 | CHAPTER THIRTEEN Nostromo: a Tale of the Seaboard / Joseph Conrad |  |
13. CHAPTER THIRTEEN
ON THE day Mrs. Gould was going, in Dr. Monygham's
words, to "give a tertulia," Captain Fidanza
went down the side of his schooner lying in Sulaco
harbour, calm, unbending, deliberate in the way he sat
down in his dinghy and took up his sculls. He was later
than usual. The afternoon was well advanced before
he landed on the beach of the Great Isabel, and with a
steady pace climbed the slope of the island.
From a distance he made out Giselle sitting in a chair
tilted back against the end of the house, under the window
of the girl's room. She had her embroidery in her
hands, and held it well up to her eyes. The tranquillity
of that girlish figure exasperated the feeling of perpetual
struggle and strife he carried in his breast. He became
angry. It seemed to him that she ought to hear the
clanking of his fetters — his silver fetters, from afar.
And while ashore that day, he had met the doctor with
the evil eye, who had looked at him very hard.
The raising of her eyes mollified him. They smiled in
their flower-like freshness straight upon his heart. Then
she frowned. It was a warning to be cautious. He
stopped some distance away, and in a loud, indifferent
tone, said —
"Good day, Giselle. Is Linda up yet?"
"Yes. She is in the big room with father."
He approached then, and, looking through the window
into the bedroom for fear of being detected by
Linda returning there for some reason, he said, moving
only his lips —
"You love me?"
"More than my life." She went on with her embroidery
under his contemplating gaze and continued
to speak, looking at her work, "Or I could not live. I
could not, Giovanni. For this life is like death. Oh,
Giovanni, I shall perish if you do not take me away."
He smiled carelessly. "I will come to the window
when it's dark," he said.
"No, don't, Giovanni. Not-to-night. Linda and
father have been talking together for a long time today."
"What about?"
"Ramirez, I fancy I heard. I do not know. I
am afraid. I am always afraid. It is like dying a
thousand times a day. Your love is to me like your
treasure to you. It is there, but I can never get enough
of it."
He looked at her very still. She was beautiful. His
desire had grown within him. He had two masters
now. But she was incapable of sustained emotion.
She was sincere in what she said, but she slept placidly
at night. When she saw him she flamed up always.
Then only an increased taciturnity marked the change
in her. She was afraid of betraying herself. She was
afraid of pain, of bodily harm, of sharp words, of facing
anger, and witnessing violence. For her soul was light
and tender with a pagan sincerity in its impulses. She
murmured —
"Give up the palazzo, Giovanni, and the vineyard on
the hills, for which we are starving our love."
She ceased, seeing Linda standing silent at the corner
of the house.
Nostromo turned to his affianced wife with a greeting,
and was amazed at her sunken eyes, at her hollow
cheeks, at the air of illness and anguish in her face.
"Have you been ill?" he asked, trying to put some
concern into this question.
Her black eyes blazed at him. "Am I thinner?"
she asked.
"Yes — perhaps — a little."
"And older?"
"Every day counts — for all of us."
"I shall go grey, I fear, before the ring is on my
finger," she said, slowly, keeping her gaze fastened upon
him.
She waited for what he would say, rolling down her
turned-up sleeves.
"No fear of that," he said, absently.
She turned away as if it had been something final, and
busied herself with household cares while Nostromo
talked with her father. Conversation with the old
Garibaldino was not easy. Age had left his faculties
unimpaired, only they seemed to have withdrawn somewhere
deep within him. His answers were slow in coming,
with an effect of august gravity. But that day
he was more animated, quicker; there seemed to be
more life in the old lion. He was uneasy for the integrity
of his honour. He believed Sidoni's warning as
to Ramirez's designs upon his younger daughter. And
he did not trust her. She was flighty. He said nothing
of his cares to "Son Gian' Battista." It was a touch
of senile vanity. He wanted to show that he was equal
yet to the task of guarding alone the honour of his house.
Nostromo went away early. As soon as he had disappeared,
walking towards the beach, Linda stepped
over the threshold and, with a haggard smile, sat down
by the side of her father.
Ever since that Sunday, when the infatuated and
desperate Ramirez had waited for her on the wharf, she
had no doubts whatever. The jealous ravings of that
precision, as with a nail driven into her heart, that sense
of unreality and deception which, instead of bliss and
security, she had found in her intercourse with her promised
husband. She had passed on, pouring indignation
and scorn upon Ramirez; but, that Sunday, she nearly
died of wretchedness and shame, lying on the carved
and lettered stone of Teresa's grave, subscribed for by
the engine-drivers and the fitters of the railway workshops,
in sign of their respect for the hero of Italian
Unity. Old Viola had not been able to carry out his
desire of burying his wife in the sea; and Linda wept
upon the stone.
The gratuitous outrage appalled her. If he wished to
break her heart — well and good. Everything was permitted
to Gian' Battista. But why trample upon the
pieces; why seek to humiliate her spirit? Aha! He
could not break that. She dried her tears. And
Giselle! Giselle! The little one that, ever since she
could toddle, had always clung to her skirt for protection.
What duplicity! But she could not help it
probably. When there was a man in the case the poor
featherheaded wretch could not help herself.
Linda had a good share of the Viola stoicism. She
resolved to say nothing. But woman-like she put passion
into her stoicism. Giselle's short answers, prompted
by fearful caution, drove her beside herself by their
curtness that resembled disdain. One day she flung
herself upon the chair in which her indolent sister was
lying and impressed the mark of her teeth at the base
of the whitest neck in Sulaco. Giselle cried out. But
she had her share of the Viola heroism. Ready to faint
with terror, she only said, in a lazy voice, "Madre de
Dios! Are you going to eat me alive, Linda?" And
this outburst passed off leaving no trace upon the situation.
thing," reflected Giselle. "Perhaps it is not true.
It cannot be true," Linda tried to persuade herself.
But when she saw Captain Fidanza for the first time
after her meeting with the distracted Ramirez, the
certitude of her misfortune returned. She watched
him from the doorway go away to his boat, asking herself
stoically, "Will they meet to-night?" She made up
her mind not to leave the tower for a second. When he
had disappeared she came out and sat down by her
father.
The venerable Garibaldino felt, in his own words, "a
young man yet." In one way or another a good deal of
talk about Ramirez had reached him of late; and his
contempt and dislike of that man who obviously was
not what his son would have been, had made him restless.
He slept very little now; but for several nights
past instead of reading — or only sitting, with Mrs.
Gould's silver spectacles on his nose, before the open
Bible, he had been prowling actively all about the island
with his old gun, on watch over his honour.
Linda, laying her thin brown hand on his knee, tried
to soothe his excitement. Ramirez was not in Sulaco.
Nobody knew where he was. He was gone. His talk
of what he would do meant nothing.
"No," the old man interrupted. "But son Gian'
Battista told me — quite of himself — that the cowardly
esclavo was drinking and gambling with the rascals of
Zapiga, over there on the north side of the gulf. He
may get some of the worst scoundrels of that scoundrelly
town of negroes to help him in his attempt upon
the little one. . . . But I am not so old. No!"
She argued earnestly against the probability of any
attempt being made; and at last the old man fell silent,
chewing his white moustache. Women had their obstinate
was like that, and Linda resembled her mother. It was
not seemly for a man to argue. "May be. May be,"
he mumbled.
She was by no means easy in her mind. She loved
Nostromo. She turned her eyes upon Giselle, sitting at
a distance, with something of maternal tenderness, and
the jealous anguish of a rival outraged in her defeat.
Then she rose and walked over to her.
"Listen — you," she said, roughly.
The invincible candour of the gaze, raised up all violet
and dew, excited her rage and admiration. She had
beautiful eyes — the Chica — this vile thing of white flesh
and black deception. She did not know whether she
wanted to tear them out with shouts of vengeance or
cover up their mysterious and shameless innocence with
kisses of pity and love. And suddenly they became
empty, gazing blankly at her, except for a little fear not
quite buried deep enough with all the other emotions
in Giselle's heart.
Linda said, "Ramirez is boasting in town that he will
carry you off from the island."
"What folly!" answered the other, and in a perversity
born of long restraint, she added: "He is not the
man," in a jesting tone with a trembling audacity.
"No?" said Linda, through her clenched teeth. "Is
he not? Well, then, look to it; because father has been
walking about with a loaded gun at night."
"It is not good for him. You must tell him not to,
Linda. He will not listen to me."
"I shall say nothing — never any more — to anybody,"
cried Linda, passionately.
This could not last, thought Giselle. Giovanni must
take her away soon — the very next time he came. She
would not suffer these terrors for ever so much silver.
uneasy at her father's watchfulness. She had begged
Nostromo not to come to the window that night. He
had promised to keep away for this once. And she
did not know, could not guess or imagine, that he had
another reason for coming on the island.
Linda had gone straight to the tower. It was time to
light up. She unlocked the little door, and went heavily
up the spiral staircase, carrying her love for the magnificent
Capataz de Cargadores like an ever-increasing load
of shameful fetters. No; she could not throw it off.
No; let Heaven dispose of these two. And moving
about the lantern, filled with twilight and the sheen of
the moon, with careful movements she lighted the lamp.
Then her arms fell along her body.
"And with our mother looking on," she murmured.
"My own sister — the Chica!"
The whole refracting apparatus, with its brass fittings
and rings of prisms, glittered and sparkled like a dome-
shaped shrine of diamonds, containing not a lamp, but
some sacred flame, dominating the sea. And Linda, the
keeper, in black, with a pale face, drooped low in a
wooden chair, alone with her jealousy, far above the
shames and passions of the earth. A strange, dragging
pain as if somebody were pulling her about brutally
by her dark hair with bronze glints, made her put her
hands up to her temples. They would meet. They
would meet. And she knew where, too. At the window.
The sweat of torture fell in drops on her cheeks, while
the moonlight in the offing closed as if with a colossal
bar of silver the entrance of the Placid Gulf — the sombre
cavern of clouds and stillness in the surf-fretted seaboard.
Linda Viola stood up suddenly with a finger on her lip.
He loved neither her nor her sister. The whole thing
some hope. Why did he not carry her off? What prevented
him? He was incomprehensible. What were
they waiting for? For what end were these two lying
and deceiving? Not for the ends of their love. There
was no such thing. The hope of regaining him for
herself made her break her vow of not leaving the tower
that night. She must talk at once to her father, who
was wise, and would understand. She ran down the
spiral stairs. At the moment of opening the door at
the bottom she heard the sound of the first shot ever
fired on the Great Isabel.
She felt a shock, as though the bullet had struck her
breast. She ran on without pausing. The cottage was
dark. She cried at the door, "Giselle! Giselle!" then
dashed round the corner and screamed her sister's name
at the open window, without getting an answer; but
as she was rushing, distracted, round the house, Giselle
came out of the door, and darted past her, running
silently, her hair loose, and her eyes staring straight
ahead. She seemed to skim along the grass as if on
tiptoe, and vanished.
Linda walked on slowly, with her arms stretched out
before her. All was still on the island; she did not know
where she was going. The tree under which Martin
Decoud spent his last days, beholding life like a succession
of senseless images, threw a large blotch of
black shade upon the grass. Suddenly she saw her
father, standing quietly all alone in the moonlight.
The Garibaldino — big, erect, with his snow-white
hair and beard — had a monumental repose in his immobility,
leaning upon a rifle. She put her hand upon
his arm lightly. He never stirred.
"What have you done?" she asked, in her ordinary
voice.
"I have shot Ramirez — infame!" he answered, with
his eyes directed to where the shade was blackest.
"Like a thief he came, and like a thief he fell. The
child had to be protected."
He did not offer to move an inch, to advance a single
step. He stood there, rugged and unstirring, like a
statue of an old man guarding the honour of his house.
Linda removed her trembling hand from his arm, firm
and steady like an arm of stone, and, without a word,
entered the blackness of the shade. She saw a stir of
formless shapes on the ground, and stopped short. A
murmur of despair and tears grew louder to her strained
hearing.
"I entreated you not to come to-night. Oh, my
Giovanni! And you promised. Oh! Why — why did
you come, Giovanni?"
It was her sister's voice. It broke on a heartrending
sob. And the voice of the resourceful Capataz de
Cargadores, master and slave of the San Tomé treasure,
who had been caught unawares by old Giorgio while
stealing across the open towards the ravine to get some
more silver, answered careless and cool, but sounding
startlingly weak from the ground.
"It seemed as though I could not live through the
night without seeing thee once more — my star, my little
flower."
* * * * *
The brilliant tertulia was just over, the last guests had
departed, and the Señor Administrador had gone to his
room already, when Dr. Monygham, who had been expected
in the evening but had not turned up, arrived
driving along the wood-block pavement under the
electric-lamps of the deserted Calle de la Constitucion,
and found the great gateway of the Casa still open.
He limped in, stumped up the stairs, and found the
fat and sleek Basilio on the point of turning off the
lights in the sala. The prosperous majordomo remained
open-mouthed at this late invasion.
"Don't put out the lights," commanded the doctor.
"I want to see the señora."
"The señora is in the Señor Adminstrador's cancillaria,"
said Basilio, in an unctuous voice. "The Señor
Administrador starts for the mountain in an hour.
There is some trouble with the workmen to be feared, it
appears. A shameless people without reason and decency.
And idle, señor. Idle."
"You are shamelessly lazy and imbecile yourself,"
said the doctor, with that faculty for exasperation which
made him so generally beloved. "Don't put the lights
out."
Basilio retired with dignity. Dr. Monygham, waiting
in the brilliantly lighted sala, heard presently a door close
at the further end of the house. A jingle of spurs
died out. The Señor Administrador was off to the
mountain.
With a measured swish of her long train, flashing with
jewels and the shimmer of silk, her delicate head bowed
as if under the weight of a mass of fair hair, in which
the silver threads were lost, the "first lady of Sulaco,"
as Captain Mitchell used to describe her, moved along
the lighted corredor, wealthy beyond great dreams of
wealth, considered, loved, respected, honoured, and as
solitary as any human being had ever been, perhaps,
on this earth.
The doctor's "Mrs. Gould! One minute!" stopped
her with a start at the door of the lighted and empty
sala. From the similarity of mood and circumstance,
the sight of the doctor, standing there all alone amongst
the groups of furniture, recalled to her emotional memory
seemed to hear in the silence the voice of that man,
dead miserably so many years ago, pronounce the
words, "Antonia left her fan here." But it was the
doctor's voice that spoke, a little altered by his excitement.
She remarked his shining eyes.
"Mrs. Gould, you are wanted. Do you know what
has happened? You remember what I told you yesterday
about Nostromo. Well, it seems that a lancha,
a decked boat, coming from Zapiga, with four negroes
in her, passing close to the Great Isabel, was hailed
from the cliff by a woman's voice — Linda's, as a matter
of fact — commanding them (it's a moonlight night) to
go round to the beach and take up a wounded man to
the town. The patron (from whom I've heard all this),
of course, did so at once. He told me that when they
got round to the low side of the Great Isabel, they
found Linda Viola waiting for them. They followed
her: she led them under a tree not far from the cottage.
There they found Nostromo lying on the ground with
his head in the younger girl's lap, and father Viola
standing some distance off leaning on his gun. Under
Linda's direction they got a table out of the cottage for a
stretcher, after breaking off the legs. They are here,
Mrs. Gould. I mean Nostromo and — and Giselle.
The negroes brought him in to the first-aid hospital
near the harbour. He made the attendant send for
me. But it was not me he wanted to see — it was you,
Mrs. Gould! It was you."
"Me?" whispered Mrs. Gould, shrinking a little.
"Yes, you!" the doctor burst out. "He begged me
— his enemy, as he thinks — to bring you to him at once.
It seems he has something to say to you alone."
"Impossible!" murmured Mrs. Gould.
"He said to me, 'Remind her that I have done something
Gould," the doctor pursued, in the greatest excitement.
"Do you remember the silver? The silver in
the lighter — that was lost?"
Mrs. Gould remembered. But she did not say she
hated the mere mention of that silver. Frankness
personified, she remembered with an exaggerated horror
that for the first and last time of her life she had concealed
the truth from her husband about that very
silver. She had been corrupted by her fears at that
time, and she had never forgiven herself. Moreover,
that silver, which would never have come down if her
husband had been made acquainted with the news
brought by Decoud, had been in a roundabout way
nearly the cause of Dr. Monygham's death. And these
things appeared to her very dreadful.
"Was it lost, though?" the doctor exclaimed. "I've
always felt that there was a mystery about our Nostromo
ever since. I do believe he wants now, at the
point of death —"
"The point of death?" repeated Mrs. Gould.
"Yes. Yes. . . . He wants perhaps to tell
you something concerning that silver which —"
"Oh, no! No!" exclaimed Mrs. Gould, in a low
voice. "Isn't it lost and done with? Isn't there
enough treasure without it to make everybody in the
world miserable?"
The doctor remained still, in a submissive, disappointed
silence. At last he ventured, very low —
"And there is that Viola girl, Giselle. What are
we to do? It looks as though father and sister had —"
Mrs. Gould admitted that she felt in duty bound to
do her best for these girls.
"I have a volante here," the doctor said. "If you
don't mind getting into that —"
He waited, all impatience, till Mrs. Gould reappeared,
having thrown over her dress a grey cloak
with a deep hood.
It was thus that, cloaked and monastically hooded
over her evening costume, this woman, full of endurance
and compassion, stood by the side of the bed on which
the splendid Capataz de Cargadores lay stretched out
motionless on his back. The whiteness of sheets and
pillows gave a sombre and energetic relief to his bronzed.
face, to the dark, nervous hands, so good on a tiller,
upon a bridle and on a trigger, lying open and idle
upon a white coverlet.
"She is innocent," the Capataz was saying in a deep
and level voice, as though afraid that a louder word
would break the slender hold his spirit still kept upon
his body. "She is innocent. It is I alone. But no
matter. For these things I would answer to no man
or woman alive."
He paused. Mrs. Gould's face, very white within the
shadow of the hood, bent over him with an invincible
and dreary sadness. And the low sobs of Giselle Viola,
kneeling at the end of the bed, her gold hair with coppery
gleams loose and scattered over the Capataz's
feet, hardly troubled the silence of the room.
"Ha! Old Giorgio — the guardian of thine honour!
Fancy the Vecchio coming upon me so light of foot, so
steady of aim. I myself could have done no better.
But the price of a charge of powder might have been
saved. The honour was safe. . . . Señora, she
would have followed to the end of the world Nostromo
the thief. . . . I have said the word. The spell
is broken!"
A low moan from the girl made him cast his eyes
down.
"I cannot see her. . . . No matter," he went on,
his voice. "One kiss is enough, if there is no time for
more. An airy soul, señora! Bright and warm, like
sunshine — soon clouded, and soon serene. They would
crush it there between them. Señora, cast on her the
eye of your compassion, as famed from one end of the
land to the other as the courage and daring of the man
who speaks to you. She will console herself in time.
And even Ramirez is not a bad fellow. I am not angry.
No! It is not Ramirez who overcame the Capataz
of the Sulaco Cargadores." He paused, made an effort,
and in louder voice, a little wildly, declared —
"I die betrayed — betrayed by —"
But he did not say by whom or by what he was dying
betrayed.
"She would not have betrayed me," he began again,
opening his eyes very wide. "She was faithful. We
were going very far — very soon. I could have torn
myself away from that accursed treasure for her. For
that child I would have left boxes and boxes of it — full.
And Decoud took four. Four ingots. Why? Picardia!
To betray me? How could I give back the treasure
with four ingots missing? They would have said I
had purloined them. The doctor would have said that.
Alas! it holds me yet!"
Mrs. Gould bent low, fascinated — cold with apprehension.
"What became of Don Martin on that night, Nostromo?"
"Who knows? I wondered what would become of
me. Now I know. Death was to come upon me unawares.
He went away! He betrayed me. And you
think I have killed him! You are all alike, you fine
people. The silver has killed me. It has held me. It
holds me yet. Nobody knows where it is. But you are
said, 'Save it on your life.' And when I returned, and
you all thought it was lost, what do I hear? 'It was
nothing of importance. Let it go. Up, Nostromo, the
faithful, and ride away to save us, for dear life!'"
"Nostromo!" Mrs. Gould whispered, bending very
low. "I, too, have hated the idea of that silver from
the bottom of my heart."
"Marvellous! — that one of you should hate the
wealth that you know so well how to take from the
hands of the poor. The world rests upon the poor,
as old Giorgio says. You have been always good to the
poor. But there is something accursed in wealth.
Señora, shall I tell you where the treasure is? To you
alone. . . . Shining! Incorruptible!"
A pained, involuntary reluctance lingered in his tone,
in his eyes, plain to the woman with the genius of sympathetic
intuition. She averted her glance from the
miserable subjection of the dying man, appalled, wishing
to hear no more of the silver.
"No, Capataz," she said. "No one misses it now.
Let it be lost for ever."
After hearing these words, Nostromo closed his eyes,
uttered no word, made no movement. Outside the
door of the sick-room Dr. Monygham, excited to the
highest pitch, his eyes shining with eagerness, came up
to the two women.
"Now, Mrs. Gould," he said, almost brutally in his
impatience, "tell me, was I right? There is a mystery.
You have got the word of it, have you not? He told
you —"
"He told me nothing," said Mrs. Gould, steadily.
The light of his temperamental enmity to Nostromo
went out of Dr. Monygham's eyes. He stepped back
submissively. He did not believe Mrs. Gould. But
inexplicable fatality affirming the victory of Nostromo's
genius over his own. Even before that woman, whom
he loved with secret devotion, he had been defeated
by the magnificent Capataz de Cargadores, the man
who had lived his own life on the assumption of unbroken
fidelity, rectitude, and courage!
"Pray send at once somebody for my carriage,"
spoke Mrs. Gould from within her hood. Then, turning
to Giselle Viola, "Come nearer me, child; come
closer. We will wait here."
Giselle Viola, heartbroken and childlike, her face
veiled in her falling hair, crept up to her side. Mrs.
Gould slipped her hand through the arm of the unworthy
daughter of old Viola, the immaculate republican,
the hero without a stain. Slowly, gradually,
as a withered flower droops, the head of the girl, who
would have followed a thief to the end of the world,
rested on the shoulder of Doña Emilia, the first lady
of Sulaco, the wife of the Señor Administrador of the
San Tomé mine. And Mrs. Gould, feeling her suppressed
sobbing, nervous and excited, had the first
and only moment of bitterness in her life. It was
worthy of Dr. Monygham himself.
"Console yourself, child. Very soon he would have
forgotten you for his treasure."
"Señora, he loved me. He loved me," Giselle whispered,
despairingly. "He loved me as no one had ever
been loved before."
"I have been loved, too," Mrs. Gould said in a severe
tone.
Giselle clung to her convulsively. "Oh, señora,
but you shall live adored to the end of your life," she
sobbed out.
Mrs. Gould kept an unbroken silence till the carriage
the doctor had shut the door of the landau, she leaned
over to him.
"You can do nothing?" she whispered.
"No, Mrs. Gould. Moreover, he won't let us touch
him. It does not matter. I just had one look. . . .
Useless."
But he promised to see old Viola and the other girl
that very night. He could get the police-boat to take
him off to the island. He remained in the street, looking
after the landau rolling away slowly behind the
white mules.
The rumour of some accident — an accident to Captain
Fidanza — had been spreading along the new quays
with their rows of lamps and the dark shapes of towering
cranes. A knot of night prowlers — the poorest of
the poor — hung about the door of the first-aid hospital,
whispering in the moonlight of the empty street.
There was no one with the wounded man but the pale
photographer, small, frail, bloodthirsty, the hater of
capitalists, perched on a high stool near the head of the
bed with his knees up and his chin in his hands. He
had been fetched by a comrade who, working late on
the wharf, had heard from a negro belonging to a lancha,
that Captain Fidanza had been brought ashore mortally
wounded.
"Have you any dispositions to make, comrade?"
he asked, anxiously. "Do not forget that we want
money for our work. The rich must be fought with
their own weapons."
Nostromo made no answer. The other did not insist,
remaining huddled up on the stool, shock-headed,
wildly hairy, like a hunchbacked monkey. Then, after
a long silence —
"Comrade Fidanza," he began, solemnly, "you have
enemy of the people?"
In the dimly lit room Nostromo rolled his head slowly
on the pillow and opened his eyes, directing at the weird
figure perched by his bedside a glance of enigmatic and
profound inquiry. Then his head rolled back, his eyelids
fell, and the Capataz de Cargadores died without a
word or moan after an hour of immobility, broken by
short shudders testifying to the most atrocious sufferings.
Dr. Monygham, going out in the police-galley to the
islands, beheld the glitter of the moon upon the gulf
and the high black shape of the Great Isabel sending
a shaft of light afar, from under the canopy of clouds.
"Pull easy," he said, wondering what he would find
there. He tried to imagine Linda and her father, and
discovered a strange reluctance within himself. "Pull
easy," he repeated.
* * * * * *
From the moment he fired at the thief of his honour,
Giorgio Viola had not stirred from the spot. He stood,
his old gun grounded, his hand grasping the barrel near
the muzzle. After the lancha carrying off Nostromo
for ever from her had left the shore, Linda, coming up,
stopped before him. He did not seem to be aware of
her presence, but when, losing her forced calmness,
she cried out —
"Do you know whom you have killed?" he answered
—
"Ramirez the vagabond."
White, and staring insanely at her father, Linda
laughed in his face. After a time he joined her faintly
in a deep-toned and distant echo of her peals. Then
she stopped, and the old man spoke as if startled —
"He cried out in son Gian' Battista's voice."
The gun fell from his opened hand, but the arm remained
extended for a moment as if still supported.
Linda seized it roughly.
"You are too old to understand. Come into the
house."
He let her lead him. On the threshold he stumbled
heavily, nearly coming to the ground together with
his daughter. His excitement, his activity of the last
few days, had been like the flare of a dying lamp. He
caught at the back of his chair.
"In son Gian' Battista's voice," he repeated in a
severe tone. "I heard him — Ramirez — the miserable
—"
Linda helped him into the chair, and, bending low,
hissed into his ear —
"You have killed Gian' Battista."
The old man smiled under his thick moustache.
Women had strange fancies.
"Where is the child?" he asked, surprised at the penetrating
chilliness of the air and the unwonted dimness
of the lamp by which he used to sit up half the night
with the open Bible before him.
Linda hesitated a moment, then averted her eyes.
"She is asleep," she said. "We shall talk of her tomorrow."
She could not bear to look at him. He filled her with
terror and with an almost unbearable feeling of pity.
She had observed the change that came over him. He
would never understand what he had done; and even
to her the whole thing remained incomprehensible.
He said with difficulty —
"Give me the book."
Linda laid on the table the closed volume in its worn
leather cover, the Bible given him ages ago by an
Englishman in Palermo.
"The child had to be protected," he said, in a strange,
mournful voice.
Behind his chair Linda wrung her hands, crying without
noise. Suddenly she started for the door. He
heard her move.
"Where are you going? "he asked.
"To the light," she answered, turning round to look
at him balefully.
"The light! Si — duty."
Very upright, white-haired, leonine, heroic in his
absorbed quietness, he felt in the pocket of his red shirt
for the spectacles given him by Doña Emilia. He put
them on. After a long period of immobility he opened
the book, and from on high looked through the glasses
at the small print in double columns. A rigid, stern
expression settled upon his features with a slight frown,
as if in response to some gloomy thought or unpleasant
sensation. But he never detached his eyes from the
book while he swayed forward, gently, gradually, till
his snow-white head rested upon the open pages. A
wooden clock ticked methodically on the white-washed
wall, and growing slowly cold the Garibaldino lay
alone, rugged, undecayed, like an old oak uprooted by
a treacherous gust of wind.
The light of the Great Isabel burned unfailing above
the lost treasure of the San Tomé mine. Into the
bluish sheen of a night without stars the lantern sent
out a yellow beam towards the far horizon. Like a
black speck upon the shining panes, Linda, crouching
in the outer gallery, rested her head on the rail. The
moon, drooping in the western board, looked at her
radiantly.
Below, at the foot of the cliff, the regular splash of
oars from a passing boat ceased, and Dr. Monygham
stood up in the stern sheets.
"Linda!" he shouted, throwing back his head.
"Linda!"
Linda stood up. She had recognized the voice.
"Is he dead?" she cried, bending over.
"Yes, my poor girl. I am coming round," the doctor
answered from below. "Pull to the beach," he said
to the rowers.
Linda's black figure detached itself upright on the
light of the lantern with her arms raised above her head
as though she were going to throw herself over.
"It is I who loved you," she whispered, with a face
as set and white as marble in the moonlight. "I!
Only I! She will forget thee, killed miserably for
her pretty face. I cannot understand. I cannot understand.
But I shall never forget thee. Never!"
She stood silent and still, collecting her strength to
throw all her fidelity, her pain, bewilderment, and despair
into one great cry.
"Never! Gian' Battista!"
Dr. Monygham, pulling round in the police-galley,
heard the name pass over his head. It was another
of Nostromo's triumphs, the greatest, the most enviable,
the most sinister of all. In that true cry of
undying passion that seemed to ring aloud from Punta
Mala to Azuera and away to the bright line of the
horizon, overhung by a big white cloud shining like a
mass of solid silver, the genius of the magnificent Capataz
de Cargadores dominated the dark gulf containing
his conquests of treasure and love.
| CHAPTER THIRTEEN Nostromo: a Tale of the Seaboard / Joseph Conrad | |