第84章
He struck his breast with his open palm; his voice had $$word$$ mained low though he had spoken in a forcible tone. He twisted his moustaches one after another, and his eyes wandered a little about the room.
`Is it my fault that I am the only man for their purposes? What angry nonsense are you talking, mother? Would you rather have me timid and foolish, selling water-melons on the market-place or rowing a boat for passengers along the harbour, like a soft Neapolitan without courage or reputation?
Would you have a young man live like a monk? I do not believe it. Would you want a monk for your eldest girl? Let her grow. What are you afraid of? You have been angry with me for everything I did for years; ever since you first spoke to me, in secret from old Giorgio, about your Linda. Husband to one and brother to the other, did you say? Well, why not! I like the little ones, and a man must marry some time. But ever since that time you have been making little of me to everyone. Why? Did you think you could put a collar and chain on me as if I were one of the watchdogs they keep over there in the railway yards? Look here, Padrona, I am the same man who came ashore one evening and sat down in the thatched ranche you lived in at that time on the other side of the town and told you all about himself.
You were not unjust to me then. What has happened since? I am no longer an insignificant youth. A good name, Giorgio says, is a treasure, Padrona.'
`They have turned your head with their praises,' gasped the sick woman.
`They have been paying you with words. Your folly shall betray you into poverty, misery, starvation. The very leperos shall laugh at you--the great Capataz.'
Nostromo stood for a time as if struck dumb. She never looked at him.
A self-confident, mirthless smile passed quickly from his lips, and then he backed away. His disregarded figure sank down beyond the doorway. He descended the stairs backwards, with the usual sense of having been somehow baffled by this woman's disparagement of this reputation he had obtained and desired to keep.
Downstairs in the big kitchen a candle was burning, surrounded by the shadows of the walls, of the ceiling, but no ruddy glare filled the open square of the outer door. The carriage with Mrs Gould and Don Martin, preceded by the horseman bearing the torch, had gone on to the jetty. Dr Monygham, who had remained, sat on the corner of a hard wood table near the candlestick, his seamed, shaved face inclined sideways, his arms crossed on his breast, his lips pursed up, and his prominent eyes glaring stonily upon the floor of black earth. Near the overhanging mantel of the fireplace where the pot of water was still boiling violently, old Giorgio held his chin in his hand, one foot advanced, as if arrested by a sudden thought.
` Adios, viejo, ' said Nostromo, feeling the handle of his revolver in the belt and loosening his knife in its sheath. He picked up a blue poncho lined with red from the table, and put it over his head. ` Adios, look after the things in my sleeping-room, and if you hear from me no more, give up the box to Paquita. There is not much of value there, except my new serape from Mexico, and a few silver buttons on my best jacket. No matter! The things will look well enough on the next lover she gets, and the man need not be afraid I shall linger on earth after I am dead, like those gringos that haunt the Azuera.'
Dr Monygham twisted his lips into a bitter smile. After old Giorgio, with an almost imperceptible nod and without a word, had gone up the narrow stairs, he said:
`Why, Capataz! I thought you could never fail in anything.'
Nostromo, glancing contemptuously at the doctor, lingered in the doorway rolling a cigarette, then struck a match, and, after lighting it, held the burning piece of wood above his head till the flame nearly touched his fingers.
`No wind!' he muttered to himself. `Look here, senor --do you know the nature of my undertaking?'
Dr Monygham nodded sourly.
`It is as if I were taking up a curse upon me, Senor Doctor. A man with a treasure on this coast will have every knife raised against him in every place upon the shore. You see that, Senor Doctor? I shall float along with a spell upon my life till I meet somewhere the north-bound steamer of the Company, and then indeed they will talk about the Capataz of the Sulaco Cargadores from one end of America to another.'
Dr Monygham laughed his short, throaty laugh. Nostromo turned round in the doorway.
`But if your worship can find any other man ready and fit for such business I will stand back. I am not exactly tired of my life, though I am so poor that I can carry all I have with myself on my horse's back.'
`You gamble too much, and never say "no" to a pretty face, Capataz,'
said Dr Monygham, with sly simplicity. `That's not the way to make a fortune.
But nobody that I know ever suspected you of being poor. I hope you have made a good bargain in case you come back safe from this adventure.'
`What bargain would your worship have made?' asked Nostromo, blowing the smoke out of his lips through the doorway.
Dr Monygham listened up the staircase for a moment before he answered, with another of his short, abrupt laughs:
`Illustrious Capataz, for taking the curse of death upon my back, as you call it, nothing else but the whole treasure would do.'
Nostromo vanished out of the doorway with a grunt of discontent at this jeering answer. Dr Monygham heard him gallop away. Nostromo rode furiously in the dark. There were lights in the buildings of the O.S.N. Company near the wharf, but before he got there he met the Gould carriage. The horseman preceded it with the torch, whose light showed the white mules trotting, the portly Ignacio driving, and Basilio with the carbine on the box. From the dark body of the landau Mrs Gould's voice cried, `They are waiting for you, Capataz!' She was returning, chilly and excited, with Decoud's pocket-book still held in her hand. He had confided it to her to send to his sister. `Perhaps my last words to her,' he had said, pressing Mrs Gould's hand.