Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART THIRD: THE LIGHTHOUSE 4. CHAPTER FOUR (continued)

Leonardo told him that the senora had not risen yet. The senora
had given into her charge the girls belonging to that Italian
posadero. She, Leonarda, had put them to bed in her own room. The
fair girl had cried herself to sleep, but the dark one--the
bigger--had not closed her eyes yet. She sat up in bed clutching
the sheets right up under her chin and staring before her like a
little witch. Leonarda did not approve of the Viola children
being admitted to the house. She made this feeling clear by the
indifferent tone in which she inquired whether their mother was
dead yet. As to the senora, she must be asleep. Ever since she
had gone into her room after seeing the departure of Dona Antonia
with her dying father, there had been no sound behind her door.

The doctor, rousing himself out of profound reflection, told her
abruptly to call her mistress at once. He hobbled off to wait for
Mrs. Gould in the sala. He was very tired, but too excited to sit
down. In this great drawing-room, now empty, in which his
withered soul had been refreshed after many arid years and his
outcast spirit had accepted silently the toleration of many
side-glances, he wandered haphazard amongst the chairs and tables
till Mrs. Gould, enveloped in a morning wrapper, came in rapidly.

"You know that I never approved of the silver being sent away,"
the doctor began at once, as a preliminary to the narrative of
his night's adventures in association with Captain Mitchell, the
engineer-in-chief, and old Viola, at Sotillo's headquarters. To
the doctor, with his special conception of this political crisis,
the removal of the silver had seemed an irrational and ill-omened
measure. It was as if a general were sending the best part of his
troops away on the eve of battle upon some recondite pretext. The
whole lot of ingots might have been concealed somewhere where
they could have been got at for the purpose of staving off the
dangers which were menacing the security of the Gould Concession.
The Administrador had acted as if the immense and powerful
prosperity of the mine had been founded on methods of probity, on
the sense of usefulness. And it was nothing of the kind. The
method followed had been the only one possible. The Gould
Concession had ransomed its way through all those years. It was a
nauseous process. He quite understood that Charles Gould had got
sick of it and had left the old path to back up that hopeless
attempt at reform. The doctor did not believe in the reform of
Costaguana. And now the mine was back again in its old path, with
the disadvantage that henceforth it had to deal not only with the
greed provoked by its wealth, but with the resentment awakened by
the attempt to free itself from its bondage to moral corruption.
That was the penalty of failure. What made him uneasy was that
Charles Gould seemed to him to have weakened at the decisive
moment when a frank return to the old methods was the only
chance. Listening to Decoud's wild scheme had been a weakness.