sat down sternly in the middle of the darkened cafe
with an old shot-gun on his knees. His wife sat on another chair by his
side, muttering pious invocations to all the saints of the calendar.

The old republican did not believe in saints, or in prayers, or in
what he called "priest's religion." Liberty and Garibaldi were his
divinities; but he tolerated "superstition" in women, preserving in
these matters a lofty and silent attitude.

His two girls, the eldest fourteen, and the other two years younger,
crouched on the sanded floor, on each side of the Signora Teresa, with
their heads on their mother's lap, both scared, but each in her own
way, the dark-haired Linda indignant and angry, the fair Giselle, the
younger, bewildered and resigned. The Patrona removed her arms, which
embraced her daughters, for a moment to cross herself and wring her
hands hurriedly. She moaned a little louder.

"Oh! Gian' Battista, why art thou not here? Oh! why art thou not here?"

She was not then invoking the saint himself, but calling upon Nostromo,
whose patron he was. And Giorgio, motionless on the chair by her side,
would be provoked by these reproachful and distracted appeals.

"Peace, woman! Where's the sense of it? There's his duty," he murmured
in the dark; and she would retort, panting--

"Eh! I have no patience. Duty! What of the woman who has been like a
mother to him? I bent my knee to him this morning; don't you go out,
Gian' Battista--stop in the house, Battistino--look at those two little
innocent children!"

Mrs. Viola was an Italian, too, a native of Spezzia, and though
considerably younger than her husband, already middle-aged. She had a
handsome face, whose complexion had turned yellow because the climate
of Sulaco did not suit her at all. Her voice was a rich contralto. When,
with her arms folded tight under her ample bosom, she scolded the squat,
thick-legged China girls handling linen, plucking fowls, pounding corn
in wooden mortars amongst the mud outbuildings at the back of the house,
she could bring out such an impassioned, vibrating, sepulchral note that
the chained watch-dog bolted into his kennel with a great rattle. Luis,
a cinnamon-coloured mulatto with a sprouting moustache and thick, dark
lips, would stop sweeping the cafe with a broom of palm-leaves to let
a gentle shudder run down his spine. His languishing almond eyes would
remain closed for a long time.

This was the staff of the Casa Viola, but