Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

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

He thought of it every day; but he thought of it without
bitterness. It might have been an unfortunate affair for his poor
dad, and the whole story threw a queer light upon the social and
political life of Costaguana. The view he took of it was
sympathetic to his father, yet calm and reflective. His personal
feelings had not been outraged, and it is difficult to resent
with proper and durable indignation the physical or mental
anguish of another organism, even if that other organism is one's
own father. By the time he was twenty Charles Gould had, in his
turn, fallen under the spell of the San Tome mine. But it was
another form of enchantment, more suitable to his youth, into
whose magic formula there entered hope, vigour, and
self-confidence, instead of weary indignation and despair. Left
after he was twenty to his own guidance (except for the severe
injunction not to return to Costaguana), he had pursued his
studies in Belgium and France with the idea of qualifying for a
mining engineer. But this scientific aspect of his labours
remained vague and imperfect in his mind. Mines had acquired for
him a dramatic interest. He studied their peculiarities from a
personal point of view, too, as one would study the varied
characters of men. He visited them as one goes with curiosity
to call upon remarkable persons. He visited mines in Germany, in
Spain, in Cornwall. Abandoned workings had for him strong
fascination. Their desolation appealed to him like the sight of
human misery, whose causes are varied and profound. They might
have been worthless, but also they might have been misunderstood.
His future wife was the first, and perhaps the only person to
detect this secret mood which governed the profoundly sensible,
almost voiceless attitude of this man towards the world of
material things. And at once her delight in him, lingering with
half-open wings like those birds that cannot rise easily from a
flat level, found a pinnacle from which to soar up into the
skies.

They had become acquainted in Italy, where the future Mrs. Gould
was staying with an old and pale aunt who, years before, had
married a middle-aged, impoverished Italian marquis. She now
mourned that man, who had known how to give up his life to the
independence and unity of his country, who had known how to be as
enthusiastic in his generosity as the youngest of those who fell
for that very cause of which old Giorgio Viola was a drifting
relic, as a broken spar is suffered to float away disregarded
after a naval victory. The Marchesa led a still, whispering
existence, nun-like in her black robes and a white band over the
forehead, in a corner of the first floor of an ancient and
ruinous palace, whose big, empty halls downstairs sheltered under
their painted ceilings the harvests, the fowls, and even the
cattle, together with the whole family of the tenant farmer.