Page 272 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

clothed in the fair robes of an idea.
‘Late at night we formed a small junta of four—the two
women, Don Carlos, and myself—in Mrs. Gould’s blue-and-
white boudoir.
‘El Rey de Sulaco thinks himself, no doubt, a very honest
man. And so he is, if one could look behind his taciturnity.
Perhaps he thinks that this alone makes his honesty un-
stained. Those Englishmen live on illusions which somehow
or other help them to get a firm hold of the substance. When
he speaks it is by a rare ‘yes’ or ‘no’ that seems as impersonal
as the words of an oracle. But he could not impose on me by
his dumb reserve. I knew what he had in his head; he has his
mine in his head; and his wife had nothing in her head but
his precious person, which he has bound up with the Gould
Concession and tied up to that little woman’s neck. No mat-
ter. The thing was to make him present the affair to Holroyd
(the Steel and Silver King) in such a manner as to secure
his financial support. At that time last night, just twenty-
four hours ago, we thought the silver of the mine safe in the
Custom House vaults till the north-bound steamer came
to take it away. And as long as the treasure flowed north,
without a break, that utter sentimentalist, Holroyd, would
not drop his idea of introducing, not only justice, industry,
peace, to the benighted continents, but also that pet dream
of his of a purer form of Christianity. Later on, the princi-
pal European really in Sulaco, the engineer-in-chief of the
railway, came riding up the Calle, from the harbour, and
was admitted to our conclave. Meantime, the Junta of the
Notables in the great sala was still deliberating; only, one of

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