Page 182 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

‘I am inexpressibly grateful for your welcome; but why
need a man be thanked for returning to his native country?
I am sure Dona Antonia does not think so.’
‘Certainly not, senor,’ she said, with that perfectly calm
openness of manner which characterized all her utterances.
‘But when he returns, as you return, one may be glad—for
the sake of both.’
Martin Decoud said nothing of his plans. He not only
never breathed a word of them to any one, but only a fort-
night later asked the mistress of the Casa Gould (where he
had of course obtained admission at once), leaning forward
in his chair with an air of well-bred familiarity, whether she
could not detect in him that day a marked change—an air,
he explained, of more excellent gravity. At this Mrs. Gould
turned her face full towards him with the silent inquiry of
slightly widened eyes and the merest ghost of a smile, an
habitual movement with her, which was very fascinating
to men by something subtly devoted, finely self-forgetful
in its lively readiness of attention. Because, Decoud con-
tinued imperturbably, he felt no longer an idle cumberer
of the earth. She was, he assured her, actually beholding at
that moment the Journalist of Sulaco. At once Mrs. Gould
glanced towards Antonia, posed upright in the corner of a
high, straight-backed Spanish sofa, a large black fan wav-
ing slowly against the curves of her fine figure, the tips of
crossed feet peeping from under the hem of the black skirt.
Decoud’s eyes also remained fixed there, while in an under-
tone he added that Miss Avellanos was quite aware of his
new and unexpected vocation, which in Costaguana was

1 1