Suspense

but without apprehensions or speculations of any sort to disturb his composure as if of a fully informed wisdom. He did not seem to himself to weigh more than a feather. He was suffering the reaction of the upheaval of all his feelings and the endless contest of his thoughts and that sort of mental agony which had taken possession of him while he was descending the great staircase of the Palazzo under the eye of the Count of Montevesso. It was as though one of those fevers in which the victim watches his own delirium had left him irresponsible, like a sick man in his bed. Attilio went on:

“Cantelucci’s an experienced conspirator. He thinks that the force of the people is such that it would be like an uprising of the ground itself. May be, but where is the man that would know how to use it?”

Cosmo let it go by like a problem that could await solution or as a matter of mere vain words. The night air did not stir, and Attilio changed his tone.

“They had their lines out ever since the calm began. We will have fish to eat in the morning. You will have to be one of ourselves for a time and observe the customs of the common people.”

“Tell me, Attilio,” Cosmo questioned, not widely but in a quiet, almost confidential tone, and laying his hand for the first time on the shoulder of that man only a little older than himself. “Tell me, what am I doing here?”

Attilio, the wanderer of the seas along the southern shores of the earth and the pupil of the hermit of the plains that lie under the constellation of the southern sky, smiled in the dark, a faint friendly gleam of white teeth in an overshadowed face. But all the answer he made was:

“Who would dare say now that our stars have not come together? Come to sit at the stern, signore. I can find a rug to throw over a coil of rope for a seat. I am now the padrone of that felucca, but of course barring her appointed work you are entirely the master of her.”

These words were said with a marked accent of politeness such as one uses for a courtesy formula. But he stopped for a moment on his way aft to point his finger on the deck.

“We have thrown a bit of canvas over him. Yes, that is the old man whose last bit of work was to steer a boat, and strange to think perhaps it had been done for Italy.”

“Where is his star now?” said Cosmo, after looking down in silence for a time.

“Signore, it should be out,” said Attilio with studied intonation. “But who will miss it out of the sky?”

Colophon

Suspense
was published in 1925 by
Joseph Conrad.

This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Szymon Szott,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2021 by
Laura Natal Rodrigues and Distributed Proofreaders
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Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans from the
Internet Archive.

The cover page is adapted from
The Coast of Genoa,
a painting completed in 1854 by
Jasper Francis Cropsey.
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