Page 400 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

over his shoulder.
‘Drive carefully,’ cried Mrs. Gould in a tremulous voice.
‘Si, carefully; si nina,’ he mumbled, chewing his lips, his
round leathery cheeks quivering. And the landau rolled
slowly out of the light.
‘I will see them as far as the ford,’ said Charles Gould
to his wife. She stood on the edge of the sidewalk with her
hands clasped lightly, and nodded to him as he followed
after the carriage. And now the windows of the Amarilla
Club were dark. The last spark of resistance had died out.
Turning his head at the corner, Charles Gould saw his wife
crossing over to their own gate in the lighted patch of the
street. One of their neighbours, a well-known merchant
and landowner of the province, followed at her elbow, talk-
ing with great gestures. As she passed in all the lights went
out in the street, which remained dark and empty from end
to end.
The houses of the vast Plaza were lost in the night. High
up, like a star, there was a small gleam in one of the tow-
ers of the cathedral; and the equestrian statue gleamed
pale against the black trees of the Alameda, like a ghost of
royalty haunting the scenes of revolution. The rare prowl-
ers they met ranged themselves against the wall. Beyond
the last houses the carriage rolled noiselessly on the soft
cushion of dust, and with a greater obscurity a feeling of
freshness seemed to fall from the foliage of the trees border-
ing the country road. The emissary from Hernandez’s camp
pushed his horse close to Charles Gould.
‘Caballero,’ he said in an interested voice, ‘you are he