Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard
the country he loved would be enshrined for the reverent worship of posterity, flitted through his mind. The historian who had enough elevation of soul to write of Guzman Bento: "Yet this monster, imbrued in the blood of his countrymen, must not be held unreservedly to the execration of future years. It appears to be true that he, too, loved his country. He had given it twelve years of peace; and, absolute master of lives and fortune as he was, he died poor. His worst fault, perhaps, was not his ferocity, but his ignorance." The man who could write thus of a cruel persecutor (the passage occurs in his History of Misrule) felt at the foreshadowing of success an almost boundless affection for his two helpers, for these two young people from over the sea.
Just as years ago, calmly, from the conviction of practical necessity, stronger than any abstract political doctrine, Henry Gould had drawn the sword, so now, the times being changed, Charles Gould had flung the silver of the San Tomé into the fray. The Inglez of Sulaco, the "Costaguana Englishman" of the third generation, was as far from being a political intriguer as his uncle from a revolutionary swashbuckler. Springing from the instinctive uprightness of their natures their action was reasoned. They saw an opportunity and used the weapon to hand.
Charles Gould's position—a commanding position in the background of that attempt to retrieve the peace and the credit of the republic—was very clear. At the beginning he had had to accommodate himself to existing circumstances of corruption so naïvely brazen as to disarm the hate of a man courageous enough
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