Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART THIRD: THE LIGHTHOUSE 12. CHAPTER TWELVE (continued)

Presently he had to come to the door again to call in his younger
daughter. It was late. He shouted her name three times before she
even moved her head. Left alone, she had become the helpless prey
of astonishment. She walked into the bedroom she shared with
Linda like a person profoundly asleep. That aspect was so marked
that even old Giorgio, spectacled, raising his eyes from the
Bible, shook his head as she shut the door behind her.

She walked right across the room without looking at anything, and
sat down at once by the open window. Linda, stealing down from
the tower in the exuberance of her happiness, found her with a
lighted candle at her back, facing the black night full of
sighing gusts of wind and the sound of distant showers--a true
night of the gulf, too dense for the eye of God and the wiles of
the devil. She did not turn her head at the opening of the door.

There was something in that immobility which reached Linda in the
depths of her paradise. The elder sister guessed angrily: the
child is thinking of that wretched Ramirez. Linda longed to talk.
She said in her arbitrary voice, "Giselle!" and was not answered
by the slightest movement.

The girl that was going to live in a palace and walk on ground of
her own was ready to die with terror. Not for anything in the
world would she have turned her head to face her sister. Her
heart was beating madly. She said with subdued haste--

"Do not speak to me. I am praying."

Linda, disappointed, went out quietly; and Giselle sat on
unbelieving, lost, dazed, patient, as if waiting for the
confirmation of the incredible. The hopeless blackness of the
clouds seemed part of a dream, too. She waited.

She did not wait in vain. The man whose soul was dead within him,
creeping out of the ravine, weighted with silver, had seen the
gleam of the lighted window, and could not help retracing his
steps from the beach.