Nostromo - A Tale of the Seaboard.pdf - Planet eBook

a personal point of view, too, as one would study the variedcharacters of men. He visited them as one goes with curiosityto call upon remarkable persons. He visited minesin Germany, in Spain, in Cornwall. Abandoned workingshad for him strong fascination. Their desolation appealedto him like the sight of human misery, whose causes arevaried and profound. They might have been worthless, butalso they might have been misunderstood. His future wifewas the first, and perhaps the only person to detect this secretmood which governed the profoundly sensible, almostvoiceless attitude of this man towards the world of materialthings. And at once her delight in him, lingering with halfopenwings like those birds that cannot rise easily from aflat level, found a pinnacle from which to soar up into theskies.They had become acquainted in Italy, where the futureMrs. Gould was staying with an old and pale aunt who,years before, had married a middle-aged, impoverished Italianmarquis. She now mourned that man, who had knownhow to give up his life to the independence and unity of hiscountry, who had known how to be as enthusiastic in hisgenerosity as the youngest of those who fell for that verycause of which old Giorgio Viola was a drifting relic, as abroken spar is suffered to float away disregarded after a navalvictory. The Marchesa led a still, whispering existence,nun-like in her black robes and a white band over the forehead,in a corner of the first floor of an ancient and ruinouspalace, whose big, empty halls downstairs sheltered undertheir painted ceilings the harvests, the fowls, and even the