Page 419 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

matters of little moment.
And he could not forget Father Beron with his monoto-
nous phrase, ‘Will you confess now?’ reaching him in an
awful iteration and lucidity of meaning through the delir-
ious incoherence of unbearable pain. He could not forget.
But that was not the worst. Had he met Father Beron in
the street after all these years Dr. Monygham was sure he
would have quailed before him. This contingency was not
to be feared now. Father Beron was dead; but the sickening
certitude prevented Dr. Monygham from looking anybody
in the face.
Dr. Monygham. had become, in a manner, the slave of a
ghost. It was obviously impossible to take his knowledge of
Father Beron home to Europe. When making his extorted
confessions to the Military Board, Dr. Monygham was not
seeking to avoid death. He longed for it. Sitting half-naked
for hours on the wet earth of his prison, and so motionless
that the spiders, his companions, attached their webs to his
matted hair, he consoled the misery of his soul with acute
reasonings that he had confessed to crimes enough for a
sentence of death—that they had gone too far with him to
let him live to tell the tale.
But, as if by a refinement of cruelty, Dr. Monygham was
left for months to decay slowly in the darkness of his grave-
like prison. It was no doubt hoped that it would finish him
off without the trouble of an execution; but Dr. Monygham
had an iron constitution. It was Guzman Bento who died,
not by the knife thrust of a conspirator, but from a stroke
of apoplexy, and Dr. Monygham was liberated hastily. His

1 Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard