Page 62 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

here. And I suppose they are homesick. I suppose every-
body must be always just a little homesick.’
She was always sorry for homesick people.
Born in the country, as his father before him, spare and
tall, with a flaming moustache, a neat chin, clear blue eyes,
auburn hair, and a thin, fresh, red face, Charles Gould
looked like a new arrival from over the sea. His grandfather
had fought in the cause of independence under Bolivar, in
that famous English legion which on the battlefield of Cara-
bobo had been saluted by the great Liberator as Saviours
of his country. One of Charles Gould’s uncles had been
the elected President of that very province of Sulaco (then
called a State) in the days of Federation, and afterwards had
been put up against the wall of a church and shot by the
order of the barbarous Unionist general, Guzman Bento. It
was the same Guzman Bento who, becoming later Perpetual
President, famed for his ruthless and cruel tyranny, readied
his apotheosis in the popular legend of a sanguinary land-
haunting spectre whose body had been carried off by the
devil in person from the brick mausoleum in the nave of
the Church of Assumption in Sta. Marta. Thus, at least, the
priests explained its disappearance to the barefooted multi-
tude that streamed in, awestruck, to gaze at the hole in the
side of the ugly box of bricks before the great altar.
Guzman Bento of cruel memory had put to death great
numbers of people besides Charles Gould’s uncle; but with
a relative martyred in the cause of aristocracy, the Sulaco
Oligarchs (this was the phraseology of Guzman Bento’s
time; now they were called Blancos, and had given up the

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