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 anything,' 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 tonight?' 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!'
She argued earnestly against the probability of any attempt being made;and at last the old man fell silent, chewing his white moustache. Women had their obstinate notions which must be humoured -- his poor wife was like that, and Linda resembled her mother. It was not seemly for a man to argue. `Maybe. Maybe,' he mumbled.
She was by no means easy in her mind. She loved Nostromo. She turned her eyes upon Giselle, sitting at a distance, with something of maternal tenderness, and the jealous anguish of a rival outraged in her defeat.
Then she rose and walked over to her.
`Listen -- you,' she said, roughly.
The invincible candour of the gaze, raised up all violet and dew, excited her rage and admiration. She had beautiful eyes -- the chica --this vile thing of white flesh and black deception. She did not know whether she wanted to tear them out with shouts of vengeance or cover up their mysterious and shameless innocence with kisses of pity and love. And suddenly they became empty, gazing blankly at her, except for a little fear not quite buried deep enough with all the other emotions in Giselle's heart.
Linda said, `Ramirez is boasting in town that he will carry you off from the island.'
`What folly!' answered the other, and in a perversity born of long restraint, she added: `He is not the man,' in a jesting tone with a trembling audacity.
`No?' said Linda, through her clenched teeth. `Is he not? Well, then, look to it; because father has been walking about with a loaded gun at night.'
`It is not good for him. You must tell him not to, Linda. He will not listen to me.'
`I shall say nothing -- never any more -- to anybody,' cried Linda, passionately.
This could not last, thought Giselle. Giovanni must take her away soon -- the very next time he came. She would not suffer these terrors for ever so much silver. To speak with her sister made her ill. But she was not uneasy at her father's watchfulness. She had begged Nostromo not to come to the window that night. He had promised to keep away for this once. And she did not know, could not guess or imagine, that he had another reason for coming on the island.
Linda had gone straight to the tower. It was time to light up. She unlocked the little door, and went heavily up the spiral staircase, carrying her love for the magnificent Capataz de Cargadores like an ever-increasing load of shameful fetters. No; she could not throw it off. No; let Heaven dispose of these two. And moving about the lantern, filled with twilight and the sheen of the moon, with careful movements she lighted the lamp.
Then her arms fell along her body.
`And with our mother looking on,' she murmured. `My own sister -- the chica !'
The whole refracting apparatus, with its brass fittings and rings of prisms, glittered and sparkled like a dome-shaped shrine of diamonds, containing not a lamp, but some sacred flame, dominating the sea. And Linda, the keeper, in black, with a pale face, drooped low in a wooden chair, alone with her jealousy, far above the shames and passions of the earth. A strange, dragging pain, as if somebody were pulling her about brutally by her dark hair with bronze glints, made her put her hands up to her temples. They would meet.
They would meet. And she knew where, too. At the window. The sweat of torture fell in drops on her cheeks, while the moonlight in the offing closed as if with a colossal bar of silver the entrance of the Placid Gulf -- the sombre cavern of clouds and stillness in the surf-fretted seaboard.
