The rest of the night he made no sound. The darkness turned to grey, and
on the colourless, clear, glassy dawn the jagged sierra stood out flat
and opaque, as if cut out of paper.
The enthusiastic and severe soul of Giorgio Viola, sailor, champion of
oppressed humanity, enemy of kings, and, by the grace of Mrs. Gould,
hotel-keeper of the Sulaco harbour, had descended into the open abyss of
desolation amongst the shattered vestiges of his past. He remembered
his wooing between two campaigns, a single short week in the season of
gathering olives. Nothing approached the grave passion of that time but
the deep, passionate sense of his bereavement. He discovered all the
extent of his dependence upon the silenced voice of that woman. It
was her voice that he missed. Abstracted, busy, lost in inward
contemplation, he seldom looked at his wife in those later years. The
thought of his girls was a matter of concern, not of consolation. It
was her voice that he would miss. And he remembered the other child--the
little boy who died at sea. Ah! a man would have been something to lean
upon. And, alas! even Gian' Battista--he of whom, and of Linda, his
wife had spoken to him so anxiously before she dropped off into her last
sleep on earth, he on whom she had called aloud to save the children,
just before she died--even he was dead!
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