`Of course. What do you mean by impossible? I tell you I have heard this Hirsch questioned last night, here, in this very room. He knew your name, Decoud's name, and all about the loading of the silver. . . . The lighter was cut in two. He was grovelling in abject terror before Sotillo, but he remembered that much. What do you want more? He knew least about himself. They found him clinging to their anchor. He must have caught at it just as the lighter went to the bottom.'
`Went to the bottom?' repeated Nostromo, slowly. `Sotillo believes that? Bueno!'
The doctor, a little impatiently, was unable to imagine what else anybody could believe. Yes, Sotillo believed that the lighter was sunk, and the Capataz de Cargadores, together with Martin Decoud and perhaps one or two other political fugitives, had been drowned.
`I told you well, Senor Doctor,' remarked Nostromo at that point, `that Sotillo did not know everything.'
`Eh? What do you mean?'
`He did not know I was not dead.'
`Neither did we.'
`And you did not care -- none of you caballeros on the wharf -- once you got off a man of flesh and blood like yourselves on a fool's business that could not end well.'
`You forget, Capataz, I was not on the wharf. And I did not think well of the business. So you need not taunt me. I tell you what, man, we had but little leisure to think of the dead. Death stands near behind us all. You were gone.'
`I went, indeed!' broke in Nostromo. `And for the sake of what -- tell me?'
`Ah! that is you own affair,' the doctor said, roughly. `Do not ask me.'
Their flowing murmurs paused in the dark. Perched on the edge of the table with slightly averted faces, they felt their shoulders touch, and their eyes remained directed towards an upright shape nearly lost in the obscurity of the inner part of the room, that with projecting head and shoulders, in ghastly immobility, seemed intent on catching every word.
`Muy bien!' Nostromo muttered at last. `So be it. Teresa was right. It is my own affair.'
`Teresa is dead,' remarked the doctor, absently, while his mind followed a new line of thought suggested by what might have been called Nostromo's return to life. `She died, the poor woman.'
`Without a priest?' the Capataz asked, anxiously.
`What a question! Who could have got a priest for her last night?'
`May God keep her soul!' ejaculated Nostromo, with a gloomy and hopeless fervour which had no time to surprise Dr Monygham, before, reverting to their previous conversation, he continued in a sinister tone, `Si, Senor Doctor. As you were saying, it is my own affair. A very desperate affair.'
`There are no two men in this part of the world that could have saved themselves by swimming as you have done,' the doctor said, admiringly.
And again there was silence between those two men. They were both reflecting, and the diversity of their nature made their thoughts born from their meeting swing afar from each other. The doctor, impelled to risky action by his loyalty to the Goulds, wondered with thankfulness at the chain of accident which had brought that man back where he would be of the greatest use in the work of saving the San Tome