam with the illusion that
the obscurity of the kitchen was as vast as the Placid Gulf, and
that the floor dipped forward like a sinking lighter. "Ola!
viejo!" he repeated, falteringly, swaying where he stood. His
hand, extended to steady himself, fell upon the table. Moving a
step forward, he shifted it, and felt a box of matches under his
fingers. He fancied he had heard a quiet sigh. He listened for a
moment, holding his breath; then, with trembling hands, tried to
strike a light.

The tiny piece of wood flamed up quite blindingly at the end of
his fingers, raised above his blinking eyes. A concentrated
glare fell upon the leonine white head of old Giorgio against the
black fire-place--showed him leaning forward in a chair in
staring immobility, surrounded, overhung, by great masses of
shadow, his legs crossed, his cheek in his hand, an empty pipe in
the corner of his mouth. It seemed hours before he attempted to
turn his face; at the very moment the match went out, and he
disappeared, overwhelmed by the shadows, as if the walls and roof
of the desolate house had collapsed upon his white head in
ghostly silence.

Nostromo heard him stir and utter dispassionately the words--

"It may have been a vision."

"No," he said, softly. "It is no vision, old man."

A strong chest voice asked in the dark--

"Is that you I hear, Giovann' Battista?"

"Si, viejo. Steady. Not so loud."

After his release by Sotillo, Giorgio Viola, attended to the very
door by the good-natured engineer-in-chief, had reentered his
house, which he had been made to leave almost at the very moment
of his wife's death. All was still. The lamp above was burning.
He nearly called out to her by name; and the thought that no call
from him would ever again evoke the answer of her voice, made him
drop heavily into the chair with a loud groan, wrung out by the
pain as of a keen blade piercing his breast.