Page 134 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

gling spurs and riding-whip under his arm, on the point of
starting ‘for the mountain.’ Then Don Pepe, modestly mar-
tial in his chair, the llanero who seemed somehow to have
found his martial jocularity, his knowledge of the world,
and his manner perfect for his station, in the midst of sav-
age armed contests with his kind; Avellanos, polished and
familiar, the diplomatist with his loquacity covering much
caution and wisdom in delicate advice, with his manuscript
of a historical work on Costaguana, entitled ‘Fifty Years of
Misrule,’ which, at present, he thought it was not prudent
(even if it were possible) ‘to give to the world”; these three,
and also Dona Emilia amongst them, gracious, small, and
fairy-like, before the glittering tea-set, with one common
master-thought in their heads, with one common feeling
of a tense situation, with one ever-present aim to preserve
the inviolable character of the mine at every cost. And
there was also to be seen Captain Mitchell, a little apart,
near one of the long windows, with an air of old-fashioned
neat old bachelorhood about him, slightly pompous, in a
white waistcoat, a little disregarded and unconscious of it;
utterly in the dark, and imagining himself to be in the thick
of things. The good man, having spent a clear thirty years
of his life on the high seas before getting what he called a
‘shore billet,’ was astonished at the importance of transac-
tions (other than relating to shipping) which take place on
dry land. Almost every event out of the usual daily course
‘marked an epoch’ for him or else was ‘history”; unless with
his pomposity struggling with a discomfited droop of his
rubicund, rather handsome face, set off by snow-white close

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