Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART THIRD: THE LIGHTHOUSE 4. CHAPTER FOUR (continued)

"Shut these windows!" Charles Gould yelled at him, angrily. All
the other servants, terrified at what they took for the signal of
a general massacre, had rushed upstairs, tumbling over each
other, men and women, the obscure and generally invisible
population of the ground floor on the four sides of the patio.
The women, screaming "Misericordia!" ran right into the room,
and, falling on their knees against the walls, began to cross
themselves convulsively. The staring heads of men blocked the
doorway in an instant--mozos from the stable, gardeners,
nondescript helpers living on the crumbs of the munificent
house--and Charles Gould beheld all the extent of his domestic
establishment, even to the gatekeeper. This was a half-paralyzed
old man, whose long white locks fell down to his shoulders: an
heirloom taken up by Charles Gould's familial piety. He could
remember Henry Gould, an Englishman and a Costaguanero of the
second generation, chief of the Sulaco province; he had been his
personal mozo years and years ago in peace and war; had been
allowed to attend his master in prison; had, on the fatal
morning, followed the firing squad; and, peeping from behind one
of the cypresses growing along the wall of the Franciscan
Convent, had seen, with his eyes starting out of his head, Don
Enrique throw up his hands and fall with his face in the dust.
Charles Gould noted particularly the big patriarchal head of that
witness in the rear of the other servants. But he was surprised
to see a shrivelled old hag or two, of whose existence within the
walls of his house he had not been aware. They must have been the
mothers, or even the grandmothers of some of his people. There
were a few children, too, more or less naked, crying and clinging
to the legs of their elders. He had never before noticed any sign
of a child in his patio. Even Leonarda, the camerista, came in a
fright, pushing through, with her spoiled, pouting face of a
favourite maid, leading the Viola girls by the hand. The crockery
rattled on table and sideboard, and the whole house seemed to
sway in the deafening wave of sound.