Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

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

He forced a slight, discordant laugh out of himself, while
Captain Mitchell, for the first time, looked at him with some
interest.

"The law shall take note later on of your transgressions,"
Sotillo hurried on. "But as for me, you can live free, unguarded,
unobserved. Do you hear, Senor Mitchell? You may depart to your
affairs. You are beneath my notice. My attention is claimed by
matters of the very highest importance."

Captain Mitchell was very nearly provoked to an answer. It
displeased him to be liberated insultingly; but want of sleep,
prolonged anxieties, a profound disappointment with the fatal
ending of the silver-saving business weighed upon his spirits. It
was as much as he could do to conceal his uneasiness, not about
himself perhaps, but about things in general. It occurred to him
distinctly that something underhand was going on. As he went out
he ignored the doctor pointedly.

"A brute!" said Sotillo, as the door shut.

Dr. Monygham slipped off the window-sill, and, thrusting his
hands into the pockets of the long, grey dust coat he was
wearing, made a few steps into the room.

Sotillo got up, too, and, putting himself in the way, examined
him from head to foot.

"So your countrymen do not confide in you very much, senor
doctor. They do not love you, eh? Why is that, I wonder?"

The doctor, lifting his head, answered by a long, lifeless stare
and the words, "Perhaps because I have lived too long in
Costaguana."

Sotillo had a gleam of white teeth under the black moustache.

"Aha! But you love yourself," he said, encouragingly.

"If you leave them alone," the doctor said, looking with the same
lifeless stare at Sotillo's handsome face, "they will betray
themselves very soon. Meantime, I may try to make Don Carlos
speak?"