Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART THIRD: THE LIGHTHOUSE 13. CHAPTER THIRTEEN (continued)

Linda had a good share of the Viola stoicism. She resolved to say
nothing. But woman-like she put passion into her stoicism.
Giselle's short answers, prompted by fearful caution, drove her
beside herself by their curtness that resembled disdain. One day
she flung herself upon the chair in which her indolent sister was
lying and impressed the mark of her teeth at the base of the
whitest neck in Sulaco. Giselle cried out. But she had her share
of the Viola heroism. Ready to faint with terror, she only said,
in a lazy voice, "Madre de Dios! Are you going to eat me alive,
Linda?" And this outburst passed off leaving no trace upon the
situation. "She knows nothing. She cannot know any thing,"
reflected Giselle. "Perhaps it is not true. It cannot be true,"
Linda tried to persuade herself.

But when she saw Captain Fidanza for the first time after her
meeting with the distracted Ramirez, the certitude of her
misfortune returned. She watched him from the doorway go away to
his boat, asking herself stoically, "Will they meet to-night?"
She made up her mind not to leave the tower for a second. When he
had disappeared she came out and sat down by her father.

The venerable Garibaldino felt, in his own words, "a young man
yet." In one way or another a good deal of talk about Ramirez had
reached him of late; and his contempt and dislike of that man who
obviously was not what his son would have been, had made him
restless. He slept very little now; but for several nights past
instead of reading--or only sitting, with Mrs. Gould's silver
spectacles on his nose, before the open Bible, he had been
prowling actively all about the island with his old gun, on watch
over his honour.

Linda, laying her thin brown hand on his knee, tried to soothe
his excitement. Ramirez was not in Sulaco. Nobody knew where he
was. He was gone. His talk of what he would do meant nothing.

"No," the old man interrupted. "But son Gian' Battista told
me--quite of himself--that the cowardly esclavo was drinking and
gambling with the rascals of Zapiga, over there on the north side
of the gulf. He may get some of the worst scoundrels of that
scoundrelly town of negroes to help him in his attempt upon the
little one. . . . But I am not so old. No!"