ALL the morning Nostromo had kept his eye from afar
on the Casa Viola, even in the thick of the hottest scrimmage
near the Custom House. "If I see smoke rising
over there," he thought to himself, "they are lost."
Directly the mob had broken he pressed with a small
band of Italian workmen in that direction, which, indeed,
was the shortest line towards the town. That
part of the rabble he was pursuing seemed to think of
making a stand under the house; a volley fired by his
followers from behind an aloe hedge made the rascals
fly. In a gap chopped out for the rails of the harbour
branch line Nostromo appeared, mounted on his
silver-grey mare. He shouted, sent after them one
shot from his revolver, and galloped up to the café
window. He had an idea that old Giorgio would
choose that part of the house for a refuge.

    His voice had penetrated to them, sounding breathlessly
hurried: "Hola! Vecchio! O, Vecchio! Is it all
well with you in there?"

    "You see -- " murmured old Viola to his wife.
Signora Teresa was silent now. Outside Nostromo
laughed.

    "I can hear the padrona is not dead."

    "You have done your best to kill me with fear," cried
Signora Teresa. She wanted to say something more,
but her voice failed her.

    Linda raised her eyes to her face for a moment, but
old Giorgio shouted apologetically --

    "She is a little upset."

    Outside Nostromo shouted back with another
laugh --

    "She cannot upset me."

    Signora Teresa found her voice.

    "It is what I say. You have no heart -- and you
have no conscience, Gian' Battista -- "

    They heard him wheel his horse away from the
shutters. The party he led were babbling excitedly in
Italian and Spanish, inciting each other to the pursuit.
He put himself at their head, crying, "Avanti!"

    "He has not stopped very long with us. There is no
praise from strangers to be got here," Signora Teresa
said tragically. "Avanti! Yes! That is all he cares
for. To be first somewhere -- somehow -- to be first
with these English. They will be showing him to
everybody. 'This is our Nostromo!'" She laughed
ominously. "What a name! What is that? Nostromo?
He would take a name that is properly no
word from them."

    Meantime Giorgio, with tranquil movements, had
been unfastening the door; the flood of light fell on
Signora Teresa, with her two girls gathered to her side,
a picturesque woman in a pose of maternal exaltation.
Behind her the wall was dazzlingly white, and the
crude colours of the Garibaldi lithograph paled in the
sunshine.

    Old Viola, at the door, moved his arm upwards as if
referring all his quick, fleeting thoughts to the picture
of his old chief on the wall. Even when he was cooking
for the "Signori Inglesi" -- the engineers (he was a
famous cook, though the kitchen was a dark place) -- he
was, as it were, under the eye of the great man who had
led him in a glorious struggle where, under the walls
of Gaeta, tyranny would have expired for ever had it not
been for that accursed Piedmontese race of kings and

    Then Signora Teresa, all in black, issuing from
another door, advanced, portly and anxious, inclining
her fine, black-browed head, opening her arms, and
crying in a profound tone --

    "Giorgio! thou passionate man! Misericordia
Divina! In the sun like this! He will make himself
ill."

    At her feet the hens made off in all directions, with
immense strides; if there were any engineers from up
the line staying in Sulaco, a young English face or two
would appear at the billiard-room occupying one end of
the house; but at the other end, in the café, Luis, the
mulatto, took good care not to show himself. The
Indian girls, with hair like flowing black manes, and
dressed only in a shift and short petticoat, stared dully
from under the square-cut fringes on their foreheads;
the noisy frizzling of fat had stopped, the fumes floated
upwards in sunshine, a strong smell of burnt onions
hung in the drowsy heat, enveloping the house; and the
eye lost itself in a vast flat expanse of grass to the west,
as if the plain between the Sierra overtopping Sulaco
and the coast range away there towards Esmeralda had
been as big as half the world.

    Signora Teresa, after an impressive pause, remonstrated
--

    "Eh, Giorgio! Leave Cavour alone and take care of

    And while she looked at him she would sometimes put
her hand hastily to her side with a short twitch of her
fine lips and a knitting of her black, straight eyebrows
like a flicker of angry pain or an angry thought on her
handsome, regular features.

    It was pain; she suppressed the twinge. It had come
to her first a few years after they had left Italy to emigrate
to America and settle at last in Sulaco after
wandering from town to town, trying shopkeeping in a
small way here and there; and once an organized enterprise
of fishing -- in Maldonado -- for Giorgio, like the
great Garibaldi, had been a sailor in his time.

    Sometimes she had no patience with pain. For years
its gnawing had been part of the landscape embracing
the glitter of the harbour under the wooded spurs of the
range; and the sunshine itself was heavy and dull --
heavy with pain -- not like the sunshine of her girlhood,
in which middle-aged Giorgio had wooed her gravely
and passionately on the shores of the gulf of Spezzia.

    "You go in at once, Giorgio," she directed. "One
would think you do not wish to have any pity on me --
with four Signori Inglesi staying in the house."
"Va bene, va bene," Giorgio would mutter.
He obeyed. The Signori Inglesi would require their
midday meal presently. He had been one of the
immortal and invincible band of liberators who had
made the mercenaries of tyranny fly like chaff before a
hurricane, "un uragano terribile." But that was before
he was married and had children; and before tyranny
had reared its head again amongst the traitors who had
imprisoned Garibaldi, his hero.

    There were three doors in the front of the house, and

    On this memorable day of the riot his arms were not
folded on his chest. His hand grasped the barrel of the
gun grounded on the threshold; he did not look up once
at the white dome of Higuerota, whose cool purity
seemed to hold itself aloof from a hot earth. His eyes
examined the plain curiously. Tall trails of dust subsided
here and there. In a speckless sky the sun hung
clear and blinding. Knots of men ran headlong; others
made a stand; and the irregular rattle of firearms
came rippling to his ears in the fiery, still air. Single
figures on foot raced desperately. Horsemen galloped
towards each other, wheeled round together, separated
at speed. Giorgio saw one fall, rider and horse disappearing

    A troop of horses had broken out of the fenced paddock
of the Railway Company. They came on like a
whirlwind, and dashed over the line snorting, kicking,
squealing in a compact, piebald, tossing mob of bay,
brown, grey backs, eyes staring, necks extended, nostrils
red, long tails streaming. As soon as they had
leaped upon the road the thick dust flew upwards from
under their hoofs, and within six yards of Giorgio only
a brown cloud with vague forms of necks and cruppers
rolled by, making the soil tremble on its passage.

    Viola coughed, turning his face away from the dust,
and shaking his head slightly.

    "There will be some horse-catching to be done before
to-night," he muttered.

    In the square of sunlight falling through the door
Signora Teresa, kneeling before the chair, had bowed
her head, heavy with a twisted mass of ebony hair
streaked with silver, into the palm of her hands. The
black lace shawl she used to drape about her face had
dropped to the ground by her side. The two girls had
got up, hand-in-hand, in short skirts, their loose hair
falling in disorder. The younger had thrown her arm
across her eyes, as if afraid to face the light. Linda,
with her hand on the other's shoulder, stared fearlessly.
Viola looked at his children.

    "Well! And do you not pray like your mother?"

    Linda pouted, advancing her red lips, which were
almost too red; but she had admirable eyes, brown, with
a sparkle of gold in the irises, full of intelligence and
meaning, and so clear that they seemed to throw a glow
upon her thin, colourless face. There were bronze
glints in the sombre clusters of her hair, and the eye-
lashes, long and coal black, made her complexion appear
still more pale.

    "Mother is going to offer up a lot of candles in the
church. She always does when Nostromo has been
away fighting. I shall have some to carry up to the
Chapel of the Madonna in the Cathedral."

    She said all this quickly, with great assurance, in an
animated, penetrating voice. Then, giving her sister's
shoulder a slight shake, she added --

    "And she will be made to carry one, too!"

    "Why made?" inquired Giorgio, gravely. "Does
she not want to?"

    "She is timid," said Linda, with a little burst of
laughter. "People notice her fair hair as she goes along
with us. They call out after her, 'Look at the Rubia!
Look at the Rubiacita!' They call out in the streets.
She is timid."

    "And you? You are not timid -- eh?" the father
pronounced, slowly.

    She tossed back all her dark hair.

    "Nobody calls out after me."

    Old Giorgio contemplated his children thoughtfully.
There was two years difference between them. They
had been born to him late, years after the boy had died.

    When quite a youth he had deserted from a ship trading
to La Plata, to enlist in the navy of Montevideo,
then under the command of Garibaldi. Afterwards,
in the Italian legion of the Republic struggling against
the encroaching tyranny of Rosas, he had taken part,
on great plains, on the banks of immense rivers, in the
fiercest fighting perhaps the world had ever known.
He had lived amongst men who had declaimed about
liberty, suffered for liberty, died for liberty, with a
desperate exaltation, and with their eyes turned
towards an oppressed Italy. His own enthusiasm had
been fed on scenes of carnage, on the examples of lofty
devotion, on the din of armed struggle, on the inflamed
language of proclamations. He had never parted from
the chief of his choice -- the fiery apostle of independence
-- keeping by his side in America and in Italy till after
the fatal day of Aspromonte, when the treachery of
kings, emperors, and ministers had been revealed to the
world in the wounding and imprisonment of his hero -- a
catastrophe that had instilled into him a gloomy doubt
of ever being able to understand the ways of Divine
justice.

    He did not deny it, however. It required patience,
he would say. Though he disliked priests, and would
not put his foot inside a church for anything, he believed
in God. Were not the proclamations against tyrants
addressed to the peoples in the name of God and liberty?

    Giorgio Viola had a great consideration for the
English. This feeling, born on the battlefields of
Uruguay, was forty years old at the very least. Several
of them had poured their blood for the cause of freedom
in America, and the first he had ever known he remembered
by the name of Samuel; he commanded a
negro company under Garibaldi, during the famous
siege of Montevideo, and died heroically with his
negroes at the fording of the Boyana. He, Giorgio, had
reached the rank of ensign-alferez-and cooked for the
general. Later, in Italy, he, with the rank of lieutenant,
rode with the staff and still cooked for the general. He
had cooked for him in Lombardy through the whole
campaign; on the march to Rome he had lassoed his
beef in the Campagna after the American manner; he
had been wounded in the defence of the Roman Republic;

    The spirit of self-forgetfulness, the simple devotion to
a vast humanitarian idea which inspired the thought
and stress of that revolutionary time, had left its mark
upon Giorgio in a sort of austere contempt for all
personal advantage. This man, whom the lowest class
in Sulaco suspected of having a buried hoard in his
kitchen, had all his life despised money. The leaders of
his youth had lived poor, had died poor. It had been a
habit of his mind to disregard to-morrow. It was
engendered partly by an existence of excitement,
adventure, and wild warfare. But mostly it was a
matter of principle. It did not resemble the carelessness
of a condottiere, it was a puritanism of conduct,
born of stern enthusiasm like the puritanism of religion.

    This stern devotion to a cause had cast a gloom upon
Giorgio's old age. It cast a gloom because the cause
seemed lost. Too many kings and emperors flourished
yet in the world which God had meant for the people.