Then, as he was about to slip his letter into an envelope, a postscript occurred to him.
“I enclose this month’s check. Next month I shall have more to send you as I shall receive my pay for some of the extra jobs I have been doing lately.”
Pirovani too was writing a letter that evening. In a nun’s school in Italy, among classmates, some of whom bore the most aristocratic names in the kingdom, his daughter was being educated. He smiled as he wrote, pouting out his lips as he used to do when he played with his little daughter.
“You must learn everything a fine young lady should know, my little Ida. Your old father got the money he is spending now on your education by good hard work, and sometimes when you were a little girl he deprived himself of a lot of things. You mustn’t forget that I had a hard time of it when I was a boy, and had none of your advantages. But just the same I made my way in the world. I know I’m ignorant, but my little Ida will know enough for two when she leaves school. And this is something else I want her to know. If I haven’t married again, it was on your account, Ida mía, it was for you that I have worked so hard.
“Next year I am coming home, and we shall buy a castle, and you will rule it like a queen, and then some fine young cavalry officer will fall in love with you, and you will marry him, and bear his aristocratic name, and your poor old father will be jealous....”
Moreno, too, in the modest building where his office adjoined his living quarters, was writing to his wife all about the fine dream he cherished of finally landing a government job in Buenos Aires....
Richard Watson was not writing letters that evening. His drawing board on his knees, he was tracing on a large sheet of paper the path of one of the main canals. But as he worked the definite outlines of board and tracings on it became blurred. The red and blue inks on the paper became a river bordered with willow trees standing out with refreshing beauty in a land of parched soil and choking dust.
The landscape he saw was of a diminutive scale. The whole extent of the district around the camp fitted into the limits of his drawing paper. At the far end of the plain he suddenly saw a rider, no bigger than a small fly, moving towards him with a graceful swing and something joyous about its free motion.... Was it the Señorita Rojas, in her boy’s clothes, whirling her lassoo?
Watson raised his hand to his eyes, and rubbed them. No, there was nothing there. He brushed the paper as though to sweep away the intruding vision, and the canal, with its red and blue lines, reappeared.
Once more he set to work on his monotonous task, but in a few moments he raised his eyes again from the paper, for now Celinda was appearing at the back of the room, mounted on her horse; the apparition was not of pigmy proportions this time, but life sized....