Page 118 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

Thus professionally spoke Don Pepe, the fighter, with
pendent moustaches, a nut-brown, lean face, and a clean
run of a cast-iron jaw, suggesting the type of a cattle-herd
horseman from the great Llanos of the South. ‘If you will
listen to an old officer of Paez, senores,’ was the exordium of
all his speeches in the Aristocratic Club of Sulaco, where he
was admitted on account of his past services to the extinct
cause of Federation. The club, dating from the days of the
proclamation of Costaguana’s independence, boasted many
names of liberators amongst its first founders. Suppressed
arbitrarily innumerable times by various Governments,
with memories of proscriptions and of at least one whole-
sale massacre of its members, sadly assembled for a banquet
by the order of a zealous military commandante (their bod-
ies were afterwards stripped naked and flung into the plaza
out of the windows by the lowest scum of the populace), it
was again flourishing, at that period, peacefully. It extend-
ed to strangers the large hospitality of the cool, big rooms
of its historic quarters in the front part of a house, once
the residence of a high official of the Holy Office. The two
wings, shut up, crumbled behind the nailed doors, and what
may be described as a grove of young orange trees grown in
the unpaved patio concealed the utter ruin of the back part
facing the gate. You turned in from the street, as if enter-
ing a secluded orchard, where you came upon the foot of
a disjointed staircase, guarded by a moss-stained effigy of
some saintly bishop, mitred and staffed, and bearing the in-
dignity of a broken nose meekly, with his fine stone hands
crossed on his breast. The chocolate-coloured faces of ser-

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