Nostromo - Joseph Conrad (books to read fiction .TXT) 📗

fear a man! It angered him that anybody should suggest such a thing. It angered him to be disarmed and skulking and in danger because of the accursed treasure, which was of so little account to the people who had tied it round his neck. He could not shake off the worry of it. To Nostromo the doctor represented all these people⁠ ⁠… And he had never even asked after it. Not a word of inquiry about the most desperate undertaking of his life.

Thinking these thoughts, Nostromo passed again through the cavernous hall, where the smoke was considerably thinned, and went up the stairs, not so warm to his feet now, towards the streak of light at the top. The doctor appeared in it for a moment, agitated and impatient.

“Come up! Come up!”

At the moment of crossing the doorway the capataz experienced a shock of surprise. The man had not moved. He saw his shadow in the same place. He started, then stepped in with a feeling of being about to solve a mystery.

It was very simple. For an infinitesimal fraction of a second, against the light of two flaring and guttering candles, through a blue, pungent, thin haze which made his eyes smart, he saw the man standing, as he had imagined him, with his back to the door, casting an enormous and distorted shadow upon the wall. Swifter than a flash of lightning followed the impression of his constrained, toppling attitude⁠—the shoulders projecting forward, the head sunk low upon the breast. Then he distinguished the arms behind his back, and wrenched so terribly that the two clenched fists, lashed together, had been forced up higher than the shoulder-blades. From there his eyes traced in one instantaneous glance the hide rope going upwards from the tied wrists over a heavy beam and down to a staple in the wall. He did not want to look at the rigid legs, at the feet hanging down nervelessly, with their bare toes some six inches above the floor, to know that the man had been given the estrapade till he had swooned. His first impulse was to dash forward and sever the rope at one blow. He felt for his knife. He had no knife⁠—not even a knife. He stood quivering, and the doctor, perched on the edge of the table, facing thoughtfully the cruel and lamentable sight, his chin in his hand, uttered, without stirring⁠—

“Tortured⁠—and shot dead through the breast⁠—getting cold.”

This information calmed the capataz. One of the candles flickering in the socket went out. “Who did this?” he asked.

“Sotillo, I tell you. Who else? Tortured⁠—of course. But why shot?” The doctor looked fixedly at Nostromo, who shrugged his shoulders slightly. “And mark, shot suddenly, on impulse. It is evident. I wish I had his secret.”

Nostromo had advanced, and stooped slightly to look. “I seem to have seen that face somewhere,” he muttered. “Who is he?”

The doctor turned his eyes upon him again. “I may yet come to envying his fate. What do you think of that, capataz, eh?”

But Nostromo did not even hear these words. Seizing the remaining light, he thrust it under the drooping head. The doctor sat oblivious, with a lost gaze. Then the heavy iron candlestick, as if struck out of Nostromo’s hand, clattered on the floor.

“Hullo!” exclaimed the doctor, looking up with a start. He could hear the capataz stagger against the table and gasp. In the sudden extinction of the light within, the dead blackness sealing the window-frames became alive with stars to his sight.

“Of course, of course,” the doctor muttered to himself in English. “Enough to make him jump out of his skin.”

Nostromo’s heart seemed to force itself into his throat. His head swam. Hirsch! The man was Hirsch! He held on tight to the edge of the table.

“But he was hiding in the lighter,” he almost shouted. His voice fell. “In the lighter, and⁠—and⁠—”

“And Sotillo brought him in,” said the doctor. “He is no more startling to you than you were to me. What I want to know is how he induced some compassionate soul to shoot him.”

“So Sotillo knows⁠—” began Nostromo, in a more equable voice.

“Everything!” interrupted the doctor.

The capataz was heard striking the table with his fist. “Everything? What are you saying, there? Everything? Know everything? It is impossible! Everything?”

“Of course. What do you mean by impossible? I tell you I have heard this Hirsch questioned last night, here, in this very room. He knew your name, Decoud’s name, and all about the loading of the silver⁠ ⁠… The lighter was cut in two. He was grovelling in abject terror before Sotillo, but he remembered that much. What do you want more? He knew least about himself. They found him clinging to their anchor. He must have caught at it just as the lighter went to the bottom.”

“Went to the bottom?” repeated Nostromo, slowly. “Sotillo believes that? Bueno!”

The doctor, a little impatiently, was unable to imagine what else could anybody believe. Yes, Sotillo believed that the lighter was sunk, and the capataz de cargadores, together with Martin Decoud and perhaps one or two other political fugitives, had been drowned.

“I told you well, señor doctor,” remarked Nostromo at that point, “that Sotillo did not know everything.”

“Eh? What do you mean?”

“He did not know I was not dead.”

“Neither did we.”

“And you did not care⁠—none of you caballeros on the wharf⁠—once you got off a man of flesh and blood like yourselves on a fool’s business that could not end well.”

“You forget, capataz, I was not on the wharf. And I did not think well of the business. So you need not taunt me. I tell you what, man, we had but little leisure to think of the dead. Death stands near behind us all. You were gone.”

“I went, indeed!” broke in Nostromo. “And for the sake of what⁠—tell me?”

“Ah! that is your own affair,” the doctor said, roughly. “Do not ask me.”

Their flowing murmurs paused in the dark. Perched on the