Page 73 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

the father, had one fault in his sagacious and honourable
character: he attached too much importance to form. It is
a failing common to mankind, whose views are tinged by
prejudices. There was for him in that affair a malignancy
of perverted justice which, by means of a moral shock, at-
tacked his vigorous physique. ‘It will end by killing me,’ he
used to affirm many times a day. And, in fact, since that
time he began to suffer from fever, from liver pains, and
mostly from a worrying inability to think of anything else.
The Finance Minister could have formed no conception
of the profound subtlety of his revenge. Even Mr. Gould’s
letters to his fourteen-year-old boy Charles, then away in
England for his education, came at last to talk of practically
nothing but the mine. He groaned over the injustice, the
persecution, the outrage of that mine; he occupied whole
pages in the exposition of the fatal consequences attach-
ing to the possession of that mine from every point of view,
with every dismal inference, with words of horror at the ap-
parently eternal character of that curse. For the Concession
had been granted to him and his descendants for ever. He
implored his son never to return to Costaguana, never to
claim any part of his inheritance there, because it was taint-
ed by the infamous Concession; never to touch it, never to
approach it, to forget that America existed, and pursue a
mercantile career in Europe. And each letter ended with
bitter self-reproaches for having stayed too long in that cav-
ern of thieves, intriguers, and brigands.
To be told repeatedly that one’s future is blighted because
of the possession of a silver mine is not, at the age of four-

Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard