Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART THIRD: THE LIGHTHOUSE 8. CHAPTER EIGHT (continued)

"Ah! that is your own affair," the doctor said, roughly. "Do not
ask me."

Their flowing murmurs paused in the dark. Perched on the edge of
the table with slightly averted faces, they felt their shoulders
touch, and their eyes remained directed towards an upright shape
nearly lost in the obscurity of the inner part of the room, that
with projecting head and shoulders, in ghastly immobility, seemed
intent on catching every word.

"Muy bien!" Nostromo muttered at last. "So be it. Teresa was
right. It is my own affair."

"Teresa is dead," remarked the doctor, absently, while his mind
followed a new line of thought suggested by what might have been
called Nostromo's return to life. "She died, the poor woman."

"Without a priest?" the Capataz asked, anxiously.

"What a question! Who could have got a priest for her last
night?"

"May God keep her soul!" ejaculated Nostromo, with a gloomy and
hopeless fervour which had no time to surprise Dr. Monygham,
before, reverting to their previous conversation, he continued in
a sinister tone, "Si, senor doctor. As you were saying, it is my
own affair. A very desperate affair."

"There are no two men in this part of the world that could have
saved themselves by swimming as you have done," the doctor said,
admiringly.

And again there was silence between those two men. They were
both reflecting, and the diversity of their natures made their
thoughts born from their meeting swing afar from each other. The
doctor, impelled to risky action by his loyalty to the Goulds,
wondered with thankfulness at the chain of accident which had
brought that man back where he would be of the greatest use in
the work of saving the San Tome mine. The doctor was loyal to the
mine. It presented itself to his fifty-years' old eyes in the
shape of a little woman in a soft dress with a long train, with a
head attractively overweighted by a great mass of fair hair and
the delicate preciousness of her inner worth, partaking of a gem
and a flower, revealed in every attitude of her person. As the
dangers thickened round the San Tome mine this illusion acquired
force, permanency, and authority. It claimed him at last! This
claim, exalted by a spiritual detachment from the usual sanctions
of hope and reward, made Dr. Monygham's thinking, acting,
individuality extremely dangerous to himself and to others, all
his scruples vanishing in the proud feeling that his devotion was
the only thing that stood between an admirable woman and a
frightful disaster.