"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--
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