Page 63 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

federal idea), which meant the families of pure Spanish de-
scent, considered Charles as one of themselves. With such
a family record, no one could be more of a Costaguanero
than Don Carlos Gould; but his aspect was so characteristic
that in the talk of common people he was just the Inglez—
the Englishman of Sulaco. He looked more English than a
casual tourist, a sort of heretic pilgrim, however, quite un-
known in Sulaco. He looked more English than the last
arrived batch of young railway engineers, than anybody
out of the hunting-field pictures in the numbers of Punch
reaching his wife’s drawing-room two months or so after
date. It astonished you to hear him talk Spanish (Castillan,
as the natives say) or the Indian dialect of the country-
people so naturally. His accent had never been English;
but there was something so indelible in all these ancestral
Goulds—liberators, explorers, coffee planters, merchants,
revolutionists—of Costaguana, that he, the only representa-
tive of the third generation in a continent possessing its own
style of horsemanship, went on looking thoroughly English
even on horseback. This is not said of him in the mocking
spirit of the Llaneros—men of the great plains—who think
that no one in the world knows how to sit a horse but them-
selves. Charles Gould, to use the suitably lofty phrase, rode
like a centaur. Riding for him was not a special form of ex-
ercise; it was a natural faculty, as walking straight is to all
men sound of mind and limb; but, all the same, when can-
tering beside the rutty ox-cart track to the mine he looked
in his English clothes and with his imported saddlery as
though he had come this moment to Costaguana at his easy

Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard