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

edge of the table with slightly averted faces, they felt their shoulders touch, and their eyes remained directed towards an upright shape nearly lost in the obscurity of the inner part of the room, that with projecting head and shoulders, in ghastly immobility, seemed intent on catching every word.

“Muy bien!” Nostromo muttered at last. “So be it. Teresa was right. It is my own affair.”

“Teresa is dead,” remarked the doctor, absently, while his mind followed a new line of thought suggested by what might have been called Nostromo’s return to life. “She died, the poor woman.”

“Without a priest?” the capataz asked, anxiously.

“What a question! Who could have got a priest for her last night?”

“May God keep her soul!” ejaculated Nostromo, with a gloomy and hopeless fervour which had no time to surprise Dr. Monygham, before, reverting to their previous conversation, he continued in a sinister tone, “Si, señor doctor. As you were saying, it is my own affair. A very desperate affair.”

“There are no two men in this part of the world that could have saved themselves by swimming as you have done,” the doctor said, admiringly.

And again there was silence between those two men. They were both reflecting, and the diversity of their natures made their thoughts born from their meeting swing afar from each other. The doctor, impelled to risky action by his loyalty to the Goulds, wondered with thankfulness at the chain of accident which had brought that man back where he would be of the greatest use in the work of saving the San Tome mine. The doctor was loyal to the mine. It presented itself to his fifty-years’ old eyes in the shape of a little woman in a soft dress with a long train, with a head attractively overweighted by a great mass of fair hair and the delicate preciousness of her inner worth, partaking of a gem and a flower, revealed in every attitude of her person. As the dangers thickened round the San Tome mine this illusion acquired force, permanency, and authority. It claimed him at last! This claim, exalted by a spiritual detachment from the usual sanctions of hope and reward, made Dr. Monygham’s thinking, acting, individuality extremely dangerous to himself and to others, all his scruples vanishing in the proud feeling that his devotion was the only thing that stood between an admirable woman and a frightful disaster.

It was a sort of intoxication which made him utterly indifferent to Decoud’s fate, but left his wits perfectly clear for the appreciation of Decoud’s political idea. It was a good idea⁠—and Barrios was the only instrument of its realization. The doctor’s soul, withered and shrunk by the shame of a moral disgrace, became implacable in the expansion of its tenderness. Nostromo’s return was providential. He did not think of him humanely, as of a fellow-creature just escaped from the jaws of death. The capataz for him was the only possible messenger to Cayta. The very man. The doctor’s misanthropic mistrust of mankind (the bitterer because based on personal failure) did not lift him sufficiently above common weaknesses. He was under the spell of an established reputation. Trumpeted by Captain Mitchell, grown in repetition, and fixed in general assent, Nostromo’s faithfulness had never been questioned by Dr. Monygham as a fact. It was not likely to be questioned now he stood in desperate need of it himself. Dr. Monygham was human; he accepted the popular conception of the capataz’s incorruptibility simply because no word or fact had ever contradicted a mere affirmation. It seemed to be a part of the man, like his whiskers or his teeth. It was impossible to conceive him otherwise. The question was whether he would consent to go on such a dangerous and desperate errand. The doctor was observant enough to have become aware from the first of something peculiar in the man’s temper. He was no doubt sore about the loss of the silver.

“It will be necessary to take him into my fullest confidence,” he said to himself, with a certain acuteness of insight into the nature he had to deal with.

On Nostromo’s side the silence had been full of black irresolution, anger, and mistrust. He was the first to break it, however.

“The swimming was no great matter,” he said. “It is what went before⁠—and what comes after that⁠—”

He did not quite finish what he meant to say, breaking off short, as though his thought had butted against a solid obstacle. The doctor’s mind pursued its own schemes with Machiavellian subtlety. He said as sympathetically as he was able⁠—

“It is unfortunate, capataz. But no one would think of blaming you. Very unfortunate. To begin with, the treasure ought never to have left the mountain. But it was Decoud who⁠—however, he is dead. There is no need to talk of him.”

“No,” assented Nostromo, as the doctor paused, “there is no need to talk of dead men. But I am not dead yet.”

“You are all right. Only a man of your intrepidity could have saved himself.”

In this Dr. Monygham was sincere. He esteemed highly the intrepidity of that man, whom he valued but little, being disillusioned as to mankind in general, because of the particular instance in which his own manhood had failed. Having had to encounter singlehanded during his period of eclipse many physical dangers, he was well aware of the most dangerous element common to them all: of the crushing, paralyzing sense of human littleness, which is what really defeats a man struggling with natural forces, alone, far from the eyes of his fellows. He was eminently fit to appreciate the mental image he made for himself of the capataz, after hours of tension and anxiety, precipitated suddenly into an abyss of waters and darkness, without earth or sky, and confronting it not only with an undismayed mind, but with sensible success. Of course, the man was an incomparable swimmer, that was known, but the doctor judged that this instance testified to a still greater intrepidity of spirit.