But Nostromo did not even hear these words. Seizing the remaining light, he thrust it under the drooping head. The doctor sat oblivious, with a lost gaze. Then the heavy iron candlestick, as if struck out of Nostromo's hand, clattered on the floor.
"Hullo!" exclaimed the doctor, looking up with a start. He could hear the Capataz stagger against the table and gasp. In the sudden extinction of the light within, the dead blackness sealing the window-frames became alive with stars to his sight.
"Of course, of course," the doctor muttered to himself in English. "Enough to make him jump out of his skin."
Nostromo's heart seemed to force itself into his throat. His head swam. Hirsch! The man was Hirsch! He held on tight to the edge of the table.
"But he was hiding in the lighter," he almost shouted His voice fell. "In the lighter, and—and—"
"And Sotillo brought him in," said the doctor. "He is no more startling to you than you were to me. What I want to know is how he induced some compassionate soul to shoot him."
"So Sotillo knows—" began Nostromo, in a more equable voice.
"Everything!" interrupted the doctor.
The Capataz was heard striking the table with his fist. "Everything? What are you saying, there? Everything? Know everything? It is impossible! Everything?"
"Of course. What do you mean by impossible? I tell you I have heard this Hirsch questioned last night, here, in this very room. He knew your name, Decoud's name, and all about the loading of the silver. . . . The lighter was cut in two. He was grovelling in abject terror before Sotillo, but he remembered that much. What do you want more? He knew least about himself. They found him clinging to their anchor. He must have caught at it just as the lighter went to the bottom."
"Went to the bottom?" repeated Nostromo, slowly. "Sotillo believes that? Bueno!"
The doctor, a little impatiently, was unable to imagine what else could anybody believe. Yes, Sotillo believed that the lighter was sunk, and the Capataz de Cargadores, together with Martin Decoud and perhaps one or two other political fugitives, had been drowned.
"I told you well, senor doctor," remarked Nostromo at that point, "that Sotillo did not know everything."
"Eh? What do you mean?"
"He did not know I was not dead."
"Neither did we."
"And you did not care—none of you caballeros on the wharf—once you got off a man of flesh and blood like yourselves on a fool's business that could not end well."
"You forget, Capataz, I was not on the wharf. And I did not think well of the business. So you need not taunt me. I tell you what, man, we had but little leisure to think of the dead. Death stands near behind us all. You were gone."
"I went, indeed!" broke in Nostromo. "And for the sake of what—tell me?"
"Ah! that is your own affair," the doctor said, roughly. "Do not ask me."
Their flowing murmurs paused in the dark. Perched on the edge of the table with slightly averted faces, they felt their shoulders touch, and their eyes remained directed towards an upright shape nearly lost in the obscurity of the inner part of the room, that with projecting head and shoulders, in ghastly immobility, seemed intent on catching every word.
"Muy bien!" Nostromo muttered at last. "So be it. Teresa was right. It is my own affair."
"Teresa is dead," remarked the doctor, absently, while his mind followed a new line of thought suggested by what might have been called Nostromo's return to life. "She died, the poor woman."
"Without a priest?" the Capataz asked, anxiously.
"What a question! Who could have got a priest for her last night?"
"May God keep her soul!" ejaculated Nostromo, with a gloomy and hopeless fervour which had no time to surprise Dr. Monygham, before, reverting to their previous conversation, he continued in a sinister tone, "Si, senor doctor. As you were saying, it is my own affair. A very desperate affair."
"There are no two men in this part of the world that could have saved themselves by swimming as you have done," the doctor said, admiringly.
