Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART SECOND: THE ISABELS 2. CHAPTER TWO (continued)

Mrs. Gould had no silver mine to look after. In the general life
of the Gould Concession she was represented by her two
lieutenants, the doctor and the priest, but she fed her woman's
love of excitement on events whose significance was purified to
her by the fire of her imaginative purpose. On that day she had
brought the Avellanos, father and daughter, down to the harbour
with her.

Amongst his other activities of that stirring time, Don Jose had
become the chairman of a Patriotic Committee which had armed a
great proportion of troops in the Sulaco command with an improved
model of a military rifle. It had been just discarded for
something still more deadly by one of the great European powers.
How much of the market-price for second-hand weapons was covered
by the voluntary contributions of the principal families, and how
much came from those funds Don Jose was understood to command
abroad, remained a secret which he alone could have disclosed;
but the Ricos, as the populace called them, had contributed under
the pressure of their Nestor's eloquence. Some of the more
enthusiastic ladies had been moved to bring offerings of jewels
into the hands of the man who was the life and soul of the party.

There were moments when both his life and his soul seemed
overtaxed by so many years of undiscouraged belief in
regeneration. He appeared almost inanimate, sitting rigidly by
the side of Mrs. Gould in the landau, with his fine, old,
clean-shaven face of a uniform tint as if modelled in yellow wax,
shaded by a soft felt hat, the dark eyes looking out fixedly.
Antonia, the beautiful Antonia, as Miss Avellanos was called in
Sulaco, leaned back, facing them; and her full figure, the grave
oval of her face with full red lips, made her look more mature
than Mrs. Gould, with her mobile expression and small, erect
person under a slightly swaying sunshade.