Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard
with him from Sta. Marta to countenance by their presence the enterprise in which the capital of their countries was engaged.
The only lady of that company was Mrs. Gould, the wife of Don Carlos, the administrator of the San Tomé silver-mine. The ladies of Sulaco were not advanced enough to take part in public life to that extent. They had come out strongly at the great ball at the Intendencia the evening before, but Mrs. Gould alone had appeared, a bright spot in the group of black coats behind the President-Dictator, on the crimson cloth-covered stage erected under a shady tree on the shore of the harbor, where the ceremony of turning the first sod had taken place. She had come off in the cargo lighter, full of notabilities, sitting under the flutter of gay flags, in the place of honor by the side of Captain Mitchell, who steered, and her clear dress gave the only truly festive note to the sombre gathering in the long, gorgeous saloon of the Juno.
The head of the chairman of the railway board (from London), handsome and pale in a silvery mist of white hair and clipped beard, hovered near her shoulder, attentive, smiling and fatigued. The journey from London to Sta. Marta in mail-boats and the special carriages of the Sta. Marta coast-line (the only railway existing so far) had been tolerable—even pleasant—quite tolerable. But the trip over the mountains to Sulaco was another sort of experience, in an old diligencia over impassable roads skirting awful precipices.
"We have been upset twice in one day on the brink of very deep ravines," he was telling Mrs. Gould in an
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