Nostromo - A Tale of the Seaboard.pdf - Planet eBook

or the pitiless, monotonous voice in which he pronouncedthe words, ‘Will you confess now?’This memory did not make him shudder, but it hadmade of him what he was in the eyes of respectable people,a man careless of common decencies, something betweena clever vagabond and a disreputable doctor. But not all respectablepeople would have had the necessary delicacy ofsentiment to understand with what trouble of mind and accuracyof vision Dr. Monygham, medical officer of the SanTome mine, remembered Father Beron, army chaplain, andonce a secretary of a military commission. After all theseyears Dr. Monygham, in his rooms at the end of the hospitalbuilding in the San Tome gorge, remembered Father Beronas distinctly as ever. He remembered that priest at night,sometimes, in his sleep. On such nights the doctor waitedfor daylight with a candle lighted, and walking the wholelength of his rooms to and fro, staring down at his barefeet, his arms hugging his sides tightly. He would dreamof Father Beron sitting at the end of a long black table, behindwhich, in a row, appeared the heads, shoulders, andepaulettes of the military members, nibbling the feather ofa quill pen, and listening with weary and impatient scorn tothe protestations of some prisoner calling heaven to witnessof his innocence, till he burst out, ‘What’s the use of wastingtime over that miserable nonsense! Let me take him outsidefor a while.’ And Father Beron would go outside after theclanking prisoner, led away between two soldiers. Such interludeshappened on many days, many times, with manyprisoners. When the prisoner returned he was ready to