“I have a call to make, on a former classmate who wants me to help him out in a business matter ... a poor devil who’s out of luck ... but he has a scheme for manufacturing agricultural implements, and it may be that all he needs to set him on his feet is a little capital. He has invented a new kind of plow, he writes me.”
The three friends walked slowly out to the street, and Richard and his young wife got into their car. Robledo however preferred to walk to the Place de L’Etoile, where he took the métro to Montmartre.
It was a late spring afternoon, the air was mild, the sky soft with a golden haze. Robledo swung along with the quick step of youth. Suddenly the image of his unfortunate companion Torre Bianca crossed his mind. This was scarcely strange for when he had last been in Paris it was as his friend’s guest, and it was together that they had all three set out from the brilliant capital to seek their fortune in the deserts of northern Argentine.... Natural enough too that the thought of this other engineer friend of his whom he was at that moment going to see, who was in desperate straits also, and burdened with a family, should make him think of the ill-fated marqués.
Very often in the last twelve years, in the life of monotonous work that he had led, with few new impressions coming in to blot out old ones, he had thought of Torre Bianca’s tragic story and had wondered what had been Elena’s fate after her flight....
Nor was it easy to forget the woman whose evil influence persisted so long after she herself had disappeared. The old inhabitants of La Presa who had remained faithful to the land and had not abandoned the ruined town, had handed down the legend of how a woman had come to that desert community from the old world, a woman who, beautiful and possessed of a fateful charm, had brought ruin and death to all those who had fallen under her spell. Those who knew her only from hearing the legend that had grown up about her, imagined her a kind of witch, and attributed to the vanished “Cara Pintada,” the “Painted Face,” all kinds of nameless crimes! It was even whispered that at times those who strayed in solitary spots along the river bank, caught glimpses of her, and always she brought evil upon those to whom she appeared....
On his occasional trips to Buenos Aires, Robledo had tried to get some news of that Moreno who had been the companion of Elena’s flight. But he had never been able to learn anything definite. Evidently both fugitives had vanished in the restless crowds of Europe, as completely and tracelessly as do those who sink in the frothing sea.
“She must have died,” Robledo would say to himself. “Without doubt she is dead. A woman of her kind would not be likely to live long.”
And for months at a time she would drop out of his mind; then some allusion on the part of the old inhabitants would awaken his memories of the vanished marquesa.
As he went down the steps of the station near the Arc de Triomphe, he had quite forgotten the unlucky couple. The human tide sweeping into the depths of the métro carried him along with it, and in a few minutes he climbed out to the street level, once more on the opposite side of the city.
As evening closed in he left his friend’s house which was in a modest side street, and walked along the boulevard Rochechuart, towards the Place Pigalle.