Page 421 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

these conditions seemed to bind him indissolubly to the
land of Costaguana like an awful procedure of natural-
ization, involving him deep in the national life, far deeper
than any amount of success and honour could have done.
They did away with his Europeanism; for Dr. Monygham
had made himself an ideal conception of his disgrace. It was
a conception eminently fit and proper for an officer and a
gentleman. Dr. Monygham, before he went out to Costa-
guana, had been surgeon in one of Her Majesty’s regiments
of foot. It was a conception which took no account of physi-
ological facts or reasonable arguments; but it was not stupid
for all that. It was simple. A rule of conduct resting mainly
on severe rejections is necessarily simple. Dr. Monygham’s
view of what it behoved him to do was severe; it was an ideal
view, in so much that it was the imaginative exaggeration of
a correct feeling. It was also, in its force, influence, and per-
sistency, the view of an eminently loyal nature.
There was a great fund of loyalty in Dr. Monygham’s
nature. He had settled it all on Mrs. Gould’s head. He be-
lieved her worthy of every devotion. At the bottom of his
heart he felt an angry uneasiness before the prosperity of
the San Tome mine, because its growth was robbing her of
all peace of mind. Costaguana was no place for a woman of
that kind. What could Charles Gould have been thinking of
when he brought her out there! It was outrageous! And the
doctor had watched the course of events with a grim and
distant reserve which, he imagined, his lamentable history
imposed upon him.
Loyalty to Mrs. Gould could not, however, leave out

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