Page:Nostromo (1904).djvu/277

 "’He has?' she cried. 'Then, indeed, I fear he never speak again.'

"She freed her wrists from my clutch and began to cry in her handkerrhief. I disregarded her sorrow I would rather see her miserable than not see her at all, never any more; for whether I escaped or stayed. to die, there was for us no coming together, no future. And that being so, I had no pity to wnstr upon the passing moments of her sorrow. I sent her off all in tears to fetch Dofia Emilia and Don Carlos, too. Their sentiment was necessary to the very life of my plan; the sentimentalism of the people that will never do anything for the sake of their passionate desire, unless it comes to them clothed in the fair robes of an idea.

"Late at night we formed a small junta of four—the two women, Don Carlos, and myself in Mrs. Gould's blue-and-white boudoir.

"El Rey de Sulaco thinks himself, no doubt, a very honest man. And so he is, if one could look behind his taciturnity. Perhaps he thinks that this alone makes his honesty unstained. Those Englishmen live on illusions which somehow or other help them to get a firm hold of substance. When he speaks it is by a rare 'yes' or 'no’ that seems as impersonal as the words of an oracle. But he could not impose on me by his dumb reserve. I knew what he had in his head; he has his mine in his head; and his wife had nothing in her head but his precious person, which he bound up with the Gould Concession and tied up hat little woman's neck. No matter. The tiling was to make him present the affair to Holroyd (the