Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART THIRD: THE LIGHTHOUSE 13. CHAPTER THIRTEEN (continued)

Giselle Viola, heartbroken and childlike, her face veiled in her
falling hair, crept up to her side. Mrs. Gould slipped her hand
through the arm of the unworthy daughter of old Viola, the
immaculate republican, the hero without a stain. Slowly,
gradually, as a withered flower droops, the head of the girl, who
would have followed a thief to the end of the world, rested on
the shoulder of Dona Emilia, the first lady of Sulaco, the wife
of the Senor Administrador of the San Tome mine. And Mrs. Gould,
feeling her suppressed sobbing, nervous and excited, had the
first and only moment of bitterness in her life. It was worthy of
Dr. Monygham himself.

"Console yourself, child. Very soon he would have forgotten you
for his treasure."

"Senora, he loved me. He loved me," Giselle whispered,
despairingly. "He loved me as no one had ever been loved before."

"I have been loved, too," Mrs. Gould said in a severe tone.

Giselle clung to her convulsively. "Oh, senora, but you shall
live adored to the end of your life," she sobbed out.

Mrs. Gould kept an unbroken silence till the carriage arrived.
She helped in the half-fainting girl. After the doctor had shut
the door of the landau, she leaned over to him.

"You can do nothing?" she whispered.

"No, Mrs. Gould. Moreover, he won't let us touch him. It does not
matter. I just had one look. . . . Useless."

But he promised to see old Viola and the other girl that very
night. He could get the police-boat to take him off to the
island. He remained in the street, looking after the landau
rolling away slowly behind the white mules.

The rumour of some accident--an accident to Captain Fidanza--had
been spreading along the new quays with their rows of lamps and
the dark shapes of towering cranes. A knot of night prowlers--the
poorest of the poor--hung about the door of the first-aid
hospital, whispering in the moonlight of the empty street.