Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART SECOND: THE ISABELS 5. CHAPTER FIVE (continued)

He remained silent for a minute, startled, as if overwhelmed by a
sort of awed happiness, with the lines of the mocking smile still
stiffened about his mouth, and incredulous surprise in his eyes.
The value of a sentence is in the personality which utters it,
for nothing new can be said by man or woman; and those were the
last words, it seemed to him, that could ever have been spoken by
Antonia. He had never made it up with her so completely in all
their intercourse of small encounters; but even before she had
time to turn towards him, which she did slowly with a rigid
grace, he had begun to plead--

"My sister is only waiting to embrace you. My father is
transported with joy. I won't say anything of my mother! Our
mothers were like sisters. There is the mail-boat for the south
next week--let us go. That Moraga is a fool! A man like Montero
is bribed. It's the practice of the country. It's tradition
--it's politics. Read 'Fifty Years of Misrule.'"

"Leave poor papa alone, Don Martin. He believes--"

"I have the greatest tenderness for your father," he began,
hurriedly. "But I love you, Antonia! And Moraga has miserably
mismanaged this business. Perhaps your father did, too; I don't
know. Montero was bribeable. Why, I suppose he only wanted his
share of this famous loan for national development. Why didn't
the stupid Sta. Marta people give him a mission to Europe, or
something? He would have taken five years' salary in advance, and
gone on loafing in Paris, this stupid, ferocious Indio!"

"The man," she said, thoughtfully, and very calm before this
outburst, "was intoxicated with vanity. We had all the
information, not from Moraga only; from others, too. There was
his brother intriguing, too."