Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART FIRST: THE SILVER OF THE MINE 6. CHAPTER SIX (continued)

For a moment, biting her carmine lip, she deplored inwardly the
tyranny of the rigid principles governing the sale of her
influence in high places. Then, significantly, and with a touch
of impatience, "Allez," she added, "et dites bien a votre
bonhomme--entendez-vous?--qu'il faut avaler la pilule."

After such a warning there was nothing for it but to sign and
pay. Mr. Gould had swallowed the pill, and it was as though it
had been compounded of some subtle poison that acted directly on
his brain. He became at once mine-ridden, and as he was well read
in light literature it took to his mind the form of the Old Man
of the Sea fastened upon his shoulders. He also began to dream of
vampires. Mr. Gould exaggerated to himself the disadvantages of
his new position, because he viewed it emotionally. His position
in Costaguana was no worse than before. But man is a desperately
conservative creature, and the extravagant novelty of this
outrage upon his purse distressed his sensibilities. Everybody
around him was being robbed by the grotesque and murderous bands
that played their game of governments and revolutions after the
death of Guzman Bento. His experience had taught him that,
however short the plunder might fall of their legitimate
expectations, no gang in possession of the Presidential Palace
would be so incompetent as to suffer itself to be baffled by the
want of a pretext. The first casual colonel of the barefooted
army of scarecrows that came along was able to expose with force
and precision to any mere civilian his titles to a sum of 10,000
dollars; the while his hope would be immutably fixed upon a
gratuity, at any rate, of no less than a thousand. Mr. Gould
knew that very well, and, armed with resignation, had waited for
better times. But to be robbed under the forms of legality and
business was intolerable to his imagination. Mr. Gould, the
father, had one fault in his sagacious and honourable character:
he attached too much importance to form. It is a failing common
to mankind, whose views are tinged by prejudices. There was for
him in that affair a malignancy of perverted justice which, by
means of a moral shock, attacked his vigorous physique. "It will
end by killing me," he used to affirm many times a day. And, in
fact, since that time he began to suffer from fever, from liver
pains, and mostly from a worrying inability to think of anything
else. The Finance Minister could have formed no conception of the
profound subtlety of his revenge. Even Mr. Gould's letters to his
fourteen-year-old boy Charles, then away in England for his
education, came at last to talk of practically nothing but the
mine. He groaned over the injustice, the persecution, the outrage
of that mine; he occupied whole pages in the exposition of the
fatal consequences attaching to the possession of that mine from
every point of view, with every dismal inference, with words of
horror at the apparently eternal character of that curse. For the
Concession had been granted to him and his descendants for ever.
He implored his son never to return to Costaguana, never to claim
any part of his inheritance there, because it was tainted by the
infamous Concession; never to touch it, never to approach it, to
forget that America existed, and pursue a mercantile career in
Europe. And each letter ended with bitter self-reproaches for
having stayed too long in that cavern of thieves, intriguers, and
brigands.