“What! That doubled-up crone?”
“Ah!” said Almayer. “They age quickly here. And long foggy nights spent in the bush will soon break the strongest backs—as you will find out yourself soon.”
“Dis …disgusting,” growled the traveller.
He dozed off. Almayer stood by the balustrade looking out at the bluish sheen of the moonlit night. The forests, unchanged and sombre, seemed to hang over the water, listening to the unceasing whisper of the great river; and above their dark wall the hill on which Lingard had buried the body of his late prisoner rose in a black, rounded mass, upon the silver paleness of the sky. Almayer looked for a long time at the clean-cut outline of the summit, as if trying to make out through darkness and distance the shape of that expensive tombstone. When he turned round at last he saw his guest sleeping, his arms on the table, his head on his arms.
“Now, look here!” he shouted, slapping the table with the palm of his hand.
The naturalist woke up, and sat all in a heap, staring owlishly.
“Here!” went on Almayer, speaking very loud and thumping the table, “I want to know. You, who say you have read all the books, just tell me …why such infernal things are ever allowed. Here I am! Done harm to nobody, lived an honest life …and a scoundrel like that is born in Rotterdam or some such place at the other end of the world somewhere, travels out here, robs his employer, runs away from his wife, and ruins me and my Nina—he ruined me, I tell you—and gets himself shot at last by a poor miserable savage, that knows nothing at all about him really. Where’s the sense of all this? Where’s your Providence? Where’s the good for anybody in all this? The world’s a swindle! A swindle! Why should I suffer? What have I done to be treated so?”
He howled out his string of questions, and suddenly became silent. The man who ought to have been a professor made a tremendous effort to articulate distinctly—
“My dear fellow, don’t—don’t you see that the ba-bare fac—the fact of your existence is off—offensive…. I—I like you—like . . .”
He fell forward on the table, and ended his remarks by an unexpected and prolonged snore.
Almayer shrugged his shoulders and walked back to the balustrade.
He drank his own trade gin very seldom, but when he did, a ridiculously small quantity of the stuff could induce him to assume a rebellious attitude towards the scheme of the universe. And now, throwing his body over the rail, he shouted impudently into the night, turning his face towards that far-off and invisible slab of imported granite upon which Lingard had thought fit to record God’s mercy and Willems’ escape.
“Father was wrong—wrong!” he yelled. “I want you to smart for it. You must smart for it! Where are you, Willems? Hey? … Hey? …Where there is no mercy for you—I hope!”
“Hope,” repeated in a whispering echo the startled forests, the river and the hills; and Almayer, who stood waiting, with a smile of tipsy attention on his lips, heard no other answer.