Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

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

Guzman Bento of cruel memory had put to death great numbers of
people besides Charles Gould's uncle; but with a relative
martyred in the cause of aristocracy, the Sulaco Oligarchs (this
was the phraseology of Guzman Bento's time; now they were called
Blancos, and had given up the federal idea), which meant the
families of pure Spanish descent, 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 unknown
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
representative 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 themselves. Charles
Gould, to use the suitably lofty phrase, rode like a centaur.
Riding for him was not a special form of exercise; it was a
natural faculty, as walking straight is to all men sound of mind
and limb; but, all the same, when cantering 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 swift pasotrote, straight out of some
green meadow at the other side of the world.