Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART FIRST: THE SILVER OF THE MINE 6. CHAPTER SIX (continued)

He had walked straight out of town with the news, straight out
before him in the noonday sun on the white road, and his feet had
brought him face to face with her in the hall of the ruined
palazzo, a room magnificent and naked, with here and there a long
strip of damask, black with damp and age, hanging down on a bare
panel of the wall. It was furnished with exactly one gilt
armchair, with a broken back, and an octagon columnar stand
bearing a heavy marble vase ornamented with sculptured masks and
garlands of flowers, and cracked from top to bottom. Charles
Gould was dusty with the white dust of the road lying on his
boots, on his shoulders, on his cap with two peaks. Water dripped
from under it all over his face, and he grasped a thick oaken
cudgel in his bare right hand.

She went very pale under the roses of her big straw hat, gloved,
swinging a clear sunshade, caught just as she was going out to
meet him at the bottom of the hill, where three poplars stand
near the wall of a vineyard.

"It has killed him!" he repeated. "He ought to have had many
years yet. We are a long-lived family."

She was too startled to say anything; he was contemplating with a
penetrating and motionless stare the cracked marble urn as though
he had resolved to fix its shape for ever in his memory. It was
only when, turning suddenly to her, he blurted out twice, "I've
come to you--I've come straight to you--," without being able to
finish his phrase, that the great pitifulness of that lonely and
tormented death in Costaguana came to her with the full force of
its misery. He caught hold of her hand, raised it to his lips,
and at that she dropped her parasol to pat him on the cheek,
murmured "Poor boy," and began to dry her eyes under the downward
curve of her hat-brim, very small in her simple, white frock,
almost like a lost child crying in the degraded grandeur of the
noble hall, while he stood by her, again perfectly motionless in
the contemplation of the marble urn.

Afterwards they went out for a long walk, which was silent till
he exclaimed suddenly--