Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

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

Mrs. Gould shook her head negatively; which was just what her
husband had expected from the strength of the argument. But she
shook her head negatively only because she thought that no one
could know her Charles--really know him for what he was but
herself. The thing was obvious. It could be felt. It required no
argument. And poor Mr. Gould, senior, who had died too soon to
ever hear of their engagement, remained too shadowy a figure for
her to be credited with knowledge of any sort whatever.

"No, he did not understand. In my view this mine could never have
been a thing to sell. Never! After all his misery I simply could
not have touched it for money alone," Charles Gould pursued: and
she pressed her head to his shoulder approvingly.

These two young people remembered the life which had ended
wretchedly just when their own lives had come together in that
splendour of hopeful love, which to the most sensible minds
appears like a triumph of good over all the evils of the earth. A
vague idea of rehabilitation had entered the plan of their life.
That it was so vague as to elude the support of argument made it
only the stronger. It had presented itself to them at the instant
when the woman's instinct of devotion and the man's instinct of
activity receive from the strongest of illusions their most
powerful impulse. The very prohibition imposed the necessity of
success. It was as if they had been morally bound to make good
their vigorous view of life against the unnatural error of
weariness and despair. If the idea of wealth was present to them
it was only in so far as it was bound with that other success.
Mrs. Gould, an orphan from early childhood and without fortune,
brought up in an atmosphere of intellectual interests, had never
considered the aspects of great wealth. They were too remote, and
she had not learned that they were desirable. On the other hand,
she had not known anything of absolute want. Even the very
poverty of her aunt, the Marchesa, had nothing intolerable to a
refined mind; it seemed in accord with a great grief: it had the
austerity of a sacrifice offered to a noble ideal. Thus even the
most legitimate touch of materialism was wanting in Mrs. Gould's
character. The dead man of whom she thought with tenderness
(because he was Charley's father) and with some impatience
(because he had been weak), must be put completely in the wrong.
Nothing else would do to keep their prosperity without a stain on
its only real, on its immaterial side!