Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated)

by Joseph Conrad

  She shook her head without looking at him. Coppery glints rippled to and fro on the wealth of her gold hair. Her smooth forehead had the soft, pure sheen of a priceless pearl in the splendour of the sunset, mingling the gloom of starry spaces, the purple of the sea, and the crimson of the sky in a magnificent stillness.

  “No,” she said, slowly. “I never loved him. I think I never . . . He loves me — perhaps.”

  The seduction of her slow voice died out of the air, and her raised eyes remained fixed on nothing, as if indifferent and without thought.

  “Ramirez told you he loved you?” asked Nostromo, restraining himself.

  “Ah! once — one evening . . .”

  “The miserable . . . Ha!”

  He had jumped up as if stung by a gad-fly, and stood before her mute with anger.

  “Misericordia Divina! You, too, Gian’ Battista! Poor wretch that I am!” she lamented in ingenuous tones. “I told Linda, and she scolded — she scolded. Am I to live blind, dumb, and deaf in this world? And she told father, who took down his gun and cleaned it. Poor Ramirez! Then you came, and she told you.”

  He looked at her. He fastened his eyes upon the hollow of her white throat, which had the invincible charm of things young, palpitating, delicate, and alive. Was this the child he had known? Was it possible? It dawned upon him that in these last years he had really seen very little — nothing — of her. Nothing. She had come into the world like a thing unknown. She had come upon him unawares. She was a danger. A frightful danger. The instinctive mood of fierce determination that had never failed him before the perils of this life added its steady force to the violence of his passion. She, in a voice that recalled to him the song of running water, the tinkling of a silver bell, continued —

  “And between you three you have brought me here into this captivity to the sky and water. Nothing else. Sky and water. Oh, Sanctissima Madre. My hair shall turn grey on this tedious island. I could hate you, Gian’ Battista!”

  He laughed loudly. Her voice enveloped him like a caress. She bemoaned her fate, spreading unconsciously, like a flower its perfume in the coolness of the evening, the indefinable seduction of her person. Was it her fault that nobody ever had admired Linda? Even when they were little, going out with their mother to Mass, she remembered that people took no notice of Linda, who was fearless, and chose instead to frighten her, who was timid, with their attention. It was her hair like gold, she supposed.

  He broke out —

  “Your hair like gold, and your eyes like violets, and your lips like the rose; your round arms, your white throat.” . . .

  Imperturbable in the indolence of her pose, she blushed deeply all over to the roots of her hair. She was not conceited. She was no more self-conscious than a flower. But she was pleased. And perhaps even a flower loves to hear itself praised. He glanced down, and added, impetuously —

  “Your little feet!”

  Leaning back against the rough stone wall of the cottage, she seemed to bask languidly in the warmth of the rosy flush. Only her lowered eyes glanced at her little feet.

  “And so you are going at last to marry our Linda. She is terrible. Ah! now she will understand better since you have told her you love her. She will not be so fierce.”

  “Chica!” said Nostromo, “I have not told her anything.”

  “Then make haste. Come to-morrow. Come and tell her, so that I may have some peace from her scolding and — perhaps — who knows . . .”

  “Be allowed to listen to your Ramirez, eh? Is that it? You . . .”

  “Mercy of God! How violent you are, Giovanni,” she said, unmoved. “Who is Ramirez . . . Ramirez . . . Who is he?” she repeated, dreamily, in the dusk and gloom of the clouded gulf, with a low red streak in the west like a hot bar of glowing iron laid across the entrance of a world sombre as a cavern, where the magnificent Capataz de Cargadores had hidden his conquests of love and wealth.

  “Listen, Giselle,” he said, in measured tones; “I will tell no word of love to your sister. Do you want to know why?”

  “Alas! I could not understand perhaps, Giovanni. Father says you are not like other men; that no one had ever understood you properly; that the rich will be surprised yet. . . . Oh! saints in heaven! I am weary.”

  She raised her embroidery to conceal the lower part of her face, then let it fall on her lap. The lantern was shaded on the land side, but slanting away from the dark column of the lighthouse they could see the long shaft of light, kindled by Linda, go out to strike the expiring glow in a horizon of purple and red.

  Giselle Viola, with her head resting against the wall of the house, her eyes half closed, and her little feet, in white stockings and black slippers, crossed over each other, seemed to surrender herself, tranquil and fatal, to the gathering dusk. The charm of her body, the promising mysteriousness of her indolence, went out into the night of the Placid Gulf like a fresh and intoxicating fragrance spreading out in the shadows, impregnating the air. The incorruptible Nostromo breathed her ambient seduction in the tumultuous heaving of his breast. Before leaving the harbour he had thrown off the store clothing of Captain Fidanza, for greater ease in the long pull out to the islands. He stood before her in the red sash and check shirt as he used to appear on the Company’s wharf — a Mediterranean sailor come ashore to try his luck in Costaguana. The dusk of purple and red enveloped him, too — close, soft, profound, as no more than fifty yards from that spot it had gathered evening after evening about the self-destructive passion of Don Martin Decoud’s utter scepticism, flaming up to death in solitude.

  “You have got to hear,” he began at last, with perfect self-control. “I shall say no word of love to your sister, to whom I am betrothed from this evening, because it is you that I love. It is you!” . . .

  The dusk let him see yet the tender and voluptuous smile that came instinctively upon her lips shaped for love and kisses, freeze hard in the drawn, haggard lines of terror. He could not restrain himself any longer. While she shrank from his approach, her arms went out to him, abandoned and regal in the dignity of her languid surrender. He held her head in his two hands, and showered rapid kisses upon the upturned face that gleamed in the purple dusk. Masterful and tender, he was entering slowly upon the fulness of his possession. And he perceived that she was crying. Then the incomparable Capataz, the man of careless loves, became gentle and caressing, like a woman to the grief of a child. He murmured to her fondly. He sat down by her and nursed her fair head on his breast. He called her his star and his little flower.

  It had grown dark. From the living-room of the light-keeper’s cottage, where Giorgio, one of the Immortal Thousand, was bending his leonine and heroic head over a charcoal fire, there came the sound of sizzling and the aroma of an artistic frittura.

  In the obscure disarray of that thing, happening like a cataclysm, it was in her feminine head that some gleam of reason survived. He was lost to the world in their embraced stillness. But she said, whispering into his ear —

  “God of mercy! What will become of me — here — now — between this sky and this water I hate? Linda, Linda — I see her!” . . . She tried to get out of his arms, suddenly relaxed at the sound of that name. But there was no one approaching their black shapes, enlaced and struggling on the white background of the wall. “Linda! Poor Linda! I tremble! I shall die of fear before my poor sister Linda, betrothed to-day to Giovanni — my lover! Giovanni, you must have been mad! I cannot understand you! You are not like other men! I will not give you up — never — only to God himself! But why have you done this blind, mad, cruel, frightful thing?”

  Released, she hung her head, let fall her hands. The altar-cloth, as if tossed by a great wind, lay far away from them, gleaming white on the black ground.

  “From fear of losing my hope of you,” said Nostromo.

  “You knew that you had my soul! You know everything! It was made for you! But what could stand between you and me? What? Tell me!” she repeated, without impatience, in su
perb assurance.

  “Your dead mother,” he said, very low.

  “Ah! . . . Poor mother! She has always . . . She is a saint in heaven now, and I cannot give you up to her. No, Giovanni. Only to God alone. You were mad — but it is done. Oh! what have you done? Giovanni, my beloved, my life, my master, do not leave me here in this grave of clouds. You cannot leave me now. You must take me away — at once — this instant — in the little boat. Giovanni, carry me off to-night, from my fear of Linda’s eyes, before I have to look at her again.”

  She nestled close to him. The slave of the San Tome silver felt the weight as of chains upon his limbs, a pressure as of a cold hand upon his lips. He struggled against the spell.

  “I cannot,” he said. “Not yet. There is something that stands between us two and the freedom of the world.”

  She pressed her form closer to his side with a subtle and naive instinct of seduction.

  “You rave, Giovanni — my lover!” she whispered, engagingly. “What can there be? Carry me off — in thy very hands — to Dona Emilia — away from here. I am not very heavy.”

  It seemed as though she expected him to lift her up at once in his two palms. She had lost the notion of all impossibility. Anything could happen on this night of wonder. As he made no movement, she almost cried aloud —

  “I tell you I am afraid of Linda!” And still he did not move. She became quiet and wily. “What can there be?” she asked, coaxingly.

  He felt her warm, breathing, alive, quivering in the hollow of his arm. In the exulting consciousness of his strength, and the triumphant excitement of his mind, he struck out for his freedom.

  “A treasure,” he said. All was still. She did not understand. “A treasure. A treasure of silver to buy a gold crown for thy brow.”

  “A treasure?” she repeated in a faint voice, as if from the depths of a dream. “What is it you say?”

  She disengaged herself gently. He got up and looked down at her, aware of her face, of her hair, her lips, the dimples on her cheeks — seeing the fascination of her person in the night of the gulf as if in the blaze of noonday. Her nonchalant and seductive voice trembled with the excitement of admiring awe and ungovernable curiosity.

  “A treasure of silver!” she stammered out. Then pressed on faster: “What? Where? How did you get it, Giovanni?”

  He wrestled with the spell of captivity. It was as if striking a heroic blow that he burst out —

  “Like a thief!”

  The densest blackness of the Placid Gulf seemed to fall upon his head. He could not see her now. She had vanished into a long, obscure abysmal silence, whence her voice came back to him after a time with a faint glimmer, which was her face.

  “I love you! I love you!”

  These words gave him an unwonted sense of freedom; they cast a spell stronger than the accursed spell of the treasure; they changed his weary subjection to that dead thing into an exulting conviction of his power. He would cherish her, he said, in a splendour as great as Dona Emilia’s. The rich lived on wealth stolen from the people, but he had taken from the rich nothing — nothing that was not lost to them already by their folly and their betrayal. For he had been betrayed — he said — deceived, tempted. She believed him. . . . He had kept the treasure for purposes of revenge; but now he cared nothing for it. He cared only for her. He would put her beauty in a palace on a hill crowned with olive trees — a white palace above a blue sea. He would keep her there like a jewel in a casket. He would get land for her — her own land fertile with vines and corn — to set her little feet upon. He kissed them. . . . He had already paid for it all with the soul of a woman and the life of a man. . . . The Capataz de Cargadores tasted the supreme intoxication of his generosity. He flung the mastered treasure superbly at her feet in the impenetrable darkness of the gulf, in the darkness defying — as men said — the knowledge of God and the wit of the devil. But she must let him grow rich first — he warned her.

  She listened as if in a trance. Her fingers stirred in his hair. He got up from his knees reeling, weak, empty, as though he had flung his soul away.

  “Make haste, then,” she said. “Make haste, Giovanni, my lover, my master, for I will give thee up to no one but God. And I am afraid of Linda.”

  He guessed at her shudder, and swore to do his best. He trusted the courage of her love. She promised to be brave in order to be loved always — far away in a white palace upon a hill above a blue sea. Then with a timid, tentative eagerness she murmured —

  “Where is it? Where? Tell me that, Giovanni.”

  He opened his mouth and remained silent — thunderstruck.

  “Not that! Not that!” he gasped out, appalled at the spell of secrecy that had kept him dumb before so many people falling upon his lips again with unimpaired force. Not even to her. Not even to her. It was too dangerous. “I forbid thee to ask,” he cried at her, deadening cautiously the anger of his voice.

  He had not regained his freedom. The spectre of the unlawful treasure arose, standing by her side like a figure of silver, pitiless and secret, with a finger on its pale lips. His soul died within him at the vision of himself creeping in presently along the ravine, with the smell of earth, of damp foliage in his nostrils — creeping in, determined in a purpose that numbed his breast, and creeping out again loaded with silver, with his ears alert to every sound. It must be done on this very night — that work of a craven slave!

  He stooped low, pressed the hem of her skirt to his lips, with a muttered command —

  “Tell him I would not stay,” and was gone suddenly from her, silent, without as much as a footfall in the dark night.

  She sat still, her head resting indolently against the wall, and her little feet in white stockings and black slippers crossed over each other. Old Giorgio, coming out, did not seem to be surprised at the intelligence as much as she had vaguely feared. For she was full of inexplicable fear now — fear of everything and everybody except of her Giovanni and his treasure. But that was incredible.

  The heroic Garibaldino accepted Nostromo’s abrupt departure with a sagacious indulgence. He remembered his own feelings, and exhibited a masculine penetration of the true state of the case.

  “Va bene. Let him go. Ha! ha! No matter how fair the woman, it galls a little. Liberty, liberty. There’s more than one kind! He has said the great word, and son Gian’ Battista is not tame.” He seemed to be instructing the motionless and scared Giselle. . . . “A man should not be tame,” he added, dogmatically out of the doorway. Her stillness and silence seemed to displease him. “Do not give way to the enviousness of your sister’s lot,” he admonished her, very grave, in his deep voice.

  Presently he had to come to the door again to call in his younger daughter. It was late. He shouted her name three times before she even moved her head. Left alone, she had become the helpless prey of astonishment. She walked into the bedroom she shared with Linda like a person profoundly asleep. That aspect was so marked that even old Giorgio, spectacled, raising his eyes from the Bible, shook his head as she shut the door behind her.

  She walked right across the room without looking at anything, and sat down at once by the open window. Linda, stealing down from the tower in the exuberance of her happiness, found her with a lighted candle at her back, facing the black night full of sighing gusts of wind and the sound of distant showers — a true night of the gulf, too dense for the eye of God and the wiles of the devil. She did not turn her head at the opening of the door.

  There was something in that immobility which reached Linda in the depths of her paradise. The elder sister guessed angrily: the child is thinking of that wretched Ramirez. Linda longed to talk. She said in her arbitrary voice, “Giselle!” and was not answered by the slightest movement.

  The girl that was going to live in a palace and walk on ground of her own was ready to die with terror. Not for anything in the world would she have turned her head to face her sister. Her heart was beating madly. She said with subdued haste �
�

  “Do not speak to me. I am praying.”

  Linda, disappointed, went out quietly; and Giselle sat on unbelieving, lost, dazed, patient, as if waiting for the confirmation of the incredible. The hopeless blackness of the clouds seemed part of a dream, too. She waited.

  She did not wait in vain. The man whose soul was dead within him, creeping out of the ravine, weighted with silver, had seen the gleam of the lighted window, and could not help retracing his steps from the beach.

  On that impenetrable background, obliterating the lofty mountains by the seaboard, she saw the slave of the San Tome silver, as if by an extraordinary power of a miracle. She accepted his return as if henceforth the world could hold no surprise for all eternity.

  She rose, compelled and rigid, and began to speak long before the light from within fell upon the face of the approaching man.

  “You have come back to carry me off. It is well! Open thy arms, Giovanni, my lover. I am coming.”

  His prudent footsteps stopped, and with his eyes glistening wildly, he spoke in a harsh voice:

  “Not yet. I must grow rich slowly.” . . . A threatening note came into his tone. “Do not forget that you have a thief for your lover.”

  “Yes! Yes!” she whispered, hastily. “Come nearer! Listen! Do not give me up, Giovanni! Never, never! . . . I will be patient! . . .”

  Her form drooped consolingly over the low casement towards the slave of the unlawful treasure. The light in the room went out, and weighted with silver, the magnificent Capataz clasped her round her white neck in the darkness of the gulf as a drowning man clutches at a straw.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  On the day Mrs. Gould was going, in Dr. Monygham’s words, to “give a tertulia,” Captain Fidanza went down the side of his schooner lying in Sulaco harbour, calm, unbending, deliberate in the way he sat down in his dinghy and took up his sculls. He was later than usual. The afternoon was well advanced before he landed on the beach of the Great Isabel, and with a steady pace climbed the slope of the island.