Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART THIRD: THE LIGHTHOUSE 7. CHAPTER SEVEN (continued)

Charles Gould on going out passed his hand over his forehead as
if to disperse the mists of an oppressive dream, whose grotesque
extravagance leaves behind a subtle sense of bodily danger and
intellectual decay. In the passages and on the staircases of the
old palace Montero's troopers lounged about insolently, smoking
and making way for no one; the clanking of sabres and spurs
resounded all over the building. Three silent groups of civilians
in severe black waited in the main gallery, formal and helpless,
a little huddled up, each keeping apart from the others, as if in
the exercise of a public duty they had been overcome by a desire
to shun the notice of every eye. These were the deputations
waiting for their audience. The one from the Provincial Assembly,
more restless and uneasy in its corporate expression, was
overtopped by the big face of Don Juste Lopez, soft and white,
with prominent eyelids and wreathed in impenetrable solemnity as
if in a dense cloud. The President of the Provincial Assembly,
coming bravely to save the last shred of parliamentary
institutions (on the English model), averted his eyes from the
Administrador of the San Tome mine as a dignified rebuke of his
little faith in that only saving principle.

The mournful severity of that reproof did not affect Charles
Gould, but he was sensible to the glances of the others directed
upon him without reproach, as if only to read their own fate upon
his face. All of them had talked, shouted, and declaimed in the
great sala of the Casa Gould. The feeling of compassion for those
men, struck with a strange impotence in the toils of moral
degradation, did not induce him to make a sign. He suffered from
his fellowship in evil with them too much. He crossed the Plaza
unmolested. The Amarilla Club was full of festive ragamuffins.
Their frowsy heads protruded from every window, and from within
came drunken shouts, the thumping of feet, and the twanging of
harps. Broken bottles strewed the pavement below. Charles Gould
found the doctor still in his house.

Dr. Monygham came away from the crack in the shutter through
which he had been watching the street.

"Ah! You are back at last!" he said in a tone of relief. "I have
been telling Mrs. Gould that you were perfectly safe, but I was
not by any means certain that the fellow would have let you go."