“It only means that I’ll have to leave without going to several of the new restaurants, and without having some of the most famous wines.... After all that isn’t such a great sacrifice!”
The Marquis grasped his friend’s hand in silence, while Elena shamelessly embraced him. All she could talk about now was that unknown land, for which, a few hours earlier, she had had not even a thought. To her childish enthusiasm it had suddenly become a paradise.
“How glad I shall be to reach that new country, the country that, you once said, was waiting there for all those who needed it!”
And while she and her husband discussed the preparations necessary for setting off the next day on their long journey, Robledo was saying to himself, as he watched them,
“Now you’ve done it! A fine present you are going to bring those people out there. It’s true they lead hard lives, but at least they live in peace....”
CHAPTER V
WHEN the Arragonese laborers who had emigrated to Argentina carrying along that most cherished of their possessions, the guitar with which they accompany the couplets they improvise, saw her flit by on her pony, they made a song about “The Flower of Black River.” And at once the name was caught up by the whole countryside.
As a matter of fact her name was Celinda and she was the only daughter of the rancher Rojas. She was small for her eighteen years, but agile and energetic as a thoroughbred colt. Most of the men of the region, who, like Orientals, considered obesity an indispensable part of feminine attractiveness, merely shrugged by way of reply when someone praised the Rojas girl’s beauty. Yes, her face was right enough, mischievous looking, with delicately up-turned nose, mouth red as a blood lily, sharp white teeth, and enormous eyes that were, it might be objected by a connoisseur, a little too round. But when you got through with her face, well, for the rest she was just as slim as a boy. At a short distance you wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. “What’s the good of a woman who doesn’t look like one?” they inquired.
In boy’s clothes, mounted on a broncho, circling a lassoo above her head, she could ride down a wild mare or young steer with as much skill as one of her father’s peons.
Carlos Rojas, as everyone in the county knew, belonged to an old Buenos Aires family. In his youth he had led an extravagant life in several of the European capitols. But marriage and an establishment in Buenos Aires proved just as costly as his bachelor wanderings in the old world, and little by little the fortune he had inherited from his father dwindled away, spent for the most part in ostentation and unsuccessful business ventures. At the moment when he became convinced that ruin was upon him, his wife died. She had been a delicate and melancholy woman, given to writing sentimental verse which she published under a pseudonym in the fashion papers; and it was she who had selected for her daughter the romantic name of Celinda.