Page 165 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

to the execration of future years. It appears to be true that
he, too, loved his country. He had given it twelve years of
peace; and, absolute master of lives and fortunes as he was,
he died poor. His worst fault, perhaps, was not his ferocity,
but his ignorance;’ the man who could write thus of a cruel
persecutor (the passage occurs in his ‘History of Misrule’)
felt at the foreshadowing of success an almost boundless af-
fection for his two helpers, for these two young people from
over the sea.
Just as years ago, calmly, from the conviction of practi-
cal necessity, stronger than any abstract political doctrine,
Henry Gould had drawn the sword, so now, the times be-
ing changed, Charles Gould had flung the silver of the San
Tome into the fray. The Inglez of Sulaco, the ‘Costaguana
Englishman’ of the third generation, was as far from being a
political intriguer as his uncle from a revolutionary swash-
buckler. Springing from the instinctive uprightness of their
natures their action was reasoned. They saw an opportunity
and used the weapon to hand.
Charles Gould’s position—a commanding position in
the background of that attempt to retrieve the peace and
the credit of the Republic—was very clear. At the beginning
he had had to accommodate himself to existing circum-
stances of corruption so naively brazen as to disarm the
hate of a man courageous enough not to be afraid of its irre-
sponsible potency to ruin everything it touched. It seemed
to him too contemptible for hot anger even. He made use of
it with a cold, fearless scorn, manifested rather than con-
cealed by the forms of stony courtesy which did away with

1 Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard