r the support of his
decaying strength.

He extended his hand grasping the briar-wood pipe, whose bowl was
charred on the edge, and knitted his bushy eyebrows heavily at the
light.

"You have returned," he said, with shaky dignity. "Ah! Very well! I----"

He broke off. Nostromo, leaning back against the table, his arms folded
on his breast, nodded at him slightly.

"You thought I was drowned! No! The best dog of the rich, of the
aristocrats, of these fine men who can only talk and betray the people,
is not dead yet."

The Garibaldino, motionless, seemed to drink in the sound of the
well-known voice. His head moved slightly once as if in sign of
approval; but Nostromo saw clearly that the old man understood nothing
of the words. There was no one to understand; no one he could take into
the confidence of Decoud's fate, of his own, into the secret of the
silver. That doctor was an enemy of the people--a tempter. . . .

Old Giorgio's heavy frame shook from head to foot with the effort
to overcome his emotion at the sight of that man, who had shared the
intimacies of his domestic life as though he had been a grown-up son.

"She believed you would return," he said, solemnly.

Nostromo raised his head.

"She was a wise woman. How could I fail to come back----?"

He finished the thought mentally: "Since she has prophesied for me an
end of poverty, misery, and starvation." These words of Teresa's anger,
from the circumstances in which they had been uttered, like the cry of
a soul prevented from making its peace with God, stirred the obscure
superstition of personal fortune from which even the greatest genius
amongst men of adventure and action is seldom free. They reigned over
Nostromo's mind with the force of a potent malediction. And what a curse
it was that which her words had laid upon him! He had been orphaned
so young that he could remember no other woman whom he called mother.
Henceforth there would be no enterprise in which he would not fail. The
spell was working already. Death itself would elude him now. . . . He
said violently--

"Come, viejo! Get me something to eat. I am hungry! Sangre de Dios! The
emptiness of my belly makes me lightheaded."

With his chin dropped again upon his bare breast above his folded arms,
barefooted, watching from under a gloomy brow the movements of old Viola
foraging amongst the cupboards, he seemed as if indeed fallen under a
curse--a ruined and sinister Capataz.

Old Vi