Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

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

The horse of the torch-bearer, motionless, hung his head low, and
the rider had dropped the reins to light a cigarette. The glare
of the torch played on the front of the house crossed by the big
black letters of its inscription in which only the word ITALIA
was lighted fully. The patch of wavering glare reached as far as
Mrs. Gould's carriage waiting on the road, with the yellow-faced,
portly Ignacio apparently dozing on the box. By his side Basilio,
dark and skinny, held a Winchester carbine in front of him, with
both hands, and peered fearfully into the darkness. Nostromo
touched lightly the doctor's shoulder.

"Is she really dying, senor doctor?"

"Yes," said the doctor, with a strange twitch of his scarred
cheek. "And why she wants to see you I cannot imagine."

"She has been like that before," suggested Nostromo, looking
away.

"Well, Capataz, I can assure you she will never be like that
again," snarled Dr. Monygham. "You may go to her or stay away.
There is very little to be got from talking to the dying. But she
told Dona Emilia in my hearing that she has been like a mother to
you ever since you first set foot ashore here."

"Si! And she never had a good word to say for me to anybody. It
is more as if she could not forgive me for being alive, and such
a man, too, as she would have liked her son to be."

"Maybe!" exclaimed a mournful deep voice near them. "Women have
their own ways of tormenting themselves." Giorgio Viola had come
out of the house. He threw a heavy black shadow in the
torchlight, and the glare fell on his big face, on the great
bushy head of white hair. He motioned the Capataz indoors with
his extended arm.

Dr. Monygham, after busying himself with a little medicament box
of polished wood on the seat of the landau, turned to old Giorgio
and thrust into his big, trembling hand one of the
glass-stoppered bottles out of the case.