Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART THIRD: THE LIGHTHOUSE 3. CHAPTER THREE (continued)

"Heavens and earth!" muttered Captain Mitchell, "I should not
have believed that anybody could be ass enough--" He paused, then
went on mournfully: "But what's the good of all this? It would
have been a clever enough lie if the lighter had been still
afloat. It would have kept that inconceivable idiot perhaps from
sending out the steamer to cruise in the gulf. That was the
danger that worried me no end." Captain Mitchell sighed
profoundly.

"I had an object," the doctor pronounced, slowly.

"Had you?" muttered Captain Mitchell. "Well, that's lucky, or
else I would have thought that you went on fooling him for the
fun of the thing. And perhaps that was your object. Well, I must
say I personally wouldn't condescend to that sort of thing. It is
not to my taste. No, no. Blackening a friend's character is not
my idea of fun, if it were to fool the greatest blackguard on
earth."

Had it not been for Captain Mitchell's depression, caused by the
fatal news, his disgust of Dr. Monygham would have taken a more
outspoken shape; but he thought to himself that now it really did
not matter what that man, whom he had never liked, would say and
do.

"I wonder," he grumbled, "why they have shut us up together, or
why Sotillo should have shut you up at all, since it seems to me
you have been fairly chummy up there?"

"Yes, I wonder," said the doctor grimly.

Captain Mitchell's heart was so heavy that he would have
preferred for the time being a complete solitude to the best of
company. But any company would have been preferable to the
doctor's, at whom he had always looked askance as a sort of
beachcomber of superior intelligence partly reclaimed from his
abased state. That feeling led him to ask--

"What has that ruffian done with the other two?"

"The chief engineer he would have let go in any case," said the
doctor. "He wouldn't like to have a quarrel with the railway upon
his hands. Not just yet, at any rate. I don't think, Captain
Mitchell, that you understand exactly what Sotillo's position
is--"