Page 83 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

returned to the giver with a more open and exquisite dis-
play of tenderness.
He left her to walk down the hill, and directly he found
himself alone he became sober. That irreparable change
a death makes in the course of our daily thoughts can be
felt in a vague and poignant discomfort of mind. It hurt
Charles Gould to feel that never more, by no effort of will,
would he be able to think of his father in the same way he
used to think of him when the poor man was alive. His
breathing image was no longer in his power. This consid-
eration, closely affecting his own identity, filled his breast
with a mournful and angry desire for action. In this his in-
stinct was unerring. Action is consolatory. It is the enemy
of thought and the friend of flattering illusions. Only in
the conduct of our action can we find the sense of mastery
over the Fates. For his action, the mine was obviously the
only field. It was imperative sometimes to know how to dis-
obey the solemn wishes of the dead. He resolved firmly to
make his disobedience as thorough (by way of atonement)
as it well could be. The mine had been the cause of an ab-
surd moral disaster; its working must be made a serious and
moral success. He owed it to the dead man’s memory. Such
were the—properly speaking—emotions of Charles Gould.
His thoughts ran upon the means of raising a large amount
of capital in San Francisco or elsewhere; and incidentally
there occurred to him also the general reflection that the
counsel of the departed must be an unsound guide. Not one
of them could be aware beforehand what enormous changes
the death of any given individual may produce in the very

Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard