Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART SECOND: THE ISABELS 7. CHAPTER SEVEN (continued)

"I busied myself for some time in fetching water from the cistern
for the wounded. Afterwards I wandered upstairs, meeting some of
the first ladies of Sulaco, paler than I had ever seen them
before, with bandages over their arms. Not all of them had fled
to the ships. A good many had taken refuge for the day in the
Casa Gould. On the landing a girl, with her hair half down, was
kneeling against the wall under the niche where stands a Madonna
in blue robes and a gilt crown on her head. I think it was the
eldest Miss Lopez; I couldn't see her face, but I remember
looking at the high French heel of her little shoe. She did not
make a sound, she did not stir, she was not sobbing; she remained
there, perfectly still, all black against the white wall, a
silent figure of passionate piety. I am sure she was no more
frightened than the other white-faced ladies I met carrying
bandages. One was sitting on the top step tearing a piece of
linen hastily into strips--the young wife of an elderly man of
fortune here. She interrupted herself to wave her hand to my
bow, as though she were in her carriage on the Alameda. The women
of our country are worth looking at during a revolution. The
rouge and pearl powder fall off, together with that passive
attitude towards the outer world which education, tradition,
custom impose upon them from the earliest infancy. I thought of
your face, which from your infancy had the stamp of intelligence
instead of that patient and resigned cast which appears when some
political commotion tears down the veil of cosmetics and usage.

"In the great sala upstairs a sort of Junta of Notables was
sitting, the remnant of the vanished Provincial Assembly. Don
Juste Lopez had had half his beard singed off at the muzzle of a
trabuco loaded with slugs, of which every one missed him,
providentially. And as he turned his head from side to side it
was exactly as if there had been two men inside his frock-coat,
one nobly whiskered and solemn, the other untidy and scared.