Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART THIRD: THE LIGHTHOUSE 4. CHAPTER FOUR (continued)

After all, with his English parentage and English upbringing, he
perceived that he was an adventurer in Costaguana, the descendant
of adventurers enlisted in a foreign legion, of men who had
sought fortune in a revolutionary war, who had planned
revolutions, who had believed in revolutions. For all the
uprightness of his character, he had something of an adventurer's
easy morality which takes count of personal risk in the ethical
appraising of his action. He was prepared, if need be, to blow up
the whole San Tome mountain sky high out of the territory of the
Republic. This resolution expressed the tenacity of his
character, the remorse of that subtle conjugal infidelity through
which his wife was no longer the sole mistress of his thoughts,
something of his father's imaginative weakness, and something,
too, of the spirit of a buccaneer throwing a lighted match into
the magazine rather than surrender his ship.

Down below in the patio the wounded Cargador had breathed his
last. The woman cried out once, and her cry, unexpected and
shrill, made all the wounded sit up. The practicante scrambled to
his feet, and, guitar in hand, gazed steadily in her direction
with elevated eyebrows. The two girls--sitting now one on each
side of their wounded relative, with their knees drawn up and
long cigars between their lips--nodded at each other
significantly.

Charles Gould, looking down over the balustrade, saw three men
dressed ceremoniously in black frock-coats with white shirts, and
wearing European round hats, enter the patio from the street. One
of them, head and shoulders taller than the two others, advanced
with marked gravity, leading the way. This was Don Juste Lopez,
accompanied by two of his friends, members of Assembly, coming to
call upon the Administrador of the San Tome mine at this early
hour. They saw him, too, waved their hands to him urgently,
walking up the stairs as if in procession.