Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART SECOND: THE ISABELS 7. CHAPTER SEVEN (continued)

"His wife has understood it, too. That is why she is such a good
ally of mine. She seizes upon all my suggestions with a sure
instinct that in the end they make for the safety of the Gould
Concession. And he defers to her because he trusts her perhaps,
but I fancy rather as if he wished to make up for some subtle
wrong, for that sentimental unfaithfulness which surrenders her
happiness, her life, to the seduction of an idea. The little
woman has discovered that he lives for the mine rather than for
her. But let them be. To each his fate, shaped by passion or
sentiment. The principal thing is that she has backed up my
advice to get the silver out of the town, out of the country, at
once, at any cost, at any risk. Don Carlos' mission is to
preserve unstained the fair fame of his mine; Mrs. Gould's
mission is to save him from the effects of that cold and
overmastering passion, which she dreads more than if it were an
infatuation for another woman. Nostromo's mission is to save the
silver. The plan is to load it into the largest of the Company's
lighters, and send it across the gulf to a small port out of
Costaguana territory just on the other side the Azuera, where the
first northbound steamer will get orders to pick it up. The
waters here are calm. We shall slip away into the darkness of the
gulf before the Esmeralda rebels arrive; and by the time the day
breaks over the ocean we shall be out of sight, invisible, hidden
by Azuera, which itself looks from the Sulaco shore like a faint
blue cloud on the horizon.

"The incorruptible Capataz de Cargadores is the man for that
work; and I, the man with a passion, but without a mission, I go
with him to return--to play my part in the farce to the end, and,
if successful, to receive my reward, which no one but Antonia can
give me.

"I shall not see her again now before I depart. I left her, as I
have said, by Don Jose's bedside. The street was dark, the houses
shut up, and I walked out of the town in the night. Not a single
street-lamp had been lit for two days, and the archway of the
gate was only a mass of darkness in the vague form of a tower, in
which I heard low, dismal groans, that seemed to answer the
murmurs of a man's voice.