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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.
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
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