Page 417 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

or the pitiless, monotonous voice in which he pronounced
the words, ‘Will you confess now?’
This memory did not make him shudder, but it had
made of him what he was in the eyes of respectable people,
a man careless of common decencies, something between
a clever vagabond and a disreputable doctor. But not all re-
spectable people would have had the necessary delicacy of
sentiment to understand with what trouble of mind and ac-
curacy of vision Dr. Monygham, medical officer of the San
Tome mine, remembered Father Beron, army chaplain, and
once a secretary of a military commission. After all these
years Dr. Monygham, in his rooms at the end of the hospital
building in the San Tome gorge, remembered Father Ber-
on as distinctly as ever. He remembered that priest at night,
sometimes, in his sleep. On such nights the doctor waited
for daylight with a candle lighted, and walking the whole
length of his rooms to and fro, staring down at his bare
feet, his arms hugging his sides tightly. He would dream
of Father Beron sitting at the end of a long black table, be-
hind which, in a row, appeared the heads, shoulders, and
epaulettes of the military members, nibbling the feather of
a quill pen, and listening with weary and impatient scorn to
the protestations of some prisoner calling heaven to witness
of his innocence, till he burst out, ‘What’s the use of wasting
time over that miserable nonsense! Let me take him outside
for a while.’ And Father Beron would go outside after the
clanking prisoner, led away between two soldiers. Such in-
terludes happened on many days, many times, with many
prisoners. When the prisoner returned he was ready to

1 Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard