Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART FIRST: THE SILVER OF THE MINE 6. CHAPTER SIX (continued)

She kept her old Spanish house (one of the finest specimens in
Sulaco) open for the dispensation of the small graces of
existence. She dispensed them with simplicity and charm because
she was guided by an alert perception of values. She was highly
gifted in the art of human intercourse which consists in delicate
shades of self-forgetfulness and in the suggestion of universal
comprehension. Charles Gould (the Gould family, established in
Costaguana for three generations, always went to England for
their education and for their wives) imagined that he had fallen
in love with a girl's sound common sense like any other man, but
these were not exactly the reasons why, for instance, the whole
surveying camp, from the youngest of the young men to their
mature chief, should have found occasion to allude to Mrs.
Gould's house so frequently amongst the high peaks of the Sierra.
She would have protested that she had done nothing for them, with
a low laugh and a surprised widening of her grey eyes, had
anybody told her how convincingly she was remembered on the edge
of the snow-line above Sulaco. But directly, with a little
capable air of setting her wits to work, she would have found an
explanation. "Of course, it was such a surprise for these boys to
find any sort of welcome here. And I suppose they are homesick.
I suppose everybody 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 Carabobo 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 multitude that
streamed in, awestruck, to gaze at the hole in the side of the
ugly box of bricks before the great altar.