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confidence in her husband; it had always been very great. He had struck
her imagination from the first by his unsentimentalism, by that very
quietude of mind which she had erected in her thought for a sign of
perfect competency in the business of living. Don Jose Avellanos, their
neighbour across the street, a statesman, a poet, a man of culture, who
had represented his country at several European Courts (and had suffered
untold indignities as a state prisoner in the time of the tyrant Guzman
Bento), used to declare in Dona Emilia's drawing-room that Carlos had
all the English qualities of character with a truly patriotic heart.
Mrs. Gould, raising her eyes to her husband's thin, red and tan face,
could not detect the slightest quiver of a feature at what he must have
heard said of his patriotism. Perhaps he had just dismounted on his
return from the mine; he was English enough to disregard the hottest
hours of the day. Basilio, in a livery of white linen and a red sash,
had squatted for a moment behind his heels to unstrap the heavy, blunt
spurs in the patio; and then the Senor Administrator would go up the
staircase into the gallery. Rows of plants in pots, ranged on the
balustrade between the pilasters of the arches, screened the corredor
with their leaves and flowers from the quadrangle below, whose paved
space is the true hearthstone of a South American house, where the quiet
hours of domestic life are marked by the shifting of light and shadow on
the flagstones.
Senor Avellanos was in the habit of crossing the patio at five o'clock
almost every day. Don Jose chose to come over at tea-time because the
English rite at Dona Emilia's house reminded him of the time he lived in
London as Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of St. James. He did
not like tea; and, usually, rocking his American chair, his neat little
shiny boots crossed on the foot-rest, he would talk on and on with a
sort of complacent virtuosity wonderful in a man of his age, while he
held the cup in his hands for a long time. His close-cropped head was
perfectly white; his eyes coalblack.
On seeing Charles Gould step into the sala he would nod provisionally
and go on to the end of the oratorial period. Only then he would say--
"Carlos, my friend, you have ridden from San Tome in the heat of the
day. Always the true English activity. No? What?"
He drank up all the tea at once in one draught. This performance
was invariably followed by a slight shudder and a low, involuntary
"br-r-r-r," which was not covered by the hasty exclamation, "Excellent!"
Then giving up the empty cup into his young friend's hand, extended with
a smile, he continued to expatiate upon the patriotic nature of the San
Tome mine for the simple pleasure of talking fluently, it seemed, while
his reclining body jerked backwards and forwards in a rocking-chair of
the sort exported from the United States. The ceiling of the largest
drawing-room of the Casa Gould extended its white level far above
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