Page 64 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

swift pasotrote, straight out of some green meadow at the
other side of the world.
His way would lie along the old Spanish road—the Cami-
no Real of popular speech—the only remaining vestige of a
fact and name left by that royalty old Giorgio Viola hated,
and whose very shadow had departed from the land; for the
big equestrian statue of Charles IV at the entrance of the
Alameda, towering white against the trees, was only known
to the folk from the country and to the beggars of the town
that slept on the steps around the pedestal, as the Horse of
Stone. The other Carlos, turning off to the left with a rapid
clatter of hoofs on the disjointed pavement —Don Carlos
Gould, in his English clothes, looked as incongruous, but
much more at home than the kingly cavalier reining in his
steed on the pedestal above the sleeping leperos, with his
marble arm raised towards the marble rim of a plumed hat.
The weather-stained effigy of the mounted king, with its
vague suggestion of a saluting gesture, seemed to present an
inscrutable breast to the political changes which had robbed
it of its very name; but neither did the other horseman, well
known to the people, keen and alive on his well-shaped, slate-
coloured beast with a white eye, wear his heart on the sleeve
of his English coat. His mind preserved its steady poise as
if sheltered in the passionless stability of private and public
decencies at home in Europe. He accepted with a like calm
the shocking manner in which the Sulaco ladies smothered
their faces with pearl powder till they looked like white
plaster casts with beautiful living eyes, the peculiar gos-
sip of the town, and the continuous political changes, the