And while the tentacles of the canal system were slowly creeping through the ancient basin of the Rio Negro, changing the once arid lands into fertile prairies, a stream of immigrants was bringing new money, new blood, new energy to the colony; and as they paid in year by year the purchase price of their farms, millions poured into the company’s offices.
And to Robledo there was a certain irony in the fact that wealth had come to him when he was already too old to feel the desires that tempt and divert other men. Watson’s children were already millionaires, many times over; it would never fall to their lot to know the enslaving power of toil, nor the anxieties of the need of money; and at their coming of age they would undoubtedly come to Paris to pour out on its pleasures a part of their princely inheritance, attracting attention even there by their extravagances and the glitter of their idle and useless lives. But the very force of the contrast between their lives and his amused Robledo, and with the smiling fatalism of the man who in a long lifetime has known want and bitterness, he accepted this termination of his labors, finding it quite in keeping with the usual ironies of life.
There was another contrast too, one which he often pondered, in the circumstances of his career. While he had been making himself a millionaire, one half of humanity, all that part of it separated from him by a wide ocean, had been suffering the horrors of a ghastly war. The first effect of this cataclysm had been to endanger his own enterprise, for the foreign colonists on his land had hastened to abandon their farms in order to join the troops of their respective nations. Then suddenly this general exodus stopped, to be followed by a veritable flood of new colonists.
Meanwhile, violent transformations were taking place in Europe. Many of those whom twelve years earlier he had known as rich men, were now poverty-stricken, or else had disappeared. On the other hand, he, who in those days had been a mere aspirant to fortune, a colonist whose future was of the most doubtful, now felt wearied by the exaggerated dimensions of his prosperity. He thought of himself as being like the steers of his friend don Carlos, who, overwhelmed by the very plentifulness of their fodder, stood knee-deep in alfalfa on legs too slender to support their enormous weight, while they looked with eyes that showed no trace of desire at the quantities of pasturage surrounding them.
Watson and Celinda were young, they still had illusions and desires, they had innumerable uses for their wealth. Celinda knew all the pleasures of luxury, and her husband could gratify that most universal of all the desires of a lover, the desire to give Celinda everything that she wanted. But as to himself, Manuel Robledo, multi-millionaire of the Argentine, not even the most innocent pleasures reserved to old age had for him any charm. Riches had come too late; he had no time now to learn what to do with them.
The greater part of his life had been spent in an effort to simplify, to do without comforts, and now he no longer needed, no longer desired, the things other people considered indispensable. Celinda and her husband kept an expensive automobile standing at the hotel entrance from early morning till late at night. They could not live without having this means of locomotion at their beck and call. One would suppose that these two former crack riders had possessed a car from the moment they were born. Ah, youth! What a marvellous adaptability it possesses for every kind of pleasure and luxury! Only in cases of urgent haste did Robledo remember that he could purchase the services of an automobile. But on all other occasions he preferred to walk or to employ the same means of locomotion as those used by people of moderate circumstances.
“It isn’t meanness, nor miserliness,” Celinda used to say, for with her woman’s keenness of observation, she had learned to understand Robledo. “He simply doesn’t think of these things, because they mean nothing to him.”
The two engineers started from their day-dream as they heard Celinda inquire,
“And what are you going to do this afternoon, don Manuel? Why not come with me to the dressmaker’s, so that you’ll know just what you are talking about when you make fun of women’s frivolous pastimes?”
But Robledo had other plans.