Page 564 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

ing tenderness.
‘Don’t expect to find me at home,’ Charles Gould warned
him. ‘I’ll be off early to the mine.’
After lunch, Dona Emilia and the senor doctor came
slowly through the inner gateway of the patio. The large
gardens of the Casa Gould, surrounded by high walls, and
the red-tile slopes of neighbouring roofs, lay open before
them, with masses of shade under the trees and level sur-
faces of sunlight upon the lawns. A triple row of old orange
trees surrounded the whole. Barefooted, brown garden-
ers, in snowy white shirts and wide calzoneras, dotted the
grounds, squatting over flowerbeds, passing between the
trees, dragging slender India-rubber tubes across the gravel
of the paths; and the fine jets of water crossed each other
in graceful curves, sparkling in the sunshine with a slight
pattering noise upon the bushes, and an effect of showered
diamonds upon the grass.
Dona Emilia, holding up the train of a clear dress, walked
by the side of Dr. Monygham, in a longish black coat and se-
vere black bow on an immaculate shirtfront. Under a shady
clump of trees, where stood scattered little tables and wicker
easy-chairs, Mrs. Gould sat down in a low and ample seat.
‘Don’t go yet,’ she said to Dr. Monygham, who was unable
to tear himself away from the spot. His chin nestling within
the points of his collar, he devoured her stealthily with his
eyes, which, luckily, were round and hard like clouded mar-
bles, and incapable of disclosing his sentiments. His pitying
emotion at the marks of time upon the face of that woman,
the air of frailty and weary fatigue that had settled upon the