Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard

J >> Joseph Conrad >> Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard


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 Tome 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 Senor 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
senora."

"The senora is in the Senor Adminstrador's cancillaria," said Basilio,
in an unctuous voice. "The Senor 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, senor.
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 Senor 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 her unexpected
meeting with Martin Decoud; she 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 to keep a roof
over her head.' . . . Mrs. 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. . . . Senora, 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, with the shadow of the
old magnificent carelessness in his voice. "One kiss is enough, if
there is no time for more. An airy soul, senora! Bright and warm, like
sunshine--soon clouded, and soon serene. They would crush it there
between them. Senora, 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 the wife of Don Carlos, who put it into my hands and 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. Senora, 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 her word was law. He accepted her denial like an 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 Dona Emilia, the first lady of Sulaco,
the wife of the Senor Administrador of the San Tome 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."

"Senora, 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, senora, but you shall live
adored to the end of your life," she sobbed out.

Mrs. Gould kept an unbroken silence till the carriage arrived. She
helped in the half-fainting girl. After 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 refused all aid from
that doctor. Is he really a dangerous 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
Dona 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 Tome 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.