Page 65 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

constant ‘saving of the country,’ which to his wife seemed a
puerile and bloodthirsty game of murder and rapine played
with terrible earnestness by depraved children. In the early
days of her Costaguana life, the little lady used to clench
her hands with exasperation at not being able to take the
public affairs of the country as seriously as the incidental
atrocity of methods deserved. She saw in them a comedy
of naive pretences, but hardly anything genuine except her
own appalled indignation. Charles, very quiet and twisting
his long moustaches, would decline to discuss them at all.
Once, however, he observed to her gently—
‘My dear, you seem to forget that I was born here.’ These
few words made her pause as if they had been a sudden rev-
elation. Perhaps the mere fact of being born in the country
did make a difference. She had a great confidence in her
husband; it had always been very great. He had struck her
imagination from the first by his unsentimentalism, by
that very quietude of mind which she had erected in her
thought for a sign of perfect competency in the business
of living. Don Jose Avellanos, their neighbour across the
street, a statesman, a poet, a man of culture, who had rep-
resented his country at several European Courts (and had
suffered untold indignities as a state prisoner in the time of
the tyrant Guzman Bento), used to declare in Dona Emilia’s
drawing-room that Carlos had all the English qualities of
character with a truly patriotic heart.
Mrs. Gould, raising her eyes to her husband’s thin, red
and tan face, could not detect the slightest quiver of a fea-
ture at what he must have heard said of his patriotism.

Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard