Page 143 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

hush Mrs. Gould.
‘General Montero is going to speak,’ he whispered, and
almost immediately added, in comic alarm, ‘Heavens! he’s
going to propose my own health, I believe.’
General Montero had risen with a jingle of steel scab-
bard and a ripple of glitter on his gold-embroidered breast;
a heavy sword-hilt appeared at his side above the edge of
the table. In this gorgeous uniform, with his bull neck, his
hooked nose flattened on the tip upon a blue-black, dyed
moustache, he looked like a disguised and sinister vaquero.
The drone of his voice had a strangely rasping, soulless ring.
He floundered, lowering, through a few vague sentences;
then suddenly raising his big head and his voice together,
burst out harshly—
‘The honour of the country is in the hands of the army.
I assure you I shall be faithful to it.’ He hesitated till his
roaming eyes met Sir John’s face upon which he fixed a lu-
rid, sleepy glance; and the figure of the lately negotiated loan
came into his mind. He lifted his glass. ‘I drink to the health
of the man who brings us a million and a half of pounds.’
He tossed off his champagne, and sat down heavily with
a half-surprised, half-bullying look all round the faces in
the profound, as if appalled, silence which succeeded the
felicitous toast. Sir John did not move.
‘I don’t think I am called upon to rise,’ he murmured to
Mrs. Gould. ‘That sort of thing speaks for itself.’ But Don
Jose Avellanos came to the rescue with a short oration, in
which he alluded pointedly to England’s goodwill towards
Costaguana—‘a goodwill,’ he continued, significantly, ‘of

1 Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard