Nostromo - A Tale of the Seaboard.pdf - Planet eBook

the skirt of his soutane at each end of his beat. Decoud murmuredto him ironically: ‘Those gentlemen talk about theirgods.’Father Corbelan stopped short, looked at the journalistof Sulaco fixedly for a moment, shrugged his shouldersslightly, and resumed his plodding walk of an obstinatetraveller.And now the Europeans were dropping off from thegroup around Charles Gould till the Administrador of theGreat Silver Mine could be seen in his whole lank length,from head to foot, left stranded by the ebbing tide of hisguests on the great square of carpet, as it were a multi-colouredshoal of flowers and arabesques under his brownboots. Father Corbelan approached the rocking-chair ofDon Jose Avellanos.‘Come, brother,’ he said, with kindly brusqueness and atouch of relieved impatience a man may feel at the end of aperfectly useless ceremony. ‘A la Casa! A la Casa! This hasbeen all talk. Let us now go and think and pray for guidancefrom Heaven.’He rolled his black eyes upwards. By the side of the fraildiplomatist—the life and soul of the party—he seemed gigantic,with a gleam of fanaticism in the glance. But thevoice of the party, or, rather, its mouthpiece, the ‘son Decoud’from Paris, turned journalist for the sake of Antonia’seyes, knew very well that it was not so, that he was only astrenuous priest with one idea, feared by the women andexecrated by the men of the people. Martin Decoud, thedilettante in life, imagined himself to derive an artistic