Page 228 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

the skirt of his soutane at each end of his beat. Decoud mur-
mured to him ironically: ‘Those gentlemen talk about their
gods.’
Father Corbelan stopped short, looked at the journal-
ist of Sulaco fixedly for a moment, shrugged his shoulders
slightly, and resumed his plodding walk of an obstinate
traveller.
And now the Europeans were dropping off from the
group around Charles Gould till the Administrador of the
Great Silver Mine could be seen in his whole lank length,
from head to foot, left stranded by the ebbing tide of his
guests on the great square of carpet, as it were a multi-co-
loured shoal of flowers and arabesques under his brown
boots. Father Corbelan approached the rocking-chair of
Don Jose Avellanos.
‘Come, brother,’ he said, with kindly brusqueness and a
touch of relieved impatience a man may feel at the end of a
perfectly useless ceremony. ‘A la Casa! A la Casa! This has
been all talk. Let us now go and think and pray for guid-
ance from Heaven.’
He rolled his black eyes upwards. By the side of the frail
diplomatist—the life and soul of the party—he seemed gi-
gantic, with a gleam of fanaticism in the glance. But the
voice of the party, or, rather, its mouthpiece, the ‘son De-
coud’ from Paris, turned journalist for the sake of Antonia’s
eyes, knew very well that it was not so, that he was only a
strenuous priest with one idea, feared by the women and
execrated by the men of the people. Martin Decoud, the
dilettante in life, imagined himself to derive an artistic