Page 105 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

CHAPTER SEVEN

RS. GOULD was too intelligently sympathetic not to
‘Mshare that feeling. It made life exciting, and she was
too much of a woman not to like excitement. But it fright-
ened her, too, a little; and when Don Jose Avellanos, rocking
in the American chair, would go so far as to say, ‘Even, my
dear Carlos, if you had failed; even if some untoward event
were yet to destroy your work—which God forbid!—you
would have deserved well of your country,’ Mrs. Gould
would look up from the tea-table profoundly at her un-
moved husband stirring the spoon in the cup as though he
had not heard a word.
Not that Don Jose anticipated anything of the sort. He
could not praise enough dear Carlos’s tact and courage. His
English, rock-like quality of character was his best safe-
guard, Don Jose affirmed; and, turning to Mrs. Gould, ‘As
to you, Emilia, my soul’—he would address her with the
familiarity of his age and old friendship—‘you are as true a
patriot as though you had been born in our midst.’
This might have been less or more than the truth. Mrs.
Gould, accompanying her husband all over the province in
the search for labour, had seen the land with a deeper glance
than a trueborn Costaguanera could have done. In her trav-
el-worn riding habit, her face powdered white like a plaster
cast, with a further protection of a small silk mask during

10 Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard