第177章

`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 Ihave 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 sickroom 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?'