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

the father, had one fault in his sagacious and honourablecharacter: he attached too much importance to form. It isa failing common to mankind, whose views are tinged byprejudices. There was for him in that affair a malignancyof perverted justice which, by means of a moral shock, attackedhis vigorous physique. ‘It will end by killing me,’ heused to affirm many times a day. And, in fact, since thattime he began to suffer from fever, from liver pains, andmostly from a worrying inability to think of anything else.The Finance Minister could have formed no conceptionof the profound subtlety of his revenge. Even Mr. Gould’sletters to his fourteen-year-old boy Charles, then away inEngland for his education, came at last to talk of practicallynothing but the mine. He groaned over the injustice, thepersecution, the outrage of that mine; he occupied wholepages in the exposition of the fatal consequences attachingto the possession of that mine from every point of view,with every dismal inference, with words of horror at the apparentlyeternal character of that curse. For the Concessionhad been granted to him and his descendants for ever. Heimplored his son never to return to Costaguana, never toclaim any part of his inheritance there, because it was taintedby the infamous Concession; never to touch it, never toapproach it, to forget that America existed, and pursue amercantile career in Europe. And each letter ended withbitter self-reproaches for having stayed too long in that cavernof thieves, intriguers, and brigands.To be told repeatedly that one’s future is blighted becauseof the possession of a silver mine is not, at the age of four-