第82章

With the writing of the last line there came upon Decoud a moment of sudden and complete oblivion. He swayed over the table as if struck by a bullet. The next moment he sat up, confused, with the idea that he had heard his pencil roll on the floor. The low door of the cafe, wide open, was filled with the glare of a torch in which was visible half a horse, switching its tail against the leg of a rider with a long iron spur strapped to the naked heel. The two girls were gone, and Nostromo, standing in the middle of the room, looked at him from under the round brim of the sombrero low down over his brow.

`I have brought that sour-faced English doctor in Senora Gould's carriage,'

said Nostromo. `I doubt if, with all his wisdom, he can save the Padrona this time. They have sent for the children. A bad sign that.'

He sat down on the end of a bench. `She wants to give them her blessing, I suppose.'

Dazedly Decoud observed that he must have fallen sound asleep, and Nostromo said, with a vague smile, that he had looked in at the window and had seen him lying still across the table with his head on his arms. The English senora had also come in the carriage, and went upstairs at once with the doctor. She had told him not to wake up Don Martin yet; but when they sent for the children he had come into the cafe.

The half of the horse with its half of the rider swung round outside the door; the torch of tow and resin in the iron basket which was carried on a stick at the saddle-bow flared right into the room for a moment, and Mrs Gould entered hastily with a very white, tired face. The hood of her dark, blue cloak had fallen back. Both men rose.

`Teresa wants to see you, Nostromo,' she said.

The Capataz did not move. Decoud, with his back to the table, began to button up his coat.

`The silver, Mrs Gould, the silver,' he murmured in English. `Don't forget that the Esmeralda garrison have got a steamer. They may appear at any moment at the harbour entrance.'

`The doctor says there is no hope,' Mrs Gould spoke rapidly, also in English. `I shall take you down to the wharf in my carriage and then come back to fetch away the girls.' She changed swiftly into Spanish to address Nostromo. `Why are you wasting time? Old Giorgio's wife wishes to see you.'

`I am going to her, senora ,' muttered the Capataz.

Dr Monygham showed himself, bringing back the children. To Mrs Gould's inquiring glance he only shook his head and went outside at once, followed by Nostromo.

The horse of the torch-bearer, motionless, hung his head low, and the rider had dropped the reins to light a cigarette. The glare of the torch played on the front of the house crossed by the big black letters of its inscription in which only the word ITALIA was lighted fully. The patch of wavering glare reached as far as Mrs Gould's carriage waiting on the road, with the yellow-faced, portly Ignacio apparently dozing on the box. By his side Basilio, dark and skinny, held a Winchester carbine in front of him, with both hands, and peered fearfully into the darkness.

Nostromo touched lightly the doctor's shoulder.

`Is she really dying, Senor Doctor!'

`Yes,' said the doctor, with a strange twitch of his scarred cheek.

`And why she wants to see you I cannot imagine.'

`She has been like that before,' suggested Nostromo, looking away.

`Well, Capataz, I can assure you she will never be like that again,'

snarled Dr Monygham. `You may go to her or stay away. There is very little to be got from talking to the dying. But she told Dona Emilia in my hearing that she has been like a mother to you ever since you first set foot ashore here.'

` Si ! And she never had a good word to say for me to anybody.

It is more as if she could not forgive me for being alive, and such a man, too, as she would have liked her son to be.'

`Maybe!' exclaimed a mournful deep voice near them. `Women have their own ways of tormenting themselves.' Giorgio Viola had come out of the house.

He threw a heavy black shadow in the torchlight, and the glare fell on his big face, on the great bushy head of white hair. He motioned the Capataz indoors with his extended arm.

Dr Monygham, after busying himself with a little medicament box of polished wood on the seat of the landau, turned to old Giorgio and thrust into his big, trembling hand one of the glass-stoppered bottles out of the case.

`Give her a spoonful of this now and then, in water,' he said. `It will make her easier.'

`And there is nothing more for her?' asked the old man, patiently.

`No. Not on earth,' said the doctor, with his back to him, clicking the lock of the medicine case.

Nostromo slowly crossed the large kitchen, all dark but for the glow of a heap of charcoal under the heavy mantel of the cooking-range, where water was boiling in an iron pot with a loud bubbling sound. Between the two walls of a narrow staircase a bright light streamed from the sick-room above; and the magnificent Capataz de Cargadores stepping noiselessly in soft leather sandals, bushy whiskered, his muscular neck and bronzed chest bare in the open check shirt, resembled a Mediterranean sailor just come ashore from some wine- or fruit-laden felucca. At the top he paused, broad shouldered, narrow hipped, and supple, looking at the large bed, like a white couch of state, with a profusion of snowy linen, amongst which the Padrona sat unpropped and bowed, her handsome, black-browed face bent over her chest. A mass of raven hair with only a few white threads in it covered her shoulders; one thick strand fallen forward half veiled her cheek. Perfectly motionless in that pose, expressing physical anxiety and unrest, she turned her eyes alone towards Nostromo.

The Capataz had a red sash wound many times round his waist, and a heavy silver ring on the forefinger of the hand he raised to give a twist to his moustache.

`Their revolutions, their revolutions,' gasped Senora Teresa. `Look, Gian' Battista, it has killed me at last!'

Nostromo said nothing, and the sick woman with an upward glance insisted.