Page 60 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

not connected with Nostromo, and in a tone which for him
was gentle), even to her, he had said once, ‘Really, it is most
unreasonable to demand that a man should think of other
people so much better than he is able to think of himself.’
And Mrs. Gould had hastened to drop the subject. There
were strange rumours of the English doctor. Years ago, in
the time of Guzman Bento, he had been mixed up, it was
whispered, in a conspiracy which was betrayed and, as peo-
ple expressed it, drowned in blood. His hair had turned
grey, his hairless, seamed face was of a brick-dust colour;
the large check pattern of his flannel shirt and his old
stained Panama hat were an established defiance to the
conventionalities of Sulaco. Had it not been for the immac-
ulate cleanliness of his apparel he might have been taken for
one of those shiftless Europeans that are a moral eyesore to
the respectability of a foreign colony in almost every exotic
part of the world. The young ladies of Sulaco, adorning with
clusters of pretty faces the balconies along the Street of the
Constitution, when they saw him pass, with his limping gait
and bowed head, a short linen jacket drawn on carelessly
over the flannel check shirt, would remark to each other,
‘Here is the Senor doctor going to call on Dona Emilia. He
has got his little coat on.’ The inference was true. Its deeper
meaning was hidden from their simple intelligence. More-
over, they expended no store of thought on the doctor. He
was old, ugly, learned—and a little ‘loco’—mad, if not a bit
of a sorcerer, as the common people suspected him of be-
ing. The little white jacket was in reality a concession to Mrs.
Gould’s humanizing influence. The doctor, with his habit of