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himself."
And Mrs. Gould had hastened to drop the subject. There were strange
rumours of the English doctor. Years ago, in the time of Guzman Bento,
he had been mixed up, it was whispered, in a conspiracy which was
betrayed and, as people expressed it, drowned in blood. His hair had
turned grey, his hairless, seamed face was of a brick-dust colour; the
large check pattern of his flannel shirt and his old stained Panama hat
were an established defiance to the conventionalities of Sulaco. Had
it not been for the immaculate cleanliness of his apparel he might have
been taken for one of those shiftless Europeans that are a moral eyesore
to the respectability of a foreign colony in almost every exotic part of
the world. The young ladies of Sulaco, adorning with clusters of pretty
faces the balconies along the Street of the Constitution, when they saw
him pass, with his limping gait and bowed head, a short linen jacket
drawn on carelessly over the flannel check shirt, would remark to each
other, "Here is the Senor doctor going to call on Dona Emilia. He has
got his little coat on." The inference was true. Its deeper meaning was
hidden from their simple intelligence. Moreover, they expended no
store of thought on the doctor. He was old, ugly, learned--and a little
"loco"--mad, if not a bit of a sorcerer, as the common people suspected
him of being. The little white jacket was in reality a concession
to Mrs. Gould's humanizing influence. The doctor, with his habit of
sceptical, bitter speech, had no other means of showing his profound
respect for the character of the woman who was known in the country as
the English Senora. He presented this tribute very seriously indeed;
it was no trifle for a man of his habits. Mrs. Gould felt that, too,
perfectly. She would never have thought of imposing upon him this marked
show of deference.
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
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