THE TEMPTRESS

WORKS OF
VICENTE BLASCO IBAÑEZ

Novels

THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE
MARE NOSTRUM (Our Sea)
BLOOD AND SAND
THE SHADOW OF THE CATHEDRAL
THE ENEMIES OF WOMEN
WOMAN TRIUMPHANT (La Maja Desnuda)
LA BODEGA (The Fruit of the Vine)
THE MAYFLOWER
THE TORRENT (Entre Naranjos)
THE TEMPTRESS (La Tierra de Todos)

Other Works

IN THE LAND OF ART

An unconventional tour of Italy and its treasures of art, architecture and scenery.

MEXICO IN REVOLUTION

Acute and brilliant chapters on Mexican affairs as seen by the author while on the spot.

E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

THE TEMPTRESS
(LA TIERRA DE TODOS)

BY
VICENTE BLASCO IBAÑEZ
AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION BY
LEO ONGLEY
NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 Fifth Avenue

Copyright, 1923
By E. P. Dutton & Company
All Rights Reserved

First Printing, July, 1923
Second Printing, July, 1923
Third Printing, July, 1923
Fourth Printing, July, 1923
Fifth Printing, July, 1923
Sixth Printing, July, 1923
Seventh Printing, July, 1923
Eighth Printing, July, 1923
Ninth Printing, July, 1923
Tenth Printing, July, 1923
Eleventh Printing, July, 1923
Twelfth Printing, July, 1923
Thirteenth Printing, Jury, 1923
Fourteenth Printing, July, 1923
Fifteenth Printing, July, 1923
Sixteenth Printing, July, 1923

PRINTED IN THE UNITED
STATES OF AMERICA

THE TEMPTRESS

CHAPTER I

AS usual the Marquis de Torre Bianca got up late. Leaving the security of his bedroom, he cast an uneasy glance at the letters and newspapers waiting for him on a silver salver in the library. Some of the postmarks were foreign. At sight of these he breathed a sigh of relief. That much respite at least.... But some of the letters were from Paris; and at these he frowned. He knew what they would be like. They would be long and full of unpleasant allusions, to say nothing of reproaches and threats.... He noted uncomfortably the addresses printed on some of the envelopes, and at their names, his creditors appeared before him, an indignant and vociferous crowd.... Alas! He knew what was in those letters.

If they had only been addressed to his wife! She received letters like that with the utmost serenity, as though debts and clamorous creditors were her native element—“The Fair Elena” her friends called her, acknowledging a beauty which couldn’t be denied, but which her women friends liked to allude to as “historic”—it had lasted so long. The Marquis, however, had a more antiquated conception of honor than the historically fair Elena. He went so far as to believe that it is better not to contract debts if there is no possibility of paying them.

Fearful lest the servant should find him still dubiously eyeing his mail, the Marquis began opening his letters.... After all, they were not so bad! One was from the firm which had sold the Marquise her most recently acquired automobile. Of the ten installments to be paid, it had collected only two.... And there were numerous other letters from shops that supplied the Marquise with her needs. From her establishment near the Place Vendome her debts had reached out and permeated the neighborhood. The maintenance, to say nothing of the comfort, of the establishment, necessitated the services of innumerable tradespeople.

The servants had just as good a reason to write him letters as the tradespeople. But instead they relied upon the worldly arts of the Marquise to provide them with a means of compensating themselves for long unpaid services. So they expressed their disgust by a reluctant and unbending attitude in the discharge of their duties.

The Marquis was wont, when he had finished the perusal of his morning mail, to look about him with something very like alarm. There was his Elena, giving parties and going to all the most distinguished festivities in Paris; occupying the most desirable apartment of an elegant house on a fashionable street, keeping a luxurious automobile, and never less than five servants. By what mysterious adjustments and manoeuvres could his wife and he keep up this manner of life? Every day there were new debts; every day they required more money for perpetually increasing expenses. Whatever funds he had disappeared like a river in the sand. And yet Elena seemed to consider this manner of living reasonable and proper, just as though it were that of all her friends....

At this point the Marquis caught sight of a letter he had overlooked, a letter bearing an Italian postmark.

“From Mother,” he said.

As he read it his expression lightened. He even smiled. Yet this letter too had complaints to make. But they were gentle, resigned.

The echoes of his mother’s voice, awakened in his memory by her words, called up before him the old white palace of the Torre Biancas, one of the monuments of his distant Tuscany. Huge, in ruins now, surrounded by gardens of the past, with vast halls whose floors were tiled, and whose ceilings were gay with paintings of mythological scenes, it had long contained a wealth of famous paintings that hung on its bare walls, marking out their squares and rectangles in the dust gathering for centuries on the slowly crumbling plaster.

But the pictures and the priceless bits of statuary had already vanished from their places when the Marquis’ father took possession of his ancestral halls. His only resource for an income lay in the archives of the Torre Biancas. Autographs of Machiavelli, Michelangelo, and other Florentines who had had correspondence with his ancestors, paid the expenses of one generation....

Around the palace the gardens of three centuries stretched out their marble steps, and balustrades crumbling under the weight of matted rose vines, to the Tuscan sun. Mosses and vines crept into the cracks of the stone, tracing out their patterns with supreme indifference to the decay their presence caused. On the driveways the ancient box, cut back to form wide walls and deep triumphal arches, looked as black as the ruins of a burnt city. It was so long now since the gardens had received any care that they were beginning to look like a flowering forest. The paths at the step of infrequent visitors sent out melancholy echoes which startled the birds like the shot of an arrow, disturbed swarms of insects floating under the outspreading branches, startled the little snakes crawling among the tree trunks.

Wearing the clothes of a simple peasant, and served only by a little country girl, the Marquis’ mother lived alone in these vast halls and gardens, accompanied by thoughts of her son, preoccupied with the problem he presented. How was she to provide money for him?

The only visitors at the palace were dealers in antiques to whom she sold one by one the remnants of a splendor already pillaged by those who had preceded her at Torre Bianca. But she must send several thousand lire to that last member of the noble line, who was playing a part worthy of his title in London, Paris, and all the great cities of the world. And convinced that fortune, so mindful of the first Torre Biancas, would finally remember her son, she reduced her own needs to the barest necessities, ate peasant’s food served to her on a rough pine table, in one of those marble rooms in which nothing now remained that could be sold.

Touched, as always, by her letter, the Marquis was murmuring softly to himself, “Mother! Mother!” He read again—

“I didn’t know what to do, Federico, after sending you the money you last received from me. If you could see the house in which you were born, my son, I wonder what you would say? No one will offer me more than a twentieth part of its value. But, until some foreigner who really wants to buy it comes along, I am willing to sell the floors, and even those wonderful old ceilings, the only things left now that have any market value. Anything to get you out of your difficulties, to prevent the slightest reproach from attaching to your name. I can live on very little, perhaps even less than I allow myself now. But isn’t it at the same time possible for you and Elena to reduce your expenses a little without Elena’s giving up in any way the position that being your wife entitles her to? Your wife is rich! Can’t she help you to keep up your establishment?”

The Marquis paused. The simple way in which his mother expressed her anxieties hurt him; and her illusions about Elena stabbed him like remorse. She believed Elena to be rich! She believed that he could induce his wife to live economically and simply ... hadn’t he tried to at the beginning of their marriage ...?

Elena’s arrival cut short his reflections. It was already past eleven, and she was going out to take her daily drive in the Bois. She liked to begin the day with this open air review of her acquaintances.

The somewhat ostentatious elegance of her dress suited her kind of beauty. Although between thirty and forty, frequent fasts and eternal vigilance still preserved her slenderness, which was enhanced by her height; and the care she took of her person kept her in what might be called that “third youth” which the women of our great modern cities enjoy.

It was only when she was absent that Torre Bianca was aware of her faults. As soon as she stepped into the room, his admiration of her took complete possession of him, making him accede blindly to whatever she might ask.

She greeted him now with a smile, to which he responded. Putting her arms about his shoulders she kissed him, and began talking to him with a childish lisp, which, well he knew, presaged a request. And yet this trick of hers had never lost its power to stir him, subduing his will.

“Good morning, Bunny! I got up so late this morning, and I have a thousand things to do before going out, but I couldn’t go without seeing my darling little Rabbit.... Give me another kiss, and I’m off!”

Smiling humbly, with an air of submissive gratitude like that of a faithful dog, the Marquis allowed himself to be petted. Elena finally tore herself away, but before she had quite reached the library door she suddenly remembered something important and stopped short.

“Have you some money?”

The Marquis’ smile vanished. His eyes put the question:

“How much do you want?”

“Oh, not so much. About eight thousand francs.”

Elena’s tailor, one on the Rue de la Paix, needless to say, had suddenly stopped being as respectful as Elena thought he should be—his bill was only three years old!—and he had threatened court proceedings.

At her husband’s gesture when she mentioned this sum, Elena’s childlike smile vanished; but she still used her little girl’s lisp to complain.

“You say that you love me, Federico, and you refuse to give me this little bit of money....”

“There are some of the letters and claims of our creditors....” The Marquis pointed to the heap on the table.

Elena smiled once more, but this time there was something cruel about the curl of her lips.

“I can show you a great many documents as interesting as those. But you are a man, and men are supposed to provide money in their homes so that their wives needn’t suffer.... How am I to pay my debts if you don’t help me?”

He looked at her with something like fear in his eyes.

“I have given you such a lot of money! But everything that falls into your hands vanishes like smoke.”

Elena’s voice was hard as she replied:

“You aren’t going to pretend that a woman of my position, or of my appearance—since people will mention it—should live in a shabby sort of way? When a man’s vanity gets so much satisfaction out of having a wife like me, he ought to bring home money by the million.”

It was the Marquis’s turn to be offended, and Elena, aware of the effect of her words, suddenly changed her manner, smiled, and came close enough to be able to put her hands on Federico’s shoulders.

“Why don’t you write to the old lady, Federico? Perhaps she can send us some money, she can sell an heirloom or something....”

The tone of these words only added to her husband’s irritation.

“The person you mention is my mother, and I wish you would speak of her as such. As to money, she can’t send us any more.”

Elena looked at her husband with a certain contempt, saying at the same time, as though to herself:

“This will teach me to fall in love with paupers.... Well, if you can’t get me this money, I’ll get it!”

As she spoke an expression so significant flickered over her face that her husband sprang from his chair.

“You had better explain what you mean,” he began, frowning. But he could not go on. The Marquise’s expression had completely changed. She broke out into bursts of childish laughter, and clapped her hands.

“At last, my Bunny is really angry. And he thought his wife meant something bad.... But don’t you know that I love no one but you? Really, no one else....”

She caught him by the arm, and kissed him repeatedly, in spite of his attempts to make her stop her caresses. And he ended by yielding to them and assuming once more his humble suitor attitude.

Elena was warning him now with upraised finger.

“Come, smile a little, don’t be naughty.... But isn’t there really any money? Do you mean it?”

The Marquis shook his head. Then he looked ashamed of his powerlessness.

“But I love you just as much,” she said. “Let the old debts wait! I’ll find a way out—I have before.... Good-bye Federico!”

And she walked backwards towards the door, throwing him kisses; but once on the other side of the hangings her expression of youthful lightheartedness vanished. Her lips were twisted with scorn and a look of frantic ferocity glittered in her eyes.

Her husband too, when he was alone, lost the momentary happiness Elena’s caresses had afforded him. There lay those letters, and his mother’s appeal.... He sat at the table, his face in his hands. All his anxieties had swooped down upon him, he could scarcely breathe in the thick swarm.

Always, at such moments, Torre Bianca called up memories of his youth as though they could offer him a remedy for present troubles. The happiest time in his life had been that period when he had been a student in the Engineering School at Lièges. Eager to restore the fallen splendor of his house, he had thrown himself into his preparations for a modern career, in order to set out on the conquest of money, just as his remote ancestors had done. Before royalty had bestowed a title upon them, they had been Florentine merchants, like the Medicis, travelling even to the Orient in their pursuit of fortune. Federico de Torre Bianca wanted to be an engineer for the same reason that all the other youths of his generation did, in order to make Italy, once famous for her art, an important modern nation because of her industries.

As he recalled his student life the first image that arose was that of Manuel Robledo, his friend and classmate. Manuel was a Spanish youth whose frank and happy disposition made it possible for him to meet daily problems with quiet energy. For several years he had played the part of older brother to the distinguished young Italian, and Torre Bianca never failed to think of his friend in difficult moments.

He was such a good fellow! Not even his successive love affairs could destroy his serenity. He had the poise of a mature man, perhaps because the important interests of his life were good eating and the guitar....

Torre Bianca, who was endowed with a fatal facility for falling in love, went about in those days with one of the pretty girls of Liège, and Robledo, out of good fellowship, feigned an absorbing interest in one of her friends. As a matter of fact he was always much more attentive to the culinary activities of their parties than to the not very insistent claims of sentiment.

Yet Bianca had come to discern through this somewhat noisy and unquestionably materialistic joviality of his friend a certain leaning towards the romantic which Robledo tried manfully to hide, as though it were a shameful weakness. Perhaps, in his country, there had been some experience.... So often, at night, the Italian boy, stretched on his dormitory bed, heard the guitar softly moaning as Robledo hummed the lovesongs of his far-away homeland.... Their course over, the friends had parted, expecting to meet as usual the following year; but that meeting had never occurred. While Torre Bianca remained in Europe, Robledo roved about through South America, for the most part in his capacity as engineer, but now and then he went through an extraordinary transformation, as though his Spanish blood made it imperative that some of the old Conquistadores should live in him once more.

At rare intervals he wrote to Torre, but his letters contained more illusions to the past than to the present. Yet somehow, in spite of his discreet reticence, Torre Bianca gathered that his chum had become a general in one of the small republics of Central America.

It was two years now since he had heard from Robledo, whose last letter announced that he was employed in Argentine, having had enough, for the time being, of those countries still continually shaken by revolution. He was contracting for the government as well as for private undertakings, and constructing canals and railroads; and through all the discomforts of the rough life he led, the belief that he was helping the advance guard of civilization to cross one of the earth’s desert places, gave him intimate satisfaction and happiness.

Torre had among his papers a photograph of his friend in which Robledo appeared on horseback, wearing an African helmet and a poncho that fell over his shoulders. Several half-breeds were planting linesman’s flags on the mesa which, for the first time since creation, was to receive the imprint of material civilization. Robledo, who was of the same age as himself, must have been thirty-seven when the photograph was taken; yet he looked many years younger than Torre Bianca did at forty.

His life of adventure had not let him grow old. Although he was heavier than in his student days, the smooth face that smiled serenely out of the photograph indicated perfect physical condition.

Torre Bianca, on the other hand, was of a much slighter build, and thanks to his fondness for sports, and especially fencing, he preserved a more than youthful agility. But his face was lined and drawn. There were furrows between his eyebrows, and the hair above his temples was already streaked with white, while the corners of his mouth, but slightly hidden by a short mustache, drooped with what might be lassitude, or what might be weakness of will. And Torre Bianca, struck by Robledo’s physical robustness, was encouraged by his photograph to go on thinking of him as competent to guide and help him, just as he had done in the early days....

As he thought of his friend that morning in the midst of his anxieties, he said to himself:

“I wish I had him here! His strong man’s strong will would strengthen mine....”

The butler interrupted his meditation. A caller ... but he would not give his name.... Torre Bianca made a determined effort to conceal his nervous dread from the servant. Was it perhaps one of his wife’s creditors trying by this means to reach him?

“He seems a foreigner, sir. He says he’s a relative....”

The Marquis had a presentiment, but he smiled at it. It was absurd.... Yet it would be like Robledo to turn up in this fashion, as if he were a character in a play, coming in just when the action requires his appearance. But how unlikely that Robledo, who when last heard from was in another hemisphere, should be on hand to take up his cue like an actor waiting in the wings! No, life doesn’t provide such neat coincidences ... only books....

He would not see his caller, he told the servant in no uncertain terms. At that moment some one lifted the door-hangings and to the butler’s consternation stepped into the room. The caller had grown tired of waiting.

The Marquis, who was easily roused, went threateningly towards the intruder. His arms outstretched, the latter cried:

“You don’t know me—I’ll bet you don’t!”

Clean-shaven, his skin tanned and reddened by sun and cold, he didn’t look like the Robledo of the photograph. And yet ... there was something familiarly distinctive about him, something Torre Bianca recognized as having once formed a part of his own life.... Something in the vigorous curve of the shoulders, something about his energetic robustness.

“Robledo!”

The friends embraced; and the servant, convinced now that his presence was superfluous, left the room.

As they smoked and talked, Robledo and Torre Bianca looked at one another with eager interest, putting out a hand now and then to assure themselves that the long absent friend was really there.

It was the Marquis who betrayed the greater curiosity.

“Will you be able to stay long in Paris?” he inquired.

“Oh, just a few months....”

He felt the need, he added, of a long draught of civilization, after spending ten years in American deserts, absorbed in the strenuous task of building roads, railroads and canals across their wide extent.

“I want to find out if the Paris restaurants still deserve their reputation, and see if the French wines are as good as they used to be. And I haven’t had any fromage de Brie for years—no other country in the world can make it—and I’m hungry for some!”

The Marquis laughed. The same old Robledo, ready to go three thousand miles to have a meal in Paris! And then, with great interest, he inquired:

“Are you rich?”

“Poor as ever,” was Robledo’s prompt reply. “But I’m alone in the world, I’m not married—there’s nothing so expensive as a wife—so, for a few months I’ll be able to spend money like a regular American millionaire. I have the money I’ve been earning all this time, I couldn’t spend it in the desert.”

He turned to look about him at the luxurious furnishings of his friend’s home.

“You’re the fellow that’s rich, I see!”

The Marquis’s only reply was an enigmatical smile; but Robledo’s words awakened his worries.

“Tell me about what you have been doing,” the engineer urged. “You never sent me much news of yourself. Some of your letters must have been lost, although wherever I went, up to recently, I always established a good many connections. Yes, I know a little about you. I believe you got married a few years ago.”

Torre Bianca nodded, and said gravely,

“I married a Russian lady, the wife of a high government official of the Czar’s court. I met her in London. We met frequently at balls and country houses ... and finally we married. We make a few pretensions to elegance—but it’s damned expensive!”

He paused for a moment, as though he wanted to learn what impression this summary of his life made upon Robledo. But the latter, eager to learn more, wisely kept silence.

“You, my dear Robledo, leading the simple life of primitive man, are lucky enough not to know what it costs to live in our civilization. I’ve worked like a dog just to keep things going—and even at that! And my poor old mother helps me with whatever she can get out of our family ruins.”

Then Bianca seemed to repent of the note of complaint in what he was saying; and with an optimism which, a half hour ago, he would have considered absurd, he smiled, and went on,

“Really I ought not to complain. There is a friendship that means a great deal in my life. Do you know the banker Fontenoy? You may have heard of him; he has business all over the world.”

Robledo shook his head. No, he had never heard that name.

“He is an old friend of my wife’s family. Thanks to Fontenoy, I became a while ago the director of some development projects in foreign countries, for which I get a salary that would have seemed to me magnificent a few years ago.”

Robledo expressed his professional curiosity. “Improvements in foreign countries!” Of course the engineer wanted to know more about that, and asked some very definite questions. But Torre betrayed a certain uneasiness in his replies. He stammered, and his sallow cheeks reddened slightly.

“Enterprises in Asia and in Africa—gold mines, and a railroad in China—a shipping company formed to handle the rice products of Tonkin, and—as a matter of fact, I’m not up on the scheme as a whole. I’ve never had time for the trip, and then, too, I can’t leave my wife—But Fontenoy, who has a great head of business, has been to all these places, and I have the greatest confidence in him. As a matter of fact, my job is just a matter of signing reports made by the experts Fontenoy sends out there to satisfy share-holders.”

Robledo could not conceal a certain astonishment at these words. Torre, aware of his friend’s wonderment, changed the subject. He began talking of his wife in a tone which indicated that he thought it one of the achievements of his life to have won her. He knew that Elena charmed apparently everyone who came within the reach of her beauty. But as he had never since his marriage felt the slightest doubt concerning her affections, he was content to follow her meekly about, scarcely visible in the foaming wake of her triumphant progress. As a matter of fact, everything that came his way, invitations, generous pay for his services, a cordial reception wherever he went, came to him, not because he was the Marquis de Torre Bianca, but because he was Elena’s husband.

“You’ll see her in a little while. And of course you’ll have lunch with us. You can’t refuse. I have some choice wines, and since you have come all the way from the western hemisphere for some Brie cheese, I’ll see that you get plenty of it.”

And then he added, in a tone that partly betrayed his emotion,

“I can’t tell you how glad I am that you are going to meet my wife. Everyone calls her ‘la bella Elena’—but she has something so much better than beauty! She has a disposition just like a child’s—capricious, yes, sometimes, like a child—and she needs lots of money. But what woman doesn’t! And I know Elena will be glad to see you—she has heard me speak so often of my friend Robledo!”

CHAPTER II

THE Marquise de Torre Bianca, having come home in good humor, was disposed to find her husband’s friend very entertaining. For the moment she had forgotten her pressing need of money, quite as though she had found a means of satisfying her creditors.

At lunch Robledo had a great deal to do to satisfy her curiosity about him. She wanted to know all the thrilling episodes of his adventurous life! Nor could she possibly believe that he wasn’t rich. How unlikely that anyone from America—either North or South America, it didn’t matter which—should not be rich, shouldn’t have millions! It required an effort for the Marquise, as for most Europeans, to reason that even in the New World there must be people who are poor.

“But I’m not rich at all,” protested Robledo. “Of course I shall try to die a millionaire, just so as not to disillusion all the people who believe so firmly that whoever goes to America must by that very fact make a great fortune, so that he can leave it when he dies to his nieces and nephews in Europe!”

He began to talk about Patagonia and his undertakings there. With his partner, a young American from the States, whom he had met in Buenos Aires, he had tried to colonize several thousand acres near the Rio Negro. He had risked in this enterprise all his savings, and those of his partner, as well as whatever sums he could persuade the banks to advance to him; but he felt certain of the safety of the investment, and he believed that it would be the source of a great fortune.

It was his job to transform the desert lands of this tract, purchased at a low price because of their aridity, into irrigated fields. The Argentine government was carrying on extensive operations in the Rio Negro region, trying to divert some of its waters. Robledo, who had been one of the engineers first employed to carry out this scheme, resigned, in order to colonize the lands which he was buying up in the areas through which the government irrigation system was sure to be extended sooner or later.

“In a few years, or even in a few months, I may strike gold,” he was saying. “Everything depends of course on how the river behaves. If it amiably allows itself to be divided up, and doesn’t rise suddenly, in the grip of one of those violent convulsions which are so frequent there, and which destroy the work of years in a few hours.... Meanwhile my partner and I have been constructing with the strictest economy all the minor canals and the other arteries which are to irrigate our waste lands; and on the day when the dike is finished, and the Rio Negro waters flow outward into our desert property....”

Robledo stopped short, smiling.

“Then,” he went on, “I shall be a millionaire in regular American style. No one knows what the extent of our fortune may be. One square mile of irrigated land is worth several millions, and I own several square miles.”

Elena was listening breathlessly. But Robledo, as if made uneasy by the admiring glance Elena’s green gold eyes shot at him, hastened to add:

“On the other hand these millions may not come for many years! They may not arrive until I am at death’s door, and then my sister’s children, here in Spain, will have a good time with the money I’ve worked and sweated for in America....”

But Elena wanted to hear about his life in the Patagonian wilds, that immense plain swept in winter by freezing hurricanes that raise towering columns of dust, and whose sole inhabitants are bands of ostriches, and straying pumas, that sometimes, under stress of hunger, risk attacking a solitary explorer.

Human population had in earlier times been represented there by scanty bands of Indians who scratched a bare living out of the river banks, and by fugitives from Chile and the Argentine, driven through these desolate regions by fear, either of the victims of their crimes, or of the law. Gradually the small forts put up by the government for the troops sent from Buenos Aires to take possession of the Patagonian desert, were slowly converted into little villages, scattered about at distances of hundreds of kilometres through these wild and arid lands.

It was in one of these villages that Robledo lived, slowly transforming his workmen’s camp into a town which would become, perhaps before the end of half a century, a flourishing city. America is rich in such transformations.

Elena was listening delightedly, with the same pleasure she would have felt at the theatre or cinema in watching an interesting story unfold.

“That’s what I call living,” she exclaimed. “That kind of life is worthy of a real man!”

She turned her gold-flecked eyes away from Robledo to look at her husband almost pityingly, as if he represented all the weaknesses of a soft civilization which she hated—for the moment!

“And that’s the way to make money,” she went on. “Really the only men worth considering are those who win wars, or those who win fortunes! Even though I am a woman, I’d love a life so full of danger....”

Robledo, to protect his host from the implications of the enthusiasm she was rather aggressively expressing, began to talk about the less glowing aspects of pioneering; whereupon the Marquise admitted that her enthusiasm for a life of adventure was somewhat chilled, and ended by confessing that she really preferred the ease and elegance of her Paris.

“But how I wish,” she added, “that my husband liked that sort of thing! Conquering, by sheer force of will, some of the vast riches of this earth.... He would come to see me every year, I would think of him all the time he was away, and even join him out there for a few months! It would be so much more exciting than this life of ours in Paris—and then, at the end of a few years, there would be riches, real wealth, immense wealth, like that you read about, and that you so rarely see in our Old World.”

She paused a moment, then added gravely, looking at Robledo,

“You, for instance, don’t care so much for money. What you want is adventure, life, activity. You like to use your strength. You don’t really know what money means. Men like you don’t need much for themselves. Only a woman can teach men what money is worth in this world!”

She turned to look at Torre Bianca, adding,

“And yet the men who have a woman to take care of never have the forcefulness, somehow, to accomplish things the way men do when they are alone in the world....”

Robledo, after this first luncheon at his friend’s house, became a frequent visitor at the Torre Biancas, dropping in as informally as though he really were a member of his host’s family.

“Elena likes you very much, really likes you, my dear fellow,” Torre assured him; and he looked immensely relieved. It would have been so difficult if he had had to choose between his wife and his friend, as he would have had to do in case they hadn’t hit it off!

Robledo, for his part, was somewhat disconcerted by Elena. When she was present he yielded to the charm of her person, to the peculiar seductive quality that enhanced her beauty. She always treated him with a gracious familiarity, quite as though he really were her husband’s brother, and took charge of initiating him in Paris society, giving him plenty of advice and information so as to prevent his being taken in by those disposed to see an advantage for themselves in his being a foreigner, and accompanying him to the fashionable resorts of the city, either at teatime or at night, after dinner.

Her mischievous and childlike expression, her imperturbable way of looking at him, the childish lisp with which she pronounced certain words, all had a certain fascination for the engineer.

“She’s a child,” he told himself. “Her husband is right about that. She has all the tricks of the dolls that society turns out—and she must be fearfully expensive! But, underneath all this, there is probably a very simple woman....”

When he was not with her, however, he was less optimistic about his friend’s wife, and smiled somewhat ironically at the latter’s credulity. Who was this woman? Where had Torre met her?

He knew concerning her only what his friend had told him. As to that distinguished functionary of the Czar’s court, her deceased husband, it was difficult to gather just what the nature of his services had been, perhaps because they had been so numerous! He had, it seemed, been Grand Marshal of the court; then again, he had been merely a general. But when it came to remarkable ancestry, no one could surpass Elena’s father. Torre Bianca delighted to repeat his wife’s statements concerning a host of personages of the Russian court, many of them great ladies, who had added the glory of a love affair with the Emperor to their other distinctions—yes, all these celebrities were relatives of Elena’s. He had never seen any of them because they had died a long time ago, or else they lived on their estates way off in Siberia somewhere.

Some of Elena’s allusions puzzled Robledo. She had never, so she told him, been in America, yet, one afternoon as they sipped their tea at the Ritz, she mentioned a trip through San Francisco when she was a little girl. On other occasions she would mention places in remote parts of the world, or persons well known in contemporary society as though she knew them intimately; and he never succeeded in finding out how many languages she knew.

“I speak everything!” had been her answer when Robledo asked her one day how many languages she could use. And her anecdotes made him wonder.... She had always “heard So-and-So tell this joke;” yet the engineer had his doubts about the real source of her rather daring stories.

“Where hasn’t this woman been?” he thought to himself. “Apparently she has lived a thousand lives in a few years. Can all this have happened when she was the wife of that Russian personage?”

His attempts to sound his friend on the subject of the Marquise had only one result. They showed that Torre’s confidence in his wife hedged him round like a thick wall of credulity. It was impossible to scale this wall or make the slightest breach in it. He would never discover the truth about Elena from her husband. But he did learn that since the day he had met her in London Torre knew nothing about his wife beyond what she herself had told him.

Of course, when he married her Federico must have seen some of the papers required for the civil ceremony.... But no, apparently he had not. The marriage had taken place in London, and had come off as rapidly as a film wedding. All that was needed was a minister to read the prayer book, a few witnesses, and some passports and papers, probably lent for the occasion.

But after awhile Robledo grew ashamed of his suspicions. Federico seemed happy and proud of his marriage. That gave his friend little right to interfere.... Besides, his suspicions might very well be due to the fact that he had lived too long in the woods. He had not yet adjusted himself to the complexities of life in Paris.

Elena was a woman of elegance, a woman of the kind he had never known before. It was his classmate’s marriage which made this unexpected friendship possible. And it was very natural that he should find in this new society things that seemed startling or even shocking. It had already happened to him on several occasions to consider as perfectly natural things that a few minutes earlier had seemed to him quite improper. Undoubtedly it was his lack of social experience that made him so suspicious.... And then, at a smile from Elena, at a caressing glance of her gold-flecked green eyes, he would express a trust and an admiration in no degree inferior to her husband’s.

Robledo was living near the Boulevard des Italiens in an old house which he had admired on one of his early visits to Paris. Then it had seemed to him the nearest approach to Paradise that an earthly building could make. Now however, he left it frequently to dine with Torre Bianca and his wife. Sometimes he was their guest in their luxurious home. Sometimes he played the host at some famous Paris restaurant.

Elena was pleased to have him come to the numerous teas she gave, so she could show him off to her friends. She took childish delight in opposing the wishes of the “Patagonian bear,” as she liked to call him, regardless of the fact that he always declared there were no bears to be found in the part of the world she attributed him to. He detested these occasions and Elena shamelessly resorted to ruses in order to get him to come.

Little by little he met all the friends of the house who usually appeared at the formal dinners given by the Torre Biancas. Elena invariably presented him, not as an engineer whose enterprises were in their first and most precarious stages, but as one whose work was already a success, and who had returned from America well provided with millions. She took care however to impart this misinformation behind his back, and Robledo was somewhat at a loss to understand the profound respect with which he was treated, and the sympathetic attention with which his friends’ guests turned to listen to him whenever he offered a remark.

The most important guests were several deputies and journalists, friends of the banker Fontenoy. The latter was a man of middle age, clean-shaven, entirely bald, who affected the dress and manners of an American business man.

Robledo, as he looked at him, was reminded of an occasion long ago in Buenos Aires when a note was to fall due the following day, and he had not yet been able to raise the money to meet it. Fontenoy looked exactly like the popular idea of the successful man of affairs who is directing business enterprises in every quarter of the globe. Everything about him seemed calculated to inspire confidence, above all his obvious faith in his own resourcefulness. Yet, at times, he would frown, and plunged in silence, give the impression of being completely detached from all that surrounded him.

“He is thinking of some new combination,” Torre Bianca would say to his guest. “The way that man’s mind works is extraordinary!”

Yet Robledo, without quite knowing why, was again reminded of his own anxieties and those of so many others way off there in Buenos Aires when they had borrowed money at ninety days, and were facing the necessity of meeting this debt on the morrow.

As he left the Torre Bianca’s one evening, Robledo started off down the Avenue Henri Martin towards the Trocadero, where he expected to take the subway. One of the guests accompanied him, a dubious looking person, who sat at the last seat at table, and now seemed quite happy to be walking along with a South American millionaire. He was a protégé of Fontenoy’s and edited a business weekly, one of the banker’s innumerable enterprises. A close and acid person, he seemed to expand only in those moments when he was criticising his benefactors, which was always the moment their backs were turned. At the end of a few yards he began to pay off his debt toward his host and hostess by gossiping about them. He knew of course that Robledo was a school friend of the Marquis.

“And have you known his wife a long time too?” he inquired, and smiled meaningly when Robledo admitted that he had first made her acquaintance a few weeks ago.

“Russian! Do you really think that she is Russian?... Of course that’s what she says she is, just as she says her first husband was a Marshall of the Czar’s court.... Yet a good many people can’t help wondering whether there ever was such a husband. I don’t care to say anything about the truth of all this. But I do know that I never have met any Russians at the noble lady’s house.”

He paused to take breath, and added,

“Moreover, some of her supposed countrymen, people in a position to know what they were talking about, told me that she wasn’t Russian. I’ve been told that she’s Rumanian, by some people who claim to have seen her when she was a girl, in Bucharest—and I have heard that she was born in Italy, and that her parents were Poles.... Well, there you are! And it’s lucky we don’t have to know the history of all the people who invite us to dinner....”

Whereupon he glanced at Robledo in an attempt to discover whether he had succeeded in whetting the Spaniard’s curiosity, and whether it would be safe for him to go on....

“The Marquis is a good fellow enough. You must know him pretty well. Fontenoy has given him a fairly important job. He is well aware of Torre Bianca’s good qualities ... and....”

Robledo sensed that his escort was on the point of saying something which it would be impossible for him to accept in silence. He called to a passing taxi, murmured something about a forgotten engagement, and made haste to be rid of the spiteful sycophant.

In his conversation with Torre Bianca, the latter always took up, sooner or later, the subject that obsessed him. He needed so much money to keep up his social position!

“You have no idea how much a wife costs, my dear fellow! Winters at the Riviera, summers at fashionable watering places, trips to famous resorts in the spring and fall, all that costs something....”

Robledo always received these outbursts with expressions of sympathy; but there was an ironic note in them which exasperated Torre.

“Of course anyone who can get along without women is free to assume that superior air of yours, my dear boy. That’s what people usually do who know nothing about love....”

Robledo turned white, and the smile that usually played about his lips vanished. So, he knew nothing about love.... Something stirred in his memory....

Torre Bianca knew very little of his friend’s early experiences. The Marquis had a vague impression that Robledo’s sweetheart had married someone else, or maybe she had died.... Anyway something had happened, and he suspected that Robledo had, as a consequence of it, vowed never to marry.... Yet who would suspect that this well-fed, practical, and ironical friend of his bore a wound that the years had not yet been able to heal?

But, as though fearful that his friend might possibly think of him as “romantic,” Robledo hastened to smile sceptically.

“When I want women they are not hard to find ... and then I am free to go my way. Why complicate my life by taking into it a companion I don’t need?”

As the three friends were leaving the theatre one evening, Elena expressed a desire to go to a certain Montmartre cabaret that was causing a stir in Paris by the magnificence of its new decorations, in the Persian style of the Thousand and One Nights, adapted of course to the architectural necessities of a faubourg cabaret.

Green lights gave the effect of a sea cave to the high-ceilinged room in which the crowd looked as livid as so many corpses, recent victims of the hangman’s art. Two orchestras working in shifts filled the air with jerking and broken rythms. Violins and banjos vied with indefinable instruments in the production of disharmonies, while automobile horns, drums and cymbals, contributed to a pandemonium in which heavy objects crashed on the ground, rails squeaked, and the barnyard squawked.

In an open space between tables groups of dancers came and went. The women’s dresses and hats, like rainbow-hued foam flecked with gold, floated in and out among the black coats of the men and the white squares of the tablecloths. The orchestras shrieked, and the guests tried hard to be as noisy as the patrons of a country fair. Those who did not dance lassooed everything in sight with paper trailers, threw cotton snowballs about, blew whistles and played with other childish toys. Multicolored balloons floated on the smoke-laden air, while men and women, as they ate and drank, wore paper caps of ridiculous cut, baby bonnets tied on with strings, clown’s hats and fantastic bird-crests.

A forced merriment prevailed, a desire to revert to the stammerings of babyhood, as though this would give new incentive to the monotonous sinnings of middle age.

Elena seemed delighted with the scene.

“There’s nothing like Paris, after all, is there Robledo?” she cried.

But Robledo, the savage, smiled with an indifference magnificently insolent. The three ate and drank, though they were neither hungry nor thirsty. At every table the champagne bottles appeared, nestling in their silver pails. One might have thought them the gods of the place, in whose honor the feast was held. And always, before one bottle was empty, another took its place as though it had grown out of the frosty depths of the bucket.

Elena, who was looking about with a certain impatience, suddenly smiled and waved to a man who had just come in. It was Fontenoy, who joined them at their table.

Robledo suddenly remembered that Elena had mentioned the banker several times while they were at the theatre. Perhaps she and the banker had arranged this “chance” meeting at Montmartre?

But Fontenoy was saying to Torre,

“What a coincidence! I have just been dining with some business friends, and I thought I needed something frivolous to take my mind off my work for a little while. I might have gone to any one of a dozen other restaurants, but I just happened to drop in here—and here you all are!”

For a moment Robledo was tempted to believe that eyes can smile without the help of lips, such a mischievous and triumphant gleam flashed from Elena’s. But when the champagne bottle had renewed itself three times in its silver nest, Elena began to look enviously at the dancers. Finally she exclaimed, like a petulant small girl,

“I’d give anything to dance, and yet none of you gives me an opportunity!”

The Marquis got up as though at an imperial command, and husband and wife threaded their way in and out among the other couples.

When they returned to their table, Elena was protesting with comic indignation.

“Here I’ve come all the way to Montmartre to dance with my own husband...!”

With an affectionate glance at Fontenoy she went on,

“Of course I wouldn’t think of expecting you to dance with me. You don’t know how, and anyway it’s too frivolous. Some of your stockholders might see you, and they’d be sure to lose confidence in you, if they saw you in this sort of place.”

Turning to Robledo, she inquired,

“Don’t you dance?”

The engineer pretended to be scandalized at the suggestion. Where could he have learned the modern steps? The only ones he knew were those of the Chilian “cueca” that his peons always danced on pay days, or the “pericon” and the “gato” as danced by some old gaucho to the clatter of his spurs.

“So, I shall have to sit here! That’s what happens when I go out with three men.... I never saw anything so ridiculous!”

But, as though he had heard what she was saying, a young man came towards their table, a young dancer whom they had often seen at well-known dancing palaces. Torre made a gesture of annoyance. The fact that he had heard Elena express her admiration of the dancer had been enough to arouse his dislike.

The youth enjoyed a certain celebrity. Someone had ironically indicated to what heights of glory he had attained by calling him “the tango-god.” Robledo guessed from the smallness of his feet, always encased in high-heeled shoes, and the brilliance of his thick hair, as black as Chinese laquer, that he was a South American.

This “tango-god” who allowed his partners to pay for the dances they had with him—or so those envious of his celebrity whispered—had no difficulty in persuading Elena to accompany him to the dance floor.

Several times she came back to her place to rest, but in a few minutes her eyes would begin following the dancer, and he, as though conscious of an inaudible summons, made haste to seek her out again.

Meanwhile Torre Bianca was not concealing his disgust. Fontenoy appeared impassive and smiled absently in those intervals Elena spent with them. But Robledo remembered the absent-minded gestures he had observed among people who have a promissory note soon falling due....

He looked more attentively at the banker, who seemed absorbed in the thought of distant things. But little by little Elena’s persistence in dancing with the young South American had induced on his face an expression of annoyance quite as marked as her husband’s. Yet, invariably, as she passed by in her partner’s arms, she smiled mischievously at Fontenoy, as though his air of disgust delighted her.

Robledo, sitting between the two, thought to himself,

“To look at them it would be hard to say which one looks more like a jealous husband than the other....”

CHAPTER III

THE Countess Titonius appeared one day at one of Elena’s teas. The Countess was a Russian lady who had married a Scandinavian nobleman, by which act she had cast him into such complete eclipse that no one could remember ever having seen him.

Well on the way toward fifty, the Countess still possessed the dregs, albeit somewhat muddy, of a remote but once heady beauty. Her overflowing obesity, her white and flaccid flesh, now served as the support for a head and face much like those of a sentimental doll; and as the Countess was given to writing amorous verses and reciting them to anyone within hearing, she was frequently referred to in the circles in which she moved, as “the five-hundred-weight of poetry.”

Already generously decolleté by mid-afternoon, her gigantic and barbarous jewels adorned the hollows and rotundities of her quivering flesh, or set off the high lights of a red gold wig for which the Countess was perpetually purchasing additional curls.

For the most part her jewels were quite shamelessly false. Most worthy of respect among their number was a pearl necklace, which, whenever the Countess deposited her bulk in a chair, dangled grotesquely over the protruding spheres of her opulent form. The pearls, irregular, triangular-shaped, and with root marks, resembled the shark’s teeth with which the members of certain savage tribes like to adorn themselves. Gossip asserted that they were souvenirs of those lovers of her youth of whom she had been able finally to extract nothing else.... It was undeniable that the Countess was given to speaking, with no perceptible restraint, of her innumerable tender experiences.

No sooner had the Countess learned from Elena’s own lips, that Robledo was a millionaire fresh from the American wild, than she began casting glances of passionate interest in his direction. Teacup in hand, she captured him in a corner, and began a conversation to escape from which he frantically sought a pretext.

“You, who are such a traveller, such a hero, must give me the benefit of your experience. Tell me, what is your real opinion about love?”

The poetess heard the hero murmuring excuses. In spite of the tender glances of her miopic eyes, she had frightened him!

A few weeks later Elena asked him to accept an invitation to a reception at the Countess’s. “It will be amusing. Titonius is sure to ask her Bohemian friends, so as to have some applause for her poems—of course she’ll read them! There’ll be a lot of people there who come in the hope of meeting celebrities, and there’ll be no-account artists, and youths convinced that they have achieved immortality because they’ve succeeded in collecting a train of admirers, or get their things published in the columns of some wretched little sheet that nobody reads. You ought to see all those absurd people! There isn’t another house like that one in Paris. Anyway I promised the Countess that you would come and I’ll be cross if you don’t!”

To keep peace Robledo betook himself at ten o’clock one evening to the house of Mme. Titonius on the Avenue Kléber, having fortified himself beforehand by dining with some South American friends at one of the Boulevard restaurants.

Two servants, hired for the occasion, were helping the guests out of their overcoats. The mixture of various social groups that Elena had foreseen was noticeable even in the anteroom. Side by side with guests of distinguished appearance, accustomed to the life of the drawing-room, he noticed youths with leonine locks, whose formal evening dress was revealed only when they slid out of threadbare coats with tattered linings. He caught the contemptuous expression of the servants as they collected these coats, as well as certain fur wraps grown bald in spots, from ladies who, on emerging from these coverings, displayed the most extravagant of head dresses.

An old fellow whose whiskers, of a dirty white, and whose wide slouch hat made him look like the popular conception of a poet, threw off his summer overcoat and the woolen mufflers wound about him. Taking his pipe out of his mouth, he struck it on the heel of his shoe, and put it in his overcoat pocket.

“Take good care of that, now,” he said to the servant.

Robledo’s fur coat inspired respect in the attendants. One of them, after helping its owner out of it, kept it on his arm.

“You’ve taken a fancy to it?” the engineer inquired.

Paying no attention to his jesting tone, the fellow replied,

“I’ll just lay it aside, sir.... Because some one might make a mistake, that he might sir, going away from here....”

And with a gesture at the mound of unsightly coverings, he winked at Robledo.

The sight of the American “millionaire” in her own drawing room aroused great enthusiasm in the poetess. Scattering the guests to right and left, she plunged through the throng to meet him, grasped him by both hands, and leaning on his arm, bore him along with her, presenting him to her friends. Her eyes dwelt on him proudly as though he were the chief attraction of the occasion.

Only the day before Elena had given him due warning.

“Take care! The Countess is enamored of you, and kidnapping is quite in her line....”

But now the poetess, in a veritable avalanche of words, was giving vent to her enthusiasm as she introduced the American.

“A hero,” she was exclaiming, “a superman from the pampas, where he has hunted lions, tigers, and even elephants....”

Robledo looked alarmed at these fantastic improvisations, but the Countess was far beyond geographic scruples.

“When you tell me all about your wonderful deeds, perhaps I shall write a poem about them, an epic, in the modern style of course, telling the adventures of your remarkable life. Men are only interesting to me when they are heroes....”

Again Robledo wore a look of alarm.

As for the moment there chanced to be no one near at hand to whom she could present her distinguished guest, the Countess conducted him to a small room into which no one had yet wandered, perhaps because the odors drifting in through a portière betokened the close proximity of the kitchen.

Sitting down in an arm-chair as wide as a throne, she bade Robledo be seated. But when he looked around for a chair, the Countess Titonius pointed to a low stool near her feet.

“That will be more intimate,” she declared. “You will look like a page of olden times at the feet of his lady.”

Robledo could not altogether conceal his dismay at these words, but he obediently followed his hostess’s directions, although his own generous proportions were something of an obstacle.

The Countess meanwhile was imitating Elena’s childish gestures and lisping speech, with rather grotesque effect.

“Now that we are alone,” she was saying, “I hope you will speak freely with me. I am going to ask you the same question as before. What do you really think of love?”

Robledo, quite overwhelmed, murmured something about love’s being a disease from which the human race has been suffering for thousands of years, without growing any the wiser about its cause and cure.

The Countess was now very close to him, scanning him with her shortsighted eyes to which she held her shell-handled lorgnette. Leaning down over her vast girth, her cheek almost touched that of the man seated at her feet.

“And do you think that I shall ever find a soul to understand my own—so misunderstood?” she was asking him.

Robledo was quite calm as he replied gravely,

“Oh, I am sure of it. You are still young, and have plenty of time....”

The words threw the Countess Titonius into such ecstatic rapture that she could not restrain herself from caressing her companion’s cheek with the tip of her lorgnette.

“Spanish gallantry!” she sighed. “But we must part! Let us keep our secret from the eyes of a world which cannot understand.... Yes, I can read your eyes. Our souls shall meet again, more intimately ... but now my social duties call. Once more, I am nothing but a hostess.”

Rising from her arm-chair throne with all the ponderous weight of her bulk, she went away, attempting as she did so, to move with the light step of a young girl. She did not forget to throw Robledo a kiss from the end of her lorgnette.

Disconcerted by this episode, and somewhat annoyed by being placed in so grotesque a position, he also left the room.

On his way back to the drawing-room he stumbled upon a man of small stature, who, in spite of having suffered a rude blow in the collision, meekly murmured his apologies. Later Robledo saw him again, wandering timidly about, watching the servants, and at the same time looking as though he were asking their pardon for doing so, and pushing the furniture that had been deranged back to its place. Whenever anyone spoke to him he made haste to answer with abject politeness, and then fled precipitately.

The Countess meanwhile had gathered a group of men about her, for the most part long-haired individuals of those Robledo had noticed in the cloak-room. Many of the women guests were openly making fun of their hostess, raising their eyebrows at one another with a gesture whose meaning was not hard to guess. The old fellow who had left his mufflers and his pipe in the coat room announced solemnly:

“We respectfully request that our beautiful Muse recite some of her poems!” at which there was much applause, and many approving nods. But the Muse showed herself to be intractable, and began to move this way and that in her chair, shaking her head. In a weak tone, as though suddenly ill, she murmured,

“No, my friends, I cannot ... tonight, it is impossible ... some other time perhaps....”

Her admirers grew insistent, and the Countess was forced to repeat her refusals, her voice constantly fainter. Finally her guests abandoned her for livelier diversions, and turning their back on the suffering Muse, promptly forgot her.

Scarcely had a young musician, clean-shaven and with flowing locks, who strove to imitate the genial ugliness of certain modern composers, sat down at the piano and ran his fingers over the keyboard, when two girls made a dash for him, put out their hands to his shoulders, implored. They would love to hear his wonderful compositions—but later! Now he must be indulgent, and come down to the level of the crowd, and play something for them to dance to. Oh, a waltz would do, if artistic principles stood in the way of his playing one of the American dances.

Several couples began to circle round the room and were rapidly joined by others. Suddenly noticing that no one was left to pay court to her, the Countess looked about in bewilderment, then rose, saying with indulgent condescension,

“Since you really want to hear me, I’ll do as you insist. I’ll recite a short poem.”

Consternation! The pianist, however, not having heard the Countess’s surrender, went on playing, until the meek anonymous gentleman, whom Robledo had noticed trotting about, repairing the disorder caused by the guests, came up to him and grasped his hands. The music ceased, the couples stopped short, and finally, with a bored expression found chairs. The Countess began....

Staring, in an attempt to appear attentive, blinking, in an attempt to repel the advances of sleep, yawning, or sunk in blank immobility, her victims sat or lolled about. Two of the women, livelier than the rest, were feigning great interest in the recitation. One of them went so far as to put a hand behind her ear in order to hear better. A running conversation was going on, however, behind their fans, which they dropped to their laps now and then when they needed both hands for the patter of applause. But they caught them up quickly to conceal their laughter. The Countess was entertaining them so much better than she knew!

Robledo chanced to be standing behind them. Leaning against the door-jamb, he was half hidden by the hangings. The Countess meanwhile was declaiming with increasing fervor, so that, in order to carry on their conversation, the two women had to raise their voices.

“Instead of stuffing us with poetry, I wish she’d give us a decent supper,” one of them was saying.

The other protested. The Countess set a table that was dangerous, but certainly plentiful. Only the brave, not to say reckless, accepted her dinner invitations, for on these occasions the Countess herself prepared the courses. “And, my dear, by the time you reach dessert, you’re lucky if you only have to ’phone for the doctor, instead of the undertaker!”

Frequently interrupted by their own laughter, they rehearsed the Countess’s history. She had once been rich; some attributed this past wealth to her parents’ fortune, others to the fortunes—and fortunes—of her lovers. Her marriage with the Count Titonius had provided her with a title and the most insignificant of husbands, a fellow who, ruined by a stupid speculation, tossed up a coin to see whether he should blow out his brains or marry the Countess. And now, in her establishment, he occupied a position quite inferior to that of the servants. When the Countess’s nerves were in a state of tension because of the infidelity of some one of her youthful protégés, it was her habit to throw all the Count’s shirts and underwear over the banisters, after which with the air of an injured queen she would order him to leave her presence for ever.

A few days later, however, when the poetess was giving another party, the outcast would reappear, meek, and sad, and shrinking, as though fearful of occupying too much space in his wife’s rooms.

“I can’t imagine,” the other was saying, “why she persists in giving these receptions, when the woman is ruined! For instance, on the table out there where we’ll have supper in a little while, you’ll see large pastry pieces, and hot-house fruit—rented, my dear, rented for the evening, just like the servants. Everyone knows it, and no one dares take any of these show pieces, the Countess would be so furious—so all we’ll get will be tea and cakes, and we’ll have to pretend that’s all we want!”

They stopped a moment to applaud the Countess, who was emboldened by her apparent success, to begin declaiming a new poem.

Robledo, as little interested in the malicious gossipings of these two women as in his hostess’s recitations, took advantage of a moment during which the Countess was bowing to her audience, to leave the drawing-room and make his way to the alcove which had been the scene of his romantic passage with the poetess.

The meek and obsequious gentleman he had stumbled against earlier in the evening was now stretched out on the divan, smoking, and looking much like a laborer enjoying a few minutes of rest. He had been watching the spirals of smoke from his cigarette unroll in the heavy air, but when Robledo sat down near him, he felt it incumbent upon him to smile at the stranger. In a few moments he inquired,

“Are you bored to death?”

Robledo looked sharply at him before he answered.

“And you?”

The little man nodded sadly, and Robledo made a gesture which plainly said, “Let’s clear out, shall we?”

But the little man’s eyes seemed to reply, “If I only could!”

“You are living here in the house?” inquired Robledo finally.

And the little man replied breathlessly, with a jerk of his head and arms.

“This is my house. I am the Countess’s husband....”

After this revelation, Robledo thought it discreet to retire. Putting the cigar he had been about to light back in his pocket, he returned to the drawing-room.

A great burst of applause met his ears. The poetess had stopped! And convinced that she would recite no more that evening, her admirers were expressing some of their delight, while the Countess grasped the hands of the friends about her and mopped her damp brow, murmuring,

“I shall die.... Such emotion.... I am in a fever.... Art is like that. You shouldn’t have made me recite....”

Looking about as though searching for someone, she caught sight of Robledo and made for him.

“Your arm, Hero of the Pampas! You shall lead me out to supper!”

The guests, for the most part, made no attempt to conceal their joy as the door of the dining-room opened. There was a general rush for the buffet, some of the guests elbowing and trampling the others.

Leaning on her escort’s arm, the Countess was gazing at him with passionate eyes.

“Did you pay special attention to my poem, ‘The Rosy Dawn of Love’? Do you know whom I was thinking of as I recited those verses?”

Robledo turned away. A laugh was about to escape....

“How could I guess, Countess? I’ve lived in the desert so long, I’m nothing but a savage!”

The guests were crowding around the table, casting hungrily admiring glances at the examples of the pastry cook’s art that occupied its centre, surrounded by pyramids of enormous fruit. The cakes and sandwiches looked pathetically insignificant beside them! The two servants who had been in charge of the cloak-room, and a butler, resplendent with a silver watch chain across his waistcoat, and side whiskers that made him look like an old diplomat, were defending the pastry edifice in the centre of the table, condescending to hand out only the trifles on its periphery; cups of tea or chocolate, small glasses of liqueurs, sandwiches and cakes.

The old fellow of the mufflers, whom the Countess hailed as “cher maître,” was trying vainly to make the servant understand that he wished him to deposit some of the pièce de resistance, or at least some of the fruit on the empty plate he was frantically extending. But the servant looked at him with a shocked expression, as though he were requesting something scarcely decent, and finally, after handing him a cake and a sandwich, turned his back upon him.

Robledo, standing near the table, found himself close to the hired “pieces” that the servants were so conscientiously defending. The Countess had dropped his arm for the moment to reply to congratulations on her remarkable reading. Relieved at being left to his own devices for a few minutes, he examined the table critically, and while the butler and his acolytes were attending to the needs of the crowd, he picked up a plate and knife and tranquilly carved a piece out of the most majestic of the pasties. He even had time to take one of the ruddy pears from the showy mounds of fruit, and cut it in two. But just as he was about to eat it, the mistress of the house, free for a moment from her admirers, turned an amorous glance in his direction, only to see a breach in the pastry edifice, and a handsome piece of fruit, ruthlessly sliced, on the barbarian’s plate....

A great change occurred in the sentiments of the poetess. At first she looked shocked, as though witnessing an act which transgressed all consecrated usages. Then came indignation, and finally rage.... It was she who would have to pay for this stupid destruction.... And she had believed for a moment that she had found—in this savage—a hero-soul worthy of her own!

Abruptly leaving her “Patagonian Bear,” she sought out the pianist who, circling round and round the table, was pleading with one servant after another for sandwiches and a little more wine....

“Give me your arm, friend Beethoven!” With a dramatic gesture she continued.

“One of these days I shall write a libretto for this young man, and then there’ll be a little less talk about Wagner!”

She took him along with her to the drawing room, now deserted, and made him sit down at the piano, while in clarion tones she declaimed to an accompaniment of arpeggios. But nothing could tempt her guests from the dining-room. They remained clustered round the table, maintaining however, the group distinctions which all Mme. Titonius’ efforts at Bohemian camaraderie were powerless to break down.

Robledo caught a glimpse through the crowd of the Marquis de Torre Bianca and his wife, who had just come in, having spent the earlier part of the evening at another party. He noticed that Elena was talking mechanically, murmuring phrases that had no meaning, as though she were thinking of something else. Convinced that his chatter annoyed her, he went off in search of Federico, from whom he obtained little attention for the reason that the Marquis was very busy describing to someone he had just met the important undertakings that his friend Fontenoy was engaged in, in various parts of the globe.

Bored, and not yet quite clear as to the reason for his hostess’s sudden desertion, he sank into a large armchair, and almost at the same instant heard someone talking behind him. Not the two women gossips this time, but a man and a woman, who, seated on a divan, were repeating the same things he had overhead before, as though no two guests in that house could do anything else but gossip about the Countess. He paid little attention to what they were saying until suddenly he heard the name Torre Bianca. The woman was saying,

“Did you ever see such jewels? Of course everyone knows that neither she nor her husband had to work hard to get them. Everyone knows that Fontenoy pays for all those little luxuries.”

The man had a different version.

“I was told that those jewels were paste, as pasty as those of our poetical Countess. The Torre Biancas kept the money the banker gave them to pay for the real gems, or else they sold the real ones and had these substitutes made.”

The woman sighed at the banker’s name,

“That man is nearly bankrupt—everybody says so! And some go so far as to talk about court proceedings and a prison sentence. What a bloodthirsty creature that Russian woman must be!”

The man laughed sceptically.

“Russian? There are people who knew her when she was a girl in Vienna, singing in music-halls. Also some one in diplomatic circles told me that she is Spanish, of an English father. No one knows her nationality, she doesn’t know it herself....”

Robledo got up from his chair. He couldn’t very well listen to any more such talk without speaking. But just as he was leaving the room he heard a double exclamation of surprise coming from behind him.

“Here is Fontenoy! How strange to see him here! He never comes, for fear the Countess will ask him for a loan.... Something unusual must be going on!”

Robledo recognized Fontenoy in one of the groups. He was just at that moment bowing to the Torre Biancas. Robledo noticed that he was smiling, and seemed as serene as usual. More than that, he had lost his usual abstracted air that always made him look as though he were thinking of a note due the next day. He seemed calmer and more confident than Robledo had ever seen him look; in fact the only remarkable thing about his manner was the exceptional affability with which he greeted the people about him.

From afar the American watched him and noticed a brief glance that passed between him and Elena. Whereupon the banker, with a slightly bored expression, left the group he had been with and slowly made his way to the small room that had witnessed the scene between Robledo and the Countess.

As he went towards it he absently pressed the hands held out in greeting and in the hope of capturing him for a moment’s conversation. “Happy to see you here,” he murmured, and passed on.

Forcing to his lips his habitual smile of kindly protection, he nodded to Robledo, but scarcely had he done so when the smile vanished.

For in that moment the two men had faced one another, and Fontenoy saw something in the Spaniard’s expression which made him drop his smiling mask. His own soul seemed to be looking out at him from those eyes....

That glance, rapid as it was, he would never forget, thought the Spaniard. He and this man scarcely knew one another, and yet there had been in Fontenoy’s eyes an expression of complete trust, as though he were showing him, in that brief moment, all that he had ever thought and felt.

Then he saw Elena skillfully making her way, without appearing to do so, towards the same room. A curiosity of which he was ashamed pricked him. He had no right to take part in the affairs of these two people. At the same time it was impossible for him to be indifferent to the unwonted event which, he knew intuitively, was even then about to occur....

The banker must have found it urgently necessary to speak to Elena—only this supposition could explain his seeking her at the Countess’s.... What were those two saying to one another?...

Pretending to be absorbed in reflection, he passed by the door.... Elena and Fontenoy stood talking; their lips scarcely moved as they faced one another, standing very straight, as though they had resolved that no one must guess, from the curves of their lips, what they were saying....

Fontenoy’s rapid glance at him made him regret his curiosity; for this glance moved him as the other had done. It told him so plainly that the man who was looking at him in this fashion was passing through one of the most critical moments of his life. He could almost believe that there was a reproach in his eyes.... “Why does what happens to me interest you if you cannot help me?...”

So he did not walk past the door again. But yielding to an unexplainable impulse that was stronger than his will, he remained close to it, listening.... No, his conduct was not gentlemanly. He was behaving like any one of those scandal-mongers he had been overhearing. Apparently his surroundings were demoralizing him....

It wasn’t easy to catch what those two people on the other side of the door were saying.... In one of the rooms the guests were dancing, in another someone was pounding a piano.... But a few confused words reached him. Fontenoy and Elena were speaking louder now, perhaps because the noise of the piano bothered them, perhaps because of increasing tenseness....

“Why waste words in dramatic phrases?”—It was Fontenoy’s voice. “You couldn’t go away! That is for me to do—that is the only thing I can do!”

The noise made by the dancers and the pianist filled the eavesdropper’s ears. But as the musician grew more merciful he caught the words another voice was saying—Elena’s voice—sounding as though it came from a long weary distance....

“Perhaps you are right. Oh, money! money! For people like us, who know what it means in our lives, what a horror to be without it!”

Shame of his spying overtook Robledo, driving out the curiosity which had for a moment controlled him. If these two people had sought one another out, it was for him to respect their secret. Anyway the mystery would be short-lived. Perhaps it would not last through the evening....

Going back to the dining room, he found Federico there, still engaged in conversation with his new acquaintance, an old gentleman who displayed the rosette of the Legion of Honor in his buttonhole, and looked like a retired government functionary.

Federico had at last terminated his extensive description of Fontenoy’s enterprises, and the old gentleman was saying,

“I haven’t the slightest doubt whatever of your friend’s integrity, but I should think twice before putting any money into his schemes. It strikes me that he takes unnecessary risks, that he invests his funds too far from home. Maybe everything will be all right, at least as long as he holds the confidence of the share-holders. But I am not so sure that even at the present moment he isn’t losing it. And on the day when the share-holders decide that they want figures and facts instead of fine hopes, on the day when Fontenoy has to show just where he stands in his business, well, on that day, I am not so sure.... I am not so sure....”

CHAPTER IV

THE warm spring-like day, coming in mid-winter, delighted Robledo as he left his hotel after a hurried breakfast. It was late and the waiters, the only occupants of the dining room, had not proved inspiring company. And all the while he had been sleeping and eating, a filmy, sun-saturated mist had been hovering, a golden caress, over Paris....

“It’s good to be alive this morning,” he thought, as he wandered through the Bois feasting his eyes on the olive-browns of its winter coloring. At dusk he made his way back to the Boulevards. He would dine, he decided, and then look up the Torre Biancas, and ask them to come out with him to some place of amusement.

Happening to stop at a café, he bought a newspaper, and even before opening it, had the premonition that in this sheet, fresh from the press, there was something that would startle him. In some obscure way he felt that he was about to learn things that until that moment had been vague and mysterious.... And, as though he had known about it beforehand, his eyes immediately fell on the headlines “Banker Commits Suicide.”

He did not need to read the suicide’s name to know who it was. Of course it was Fontenoy! There were the details, quite as he expected them to be, as though they had all been previously revealed to him.

“In his luxurious apartment ... on the bed ... the revolver still in his hand ... Fontenoy....”

Already the day before rumors of his failure had been circulated in financial circles, where it was also stated that he would be prosecuted. His share-holders had lodged a complaint against him, and the examining judge was expected to look through his books that very day; all of which seemed to foreshadow the immediate arrest of the banker.

Robledo read again the paragraph of the article, in which it was stated that Fontenoy had deceived the people who entrusted their money to him, that his mining and other enterprises in Asia and Africa were little better than dream projects, capable of development perhaps, but by no means actually producing, as Fontenoy had represented. The article furthermore went on to suggest that the banker was more of a visionary than a criminal, which of course didn’t at all do away with the fact that he had ruined a great many people. Moreover, it appeared that he had appropriated considerable sums for his personal expenditures, “and responsibility for the disaster will undoubtedly involve some of his associates.”

The articles ended by prophecying not only the banker’s arrest, but that of all those who held important positions in his company.

Robledo’s thoughts turned abruptly from the suicide to his friend. What was to become of Federico? He ordered the taxi driver to take him to the Avenue Henri Martin.

The butler received him with a funereal air, as though there had been a death in the house. No, the Marquis was not at home. He had gone out at noon, when someone telephoned him about the suicide, and hadn’t yet come in.

“And Madame la Marquise,” continued the servant, “is quite ill, and can see no one.”

Robledo, as he listened to the fellow, was able to judge of the commotion caused in the house by the banker’s death. The icy and solemn demeanor of the servants had vanished. Now they looked like the shivering crew of a doomed ship waiting for the final crash that will throw them into the sea. Robledo heard whisperings and furtive steps behind the portières, and hands pulled them aside and curious eyes peered out at him.

Evidently, in the servants’ quarters, there had been much talk about what was going on, and about the probable arrival of the police. Every time the door bell rang, they were expected. In a tone of suppressed rage the chauffeur kept saying to his companions below stairs—

“So the captain couldn’t think of anything to do but put a bullet through his head! Well this ship is going down, I tell you! Who’s going to pay us our wages?”

Robledo returned to the centre of the city for dinner, and called up Torre Bianca several times during the course of it.

At nearly twelve o’clock the butler replied that his master had just come in, and Robledo hurried back to his friend’s home.

He found Federico in the library. The latter had aged over night as though the last few hours had been so many years. Impulsively Torre embraced his friend, turning instinctively to him for support.

The poor Marquis was not only startled, he was bewildered. Never had he lived through so many emotions in so short a space of time. That morning, like Robledo, he had felt the confidence and pleasure that the golden beauty of the day inspired. What a pleasure to be alive!... And then the summons of the telephone, the ghastly news, the rush to Fontenoy’s apartment, the sight of his friend’s body on the bed; and the grisly crowd a violent death always assembles, for that detail that seems so grotesquely insignificant before the reality of death, the autopsy....

Even more painful were his impressions at Fontenoy’s office. There he found a judge installed in full possession of all the banker’s effects, examining papers, affixing seals, making out an inventory, coldly, suspiciously, implacably. The secretary—it was he who had notified Torre Bianca—was making valiant efforts to conceal his terror.

“We aren’t going to get out of this so easily,” he said, manfully trying to face the facts that had come so uncomfortably near. And then as a concession to his fears he added, “The boss ought to have tipped us off....”

Torre Bianca spent the rest of the day looking up the people who had in various ways been associated with Fontenoy. Many of them had been receiving handsome salaries for sitting on the board of directors, taking their orders of course from the man who paid them. Now they were thoroughly frightened, and Torre Bianca saw that, to save their skins, they would not hesitate to lie about him or anyone else who might be found to serve as a scapegoat....

They lost no time in making out their case against him.

“You signed those reports stating that the business was all right. Of course you must have seen those foreign concerns with your own eyes, otherwise you’d have no right to affix your name to the technical reports that were used to win our confidence....”

Yes, it was quite plain to Torre Bianca that all these people were going to look for someone who was still alive on whom to throw all the odium of a scandalous confidence-game, since Fontenoy had eluded them.

“Manuel,” he said that evening to his friend, “I’m scared! And the worst of it is that now I myself can’t understand why I signed those accursed reports! They didn’t seem to me so particularly important.... How could I possibly have such blind faith in what Fontenoy was doing?”

Robledo smiled sadly. He knew who was responsible for this “blind faith”; but he concluded that it would be cruel to add to his friend’s distress by giving him his views on that subject.

Even in the midst of his tormenting anxieties Torre Bianca was thinking more of his wife’s distress than of his own.

“Poor Elena! I’ve just been up to talk to her.... She nearly collapsed when I told her I had seen Fontenoy this morning.... The whole thing has been such a shock that her nerves are all unstrung.”

Robledo grew impatient of his friend’s concern for Elena’s health. He broke out brusquely—

“You’d better think about your own situation and stop bothering about your wife. You’ve got more than a matter of ‘nerves’ to face.”

Little by little as they discussed the affair, both men began to feel more hopeful. Familiarity with misfortune invariably robs it of its terrors! There was no need, they decided, to despair, until the banker’s affairs had been thoroughly investigated. Fontenoy was far more of a visionary than a crook, even his worst enemies admitted it. And it was more than likely that some of the enterprises he had planned and started would turn out to be good investments. He had been wrong of course in trying to hurry them up, and in giving the public to understand that they were far more developed and remunerative than they actually were. But a few competent managers could find a way to make them productive; and that would justify Fontenoy’s statements, and prove that Torre Bianca had done nothing out of the way in signing them in his capacity of engineering expert.

“Yes, perhaps it will all be straightened out,” said Robledo, who felt that it was wise to cheer up his friend as much as possible. Torre Bianca’s distress of mind had considerably alarmed him, and he believed that only by recovering a certain amount of confidence in himself could he face the immediate future. The man needed to think clearly, and for that he must have a good night’s rest!

“You’ll see a turn for the better as soon as the first flurry is over, Federico! Only, for God’s sake, don’t pay any attention to whatever Fontenoy’s parasites advise you to do, for they’re in a panic!”

As soon as Robledo got up the next day he sent for the newspapers. One glance at their headlines showed him only too plainly that Fontenoy’s suicide was assuming the proportions of a public scandal. It was intimated that several persons well known in society were threatened with arrest within forty-eight hours, and in one of the papers he thought he discerned allusions to Torre, in a somewhat vague sentence about a certain engineer, “reputed to be a protégé of the banker’s.”

When he returned to his friend’s he found the Marquis nervously scanning the newspapers in the library.

“They want to put me in jail,” said the latter dolefully. He looked old and broken, but curiously resigned.

“And yet I never hurt anyone,” he went on. “I can’t understand why they come after me.”

Robledo tried to cheer him up a bit but without success.

“And see what it’s done to me! I never in my life feared a living soul, and now I can’t stand having anyone look at me! Even when the butler speaks to me I have to look away.... Heaven only knows what they’re saying about me in the servants’ quarters!”

As though he had shrunk back from the painful present to his childhood, he added timidly and with pathetic humility,

“I’m afraid to go out. I’m afraid of seeing all those people I’ve met so often in this drawing-room and that, because if I met them I’d have to stop and explain what I’ve done—and then they would look at me sceptically, or worse than that, they would say they were sorry for me, without meaning it!”

He stopped, and after a pause, he exclaimed,

“Elena is much braver than I! This morning, after seeing the newspapers, she ordered the automobile. I don’t know where she was going, probably to see some of those people. She said I ought to defend myself against all these accusations. But what defense have I? I can’t pretend that I didn’t sign reports about business I knew nothing about! I can’t lie about it.”

Robledo tried in vain to make him feel less hopeless. His optimism had collapsed under the attacks made upon it.

“Elena believes, as you do, that everything will come out all right. She is so confident in her power that she never gives up. Of course she has a lot of friends in Paris, people who knew her family in Russia. She went away this morning vowing that she would run down my enemies and all their machinations.... She thinks I have a lot of them and that they will use this Fontenoy business to destroy me.... And it’s true that she knows much more than I do about everything; it wouldn’t surprise me if she succeeded in making the newspapers and even the judge change their tone, and stop talking about proceedings and a prison sentence!”

It hadn’t been easy for him to bring out that word!

“A prison sentence! What do you think of a Torre Bianca in jail, Manuel? No, that’s something that shouldn’t be allowed to happen. And there is always a way to avoid that!”

As though all his forebears had awakened in him at the threat of public disgrace, he suddenly regained his former nervous and vibrant energy. But Robledo, startled by the cold gleam like the glitter of drawn steel that flashed from his friend’s eyes, exclaimed,

“You aren’t thinking of anything so foolish, Federico! After all, life is the best thing we’ve got. Death doesn’t solve anything ... and anyway, who knows? Perhaps you are right about Elena. Perhaps she will be able to influence the outcome of this affair.... It isn’t so improbable!”

As he left the house Robledo noticed several persons in the reception room. The butler murmured to him confidentially,

“They’re waiting for Madame la Marquise, sir. I told them the Master was out.”

His manner made it quite plain that these were people who had come to collect the money owing to them.

What little credit the Torre Biancas still possessed had vanished at the banker’s suicide. All the tradespeople knew that Fontenoy was paying most of the bills of the establishment; and obviously, since the Marquis’ income came from his employment in Fontenoy’s office, that too had been cut off.

It was clear to Robledo now that he always found the Marquis in the library because that was his refuge. He was afraid ... he was afraid of even the people in his own house....

Later that day he called Torre up. Elena had just come in, and seemed pleased with the results of her expedition.

“She thinks,” confided the Marquis over the telephone, “that the blow isn’t going to fall right away—that she has gained time, and that’s everything!”

That evening Robledo went back to the Avenue Henri Martin. He had found nothing in the evening papers to justify Torre Bianca’s comparative tranquillity. The allusions to the probable arrest of well-known personages continued, and there was a considerable expenditure of rhetoric about the scandalous and sensational failure.

When he found copies of the same newspapers he had just finished reading lying about on Torre’s library table, he was prepared to find the Marquis dispirited and anxious. There was an odd discrepancy between Federico’s voice, which was calm and cold, and the tenseness of his features. Evidently he had resolved to place all his hopes in the possible results of Elena’s attempts to influence public opinion in his favor. In other words he admitted that only a miracle could save him. And if the miracle did not occur....

Robledo looked about him, staring at the desk, the book shelves. Was there a revolver in that room? Had his friend prepared to this extent for a fatal emergency?

“Are there some people out there?” Torre asked.

As he seemed to be well aware of the annoying callers who had waited throughout the day in the reception hall, Robledo did not ask him to account for his question, but merely shook his head. The Marquis, however, was determined to speak of that invading throng of creditors rushing in on him from all parts of Paris.

“They smell death,” he said. “They are alighting on this house like a flock of crows.... When Elena came in this afternoon, the hall was full of them. But she is wonderful! No one can resist her when she chooses to exert her power over people. She simply talked to them ... and they went away quite satisfied. If she had asked them for a loan I believe they would have given it to her.”

He was so proud, for the moment, of his wife’s seductive charm! But reality soon thrust itself upon his attention.

“They will come back,” he added mournfully. “They have gone away, but they will come back tomorrow. It’s true that Elena saw certain influential friends of hers today, people who can affect the policy of the papers, and the courts. They all promised to help her, but as soon as Elena leaves them, it is no longer the same.... I don’t doubt that they were perfectly sincere in what they said to her. But, after all, what can a woman do against so many enemies? Besides, I ought not to allow my wife to go about defending me while I stay locked up here! I know what a woman is exposing herself to when she asks men for their help. No, I’d rather go to jail....”

Only a moment ago he had been intimidated by the thought of his creditors, much as a child is frightened by the thought of bogeys; and now, the idea that Elena might be exposing herself to all sorts of risks on his account, brought a flash to his eyes; he straightened up as though galvanized by a stream of nervous energy.

“I forbade her making these calls, even though the people she went to see are old friends of her family’s. But there are certain things a man can’t allow a woman to do.... How can I let Elena ask people to help me? No, I’m going to trust to fate, and take what comes! And after all, unless a man’s a coward there’s always one solution to the problem—”

Robledo had been listening patiently. He understood his friend; and gravely he replied,

“I know a better solution than yours, Federico. Come back to Argentina with me!”

Calmly and methodically, as though he were explaining a matter of business or an engineering project, he told Torre what he wanted him to do.

It was absurd to hope that Fontenoy’s affairs, hopelessly tangled up by his suicide, could be straightened out; and moreover it was dangerous to remain in Paris. “I am aware besides, of what you are planning to do, tomorrow, perhaps even tonight, if you begin thinking that there is no way out. You’ll lay your revolver beside you on the desk, write two letters, one to your wife, one to your mother. Your mother! That will be her reward for all that she has done for you! You will leave her to face the world alone by rushing out of it to save your own hide....”

Torre listened with lowered head. His mother and all the Torre Biancas seemed to be looking at him reproachfully....

Suddenly he looked up. “Do you think that it would be easier for my mother to see me in jail?”

“You don’t have to go to jail to avoid committing suicide. What I ask you to do is this. Trust yourself to me for a little while. Do as I tell you, without wasting any time in argument. We must come to a decision.”

Knowing that Federico was as conscious of the newspapers on the table as he was, he went on,

“In my opinion you are not going to get out of this mess if you stay here. On the contrary! So, tomorrow we’ll start for South America. Out in Patagonia you can get an engineering job and work with me. What do you say?”

But Torre Bianca remained impassive, as though he didn’t understand, or as though he thought the suggestion too absurd to deserve an answer. His silence annoyed Robledo.

“I am thinking, of course, of the fact that you signed documents without knowing whether the statements in them were true or not.”

“I can think of nothing else,” replied the Marquis. “That is why I have decided that the only thing I can do....”

Robledo could not contain his annoyance. Walking up and down he answered, and his voice sounded very loud—

“I won’t have you die, you old fool! You’re taking your orders from me now! Pretend, if you like, that I’m your father—no, your mother, rather. Look upon me as your poor old mother. She wants you to obey her, Federico, by doing what I tell you!”

His friend’s vehemence made its impression on the Marquis. He covered his eyes with his hands and sat, head bowed, in silence. Using the advantage he had gained, Robledo went on, with something that was far more difficult to say.

“I’ll get you out of here, you can rely on that, and we’ll go together to America. You can begin life all over again there. It will be hard work, but you’ll find a satisfaction in it that you never knew in this old world. And perhaps, after going through a lot of hardship, you will become rich. But, in order to accomplish all this, Federico, you must come to America ... alone....”

The Marquis started up from his chair. He looked at his friend with pained surprise. “Alone?” Did Robledo dare suggest that he must abandon Elena? Why death was preferable! What torture, to wonder every moment what was becoming of her ...!

But Robledo, thoroughly irritated now, as always, by being opposed, exclaimed,

“Oh, Elena! Elena is—”

A glance at the Marquis made him drop his hostile tone.

“Elena is largely to blame for the situation you are in today, my friend! It was through her that you knew Fontenoy—and so, more or less directly, it was through her that you came to sign statements that mean nothing less than your professional disgrace.”

Federico shrank away, but Robledo went on mercilessly,

“How did your wife happen to know Fontenoy, anyway? You told me he was a friend of her family’s, but was that all you knew about him?”

For a moment he restrained himself only to burst out angrily,

“Women always know about us, and of them we know only what they choose to tell us....”

The Marquis looked confused. What was Robledo saying?

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said finally. “But if you are talking about my wife, please remember that she bears my name, and that ... I am very fond of her....”

In the pause that followed a distance increasing with the minutes separated the two men. Robledo made a determined effort to renew the cordiality of their relations.

“Life over there is hard. We are very far from having even the most ordinary comforts of civilization. But the desert is a great sea of energy that cleanses and strengthens those of us who go to it as refugees from the old world, or from ourselves. A plunge into it prepares us for a new kind of life, a life such as you know nothing of.... You find there men who have escaped from all sorts of catastrophes, men from everywhere. Yet all differences of race, birth, and breeding are washed away. Only the fundamentals remain. There men show themselves for what they are, the strength that is in them freed from all the bonds that entangle you here.... And that is why I call my country what it really is—‘the land of all the world’. It is waiting for us, Federico!”

But the Marquis appeared unmoved.

“And what is waiting for you here? Perhaps public disgrace or prison, or even that most stupid of deaths, suicide. But there you will learn to know hope again, hope, the best thing in our lives! Are you coming with me?”

The Marquis turned to him. His reply was ready. But Robledo checked him with a gesture.

“You understand the conditions.... You must go out there as you would go to war, with little baggage and no encumbrances. A woman, in this sort of expedition, is nothing but a burden. Your wife isn’t going to die of grief just because you leave her in Europe. You can always write—and such an absence as that renews instead of exhausting love. Besides, you will be sending her money to live on, and whatever way you look at it, you will be doing more for her than by going off to jail or shooting yourself. Are you coming with me, Federico?”

Torre Bianca remained silent for a space. Then he got up, made a gesture which Robledo interpreted as meaning that he was to wait, and left the room.

The American did not remain alone long; nor did he remain altogether in silence, for through the walls and hangings, came, as from a great distance, the sound of voices, that rose once or twice to the intensity of angry cries. Then came the sound of approaching steps, and Elena appeared, followed by her husband.

Elena, too, bore the traces of recent events. For her, too, certain hours she had just lived through had been so many years. But although she appeared much older, she was none the less handsome. On the contrary, her tired beauty seemed more sincere than the skillfully enhanced splendor of her happier days. Now she possessed the melancholy charm that flowers have just as they begin to fade. For twenty-four hours she had neglected her dressing table. During that time she had experienced a succession of emotions that were either extremely painful or else annoying to her vanity. For it was difficult for her to think more of her husband’s distress than of what people were saying....

With a violent gesture she pulled aside the hangings, and swept into the library like a foaming tide, her eyes defying Robledo as she advanced.

“What is this you sent Federico to tell me?” she demanded harshly. “Is it true that you want to take him away with you and force him to leave me here, to face our enemies?”

Torre Bianca, who was following her, once more subdued to her spell, began to protest, in order to soothe her.

“I shall never abandon you, Elena, that is what I told Manuel!”

But Elena was intent upon Robledo, and continued advancing toward him.

“And I thought you were a friend! How despicable of you, trying to rob a wife of her husband’s support, trying to make him abandon her!”

As she spoke, she looked fixedly into Robledo’s eyes as though she were trying to see her own reflection in them. But what she found there was something that made her suddenly soften her voice, and finally adopt a childish air of disgust. Even, she raised a finger to scold him. The American, however, remained unmoved before these manœuvres, and Elena had to continue with what dignity she could:—

“Come, please explain all this to me! What is this plan of yours to take my husband away from me, and carry him off to your distant estate where you live like a feudal lord?”

Unmoved either by her voice or her eyes, Robledo replied coldly as though explaining a matter of business.

He and Federico had just been discussing the best means of getting the Marquis out of Paris. It was his intention to have an automobile ready for his friend the following morning, quite as though it had suddenly struck his fancy to take a trip to Spain. Obviously certain precautions were necessary. Torre Bianca was free to go and come as he liked but it was quite possible that, while the judge was making up his mind as to how to carry on the case, the Marquis was being watched by the police. Although the Spanish frontier was several hundred miles away, they could reach it before any order was given for Torre’s arrest. Besides Robledo had some friends near there, who could, in case of danger, help them to get through to Barcelona, and once in that port, it would be easy to take passage for South America.

Elena listened frowning.

“All that is very beautifully worked out,” she rejoined. “But why is this plan to include only my husband. Why can’t I go too?”

Torre Bianca looked his surprise. Only a few hours ago, on returning from the calls she had been making, Elena had exhibited great confidence in the future, partly to arouse her husband’s courage, partly to stimulate her own. The people she had seen were men with whom she had an acquaintance of long standing, and from them she had collected many promises, given, for the most part, with the melancholy and protecting gallantry inspired by memories.... Having nothing to depend on at present but these promises, she had, of course, found it necessary to place implicit trust in them, persuading herself to believe in their efficacy. But now, on hearing Robledo’s plan, all her carefully patched up optimism crumbled into dust.

Her friends’ promises were nothing but lies! They would do nothing for her or her husband now that they were in difficulties; and the law would take its course. Federico would go to prison, and she would have to take up again a life full of uncertainties in this old world, where she could scarcely find a corner that she had not at some time known before.... Besides, here there were so many enemies, eager for revenge....

Robledo saw something he had never seen before in her eyes—fear, the fear of the animal at bay. And for the first time also he heard a note of complete sincerity in her voice.

“And you, Manuel, are the only person in the world who understands our situation; you are the only person who can help us.... Let me go with you! I am not strong enough to stay here alone. I’d rather be a beggar out there in the new world!”

Her tone now was so gentle and expressed such distress that Robledo felt sorry for her. He forgot all that he had once held up against her.

Torre Bianca, as though aware of his friend’s sudden weakening, announced resolutely:

“Either with her, or not at all, Robledo. I am not afraid to stay here.”

Still Robledo hesitated. At last he raised his hand, accepting his friend’s condition. And at once he regretted it, as though he had capriciously given his approval to something absurd.

Elena, forgetting her present worries with startling ease, began to laugh.

“I adore travelling,” she began enthusiastically. “And I shall ride horseback and hunt wild animals, and have all sorts of hairbreadth escapes. Life will be so much more interesting than here! I shall feel just like the heroine of a novel!”

The American looked at her, startled. Had she no feeling? No memory? Had she already forgotten Fontenoy? She seemed at that moment not to know that she was still in Paris, and that the police might at any moment step into that house to arrest her husband.

And just as disturbing was the discrepancy between the actual conditions in which colonists make their fight for existence, and this woman’s romantic illusions about those conditions.

Torre Bianca interrupted his wife by saying in a hopeless tone,

“But we can’t leave without paying our debts! And what are we going to do it with?”

Again Elena burst out laughing, at the same time making a gesture which implied that she thought he must have taken leave of his senses.

“Pay! What an idea! Let them wait! I can always find something to say to them that will satisfy them.... And from America we can send them money when you are rich.”

But the more scrupulous Marquis was obsessed by the thought of his responsibilities toward his creditors.

“No. I shall not leave until we have paid the servants at least. But, in addition, we need money for the trip.”

There was a long pause; finally, as though he had found a solution, the Marquis exclaimed,

“Fortunately there are your jewels. We can sell them before we sail.”

Elena looked ironically at the necklace and rings she was wearing.

“We won’t get two thousand francs for the lot. They are all paste, Federico.”

“But the real ones?” exclaimed Torre Bianca. “Those you bought with the money from your estate in Russia?”

Robledo thought it the moment to intervene.

“Never mind the jewels, Federico. I’ll pay your servants and the trip out ... for both of you.”

Elena grasped both his hands, repeatedly thanking him. The Marquis was touched by his friend’s generosity. But he could not accept it, he asserted. Robledo cut his protestations short.

“That’s all right! I came to Paris with enough money to last me six months. If I go back at the end of four weeks, I can afford to pay your expenses.”

Then, with comic despair he added,

“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.

It became necessary then for Rojas to give up the old farm that had been in the family for several generations, and that was worth several millions. When the three mortgages on it had been paid and his other debts settled there was nothing for Rojas to do but strike out into the less civilized parts of the Argentine. When money was more plentiful he had bought a section in Rio Negro as a speculation, and to this property, which he had never seen, he now betook himself.

Farming is the last resort of many a man who has dissipated his fortune. In spite of entire ignorance of the principles, to say nothing of the practice, of agriculture, the man who has failed in other occupations expects to make a success of this most laborious and difficult of professions. Rojas, accustomed to a life of spending, believed that by transferring himself to Rio Negro he would be able to accomplish this miracle. He had never been willing to bother with the management of the farm near Buenos Aires, with its rich pasture lands capable of supporting thousands of steers. Yet now he was planning to lead the rough life of the pioneer farmer, who must conquer the wilderness if he is to live. What his ancestors had done in the rich lands near Buenos Aires, where rains are opportune, he now had to do under the brazen skies of Patagonia that rarely, throughout the whole length of the year, let more than a few drops fall on the parched prairie.

But the erstwhile millionaire bore his misfortune with immense dignity. He was a man of fifty or thereabouts, somewhat short in stature, with a nose of roman proportions, and a beard streaked with white. In the midst of his rustic surroundings he preserved something of the manners acquired by contact with a more polished society. As they said at the settlement up at the dam, it didn’t matter how Rojas dressed, you could always tell he had been born a gentleman. He always wore high boots, a wide-brimmed hat, and a poncho, and in his right hand carried a revenque or small whip.

The buildings on his ranch were of a most modest sort. They had been put up as temporary structures in the hope that a turn for the better in his fortunes would soon make it possible to improve them. But, as so often happens in rustic settlements, these makeshift buildings were destined to last even longer than some of those erected with great care as permanent ones.

Over the walls of baked brick, with no other supports, or of simple adobe, rested the roof of corrugated tin. Inside, the partitions came only part way to the roof so that air could circulate freely through the entire building. The rooms did not contain much in the way of furniture. The one used by Don Carlos as office and reception room was adorned with a few rifles and the skins of some of the pumas he had shot in the surrounding plateau lands. It was the rancher’s custom to spend most of his time inspecting the corrals close by; but now and then he would start his horse off at a gallop for a sudden descent upon the peons at the other end of the ranch. One could never be sure that they weren’t sleeping while the cattle strayed....

The lunch hour had passed, and still Celinda had not come in. Her father every now and then looked impatiently out of the door. He had no fears whatever on her account. Ever since she had come to Rio Negro, at the age of eight, she had fairly lived on horseback, treating the Patagonian plateau lands as her playhouse.

“No one is going to take any chances with Celinda,” her father used to say proudly. “She’s a better shot with the revolver than I am. And besides, there is no two-legged or four-legged beast can get away from her when she has her lassoo along. My girl is as good as any man!”

In one of his pauses at the door he caught sight of her, approaching rapidly along the dark line that plain and sky make where they meet. The little mounted figure running along the horizon looked like a small tin horseman escaped from a box of toys.

In front of her pony ran a diminutive steer. And now the group, at full gallop, was growing larger with amazing rapidity. Anything moving on that immense plain appears to the bewildered eye, unaccustomed to the optical tricks of the desert, to change its size without going through the customary gradations.

The girl was close at hand now, uttering cowboy cries and cracking her lassoo in order to excite the steer to a quicker pace and rush him through the gate of the corral. With a great snort he dove through the opening in the wooden stakes, whereupon Mlle. Celinda dropped lightly from her horse and came to greet her father. But the latter, after kissing her cheek, held her away from him, and looked severely at her.

“Haven’t I told you that I didn’t want to see you wear men’s clothes? Trousers are for men, just as skirts are for women. I won’t have a daughter of mine looking like a movie actress!”

Celinda received her father’s reproof with lowered eyes, and an air of graceful hypocrisy. Dutifully promising to dress as he required, she restrained the amusement his allusion caused her, for as a matter of fact, she scarcely ever thought of anything but those movie actresses in knickerbockers that figure so largely in American films; for their sake she had taken many a five hour gallop to Fuerte Sarmiento, the nearest town, where, on a sheet hung up in the only hotel, wandering film operators showed films which Celinda watched with breathless attention. It wasn’t that the stories were so interesting, but what a good idea they gave her of the prevailing styles!

As they lunched Don Carlos inquired of his daughter if she had been near the camp at the dam. How was the work getting on?

The hope, which daily grew brighter, of becoming rich again, had, of late, changed Rojas from the gloomy and discouraged man he had been for so many years, into one capable now of smiling once more. If the engineers of the Argentine government succeeded in damming the Rio Negro, the canals even then under construction, according to the plans of a fellow named Robledo and his partner, would irrigate the lands that these two engineers had bought; and since those lands adjoined his own, he, too, would benefit from the irrigation system, and the value of his property would go up by leaps and bounds.

Celinda listened to her father’s comments on the engineering work and its possible consequences for themselves with the indifference youth generally exhibits toward money matters. But the discourse of Don Rojas on riches and what could be done with them was cut short by the arrival of a mulatto of overflowing proportions, fat cheeked, with slanting eyes, her coarse black hair gathered into a thick braid that undulated along the elevations and declivities of her back and then hung free, endeavoring apparently to reach the ground.

Before coming into the dining room she deposited a bag full of clothes at the door. Then she made a rush for Celinda, kissed her, and even spattered some of her tears over her:

“My pretty little one! My baby, my own little Señorita!”

When Celinda first came to the ranch the mulatto had been hired to take care of her, and it had been a real hardship for the woman to leave the girl. But she had never been able to get on with Don Carlos. The rancher was abrupt in his manner of giving orders, and would take no argument from women, especially when they had reached a certain age.

“The boss is a gay old boy,” Sebastiana confided to her friends. “I’m getting too old for him, and it’s the younger ones that catch all the smiles and pretty speeches, while all I get is sharp words and threats of the rebenque!”

When she had finished exclaiming over Celinda, the mulatto looked at Don Carlos with an indignation that was comical in effect.

“Well, since the boss and I can’t get on together, I’m going to the dam to keep house for the Italian contractor!”

Rojas shrugged to indicate that she could go wherever she pleased for all of him, and Celinda followed her old servant to the front door.

The afternoon was half gone when Don Carlos, who had been taking his siesta in a huge canvas armchair, and reading several of the Buenos Aires newspapers, which the train brought out to the desert three times a week, left the ranch house.

Hitched to a post of the portico which shaded the door was a horse. The rancher smiled as he noticed that the animal bore a side saddle. In a moment Celinda appeared, wearing a black riding skirt. She tossed her father a kiss from the end of her riding whip, and then, without setting foot in the stirrup or accepting a helping hand, with one leap she landed on the saddle, and the horse started off at full gallop toward the river.

But his rider did not let him go very far. Celinda dismounted in a grove of willows where a second horse, the same one she had ridden that morning with a cross saddle, was waiting for her. Dropping her skirt and the rest of her feminine costume, she stood revealed in knickerbockers, riding boots, and a boyish shirt and necktie. She smiled as she thought of how she was disobeying “the old man,” as, in accordance with local custom, she called her father.

But how surprised that other man would be to see her in a feminine riding skirt! No, she didn’t want to surprise him that way.... He had always seen her in boy’s clothes and so he always treated her with the friendly confidence he would have for someone of his own sex. Who could tell what would happen were he to see her wearing skirts, just like a young lady? He might grow shy and begin being tremendously polite, and finally stop seeing her altogether!

So she left her girl’s clothes on the horse she had ridden to the willows, gaily mounted the other, and pressing her slim feet against his flanks, tossed her lassoo in the air, making spirals of rope above her head.

And now the Flower of Rio Negro was galloping along the river bank through the aged willow trees that droop their festoons of delicate green over the gliding water. This solitary river roadway, that stretched from the storm-beaten peaks of the Andes, on the Pacific side, to its wide outlet in the Atlantic, had been named Black River because of the dark-colored plants which covered its bed, giving a greenish tinge to the snow waters of the distant mountains.

The thousand-year-old erosion of the swift stream had cut a deep gash, two or three leagues wide in certain places, in the Patagonian table land. The river slid along through this cut between two banks of earth brought down by the stream in the flood season. These banks were of a rich and light soil, extremely fertile wherever the river water reached it. But beyond this point the ground rose to form steep, yellow, sinuous walls that gazed unblinkingly at one another across the gliding black water; and beyond these heights stretched the mesa, that region where icy cold alternates with suffocating heat, where hurricanes torment the harsh vegetation that will yield a living only to those flocks that can scour many leagues of that arid plain.

All the life of the region was concentrated in the wide fissure carved by the river waters across the desert. The two strips of soil on its banks represented so many thousand miles of fertile earth brought down by the river from its wanderings in the Andes. And it was in one part of this great cleft that the government engineers were at work in an attempt to raise the level of the waters the few yards necessary in order to inundate the adjoining lands.

Celinda was uttering sharp cries to excite her horse; it seemed as though she must share her delight with him. In a little while she was going to meet what interested her most in that whole wide countryside! As she followed a turn in the river bank, the surface of the stream suddenly widened before her eyes, forming a quiet and solitary lake. At its farthest limit, at the point where the banks pressed in and disturbed its waters, were outlined the iron profiles of several great derricks, and the tin or straw roofs of a settlement. This was the little town that had grown up near the dam, a town of houses that had risen but a slight distance above the ground, with not a single second story to break the monotonous level of its roof line.

But Celinda’s curiosity stopped short of the settlement. Reining in her horse, she walked him through several squads of men working at some distance from the river, at the point where the level of the ground began to rise abruptly.

These peons, some of them Europeans, others half-breeds, were removing and heaping up the soil which they took from the ditches that were to become part of the irrigation system. Two ditching machines, with a great roar of motors, were also attacking the ground in an attempt to facilitate this human labor.

Celinda looked about her with keen exploring eyes, and turning her back on the workmen she went toward a man she had spied on a small elevation of ground. He sat on a canvas folding chair, before a small table; his sombrero lay at his feet which were encased in thick muddy boots, as rough and serviceable as the rest of his clothing. His head on his hand, he was studying the charts spread out before him.

He was one of those blond clear-eyed young men who remind us of the Greek youths immortalized in sculpture, and who for some unexplainable reason reappear, with surprising frequency, in the northern races of Europe. Straight-nosed, with curly hair growing low over his forehead, and a firm and powerful neck line, he was an unexpected apparition in that barren spot. So absorbed was he in his calculations that he did not notice Celinda’s arrival.

She still had her lassoo in her hand, and with the cunning and noiseless step of an Indian, she began to climb up the slope. Not the slightest sound betrayed her approach. Within a few yards of her goal she straightened up, laughing silently at her prank, and giving the lassoo a few vigorous preliminary swings, she suddenly let it fly. The noose poised over the youth and descended upon him in a flash. Then it tightened, pinning down his arms, and a slight jerk nearly upset him.

Angrily he looked about him, his fists doubled up, his muscles tense; then suddenly he burst out laughing. To complete her impudent performance, Celinda was gently tugging at the lassoo, and in order not to be overturned, there was nothing for the youth to do but move towards her. When he stood close beside her she looked up at him apologetically.

“It’s such a long time since we’ve seen one another ...! Tanto tiempo! I thought I’d better get you on the other end of this rope, so you can’t get away!”

The youth looked his astonishment. In a drawling voice that made his slow Spanish sound amusingly foreign, he exclaimed.

“Such a long time! Why, what about this morning?”

“Tanto tiempo!” She mimicked his accent. “Well, what of it, you ungrateful gringo? Is it such a small matter to you that we haven’t seen one another since this morning?”

Then they both burst out laughing, like two children.

By this time they had reached the hitching post where she had left her horse. Hurriedly she sprang to his back, as though it made her feel uncomfortable and helpless to stand on the ground. Besides, in spite of his six feet and over, this point of vantage made it possible for her to look down at him.

The rope was still wound about his arms and shoulders, but Celinda determined to let her captive go.

“Listen, don Ricardo, I’m going to set you free, but only so you can do a little work!”

With a quick twist she tossed the rope off his shoulders. But as though her presence robbed him of all initiative, the youth remained motionless before her. Majestically she offered him her hand.

“Don’t be ill-bred, Mr. Watson! That is for you to kiss. You seem to be losing all your manners out here in the desert.”

Amused by the girl’s mock gravity, the young engineer bent over her hand. But his air of treating her with the good-natured condescension an older person displays toward a mischievous child, annoyed her.

“One of these days I’m going to get really cross with you, and then you’ll never see me again. You always treat me as though I were a little girl, when I’m not! I’m the first lady of the land, I’m the Princess Flor de Rio Negro!”

But Watson was still laughing at her; and finally the girl laughed too; whereupon, the Princess Flor began exhibiting a serious and maternal interest in her friend’s welfare.

“You are working too hard, and I don’t like to see you get so tired, gringo mio! There’s too much work here for one man to do. When is Robledo going to come back? He must be having a gay time over there in Paris!”

Watson, as she mentioned his partner’s name, caught up her serious tone. He was already back, the engineer replied, and might put in an appearance at any moment. As to the work, it didn’t seem so heavy to him. He had held more difficult jobs in other countries. Until the government engineers finished the dam, his work and Robledo’s would be comparatively light, since most of the ditches were ready, waiting for the water that was to pour through them.

They were moving along side by side now, unconsciously going toward the engineering camp. Richard, as he walked along, kept a hand on her horse’s neck, and looked up at Celinda, whose quick motions of her eyes and lips while she talked were often easier for him to understand than her rapidly uttered words. The peons, considering the day’s work ended, were putting their tools together. The rider and her escort, to avoid the groups of laborers returning to the town, took a path at some distance from the river, and wound slowly up the slope that led to the mesa.

As they ascended a spur of ground that was like a buttress in the great wall of parched clay, stretching as far as the eye could reach, they saw, far below them, the lake-like width of the river above the narrow point selected for the construction of the dam. The camp, a medley of strangely assorted buildings, scattered about without any attempt at order, contained adobe huts covered with straw, houses of brick with tin roofs, tents of dirty canvas, and, most comfortable of the lot, the portable houses occupied by the engineers, overseers, and other employees. Above all the other houses, one in particular stood out, a wooden building mounted on piles, with a porch running around all four sides. It was the bungalow that, a few weeks before, had been received at Bahia Blanca for Pirovani, the Italian contractor of the works at the dam.

The streets of this hastily improvised town were always empty during the day. But as dusk set in they began to be peopled by groups of peons who, returning from their work, met other groups and mingled with them, until finally hundreds of workmen were assembled on the main thoroughfare; and they were all going in the same direction.

A frame house, the only one that, in size, compared with the bungalow of the Italian contractor, was the goal of the slowly moving crowd. Above the door was a sign on which was written in ordinary long hand, “The Galician’s Resort.” The Galician was, as a matter of fact, an Andalucian, but it is the prevailing assumption in those regions that any Spaniard who comes to Argentina must by that fact be a Galician. “The Resort,” of course, was chiefly useful to the community as a saloon, but it also served as a store where the most diverse articles could be purchased.

A group of faithful customers occupied by right of their patronage the vicinity of the counter or “bar.” Some of them were emigrants who, once cut adrift from their native Europe, had wandered through the three Americas, from Canada to Tierra del Fuego. Others, half-breeds, or even whites, had, after a few years in the desert, returned to a state approaching that of primitive man; their features were harsh and hawk-like, their beards thick and rough, and on their long hair they wore wide-brimmed sombreros. Thrust negligently through their belts of leather adorned with silver coins, they carried their revolvers and knives.

Outside the café, waiting for their husbands, in the hope that the latter would not drink too much if they knew that their wives were waiting for them, or watching for the companions of their nights, were assembled the beauties of the settlement, half-breed women of a light cinnamon color, with eyes like coals, coarse hair of the thick blackness of ink, and teeth of a luminous whiteness; some of them were so fat they looked like the grotesque exaggerations of caricature; others were as absurdly thin, as though they had just come out of a town besieged by hunger, or as if they were being consumed by flames incessantly burning within.

And now lights were twinkling in the town, their reddish points piercing through the violet veils of the twilight.

Celinda and her companion were still watching the settlement and the wide spreading river in silence, as though afraid that the scene before them would vanish at the sound of their voices.

“Come, Señorita Rojas,” exclaimed Watson suddenly, feeling the need perhaps of dispelling the seductive influence of the evening, “Come! It will soon be dark, and your ranch is a good distance from here.”

The girl laughed at the suggestion of there being any danger for her in that, but at last she bade her friend good-by and set her horse at a gallop.

Richard started back to the camp. He went down a rough road that passed for the main thoroughfare of the town, although there were many others of as great a width, the government at Buenos Aires having decreed that all the towns springing up in the desert should allow their streets a minimum width of twenty yards. No one could tell how soon they might become cities! Meanwhile, the low buildings of a single storey were separated from those opposite by a space swept by the icy winds that whirled great columns of dust through them. At times the sun baked the soil, and from its cracks, whenever a passer-by disturbed them, arose swarms of buzzing flies; and then again, the puddles formed in the clay by the infrequent but ferocious downpours made it necessary for the inhabitants to walk through water up to their knees if they wished to call on a neighbor living opposite.

As Watson went along between the two rows of buildings he met all the principal personages of the camp. First to cross his path was the señor de Canterac, formerly a captain in the French artillery, who, according to the statements of many who called themselves his friends, had, because of certain private enterprises, been forced to flee his country. At present he was employed as engineer by the Argentine government; and it always fell to his lot to work on the difficult jobs that the other engineers took good care to avoid. But de Canterac, being a foreigner, had to take what the native sons refused.

He was a man of forty odd, inclined to stoutness, his hair and mustache turning white. Yet he preserved a certain youthfulness of appearance. As though still wearing the uniform, he walked with military bearing, and in spite of his surroundings, paid considerable attention to the elegance of his attire.

Watson caught sight of him coming down the street on horseback, wearing a handsome riding suit, and a white helmet. The Frenchman greeted the engineer, and dismounting, walked along beside him, leading his horse by the reins, while he looked at some of the young American’s drawings.

“And when do you expect Robledo?” he inquired.

“He’ll be getting here at any time now. He has probably already landed at Buenos Aires. Some friends are coming along with him, it seems.”

They had reached the small frame house where the Frenchman lodged. Tossing his horse’s reins with military abruptness to the mulatto servant, de Canterac turned to Richard.

“In six weeks’ time, my friend, the first dam will be finished, and you and Robledo will be able to irrigate a part of your property right away.”

Watson smiled. With a gesture of leave-taking, he went on towards his quarters. But at the end of a few yards he stopped to reply to the greeting of a young man, who in his city clothes looked as though he might be a government clerk. His round, shell-rimmed glasses re-enforced this impression, as well as the memorandum books and loose papers that he was carrying under his arm. He gave every indication of being one of those hard-working employees, who, falling into the deep ruts of routine, become incapable of initiative, or of any project requiring ambition, but live along from year to year, perfectly satisfied with the mediocrity of which they have become a part.

This was Timoteo Moreno, born in Argentina of Spanish parents. The Commissioner of Public Works had sent him as his representative to the works at the dam, and it was his chief responsibility to pay to the contractor Pirovani the money sent on for that purpose by the government.

He had just greeted Watson when he slapped his forehead, and stepped back, searching among his papers as he did so.

“I forgot to leave Captain Canterac’s check at his place.... Oh, well....” He shrugged, and went along beside Watson. “I’ll give it to him when I go back. Anyway there’s no out-going mail until day after tomorrow.”

Now they were standing in front of the bungalow belonging to the rich man of the settlement. Just at that moment he came out and stood for a moment leaning over the railing of the balcony, but no sooner had he recognized them than he came rushing down the wooden steps. “They must come in, they must have a glass of something with him,” he insisted.

The rings he wore, his heavy gold watch chain and showy clothes did not conceal the fact that this was the Pirovani who had arrived in Argentina ten years earlier as a common laborer; but they did give everyone to understand that he was one of the richest men to be found between Bahia Blanca and the steep wall of the Andes forming the Chilian frontier. There was not a bank in the region that would not honor his signature. Although barely forty his heavy muscular frame and plump clean-shaven face already showed that softening of tissue that betrays the invasion of fat cells.

Beaming with pleasure at having someone come his way to whom he could display the magnificence of his bungalow, he pressed his invitation upon them.

“Even though I am a widower, and live alone here, I like to have some of the comforts of Buenos Aires. Just got some new furniture, too, I want to show you. Come on in, Moreno, you haven’t seen it all, and Mr. Watson here doesn’t know half what I’ve got to show him!”

The two men followed their enthusiastic host up the wooden outside steps into the dining room, which contained a large number of heavy and showy pieces of furniture. Pirovani exhibited them proudly, slapping them to show the fine quality of the oak, and rolling his eyes toward the ceiling whenever he alluded to the prices he had paid for them. The parlor too, which he insisted on showing, contained an excessive number of chairs and tables among which the visitors had to thread their way; and the bedroom, with its elaborate furnishings, would have been far more suitable for a variety hall actress than for Mr. Pirovani, the contractor. In all the rooms of course, the contrast between the over-elaborate furniture and the rough frame-work of the bungalow was startling.

“A pretty sum, it cost me,” exclaimed the Italian proudly. “What do you think of it, don Ricardo? You’ve seen a lot of fine things in your travels.... How do you like my little place?”

Watson replied as best he could; but the proud possessor of the bungalow needed very little encouragement for his outbursts of satisfaction.

When they returned to the dining room, a young half-breed servant, her thick braid hanging down her back, placed some bottles and glasses on the table.

“I’m going to have a new housekeeper,” announced Pirovani. “This place needs someone who knows how to take care of it. Rojas, the rancher, is going to let me have his Sebastiana.”

Certain that Moreno and the contractor wanted to talk over the construction plans, Watson refused a second glass of his host’s wine, and left the bungalow.

It was dark now in the streets and all the life of the town seemed concentrated in the tavern. Through the glass of its double swinging doors two rectangles of red lights fell on the road providing the only illumination in the settlement.

Most of the patrons of the establishment were standing, taking their drinks over the bar. A Spaniard was playing the accordeon, while some of the other workmen were dancing with the half-breed girls. There was, an abundance of Chilians who had strayed in from the other side of the mountains, and who, after a few days of work, would be sure to wander off to some other camp, driven by their eternal restlessness; a strange and disturbing lot, these, always ready with their knives, yet always ready to smile and speak softly. In another group were the natives of the land, with their thick beards, ponchos on their backs, and heavy spurs clicking, stray horsemen who lived no one knew how, nor did anyone know where they came from. Like the cowboys of former times they wore the wide leather belt ornamented with silver coins which served as a rack for their revolvers and knives.

All of these Americans treated the accordeon playing and the waltzes of the Galicians and gringos with scornful silence, until finally one of them demanded the “cueca” in so threatening a tone that the couples who were dancing with their arms about one another’s necks in European fashion, hastily left the floor. Then the native dances began, the “pericon,” the “gato,” those old Argentine dances, for so many generations the chief diversion of the natives, and more popular among them than any other, the Chilian “cueca,” which, for hours at a time, with its accompaniment of hand-clapping and sharp cries, excited the crowd gathered in the tavern.

The proprietor of the boliche handed out two guitars, carefully kept under the counter, whereupon the players squatted with their instruments on the ground; but at once a half-breed servant girl hurried towards the musicians to offer them the horse skulls which were the places of honor of the establishment.

Besides possessing this distinction, they were also the best seats in the place. The proprietor owned a couple of chairs which were always brought out when the commissioner of police or some other dignitary came to call, but they were rickety, and gave small promise of lasting out the evening. The steadiest and safest seats in the boliche were those provided by the skeletons of animals, dragged in for this useful purpose from the mesa.

At the sound of the guitars the couples stepped out from the groups along the wall. The girls, a handkerchief in their left hands, held out their skirts with the right, and slowly revolved. The men, also holding a handkerchief in their left hands, gave it a rotary motion, as they circled round their partners, for the “cueca,” like the dances of primitive times, tells the eternal story of the male’s pursuit of the female. The women meanwhile danced in small circles, fleeing from the men, whose wider circles enclosed those of their partners.

The girls who were not dancing clapped their hands continuously, emphasizing the purring rhythm of the guitars. Now and then one of them would sing a couplet of the “cueca,” at which the men would shout and toss up their hats.

A horseman dismounted in front of the tavern. He tied his mount to a post of the leaf screen, and came in, receiving full in his face as he stood in the door, the red light of the lamps that hung from the ceiling. The newcomer, whom the men greeted with respect, might have been about thirty years of age. Like all the other horsemen of the region, he wore a poncho and heavy spurs; his hair and beard were long, and his sharply outlined profile might have been taken for that of an Arab. Although handsome, his bearing was harsh and repellent, and in his black eyes shone at times an expression that was both imperious and cruel. This was “Manos Duras,” notorious in the territory, and a somewhat disquieting neighbor, for he lived from the sale of cattle; but no one had ever been able to discover where he bought his steers.

The proprietor made haste to offer him a glass of gin, while even the roughest looking gauchos raised a hand to their hats as though he were their chief. The Galicians looked curiously at him, repeating his name to one another, while the mestizas went towards him smiling like slave-girls.

Manos Duras accepted this reception somewhat haughtily. One of the women, eager to provide him with a seat of honor, dragged out another horse-skull, on which the fear-inspiring gaucho sat down, while the patrons of the tavern squatted around him on the floor.

The “cueca,” interrupted for a moment by this arrival, went on again, and did not stop even at the entrance of another personage of important demeanor, to whom, as soon as he appeared on the threshold, the tavern-keeper began bowing most respectfully, from the other side of the bar.

This was Don Roque, Commissioner of Police at the dam, and the only representative of Argentine authority in the settlement. As the governor of the territory of Rio Negro lived in a town on the Atlantic, which it required a journey of twelve days on horseback to reach—six times what it required to go to Buenos Aires by train—the Commissioner, who was his representative, enjoyed an ample freedom for the simple reason that he was forgotten. The Governor lived too far away to send for him, and the Minister of the Interior, who resided in the capitol of the Republic, did not deign even to notice the Commissioner’s existence.

As a matter of fact he did not abuse his authority, nor did he have at his disposal the means of making others feel it too heavily. Fat, good-natured, and of somewhat rustic manners, he was a native of Buenos Aires, who, falling on evil days, had been forced to ask for a government job, and had resigned himself to accepting the one offered him in Patagonia. He wore city clothes, adapted, however, to the discharge of his duties by the addition of high boots and a wide-brimmed sombrero. A revolver in full view on his waistcoat was the only insignia of authority he displayed.

The proprietor handed out his best chair, kept under the counter for guests of unusual distinction, and the commissioner set it down near Manos Duras, who, by way of acknowledging the Police Commissioner’s presence removed his hat but did not stir from the horse skull in which he was sitting.

The dance went on. Don Roque was puffing with great satisfaction at a huge cigar, which the gaucho, in a lordly manner, had offered.

“Do you know,” said the Commissioner, speaking in a low tone, “they say you’re the fellow who stole three steers from the Pozo Verde ranch last week. That’s outside my jurisdiction, since it’s in the Rio Colorado limits, but my associate, the commissioner over that way, thinks you’re the one that did it.”

Manos Duras went on smoking in silence. Finally he spat.

“They don’t want me to sell meat to the camp up here at the dam.”

“Well, they told the governor of the territory that it was you who killed those two peddlers a few months back.”

The terrible gaucho shrugged and said coldly, as if bored by this dialogue,

“Why don’t they prove what they say?”

And the dance in the “Galician’s Resort” went on until ten o’clock, this being, in a land where everyone gets up with the dawn, the equivalent of those early morning hours at which the night revels of city dwellers come to an end.

But the chief citizens of the settlement were not asleep. Nearly all of them could be found late in the evening, sitting at a desk or table somewhere, pen in hand, while scenes very different from those actually around them floated before their eyes.

Canterac, his head leaning on his arm, was looking at a little house near the Champ de Mars. In it was a woman, of rather sad expression, whose hair was turning grey, although her cheeks still had the freshness of girlhood. Two little girls sat near her at the table, and a boy, his boy, fourteen years old now, sat in his father’s place.... They were talking of him, and Canterac, sitting at his rough oak table in Patagonia, put out a hand to speak to them.... The stiff pen fell out of his hand. Smiling to himself he went on with his writing.

“And I shall see you soon. Within a few days I shall make the last payment on those debts of honor that drove me away from you.... And that I have at last cancelled them is due to you, my brave comrade, and to your wise management of the savings I have sent you. How good it will be to see you and the children....”

For the moment he had lost his expression of stern authority. This was another de Canterac, one never seen in that Patagonian settlement.

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....

The girl threw her lassoo at him, breaking out into unrestrained youthful laughter that displayed all her sharp young teeth; and automatically Richard moved his head to dodge the descending circles of rope.

“I must be asleep,” he thought. “There’s no use trying to work tonight. Well, let’s go to bed.”

But before he went to sleep, he saw the whole camp spread out before him, and looked down on it from a height in the sunset, just as when Celinda, on her horse, had been beside him.

But this time the ground below was dark, and on the blue background of the sky, pierced with lights, an apparition grew before him, a woman, of a grave beauty, with stars in her hair, and on her dark tunic, a woman of great size who spread out her arms, plucking in the darkness the dreams that grow in the wide meadows of the infinite, and scattering a rain of soft fragrant petals over the earth.... It was Night herself comforting with dreams the restless striving exiles of that faraway Patagonian settlement....

But, as Richard Watson was young, the dewiest, freshest petals were for him; as they touched him he shrank away, and then felt a terror lest there should be no more; for the petals that startled him even as they caressed were the first dreams of youthful love.

CHAPTER VI

A GROUP of children playing on the “main street,” so-called, burst into shouts of astonishment as they caught sight of the coach which three times a week made the trip from the dam to Fuerte Sarmiento, for it presented an extraordinary appearance.

These little ragamuffins, busy with their games in the ruts and holes of the highway, presented all the racial diversities characteristic of the settlement’s population. There were white children shuffling about in their elders’ cast-off shoes, their small forms lost in the baggy folds of their fathers’ trousers; and there were half-breed children whose dress had been simplified to a mere shirt, short enough to expose their little copper-colored bellies to the air.

As the travellers who arrived at the dam had rarely been known to bring anything with them in the way of baggage save a canvas sack in which was heaped whatever clothing they possessed, the young inhabitants were very naturally excited and astonished at sight of the trunks and boxes heaped on the top of the mail coach, as, drawn by four lean and clay-spattered nags, it rattled up the road. So high was the pile of luggage roped on to the coach roof that, as the stage lurched into and out of the ruts of the clay road, the whole structure tipped over at such an angle that it seemed about to upset.

The men who were out of work, attracted by the novel sight, stood watching from the doorway of the tavern. The coach stopped finally in front of the frame house occupied by Watson, who came out in front of his door, his servants peering from the doorway behind him.

As soon as they saw that the passenger stepping down from the coach was Robledo, men and women rushed forward to greet him, stretching out their hands to him in the confident comradeship of the desert. But everyone promptly forgot him at sight of the other passengers.

First came the Marquis de Torre Bianca, who turned around to help his wife to alight from the clumsy steps.

The Marquise, dressed in a luxurious travelling suit which contrasted oddly with her surroundings, wore the hard expression which disfigured her beauty in her bad moments. In spite of her thick veil, the red dust of the long road she had travelled covered her face and hair. With scarcely restrained astonishment and ill-humor, she looked about her, and her eyes betrayed the despair with which she was saying to herself, “Is this what I have come to?”

“Well, here we are,” said Robledo cheerfully. “Two days and two nights from Buenos Aires, and a couple of hours driving through a dust storm, that isn’t so bad! The ends of the earth are quite a way off from here!”

Several of the workmen who had welcomed Robledo began, of their own accord, to unload the baggage. These were Elena’s things sent on to her at Barcelona by her maid, and she cherished them. They were the chests and boxes saved from her shipwreck!

Meanwhile a group of children and ragged women had gathered around Elena, gazing at her with amazement and admiration, as though she had fallen into their midst from another planet. Some of the little girls timidly felt of the cloth of her dress. Their fingers had never touched anything so wonderful!

By this time the news of Robledo’s arrival had reached Canterac, Pirovani, and Moreno, and the engineer was presenting them to his friends.

Watson, seeing that the multitude of bags and boxes was being carried into the house he occupied with Robledo, said to his partner,

“You don’t expect the lady to share our rough quarters, do you?”

“The lady,” Robledo replied, “is the wife of an old college friend of mine. He is going to take pot luck with us, and so is she. You don’t need to build a palace for her.”

But Elena found it difficult to conceal her distress as she looked about at the rooms that she was henceforth to live in; rough wooden walls, scanty and awkward furniture, and scattered about, on every side, saddles, engineering instruments, and sacks of provisions; and everything in this house, occupied by two busy men who had no thought for anything except their work, was in disorder, and covered with dust.

Torre Bianca was never under any circumstances surprised. As Robledo took him through the house, putting in a word of apology now and then for its appearance, the Marquis smiled gently at his friend. Whatever Manuel did seemed to him worthy of approbation.

“And here are the servants,” said Robledo, introducing to Elena a fat half-breed, already well on in years, who acted as housekeeper, two little barefooted mestizas, who served as errand girls, and the Spanish peasant who took care of the horses. All of this ragged crew expressed with incessant smiles the admiration they felt for the beautiful lady, and Elena finally broke into a laugh as she remembered the servants she had left in Paris.

After supper Robledo took his partner aside to discuss the progress of the work with him.

As Watson showed him the plans and documents, he also mentioned what Canterac had said to him that afternoon.

“He says that in six months we shall be irrigating....”

Robledo looked immensely pleased.

“Then we’ll see this hard baked soil that bears nothing but matorrales now, turn into the kind of earth they must have had in the Garden of Eden. Thousands of people will lead happier and better lives here than they could ever do in the old world, and with all that, you and I, Watson, are going to get rich. We’ll get rich because we’ll be helping other people to get rich. That’s the way it goes. If you want progress, you’ve got to make it profitable to somebody.”

The two friends sat silent, looking into the air before them as if they saw there the lands eternally green, and gurgling canals in which gleamed silver water, the roads bordered with tall trees, and the white houses, which were to come to life on the arid mesa at the magic touch of water. Watson, as he saw the picture unfold before him, was reminded of his native California; to Robledo, the scene in his mind’s eye, was very like his beloved Valencia.

It was Watson who came out of his day-dream first. He nodded towards the adjoining room in which they had left the new arrivals. The Marquis was dozing in a canvas chair; Elena sat at a little distance from him, her head in her hands, in a tragic attitude which indicated plainly that the question, “What have I come to?” was throbbing in her mind with desperate persistence.

During the few days she had spent in Buenos Aires her exile had seemed to her tolerable. The capital was like any large European city. It was only after determined search that she had discovered a corner of the old colonial town, a small remnant of earlier and more primitive times, barely sufficient to convince her that she had actually reached America.

The only thing that had seemed really strange to her during her sojourn in Buenos Aires, besides her quarters in a second-class hotel, was the absence of her automobile; aside from this, her manner of living had undergone no great change. But then came that terrible journey across interminable plains through which the train crawled hour-long, and never a house nor a living soul. It was as though the world had suddenly become nothing but space! And then the arrival in this strange land where the turn of a wheel or even a step started up clouds of dust; where the soil which was dissolved and held in suspension in the air clogged and irritated her nose and throat; where the people looked ragged and unkempt, and yet treated everyone else with a certain familiarity, as though they considered anyone who came there, their equal! “What had she come to?”

Robledo answered the question he read in his partner’s eyes.

“My friend is going to help us. He’s an engineer. But don’t worry about him. I am going to give him a share in our business, out of my half of course.”

Then he told Watson the few facts he thought his partner should know about the Marquis.

“As long as your friend is going to help us,” said the young American, “you had better take his share out of my half as well as yours. He seems a nice fellow. Anyway I feel sorry for his wife.”

Robledo took the boy’s hand in his, in quick response to his generosity, and they dropped the subject.

On the very next morning, Elena, who showed a certain easy adaptability to the diverse circumstances of her life, set out to win the admiration of her hosts by her domestic talents, just as, a few weeks earlier, she had sought distinction in Paris drawing rooms through quite other attainments. Dressed in a tailored suit which she had cast aside in Paris, but which caused a great sensation among the engineer’s servants, she started out, with carefully gloved hands, to set the house in order.

The half-breed and her two little helpers submissively followed the señora around, until the moment came when Elena rashly ventured to add example to precept; whereupon her ignorance of housework became immediately apparent. It was only too clear that she did not at all know how to do the things she had ordered to be done, and the half-breed’s help was more than once required in order to get the Marquise out of the difficulties her ignorance had plunged her into.

In the kitchen a stove, in which was burned the same oil as that used for the dredging machines, served for cooking purposes. Elena, delighted by the ease with which the flame could be lighted and put out, determined to have something to do with the preparations of the next meal. But she soon had to retire before the superior skill of the half-breed, who was now frankly laughing at her pretensions as a housekeeper.

Still trying to be useful, Elena took off her gloves in order to wash the dishes, but she at once put them on again, fearful that the very hot water might injure her delicate skin, and destroy the polish of her nails—and she remembered that in her moments of despair, she had felt a certain relief in contemplating her hands.

Torre Bianca, dressed in a tweed riding suit, accompanied Watson and Robledo to the canals. He watched the pile drivers at work, saw what was being done, and talked with the peons. It wasn’t long before he was covered with dust from head to foot; his sunburned hands itched painfully; and yet he already felt the happy tranquillity of the man who knows that he can earn his daily bread.

At nightfall the three engineers returned to the house, where they found dinner awaiting them. Elena had been complaining of the rustic simplicity of the table covers and plates. The half-breed, at her instigation, purchased for a modest price, some additional pieces of china which had found their way from Buenos Aires to the “Galician’s Resort.” The next day some flowers, brought in by the two little copper-colored errand girls, appeared on the table, and it became more evident from day to day that there was now a woman accustomed to the refinements of life in the engineers’ house.

One evening, while the half-breed was serving the first course, Elena threw off from about her shoulders an old evening wrap which, as it was somewhat the worse for its previous services, she now used as a dressing gown. As she emerged from this covering it was revealed that she was in evening dress. Her gown was a little worn, but it was still a brilliant relic of happier days.

Watson looked at her with astonishment, Robledo made a gesture which indicated that he thought she had gone crazy, but the Marquis remained impassive, as though nothing that Elena did could cause him any surprise.

“I’ve always dressed for dinner,” observed Elena, “and I don’t see any reason for changing my habits here. It would make me so uncomfortable!”

The hours after the evening meal were usually spent in long conversations. Robledo did most of the talking. He liked to tell the stories of the various interesting characters he had seen pass through “the land of all the world.” Many of them had already wandered over a great part of the planet before they landed in the port of Buenos Aires. Others eager for adventure had fled to the new continent in order to begin a new life there.

In the capital they had encountered the same obstacles as those they had run away from in Europe. The big city was already old. Tenements and slums had grown up there too, and it was as hard to make a living as ever it was in Europe. Sometimes it was even harder, so great was the competition between all professions in the crowd thronging into Buenos Aires from every quarter of the globe.

So they sought the waste places of the republic, the territories that were still arid plains, and began transforming them for the future generations of immigrants.

“What a lot of strange characters I have seen pass through here!” Robledo would begin. “I remember one fellow, a peon, who, in spite of his angry-looking, bulbous nose, inflamed by long years of drinking, still had something about him that suggested an interesting history. When he came straggling through here he was nothing but a wreck; but he was like those ruined palaces, the smallest fragment of which, a piece of broken pillar, or a bit of pediment, picked up from among the crumbled walls, evokes the splendors of the past. Yet this fellow would stop at nothing, not even theft, when he craved drink, and would lie for days on the ground dead drunk. But a gesture, a chance word would make us suspect that he had not always been a dirty, drink-sodden vagabond.

“One day I found him brushing the foreman’s hair, just for the joke of the thing, and shaping the fellow’s mustache, making it look like Kaiser Wilhelm’s. So I gave him a drink, I gave him all the drinks he could hold, because that’s the only way to make that kind of a fellow talk. And so I learned that this broken-down old drunkard was a German baron, once a captain of the Imperial Guard. He had gambled with some money left in his charge by his superior officers, and instead of committing suicide, as his family expected him to do, he came to America, where he began his career as a general. He ended up a useless, drunken, day-laborer.”

Seeing that Elena was interested, Robledo went on modestly,

“This German baron was a general in one of the revolutions in Venezuela. I, too, was once a general in another South American republic. I was even minister of war for ten days ... but they threw me out for being too scientific, and for not knowing how to handle a machete as well as my aides.”

Then Robledo went on to speak of another peon, a drunkard also, a silent gloomy sort of fellow, who had crawled into the camp up at the dam to die. They had buried him near the river, and Robledo had found some of the poor devil’s papers in the canvas sack the vagabond dragged along with him. He had once been a well-known architect in Vienna. One of the photographs among the papers was of a lady with an impressive head-dress and long pendent earrings, who looked very much like the murdered Empress. This was the architect’s wife. While her husband was accompanying General Gordon on one of his expeditions she had been killed in Khartoum, torn to pieces by the fanatics that the Mahdi was leading through the Sudan. The other photograph, that of a handsome Austrian officer, his white coat snugly fitted in at the waist, was the vagabond’s son.

“And it’s no use trying to reform those fellows,” said Robledo. “You may clean them up a bit, and make life a little more comfortable for them, you may preach to them about drinking less, and try in every way to help them ‘get back’—As soon as they are rested and begin to look a little happier, they come up to you some fine morning with packs on their backs. ‘Well, I’m off, boss! What’s due me?’ And it’s no use asking them any questions. Everything is all right, they have no complaints to make; but just the same they light out. No sooner do they get a few square meals than the devil who drives them round and round the globe suddenly remembers them and starts them off again. They know perfectly well that beyond the horizon line out yonder are the Andes, and beyond the Andes, Chile; and beyond that the Pacific and its islands, and then the crowding masses of China.... And so their mania for wandering awakens ... they must always see what is beyond.... They pick up their bundles and start out again, with hunger and exhaustion waiting for them out there.... They die in hospitals, or in the desert; and if they do not die but keep on, always following the ‘beyond’ that mocks and beguiles them, they turn up here again—but only because they have made a complete circuit of the globe.”

Now and then the two engineers spoke of their own lives. Watson’s history was of the briefest. Leaving his native California after graduating from Berkeley, he had taken up his engineering work in the silver mines of Mexico, and from there he had gone to Peru. Finally he had moved on to Buenos Aires where he had met Robledo, and it was there the two men had gone into partnership in order to carry out their Rio Negro enterprise.

The Spaniard did not like to recall his experiences in America before his arrival in Argentina. In that earlier period he had taken part in revolutions for which he felt nothing but contempt, becoming involved in them merely because of his desire for activity. For the same reason he had undertaken various business ventures only to discover in the course of them that he was being deceived and robbed, sometimes by his partners, sometimes by the government. Violent changes in his fortunes had thrown him from absurd abundance into abject want. But he avoided talking of all this, and most of his stories were about life in Patagonia.

Once he had crossed the enormous plateau which begins at the cut of the Black River and stretches toward the Strait of Magellan. He had started out on this exploring expedition after resigning his position with the Argentine government, and to avoid expense he had taken with him only a native peon and a troup of six desert horses capable of feeding on the rough weeds of the mesa. Robledo and the peon rode all day, changing horses at frequent intervals. The engineer had, with the help of some of his friends, made out a map indicating the springs, the only possible camping places.

For several years there had been droughts. On reaching the first spring Robledo found that it was very salty. He was accustomed to the brackish water which the optimism of the desert explorers considers drinkable; but the water in this spring was of saltiness that was more than he or the Indian with him could stomach.

They went on, confident that they would come upon a spring the next day. When they reached it they found that it did not contain salt water, for the reason that there was no water in it at all. So they continued across the plateau that was always endless and always the same. Steering their course by the compass, they suffered a thirst which made them walk with their lower jaws drooping, and through their eyes, starting from their heads, passed now and then the terrifying glitter of madness. And finally they had been forced to resort to a loathesome thing in order to ease the torment of their swollen tongues and throats with a little liquid.

“What tormented me,” said Robledo, “was the memory of all the times when I had been asked to have a drink in some café or other, and had not cared enough about what was set before me to drink it—beer, charged waters, iced drinks—and then I was stricken with remorse at the memory of certain parties I had been to, when I had passed by the buffet full of decanters and bottles without taking any of their contents, for I kept saying to myself, excited with fever as I was, and staggering along under the hard merciless sun, ‘If you had drunk all the beers, and all the soda waters, and all the iced drinks that were offered you and that you didn’t appreciate, you would now have inside of you a reserve store of liquids and you’d be able to stand this awful thirst much better!’ And this absurd idea tormented me like remorse for a crime, and at times I wanted to punch my own head for my stupidity in not having drunk everything that had once been within my reach so that I might have been prepared for that awful desert trip.

“Finally, with only two of our six horses still stumbling along beside us, we reached a well of fresh water. That was the most delicious drink of my whole life! And after all our long hard pull through that desert of death, we found nothing! The information I had been given, and to confirm which I had started off on this expedition, proved to be false.... But that’s the way you have to seek fortune now, for those of us who go to the new world are half a century late. All the rich lands, those easy to develop, have been taken up, and only those that are remote and inhospitable, are left—and often all that they offer is ruin and death.

“However,” Robledo continued, “men go right on coming to this corner of the globe. Hope lives here among us, and without hope life is intolerable. And just consider our own household for instance! Elena there, a Russian, Federico, Italian, Watson from the United States, I a Spaniard. And the people who come to see us are each of them of a different nationality. As I say, it’s the land of all!”

Little by little it became the custom of the most important personages of the settlement to call at the engineers’ house after supper. First to appear was Canterac, in a suit of military cut, and still more carefully brushed and polished than before the arrival of the Torre Biancas. Then came Moreno, betraying a certain nervous agitation at greeting his hostess, uttering a few stammerings instead of words, and almost biting off his tongue in the tenseness of his embarrassment. And last came Pirovani, displaying a new suit every other night, and always bringing his hostess a present.

Canterac used to laugh at him, asserting that if Pirovani was late it was because he had been polishing his watch charms, watch chain and cuff buttons, so as to dazzle the rest of the company.

One evening the Italian appeared in a startling suit just arrived from Bahia Blanca, bearing in his fat hand a bouquet of enormous roses.

“These were brought down to me today from Buenos Aires, señora marquesa, and I hasten to lay them at your feet!”

Canterac glared at the Italian with mock indignation, and murmured in a loud aside to Robledo,

“That’s a lie! These roses came by telegraph! Moreno, who knows everything, told me so, and this afternoon Pirovani sent a man to get them from the station. He had strict orders to gallop all the way!”

The housekeeper and the two little half-breeds cleared the table, and the living room, in spite of its rough wooden partitions, began to look suggestive of festivity, as the three callers grouped about Elena, offering her compliments and conversation, according to their talents. It was noticeable that they invariably repeated the word marquesa at every opportunity, as though they enjoyed being constantly reminded that they were in such distinguished company.

Elena soon discovered a preference for Canterac which she made no attempt to conceal. After all, he was of her world, although his circle in Paris had not been the same as hers. Yet it had been adjacent, and though they had never met, they discovered that they had mutual friends.

While the Frenchman and Elena talked, Moreno smoked resignedly, exchanging a few words with Watson, or listening to Pirovani’s discussions with Robledo and the Marquis. But he had little attention for anyone save the Marquise and Canterac, whom he watched with anxious eyes. However, the tertulia underwent a transformation after the arrival of Pirovani with his roses.

The next evening Elena and the men of her household were sitting at table, more silent than usual. She was wearing one of her most startling evening dresses, one which, even in Paris, would have been described as daring. But the three engineers, still in their work clothes, appeared to be exhausted by the day’s labors. Robledo yawned several times though he was making valiant efforts to keep awake. The Marquis was quietly nodding in his chair; and Elena meanwhile was looking at Watson as though she had for the first time become aware of him, which caused the young American considerable discomfort.

Suddenly Pirovani appeared at the door, carrying a large package, and arrayed in a new suit of wide checked material whose many colors resembled the mottled patterns of a python’s skin.

“Señora marquesa,” he began solemnly, “a friend of mine in Buenos Aires has just sent me this box of caramels. Allow me to present them to you!”

Elena, amused by the contractor’s new clothes, smilingly acknowledged his present, rewarding him for his attentions with several glances full of coquetry.

At that point, Moreno arrived, recklessly gotten up in patent leather boots, a wide-skirted cutaway, and a high silk hat, just as though he were about to call on his chief, the Minister of the Interior.

Robledo, rousing a little at these arrivals, observed ironically,

“What elegance, Moreno!”

“I was afraid,” exclaimed the latter “that these things would get moth eaten in the trunk, so I put them on to give them an airing.”

Timidly he approached Elena. “Good evening, señora marquesa!” Imitating the personages of elegant life and manners whom he had so often admired in novels and on the stage, he bent over her hand. Then unwilling to leave her side after this successful performance, he did his utmost to keep up a conversation with her, to Pirovani’s intense indignation. Finally the Italian got up, as a protest against this intrusion, and could be heard inquiring of Robledo in his corner,

“Did you ever see anything like the get-up of that jackass?”

But the surprises of the evening were not yet over.

The door opened once more, and Canterac appeared on the threshold, where he paused a moment, giving all his spectators the opportunity to get a good look at him.

He wore a dinner coat, and a fine and exquisitely ironed dress shirt, and when finally he stepped into the room, he did so with a certain languid grace as though he were presenting himself in a Paris drawing room. After a slight bow to the men, he bent over Elena and kissed her hand.

“I too felt like dressing for dinner this evening, Marquesa, as in the good old times.”

Elena, pleased by this homage, turned her back upon Moreno, and made the new arrival sit down beside her. For the rest of the evening she devoted most of her attentions to the Frenchman, while Pirovani sulked in a corner, making small attempt to conceal his displeasure, though he was obviously impressed by Canterac’s aristocratic appearance.

For several evenings after this the contractor failed to appear. Moreno, curious about the reason for his absence, called at the Italian’s and came back with some news.

“Pirovani’s gone to Bahia Blanca without telling anyone what for. He must have some important business on.”

So the tertulias continued. Canterac in his dinner coat still enjoyed Elena’s preference, and Moreno got into his swallow-tail every evening for no other purpose apparently than to carry on his desultory conversations with Torre Bianca. Even the Marquis appeared one evening in a dinner coat, and when Robledo made a gesture of astonishment, he gave a shrug and a nod towards his wife.

On the fifth evening Moreno came rushing in to announce that Pirovani had returned. “He may be here at any moment now!”

And since Pirovani had provided them all with a subject for speculation, everyone had the sense of waiting for him to put in an appearance.

Then the door opened; and pausing on the threshold as Canterac had done, in order to allow the onlookers to get the full effect of his attire, Pirovani appeared, in a frock coat that was resplendent with lapels of a heavily ribbed silk, the fibres of which were as thick as those of wood, a white waistcoat richly embroidered, a white camelia in his buttonhole, and a large ribbon from which dangled a monocle.... Needless to say, he had never learned to wear one!

His aspect was solemn and magnificent, like that of a circus director, or a world-famous prestidigitator. Making manful efforts to preserve his calm and conceal his emotions, he nodded with masculine indifference to the men, and bowed low before the marquesa, whose hand he raised to his lips.

Elena’s eyes gleamed with suppressed amusement. Everything about Pirovani always seemed to her humorous. But, perceiving that this transformation had been accomplished in her honor, she welcomed him affectionately, and made him sit down beside her. Canterac, visibly offended by his rival’s triumph, abruptly left the group, while Moreno, with a scandalized expression, made a gesture towards Pirovani and muttered to Robledo,

“So that’s the important business he took a trip to Bahia Blanca for! That’s what he made such a mystery about!”

Robledo, however, left him to mutter alone, and went on talking to Watson, who, still dazed by the contractor’s theatrical entrance, was watching him with considerable amusement.

“From dinner coats to swallow-tails,” growled Robledo. “We’ll be holding carnival out on the desert soon, and this woman will be driving us all crazy before we get through!”

He glanced with relief at the young American, who, like himself, still wore his simple work clothes, and mentally compared his appearance with that of the other men in the room.

“What a commotion that sort of woman stirs up in a frontier settlement, where men live alone, and have no other distraction from their work!” he thought. “And she’s only just begun.... Who knows what she’ll try next? We may all end up by killing one another on her account! Perhaps this is Helen of Troy in our midst....”

With a cynical shrug, Robledo turned his back on the group around Elena. He had done his best to leave her in the old world—His conscience was clear on that score!

CHAPTER VII

“ANOTHER little glass of mate, comisario?”

The police commissioner of the camp sat opposite don Carlos Rojas in the latter’s living room. A half-breed girl, standing very straight, was looking at the two men with her slanting eyes, waiting for the master’s orders.

In front of them on the table were two little calabash shells full of a decoction made from the mate herb, and they were sipping the liquid through the silver “straw” that is known in these regions as a bombilla. No sooner did the servant hear the gurgling of the liquid in the straws, which indicated that the contents of the cup was getting low, than she ran to the stove and brought the “peacock” or pava as the kettle is called, from the curved neck of which she poured boiling water on the soaking leaves at the bottom of the calabashes, and filled these unique goblets to the brim.

Rojas and his guest, as they talked, took frequent sips of their tea. It was evident from the rancher’s expression that something had gone wrong with him. As a matter of fact he had lost another steer, and he angrily attributed this loss to Manos Duras who, of late, had sold altogether too many pieces of beef to the camp at the Dam. As Rojas himself was its official victualler, the loss of his trade, in addition to the disappearance of his steers, seemed to him an insufferable outrage.

He had sent in hot haste for the commissioner, and together, after don Rojas had told his suspicions, they had counted his herd. It was certain that one was lacking. And, as he talked with don Roque, the rancher worked himself up to the point where he came out flatly with the statement that there was no justice to be had in Rio Negro.

“But,” protested the comisario in a tone of discouragement, “I sent that fellow up to the capital of the territory three separate times, under guard, in fact he went as a prisoner, and each time he got off scot-free. No proofs! What could we do? No one will testify against him!”

But Rojas continued his protests, and the commissioner to quiet his growing irritation, promised to make a more determined effort than ever this time to bring the thief to justice.

However, he had at his disposal very few means of carrying out his promise. The police forces at the settlement consisted of four lazy rascals, whose uniforms had grown old and spotted in the service, and whose only weapons were cavalry swords. When they had to pursue a criminal, the well-to-do inhabitants lent the police their rifles; and their horses, of course, were gaunt nags, too ill-nourished to be a menace to anyone intent on escaping.

“That’s what comes of being a federal republic,” lamented don Roque. “The states at least have their own police system. We in the territories who have to depend on the Federal Government for our protection, are so far away from Buenos Aires that they forget all about us. There’s nothing for us to do but trust to our wits for our safety.”

“Yes, here we are, deserted you might say,” continued don Roque, “turning into savings! After all, this is nothing but Patagonia, and it is only a few years ago that anything like civilization began here at all. Meanwhile the rest of the Argentine has forged ahead at a breathless pace in less than half a century.... Pucha! It’s worth seeing just the same!”

And for the moment they forgot their immediate worries, while they talked of that part of their country which had progressed with such dizzying rapidity within their lifetimes. But don Roque had a jealous enthusiasm for Patagonia also.

“Desert though it is at this moment, you’ll see it bloom yet, and in a short time from now, too, when this soil begins to get water. And it’s lucky for us that this land has such an ugly face.... If it hadn’t it would have been stolen from us long ago!”

Wound up by his own words he went on to tell how he had read in a magazine about that gringo Charles Darwin, the same who had discovered how we had all come from monkeys. He, too, it seemed, had wandered around these parts, when, as a youth, he had landed at Bahia Blanca, arriving there in a British frigate in which he was making a tour of the world. He had taken it into his head to study the plants and animals of the region, not an arduous task because there were so few specimens of either. Finally, in despair, he gave up his search for new flora and went away, leaving to this arid plateau the name “Land of Desolation.”

“That was doing us a favor, if the gringo but knew it! Just as soon as people learn what this country is like when it’s irrigated, the English are sure to take it from us! Didn’t they take our Islas Malvinas, that they now call Fauckland Islands?”

Rojas too began to talk of past times, lamenting the fact that his forebears had not been able to see where the true riches of the country lay. It had been their misfortune to become well-to-do before the generation of great and rapid fortune-making in the Argentine.

It was in 1870 that the government at Buenos Aires, growing weary of having the Indians, still in a state of savagery, at its very gates, completed the work of the Conquistadores, by sending a military expedition out to the desert to take possession of twenty thousand leagues of land, practically all that was capable of cultivation.

“The government sold that land for 1500 pesos. The league and the peso in those days was worth only a few centavos. More than that, it allowed several years’ time for payment, and even printed the names of purchasers in the official newspaper, declaring them ‘well-deserving of the country’. The soldiers who had taken part in the expedition also received land as a reward for their services. It wasn’t long before they sold the titles to their acres to the store-keepers in exchange for gin, and canned food. And these are the lands that now supply wheat and beef to half the world! On them have arisen numberless villages and towns. Today a league of land, which once cost a few cents, is worth millions. The owners of all this property have no other merit than that they kept their land, without cultivating it, and with no wish to sell it, waiting for the European immigration which would give it its value. My grandfather was already rich in those days and owned a big ranch. He didn’t want to buy any of the new property. If he had only known!”

Rojas at the moment was quite forgetful of how he had squandered the better part of his inheritance; the thought of the enormous fortune his family might have amassed had it been willing to take advantage of an opportunity provided by the rapid expansion of the country, and seized by so many others, fascinated and tormented him.

But at this point the conversation of the two Argentinians was interrupted by Celinda’s arrival. Dutifully wearing her riding skirt, she came in to give her father a kiss, and greet the comisario. Taking advantage of the moment during which don Carlos left them to get a box of cigars, don Roque said teasingly to the girl,

“Haven’t I seen you wear a different riding suit when you were out on the mesa!”

Celinda smiled, at the same time indicating by a graceful little threatening gesture, that he must be more discreet.

“Be careful,” she said. “Don’t let my old man hear you.”

While the two men lit their cigars and went on with their talk about Manos Duras, and how he was to be punished for his lawlessness, Celinda knowing the conversation was likely to be a long one, left the ranch, demurely riding her horse with a side-saddle.

A half hour later, however, she was cantering along the river bank; wearing boy’s clothes and mounted on a different horse. Suddenly she caught sight of a group of riders approaching, and stopped to reconnoitre.

Canterac, inspired by his desire to arouse the marquesa’s interest in him, had invited her to ride on the river path. It would, he believed, give her a heightened estimate of him when she saw the work that was being carried out under his direction. She would realize then that he was the real manager of the enterprise, when she saw hundreds of men obeying his orders....

Elena and the Frenchman were in the lead. Behind them rode Pirovani, who hadn’t a very steady seat, and lurched about rather grotesquely on his saddle, making determined efforts nevertheless to get his horse between Elena’s and the Frenchman’s. Last of the cavalcade came the marqués, Watson and Moreno.

As Elena and Canterac rode past Celinda the two women looked at one another. The marquesa smiled, as though eager to speak to the young girl; but with a childish frown, Celinda turned severe eyes on her.

“She’s nothing but a girl,” said Canterac, “a mischievous little thing, full of pranks—and, although she looks like a boy, I shouldn’t wonder if she had it in her to turn any man’s head. The people hereabouts call her Flor de Rio Negro.”

Elena, offended by the girl’s attitude, looked haughtily at her.

“Flor, perhaps,” she commented, “but a little too wild!”

And followed by her escort she rode on.

This brief conversation had been carried on in French, so that Celinda caught but a few words of it; but it was easy to guess that the marquesa had said something disparaging, and Celinda did not restrain her impulse to make a grimace at the intruder’s unconscious back.

The other riders then drew near, and the marqués ceremoniously greeted the young girl. Moreno, however, did not even see her, so intent was he in watching the group ahead. As for Richard Watson, he indicated by his manner that he intended riding on with the other members of the party; and he pretended not to understand Celinda’s perfectly obvious gestures.

She let him go on, though she wore an expression of childish annoyance. Suddenly, however, she repented of her meekness, and pulling on the reins, wheeled her horse around and followed the group.

As she rode, her right hand suddenly caught up the lassoo tied to the front of the saddle and threw it at the American ... a tug at the rope ... and Watson, to escape rolling out of the saddle, had to stop and turn his horse back; his companions meanwhile, rode on, unaware of his capture.

The thong still tight about his shoulders, Richard rode up to the girl; he was too much annoyed to free himself and ride away; better have it out!

“Come here,” she said smiling, as she drew in the rope. “Tell me what you mean by going around with that woman—without my permission!”

In a voice betraying his annoyance, Watson replied sharply,

“You have no rights over me, señorita Rojas! I shall go about with anyone I like!”

Celinda grew pale. She had not expected that tone. But very quickly she recovered herself, and imitating the young man’s serious manner, she replied,

“Mr. Watson, I have over you this right at least. I do care about what happens to you, and I don’t like to see you in bad company!”

Conquered by the girl’s comic seriousness, young Watson burst out laughing; and then Celinda laughed too.

“You know how I am, gringuito.... I don’t like to see you with that woman. Anyway she’s too old for you.... Swear to me that you’ll do what I ask—or I won’t let you go!”

Watson swore solemnly, with hand up-raised, making determined efforts to preserve his solemnity. Celinda loosened the rope and the two young people set off in the opposite direction to that taken by Elena and her party.

Since the day when the Frenchman had shown the marquesa the engineering works at the Dam, somewhat boastfully exhibiting his authority over the workmen, Pirovani had felt that he had lost ground; and he was eager at any cost to regain it.

An inspiration came to him one morning as he leaned on his elbow over the railing of his balcony. He knew now how to steal a march on his rival! Within half an hour one of the Italian’s foremen was in conference with his employer.

This fellow, a Chilian, crafty, ingenious in finding a way out of tight places, was frequently called upon by the contractor to handle difficult missions for him. He was known as “the Friar” by his compatriots, an allusion to his sojourn during one period of his adventurous life with the Dominicans at Valparaiso. As a result of this experience he not only knew how to read and write; he had also acquired a taste for unusual words, which he rendered more unusual still by stressing their syllables to his own taste. Soft-voiced and courteous-mannered, he peppered his conversation with poetic phrases. A little incident of two fatal knife thrusts administered to a friend had caused him to abandon his native land.

Foreseeing that his master’s summons would mean a long journey, he had ridden over on his excellent mare. As he dismounted, Pirovani came out, and gave his henchman a vigorous slap on the shoulder by way of indicating the affectionate confidence he felt in him.

“Listen, roto,” said the contractor, adopting the Chilians’ own ironical nickname for themselves, “I want you to get to the station as fast as you can. The train for Buenos Aires will go through in two hours, and you are going to take it.”

In spite of his half-breed impassivity, the Friar could not suppress a gesture of astonishment at hearing that he was being sent to the capital.

“Just as soon as you get there,” Pirovani continued, “give this list to my agent, Fernando—you know him. Tell him he is to buy these things at once, and give you the packages. You are to take the next train back. I expect you to make the round trip in five days.”

The Chilian listened with utmost gravity to these commands. He concluded from his employer’s manner that the mission being entrusted to him must be of tremendous importance and felt agreeably flattered at having been chosen to accomplish it.

Pirovani thrust a fistfull of bills into his hand and bade him good-by, turning his back on him with the brisk satisfaction of a general who has just commanded the manœuvres sure to bring a quick and decisive victory.

With a frown indicative of profound thought, the Friar went down the steps.

“This must be an order for steel for the works,” he reflected. “Or perhaps he’s sending me for money....”

Seeing that Pirovani had retired into his cottage, he gave up his attempt to think out a reason for his errand, deeming it simpler to open the envelope entrusted to him. Then he stood in the middle of the street reading the papers it contained.

His first glance at the several lines of the document did not enlighten him.

“One dozen bottles of ‘Jardin Florido’.”

“Idem, ‘Nymphs and Undines’.”

“Six dozen boxes of ‘Moonlight Soap’”....

The bewildered foreman went on with the remaining pages of the thick packet. He was beginning to understand; but the more he understood, the greater was his astonishment. Was it for this that he was being sent to Buenos Aires with orders to return at once?...

“Holy smoke!” he muttered, “this can’t all be for one female! There’s enough here for the Grand Turk’s harem!”

But, as the prospect of a trip to Buenos Aires pleased him, even though he would be able to remain there only a few hours, he cheerfully mounted his horse, and galloped off hot-foot to the station.

Of all the marquesa’s nightly callers, the calmest, to judge by appearance, was Moreno. As his work kept him busy only about one day a week, he spent the rest of the time reading in the window of the frame house where he had set up his office. He was a greedy and insatiable reader, devouring two and sometimes three novels daily. His passion for novels of all kinds was one of long standing; it had grown worse in the many hours of solitude he spent at la Presa. When everybody else went away to work in the morning, leaving him alone in his rustic office, he had no distraction of any other kind.

It was after the arrival of the Torre Biancas that his literary preferences, up to that time not clearly formulated, took definite shape. He determined henceforth to read nothing but those tales the scene of which was the so-called world of fashion, with heroes and heroines who were personages of supposedly high society. Moreover, now that he was rubbing elbows with some of the most distinguished representatives of Parisian high-life, he could judge of whether these novels were true descriptions of the subject they attempted to treat, or not.

At times he would stop reading and look up at the ceiling with an ecstatic expression, while a desire whispered in his brain,

“Oh, to be the hero of such a story! Oh, to be loved by a woman of high society!”

One afternoon when Moreno was least expecting him Canterac appeared at his door on horseback. As a rule he was at that time of day always at the dam. Something unusual must have happened ... the captain would not be likely otherwise to come and see him.

The horseman rode up to the window and shook hands with Moreno. With military abruptness, avoiding all preambles, he began,

“I wanted to talk to you a minute before tonight so you can get a letter off in today’s mail.... It’s about a present for the marquesa. Poor woman, in this desert of ours she has none of the things she’s accustomed to, and if you remember, a few weeks ago she happened to mention that she misses perfumes so much....”

The engineer took some papers out of a leather wallet, and gave them to Moreno.

“I clipped these out of some catalogues that the Galician fellow at the store gave me. Of course it took him a while to get them for me from Buenos Aires. I should have had them three days ago, so as to send the order by the other train. But, to come to the point.... You have a lot of friends in Buenos Aires, won’t you get one of them to buy these things for me? And take the money out of my pay for the month....”

Moreno with a nod, took the catalogue clippings.

“I hope Pirovani won’t get ahead of me in this matter,” Canterac went on. “The fellow is more insufferable every day.”

The captain had left him to return to his work at the Dam. Moreno neglected his novel a moment longer to examine the catalogue lists and prices; and as he did so his eyes grew round with amazement; in fact they became almost as round and blank as the shell-rimmed glasses covering them.

For the list marked was a long one; it contained not only perfumery, but all kinds of toilet articles. Evidently the Captain had plunged into the catalogue as though it were a newly discovered continent, appropriating everything he encountered.

“All this mounts up to more than a thousand pesos,” said the paymaster to himself. “And Canterac’s pay is only 800 pesos a month.”

Methodical and prudent as he was, a man of figures and accounts, he felt outraged at this lack of balance between income and expenditure. But after a little reflection he began to smile to himself. After all, this lavishness was easy to understand! The marquesa was so charming ... and she couldn’t be expected to live like an ordinary woman!

But all the rest of the afternoon Moreno was uneasy; he couldn’t keep his attention on the novel he held in his hands. It would waver and slowly sink to the table in front of him, thickly strewn with business papers. Finally, with a frown, he picked up a sheet of writing paper and with the expression of a child fearful of being caught telling a whopper, he began to write—

“Dear Clara:

Send me, as soon as you get this, the frock coat I had made when we were married. Things have changed here considerably. Quite important persons are coming this way now and there are a good many parties given for them. Naturally I want to make as good an appearance as anybody else. It’s really quite important for my advancement that I should....”

Here Moreno scratched his head with his pen handle; then, with a remorseful expression, he went on writing until he had covered all four pages of his letter paper.

Every evening now at the marquesa’s tertulias, Pirovani betrayed the indecision and preoccupation of one who has something on his mind of which he must speak, but whose emotions get the better of him before he can begin.

After a week of hesitancy however he decided to postpone his offer no longer; he reached this decision precisely on the evening when Moreno counted on enjoying one of the most triumphant moments of his life.

Elena was wearing one of those evening dresses of hers the effect of which she was constantly varying by the addition or removal of some ornament so that her costumes always appeared new. Canterac and Torre Bianca wore dinner dress, and Pirovani was displaying the majestic cut of his swallow-tail. But, alas! He was no longer the only one to be so arrayed; for, at the last moment, Moreno had arrived wearing the evening clothes sent down by his wife. It was true that his clothes were modest enough, and somewhat the worse for numerous years of service and moth balls. But still they were formal evening dress, and robbed the contractor of the distinction of being the only guest present to be thus attired; as a consequence, Pirovani was so nervous that he chattered like a magpie.

Watson and Robledo had compromised with their surroundings by putting on dark suits; they felt obliged to change their clothes every evening now so as not to strike too glaring a note in the picture of incongruous elegance that was being created out of respect for Elena’s presence.

Watson was tired out by his day’s work; he was preoccupied moreover with thinking of the meeting he had had in the late afternoon with Celinda near her father’s ranch. Finally, after several more or less disguised yawns, he got up to go to his own quarters. Elena could not conceal her annoyance when he returned her look of cordial interest with a coolly courteous bow, as though it were without the slightest regret that he left her charming presence.

As, at that very moment, Canterac was engaged in conversation with the Marques, and as Moreno was discussing something with Robledo, Pirovani seized his opportunity.

“I haven’t dared say anything before, Marquesa, but now I feel that I must.... This frame is unworthy of your beauty and elegance....”

He gave a depreciative glance about at the room and its furnishings.

“If you like, my house is at your disposal from tomorrow on. It is yours, marquesa. I can live in the house of one of my employees.”

Elena, for some reason, did not betray great astonishment. One might have said that she had been expecting this offer for a long time, or even that she had been subtly suggesting it to the contractor. However, she went through various gestures of protest, at the same time smiling at Pirovani, and letting her glance rest caressingly on him.

Finally she weakened before his arguments, and promised to consider the suggestion and consult her husband about it; she could not decide alone....

While Robledo and Watson were at work the next day, she kept her promise.

In spite of the submissiveness with which Torre Bianca usually accepted his wife’s suggestions, he indicated in no uncertain terms that this particular one scandalized him. Certainly he could not accept Pirovani’s generosity!

“What will people think of his giving up his own house to us? Everyone knows that he takes such enjoyment in it!”

No; he shook his head emphatically. Besides, all his class feeling awoke at the thought of being under obligations to a man, for whom he felt no dislike, it is true, but whose tastes he considered rather vulgar.

But Elena became irritable.

“Your friend Robledo is constantly doing us favors, and yet it doesn’t seem to occur to you that people might think that strange! Why do you think it so extraordinary that a new friend should express his interest in us by letting us live in his house?”

And Torre Bianca, who was so accustomed to yield on every occasion to his wife’s wishes, felt himself yielding once more at these words; nevertheless he persisted for awhile longer in voicing his objections to the idea, so that finally, by way of settling the matter, Elena said,

“Of course I understand your scruples ... but it isn’t as though the house were being given to us ... it is simply rented. I insisted on that point to Pirovani. You will pay him when the irrigation project begins to bring us in some money.”

With a gesture of resignation, the marqués surrendered. Particularly noticeable at the moment was his air of discouragement; and he looked aged and sick, as though some secret malady were eating away his life.

“Do as you like. I have no desire but to see you happy.”

The following day Elena called on Pirovani. It had been arranged that she was to see the house, and look it over thoroughly before moving.

The contractor, pale with emotion at being alone with her at last, received her at the head of the stairs, and escorted her through the various rooms. Elena, playing her part as mistress of the establishment, at once ordered certain pieces of furniture to be moved about; the Italian, meanwhile, overcome with admiration of her taste, looked significantly at Sebastiana the housekeeper; he wanted her too to share his ecstasy over the titled lady’s exquisite discrimination.

Finally they reached the bedroom that was to be Elena’s henceforth. On the dressing table and chairs, spread out in every available space, were innumerable packages all carefully wrapped in tissue paper, tied with ribbon, and sealed; and about each package hovered an aroma of flowers and spices. Pirovani was opening them eagerly, revealing dozens of flasks of perfumes, and boxes of delicate and extravagant soaps, as well as handsome toilet articles; all the enormous order, in fact, brought from Buenos Aires, and that now with its gilded labels, its gorgeously lined cases, its glittering cut glass, caressed the eye and at the same time flattered the sense with its perfumes suggestive of all the marvellous blossoms of a Persian garden.

Elena passed from surprise to amazement; finally she burst out laughing, uttering exclamations of amusement not untinged with mockery.

“How generous of you! But there’s enough here to start a perfume shop!”

Pirovani, quite white by this time, and growing bolder under the marquesa’s smiles, tried to get possession of her hand. But Elena, with a malicious glance in her dark eyes, checkmated him at once.

“I know that this is a real present,” she said, “and that you are not like those vulgar men who sell their gifts.... You want nothing from me but appreciation, I am sure!”

Then, taking pity on the Italian’s embarrassment—alas! he had, as well he knew, laid himself open to the charge of vulgarity, according to the marquesa’s definition—she extended her right hand graciously toward his lips.

“That is for you,” she said.

But he had not yet learned how to kiss a lady’s hand with the proper mixture of fervor and restraint; and Elena, abruptly putting an end to his homage, shook her finger at him....

They went on then to the other rooms of the house, and the contractor, as though repentant of his audacity, meekly followed his guest about; and yet there were moments when he wished he had been more audacious still; but above his conflicting sentiments persisted a sense of triumph. The marquesa’s white and fragrant hand had actually been offered to his lips, and with what a gesture!

Ah, what good fortune to be able to offer a woman like that a house, and servants, and the luxurious articles so indispensable to her comfort!... With a smile Pirovani contemplated his recent success, and dreamed of other successes to come....

CHAPTER VIII

PIROVANI’S house took on an entirely new appearance after the Torre Biancas moved in. The window panes shone now and through them could be seen new and gay-colored curtains. The servants no longer lolled about the verandah, unkempt and dirty, performing their household duties in full sight of the street. The presence of the beautiful and elegant new mistress of the house had inspired them all with a desire to present a somewhat less untidy appearance. Even the fat Sebastiana “wore her Sunday clothes every day,” as her friends put it.

The community around the Dam enjoyed other novelties too after Elena had taken possession of the contractor’s bungalow. There was in Pirovani’s parlor a grand piano of modest dimensions which until then had remained locked. It represented a purchase the Italian had made in Buenos Aires to oblige a friend who had invested too much money in his stock of musical instruments. Besides, the contractor had heard that no parlor was complete without a piano, but of course he had always thought he would have one with perpendicular strings and an upright case. However, on his friend’s recommendation, he had purchased the handsome instrument, although he had small hope that any one would ever come to the Dam who would prove capable of playing it.

Elena however paid it a great deal of attention, sitting in front of it for hours at a time, letting her fingers run up and down the keyboard, while the “romances” she had learned when she was a young girl came back to her; but invariably she interrupted them to dash off a fragment of the popular music she had heard in Paris before she came away.

Inspired by this evocation of her more youthful past, she sometimes added her voice to that of the instrument. When this happened Sebastiana and the other servants left their work in the corral or the balconies, and cautiously creeping nearing and nearer the drawing room listened with softened expressions and glances of admiration to the sounds issuing from it, subdued like the creatures of the wood who listened to Orpheus’ lyre.

The neighbors too yielded to the spell. As soon as it was night and the workmen had finished their meal, the women and children would start out for Pirovani’s. Squatting on the ground at a little distance they would gaze eagerly at the windows that glowed red from the lamp within. If some of the children grew impatient, and began their own games again, their mothers would cry out,

“Be still, you little gallows birds, the lady’s going to sing!”

And an almost religious emotion passed through them at the sound of the piano keys and Elena’s voice; for the melody that penetrated through the wooden walls to the crowd in the dark street seemed a message from another world; so many of them had, for years, heard no music but that of twanging guitars at the boliche.

Then, impelled by admiration and twinges of desire, some of the men would join the groups in the street. They were the same men who looked with indifference at the girl from the Rojas ranch with her boy’s clothes and boy’s ways; but this woman, when she rode by in her trim riding skirt, aroused their enthusiasm. What a woman, the marquesa de Torre Bianca! Some curves about her!

And, as they listened to her singing, they stood gaping with sensuous delight, firmly believing that only a beautiful woman could utter tones such as those vibrating in their ears....

A week after the Torre Biancas had moved into their new quarters, Sebastiana announced to her friends that henceforth the señora marquesa was going to be at home once a week just like the great ladies in Buenos Aires. This announcement was made in such fashion that the gossips of La Presa took it into their heads that these weekly parties were going to be extraordinary occasions. Scarcely was dinner over on the appointed night, when groups began to gather before the illuminated windows. Some of the women stood with hands raised to their ears so as to hear better, and they did not hesitate, by means of severe elbow thrusts, to impose silence on their chattering neighbors.

While her guests were arriving, Elena, at the piano, was singing sentimental lyrics of a bygone period.

The first to present themselves were Canterac and Moreno. The latter, in order to complete his evening attire, had thought it necessary to don a silk hat. Pirovani could top off his dress suit with a crush hat if he liked! Just the same the marquesa, who was a woman of such distinction, couldn’t help noticing things like that!... details of course, but how quickly they betray bad taste!

As Canterac stood on the first step of the stairway he said to his companion,

“I oughtn’t to go into this house, belonging as it does to that schemer Pirovani, whom I thoroughly detest. But I was afraid the marquesa wouldn’t like it if I didn’t come to her party.”

Moreno, the friend of everybody, and incapable of animosity, took up the defense of the absent contractor.

“But that Italian is a good fellow! I am certain he likes you very much.”

Canterac’s reply to these conciliating words was a threatening gesture,

“The fellow, tactless as he is, seems to take pains to cross my path.... There’s something coming to him....”

They entered the house and the marqués came forward to welcome them. Then they passed into the drawing-room, where all three men stood waiting, while Elena went on with her song as though she had not heard them come in.

As he approached the bungalow Robledo broke into a broad smile at sight of Pirovani in a new fur overcoat, and a brand new top hat, ordered from Bahia Blanca—for this occasion—as though some familiar spirit had informed him of his friend Moreno’s disparaging thoughts!

From the groups of curiosity-seekers, half-hidden in the shadow, came bursts of laughter and whispers. Some of them were making fun of the tube of shining silk which the contractor had put on his head; others were admiring it, their starved vanity making them feel that somehow this high silk hat was adding to the importance of the life they all led out there in the desert.

“Here I am, a visitor in my own house,” said Pirovani laughing, and as though startled by the extravagant novelty of his performance.

“You made a mistake in giving it up,” replied Robledo drily.

Pirovani assumed a superior air.

“You must admit, my dear fellow, that your quarters weren’t quite the proper place for a lady, at least a lady of such distinction.... Even though I never went to college, I know what a man with any claims to being anybody owes to such a woman, and that’s why....”

With a shrug Robledo moved on as though he did not wish to hear further. The contractor puffed along behind him, and, pointing towards the glowing windows, he exclaimed in a transport of enthusiasm;

“What a voice! What an artist, eh?”

Once more Robledo shrugged, and then both men went into the house.

On reaching the drawing room they joined the other three men who were standing there listening. No sooner had Elena uttered the last note than the contractor burst into applause amid loud exclamations of enthusiasm. Canterac, Robledo, and Moreno, although less explosively, also expressed their admiration, each in his own fashion.

It at once became evident that in the new house the gatherings were going to be less simple and austere than in Robledo’s lodgings. Sebastiana, who held firmly to the opinion that mate was the remedy for every kind of infirmity, as well as the supreme delight of the human palate, was forced to serve cups of boiling water with a thing called tea in it to the guests.... The two little half-breed servants followed shyly in Sebastiana’s wake, bearing sugar and cakes.

Under pretext of attending to the serving of the refreshments, Elena came and went among those guests of hers, whose eyes avidly followed her about as she balanced her cup, sometimes spilling a little of its contents on the saucer. Her three privileged admirers tried to engage her in conversation; but, gently evading them, she always brought it about that sooner or later, they found themselves carrying on a dialogue with her husband.... Meanwhile, she was in pursuit of the only man who, so it seemed, cared nothing about talking to her, and who had been silent most of the evening. Finally, by skilful manœuvres, she found herself sitting at the far end of the room with Robledo beside her.

“Evidently Watson didn’t care to come,” Elena was saying. “I am more firmly convinced every day that he doesn’t like me, and I sometimes think that you don’t like me very much either....”

Robledo remonstrated, more in gestures than words, at this accusation; but as Elena was pleased to make herself out the victim of an unjust antipathy on the part of the two business associates, the Spaniard finally replied,

“Watson and I are your husband’s friends, and on his account it alarms us to see how lightly you arouse certain equivocal hopes in all these men who come to see you.”

Elena began to laugh, as if pleased by Robledo’s words, and the grave tone in which he uttered them.

“You needn’t worry about that. A woman of experience, who knows the world as I know it, isn’t likely to compromise herself with any of these people you speak of.”

And she cast an ironic glance at her three admirers who were still sitting beside her husband.

“Of course I do not allow myself to make any suppositions,” Robledo continued in the same tone, “I simply see the present, just as in Paris I saw ... and I am a little worried about the future.”

Elena could not decide, as she looked at the engineer, whether to continue to treat the subject lightly or to become angry. Finally she took up the dialogue again with the grave expression of one who has been offended by the tone of the discussion.

“I do not think myself either better or worse than other women. It is simply that I was born to live in luxury, and I have never in my whole life met anyone able to give me all that I wanted.”

During a long pause they looked at one another; then she added,

“The men who wanted to win me could never give me all that I need in life; and those who might have satisfied my desires never noticed me.”

She lowered her head as though her courage had suddenly abandoned her.

“You have no idea what my life has been.... I need wealth, I cannot live without money; and I spent the best part of my youth running after it ... uselessly! Just as I thought I held it in my hand, it vanished, to reappear again farther on.... Again I had to give chase.... And again.... Always the same story!”

She was silent for a few moments, assembling her thoughts; then she added, as though making a confession,

“Men cannot understand the anxieties and desires of the women of today. We need so much more to live on than the women of former times! An automobile and a pearl necklace are the modern woman’s uniform. Without them any women who thinks at all knows that she is unhappy, helpless.... Sometimes I had these indispensable articles, but I never felt sure of them.... I never could count on being able to keep them ... there was always the prospect of losing them the next day. And we all need to hope, don’t we, in order to live! So I am living on the hope now that my husband will make a fortune ... even though I cannot foresee when that might happen. Yet even so, it is enough to help me stand this horrible exile.”

Then, in a tone of discouragement, she went on,

“And what is he likely to make? Sous, perhaps, where you make thousands of pesos! No ... I ought never to have married Federico!”

She raised her head and smiled sadly at Robledo.

“Perhaps it would have meant happiness for me to have met a man like you, spirited, energetic, able to master his destiny. And you, to become all that you had it in you to be, ought to have had a woman to inspire you....”

It was now Robledo’s turn to smile.

“It is a little late to talk of that.”

But she looked at him obstinately while she protested at his words. Is it ever too late for anything while one lives? And there are men of such supreme energy that they are like tropical regions where death is known but not old age, and they are forever renewing themselves, like the springtime. They have that commanding will which imagination obeys; and imagination is the artist who touches up the dull grey canvas of existence with the colors of his crazy palette.

Elena’s face was close to him, her eyes searching his. For a moment he was troubled. Then, with a gesture of negation, he took possession of himself.

“What you say, my dear friend, is very interesting. But men who are really energetic do not care to be revived to false springtimes. That always brings complications.”

As they went on talking she alluded again to her past experiences.

“If I were to tell you my life! Of course every woman cherishes the belief that her history needs only to be adequately told in order to make the most interesting novel ever written. I don’t pretend that my experiences have invariably been interesting. But they have made me unhappy because there was always such a disproportion between what I thought I deserved and what life gave me.”

She paused, as if a painful thought had suggested itself.

“Don’t think that I am one of those parvenues who hunger for the pleasures and comforts that they have never enjoyed. Quite the contrary! I need luxury and money in order to live, because I had them when I was a child. Then, when I was a young girl I was very poor. What struggles I went through to win my way back to the position I had formerly occupied! The position I had been educated to.... And the struggle never ends.... All kinds of catastrophes repeat themselves until I am sick of them ... and all the while I am farther and farther away from the place that should belong to me in life. Here I am now, in one of the most god-forsaken corners of the earth, leading an existence that must be very like that of the people who lived in the most primitive times.... And yet you blame me!”

Robledo took up his own defence.

“I am your friend, and your husband’s. When I see you heading in a wrong direction, I merely give you some good advice. The game you are playing with these men is a dangerous one.”

He indicated clearly enough that he was talking about the men sitting at the other end of the room with Torre Bianca.

“Moreover, before you came, life here was monotonous, it is true, but it was at least peaceful and fraternal. Now your presence seems to have changed these men. They look at one another with scarcely concealed hostility, and I am afraid that their rivalry, which up to the present is merely childish, will sooner or later take a turn toward the tragic. You forget that we are living far removed from other human groups and this isolation makes us by slow degrees revert to barbarism. Our passions, domesticated as they are in city life, lose their manners here, and run wild. Take care! It is dangerous to play with them as though they were feeble toys.”

She laughed at his fears; and there was in her laugh something scornful. She couldn’t understand such love of caution in a strong man.

“You must let me have my court! I need to have people who admire me about me, or I can’t live.... Yes, like a pampered actress, if you like. What would become of me if I couldn’t have the fun of coquetting and flirting?”

Then frowning, and in an irritable voice she inquired,

“What else is there to do here, will you tell me? You have your work, your battle with the river, your contests from time to time with the workmen. All day long I am bored to death. On some of those interminable afternoons I cannot get away from the thought of killing myself ... and it is only when night finally arrives and these admirers of mine come to see me, that I find this desert endurable. In some other part of the world no doubt I should laugh at them, but here I find them interesting. They are my only comfort in this horrible loneliness....”

With a mocking smile she looked in the direction of the three men; and then she added,

“Don’t worry, Robledo. I am not likely to lose my head over any one of them. I know what I am doing.”

And, somewhat bitterly, she compared herself to a traveller on the Patagonian table-lands who, with only one cartridge in his revolver, might be attacked by several of the vagabonds who prowl about in the mountains. If he were to fire he would get rid of only one enemy, and leave himself quite defenceless against the attacks of the others. Wasn’t it better to prolong the situation, and threaten them all without firing?

“You needn’t fear that I shall take any one of these men for my lover. They are not the kind to lose one’s head over. But even though some one of them should interest me, I would be cautious, for fear of what the others might say and do when they found that there was no chance for them. It’s far better to keep them all restlessly happy with hope.”

And, noticing that her prolonged conversation with Robledo was arousing uneasiness among the other visitors, and in fact quite scandalizing them, she got up and moved towards them. All three at once came towards her, surrounding her as though they were going to fight with one another for each one of her words and gestures.

It was after midnight when the marquesa’s first tertulia came to an end. The lateness of the hour was unprecedented in the social annals of La Presa. It was only on those Saturday nights when the workmen received their bi-monthly pay that some of the Galician’s customers stayed out as late as that, and usually it was because they couldn’t get home.

All next day Sebastiana went about half asleep, and with lagging feet, for she had got up at dawn as usual, in spite of having stayed up the night before until the last guest had gone.

She stood on the balcony scolding one of the little half-breeds, who “with all her noise was going to wake up the mistress,” when suddenly she seemed to forget her anger, and stood, one hand over her eyes, peering at the street. A horse was rearing there, too abruptly reined in by his rider, who was quite carelessly waving a hand at the voluble house-keeper.

“Mi señorita ... I never know her with those clothes! How is my little one?”

And hastily she clambered down the steps and crossed the street to welcome Celinda Rojas.

Mistress and servant had not met since the day Sebastiana had left the ranch. Out of spite for don Rojas, the half-breed made haste to enumerate all the advantages of her new position.

“It’s a fine house I’m in, señorita mía! No offence to your own, of course. Money flows through it like water in the irrigation ditch. And the mistress is a fine gringa, they say she was born a marquesa over there in her country. The Italian fellow, they say too, is a demon with his workmen, but he seems half foolish over the señora marquesa, and he takes good care that she lacks for nothing. Last night we had a party with music. I thought of my pretty dove when I heard it, and I said to myself, ‘How my little mistress would love to hear this marquesa sing!’”

Celinda nodded as she listened, as though what she heard excited her curiosity, making her eager to hear more.

Meanwhile Sebastiana, so as further to impress her, went on to enumerate the guests who had been present at the party.

“Haven’t you forgotten someone?” the girl asked when Sebastiana came to a pause. “Wasn’t don Ricardo there, the young man who works with don Manuel, the engineer?”

The half-breed shook her head.

“No. I never once the whole evening long saw the gringo.”

Then she burst out laughing, slapping the enormous muscles of her thighs, which served to bring them into still greater relief under the thin stuff of her skirt.

“I knew it, niniña, I knew it! I’ve heard how you and the gringo are always riding around together, and how not a day goes by that you don’t see each other. But if ever you give him your lips to kiss, little one, be sure to pick out a spot where no one can see you, to do it in. These people around here talk too much, it’s meat and drink to them. And don’t forget that those folks down at the river have very long spectacles, and they can see for miles and miles....”

Celinda blushed, and at the same time protested at her nurse’s insinuations.

“Yes, he’s a fine young man,” the half-breed went on. “That don Ricardo is a handsome gringo, and he’d make a grand husband for you if don Carlos, with his contrary nature, doesn’t stand in the way of your marrying him. When these gringos from America don’t drink, they make fine husbands. I had a friend who married one of them, and she leads him about by the nose. And I know another one who....”

But Celinda wasn’t interested in Sebastiana’s friends and interrupted her.

“So don Ricardo wasn’t here last night?”

“Neither last night, nor any other night. I’ve never seen him around here at all.”

Sebastiana looked at the girl with a gleam of amusement in her eyes, while a good-natured smile spread over her wide, copper-colored face.

“So you’re a little bit jealous, child? No need to blush about that. We’re all the same when we’re in love with a man. The first thing we think about is that some one is going to take him away from us.... But you’ve no reason to worry.... A pearl the like of you, niña, mía! The lady in the house there is handsome too, especially when she’s just got through fixing her hair, and putting all those things that smell so good and that came all the way from Buenos Aires on her face.... But, when you are in the game, what hope has she? Didn’t I see my little girl here come into the world, you might say? And I’ll bet the señora marquesa can’t remember when she was born.”

Then, as a result of her own thoughts, she considered it well to add,

“To tell the truth, I don’t think the marquesa is so old, at that—but anyone would seem old alongside of you, precious! We can’t all be rose-buds!”

She stopped talking for a moment while she looked about, and then lowering her voice, and standing on the tips of her toes, she said, as joyfully as any gossip who has found someone to whom to impart a tit-bit, “You must know, pretty one, that there are plenty of them running after her ... but don Ricardo is none of those! The poor gringo has enough on his hands looking after you, my jasmine-blossom! The others are all chasing after the marquesa like ostriches ... the captain, and the Italian, and the government fellow, the one who always carries so many papers.... All of them out of their heads and bristling at sight of one another like so many dogs. The husband never sees a thing ... and she laughs at them all and has a good time making them squirm.... To tell the truth I don’t think she cares a picayune for any one of the whole lot that comes to the house.”

But Celinda’s uneasiness was not set at rest by these words. On the contrary she protested mentally,

“How can Richard Watson be compared with these people?”

Then she felt that she must express a part at least of what she was thinking.

“It may be true,” she observed, “that she doesn’t care much about the others, but Richard is younger than any of them, and I know that these women who have run about a lot in the world, and are beginning to grow old ... well, they’re often very capricious!”

CHAPTER IX

THE notorious Manos Duras lived on an elevation of the mesa from which he could see the distant limits of Patagonia on the far horizon, and below, the wide, twisting curves of the river, beyond which stretched one end of the Rojas ranch.

His ranch-house, of adobe, was surrounded by other huts, or hovels, and a few corrals fenced in by old stockades, but only on rare occasions was any cattle to be found in them.

Everyone in the country knew where the ranch of Manos Duras was located; but very few ever cared to visit it, for the region had a bad name. Sometimes those who with a certain trepidation passed near by, felt reassured when they saw how solitary the place was. On the road leading up to the ranch house there were none of those barking and leaping long-haired dogs with blood-shot eyes and pointed ears who usually accompany the cowboy. Nor were any horses to be seen nibbling at the sparse grass in the corrals.

Manos Duras was away. Possibly he was roving up and down the banks of the Colorado where cattle were more abundant than along the Rio Negro. Or possibly he was roaming among the spurs of the Andes, going to pay a visit to his friends in the Bolson valley, settled for the most part by Chilian adventurers, or on his way to make a call on his acquaintances along the shores of the Andene lakes. These excursions of his to the mountains were usually undertaken for the purpose of disposing, in Chile, of the cattle he had “rustled” in the Argentine.

But at other times the Manos Duras ranch contained an extraordinary diversity of inhabitants. Wandering gauchos like himself took up their quarters in the adobe huts for weeks at a time without anyone’s ever discovering for a certainty where they came from nor where they were going.

The comisario of La Presa was beginning to feel uneasy about these mysterious visitors. He got little rest, for not a night went by that he did not fear that some scandalous depradation might occur. Yet day after day passed, and nothing happened to ruffle the calm of the settlement and its outskirts. At the gaucho’s ranch numerous heads of cattles were sold and skinned, and Manos Duras provided the whole region with meat. But, as no complaints of theft reached him, don Roque refrained from any investigation as to the source of the bandit’s flocks and herds.

Then one fine morning the gaucho’s companions disappeared, and Manos Duras continued living in solitude on his ranch; at last he too disappeared for a while, to the comisario’s infinite relief.

Suddenly he reappeared again, with three companions, evil-looking specimens out of whom no one could get a word. At the Galician’s it was asserted that they came from a distant valley of the mountain chain.

“They’re three good fellows who are out of luck,” said the gaucho. “Three pals of mine who are going to live up at the ranch until the white-livered rotters down yonder get through telling lies about them.”

One day of intense heat, Manos Duras sprang on his horse to go up to La Presa to make some purchases.

The Patagonian summer had begun with the violent ardor it displays in lands rarely cooled by rain, but where the winter temperatures go down to many degrees below zero. The parching soil seemed to tremble under the intensity of the sun’s hot brilliance. So strong was the radiation that straight lines took on a wave-motion in the dazzling glare, and the outlines of the mountains, the buildings and the people in the streets became oddly changed. These tricks of the blinding light doubled or even tripled the objects in the scene, giving the impression that this desert land was a region of lakes, where everything was reflected in a series of glittering surfaces. The mirages of the desert, these, which attract the attention of even the sons of the soil, so odd and capricious are the forms which these optical illusions assume.

Far in the distance, behind the deep gash cut by the river, almost on a level with the horizon line, lay what looked like a long, dark-colored worm with a tuft of cotton on its head.

Manos Duras stopped short to look at it. That was not the day on which the mail train usually came in from Buenos Aires.

“It must be a freight from Bahia Blanca,” he said to himself.

He could make it out quite plainly although it was still many miles away from la Presa, and it had as many miles again to go before it would stop at Fuerte Sarmiento. In this land the power of vision seemed enormously increased; the retina seemed capable here of enclosing a vast extent of territory; here distance seemed to have lost its significance. It meant little compared with the importance it assumed in other parts of the world.

After gazing a few seconds at the slowly moving train miles away, the gaucho started off once more at a gallop. To shorten the way, he was accustomed to ride through the out-lying part of the Rojas ranch stretched between his land and the settlement beyond. With the coolness that was so characteristic of him he turned his horse down a trail that only a practised eye could have discovered between the tough matorral brush.

But don Rojas was also at that hour riding about his property, looking it over and making calculations for the future.

The part of his estate that was on the plateau would never amount to anything, he reflected. That beggared soil could never provide fodder for more than a very limited number of cattle. His herds were “criollos,” as he called them disparagingly; that is to say they were spare, heavy-boned beasts, hard-hoofed, with clumsy horns; in short they were adapted to their rigorous surroundings, and could get along on sparse pasturage; these were the degenerate descendents of the cattle that, centuries before, the Spanish colonists had brought over in their small sailing vessels.

He was thinking regretfully of the prize herds of his father’s estate, of the huge steers, flat backed as your hand, short-horned, the solid flesh fairly bursting through their sleek hides—mountains of beefsteak, as he called them.... Then he began thinking of the miracle that was to be wrought on his lands below when the irrigation ditches brought them the water that was to transform them, releasing their fertility.... Alfalfa would flourish there as in the land of Canaan, and here, along the banks of the Rio Negro he would be able at last to reproduce the marvels of scientific breeding accomplished on the ranches near Buenos Aires; then, instead of thin, hard-hided “criollos” he would have herds of the finest cattle, the product of crossing the best breeds to be found anywhere in the world. With all the delight of an artist in polishing off his creations don Carlos brooded over this transformation that in his mind’s eye he saw taking place on his barren ranch, when suddenly he saw a rider approaching him.

He raised his hand to shade his eyes and could scarcely contain himself when he saw who it was.

“By the.... What? That robber Manos Duras!”

The gaucho as he drew near, raised his hand to his sombrero, in greeting, then spurred his horse ahead.

After a moment of hesitation don Carlos also started off at top speed, cut across the gaucho’s path, and obliged him to stop.

“Who gave you permission to come on my property?” he shouted in a voice that was shrill and shaking with anger.

Manos Duras made no attempt to reply, merely looking at the rancher with the same silent insolence he used towards others. His bold eyes however avoided meeting those of don Carlos. As though offering excuses, he replied in a low tone that he was aware of the fact that he had no right to pass through there without the owner’s permission, but the short-cut eliminated a long and round-about bit of the road to la Presa. Then, as a final explanation he added:

“Besides, don Carlos lets everyone ride through here....”

“Everyone but you,” was the aggressive reply. “If ever I find you again on my land, you’ll get one of these bullets!”

This reply put an end to the gaucho’s assumed meekness. He looked contemptuously at Rojas, and said with slow distinctness,

“You are an old man, that’s why you talk to me like that.”

Don Carlos took his revolver from his belt and pointed it at the gaucho’s breast.

“And you are nothing but a cattle thief.... Why they should all be afraid of you is more than I can understand. But if ever again you steal one of my steers, old man as I am, I’ll make you pay for it!”

As the rancher was still pointing his revolver at him, and as the expression of his face allowed no doubt whatever concerning his determination to carry out his threats, the gaucho did not dare move a hand toward his belt. The slightest motion on his part might call forth a shot.... So he contented himself with giving don Carlos a venomous glance, and saying very low,

“We’ll meet again, boss, and we’ll have more time to talk.”

With this he dug his spurs into his horse and set off at a gallop, without looking back, while don Carlos remained holding his revolver in his right hand.

Near the river however the gaucho had a more agreeable encounter. He noticed three riders coming towards him, and stopped to see who they might be.

The marquesa had felt impelled to accept an invitation to go once more to the works to see the progress of the dam. Things were now at such a pass between Pirovani and the French engineer that she had felt it necessary to her own peace to sooth the latter by accepting his suggestion that she ride out with him. For his part, he felt that he must show her once again that he was after all the directing spirit of the enterprise, and that the contractor, on that ground at least, had to submit himself very often to his commands.

While they were on these excursions the Captain could talk much more freely to Elena than at her house. The fact that the marqués was busy with the work of planning the canal system aroused all sorts of hopes and illusions in the captain’s breast. If only the marquesa would consent to riding with him, alone, along the river bank....

But, as though she had divined his thoughts, she insisted that Moreno go with them. Only on that condition would she consent....

“Because you see, you’re dangerous, señor Canterac,” said Elena, pretending to be afraid, and at the same time laughing at her pretended fear.

“I’ll go with you only if this friend of ours, who is the father of a family, and a thoroughly serious sort of person, goes along with us.”

Moreno, pleased at having been included, but at the same time somewhat vexed at being described in such terms, rode along behind Elena, who paid not the slightest attention to him. She remembered him only when Canterac became too vehement in his attentions, riding close to her horse and grasping her hand, or attempting other more or less daring gallantries.

“Moreno,” she would manage to say, while the Captain was manœuvering for place, “ride forward and stay on my left.... I don’t want the Captain so near ... anyway they’re too bold! I don’t like military men!”

All three stopped their attempts at conversation to look intently at Manos Duras who was waiting motionless at the side of the road. Moreno knew who he was and murmured his name to Elena, whose interest in the gaucho was so keen that she yielded to her impulse to speak to him.

“So you are the famous Manos Duras of whom we have heard so often?”

The horseman seemed a little disturbed by Elena’s words, and more so by her smile. He took off his sombrero with a reverential gesture—“as though he were in front of a miracle-working picture,” thought Moreno—Then, in a theatrical manner that was with him quite spontaneous, he replied,

“I am that unhappy man, señora, and this present moment is the happiest in my life.”

He looked at her with eyes in which she could plainly read a strange mixture of worship and desire; and she smiled with pleasure at the barbaric homage she was receiving.

Canterac, who thought the conversation ridiculous, indicated his impatience by teasing his horse and protesting every few moments that they ought to be getting on. But Elena did not choose to hear him, and, with smiling interest, continued her conversation with the gaucho.

“They tell dreadful stories about you.... Are they true? How many murders have you really committed?”

“Black calumnies, señora!” Manos Duras replied, looking straight into her eyes. “But, if there are any murders I can commit for you, you have only to ask!”

Elena seemed thoroughly pleased by this reply, and said with a look at Canterac,

“How gallant the man is, in his way! You can’t deny that such offers as these are pleasant to hear....”

But the engineer for some reason seemed more and more irritated by the familiarity of this conversation between Elena and the cattle-rustler. Repeatedly he tried to nose his horse between the mounts of the other two, so as to put an end to the dialogue, but each time, with a gesture of impatience, Elena checked him.

Seeing that she was bent on continuing her conversation with Manos Duras he turned to Moreno; he had to express his anger to someone.

“This fellow is too presumptuous! We’ll have to give him a lesson!”

The government employee accepted without reservation the allusion to the gaucho’s presumption, but he merely shrugged at the suggestion of teaching him better. What could they do to this terrible bandit, if even the comisario had to show him a certain respect?

“You ought at least to stop them from buying his meat at the settlement. Boycott him, that’s part of the answer!”

Moreno nodded with alacrity. The suggestion was easy enough to carry out, if that was all that he would be asked to do....

Finally Elena moved on, bidding farewell to the gaucho with a coquetry excited by his emotion and the wolfish desire she saw in his eyes....

“Poor fellow! How interesting to meet him like this.”

And while the three riders went on, Manos Duras still remained motionless by the road. He wanted to look a while longer at that woman. A grave, thoughtful expression had come over his face as though he had a presentiment that this meeting, in some way or other, was to affect his life. But when Elena and her companions passed behind a hillock of sand and disappeared from his range of vision, the gaucho no longer felt the dazzling stimulation of her presence. He smiled cynically to himself while pictures of barbaric lubricity passed through his mind, driving out his doubts and restoring to him his accustomed boldness.

“And why not?” he said to himself. “This is a woman, like those that dance at the boliche ... aren’t they all the same?”

Elena and her escorts went on along the river bank. Suddenly Elena straightened up in her saddle so as to be able to see farther into the distance.

In a meadow edged on the river side with young willows, were two horses, saddled but not hitched. A man and a boy stood at the far end of the meadow practising throwing the rope. The lariat they were using seemed to be a light one, less heavy and rapid in the air than the lassoos of woven leather that the native cow-punchers used.

More by instinct than by strength of sight, Elena recognized the boy. Undoubtedly that was Flor de Rio Negro teaching Watson to throw the rope, and laughing at the gringo’s clumsy attempts to master the whirling, snake-like coils. Richard too, now that Torre Bianca went daily to direct the canal work, was enjoying more liberty, and was using it to follow the Rojas girl about in her rides and share in her childish games.

Indicating to her companions that they were not to follow her, Elena rode towards the meadow.

Celinda however was quicker to notice her than was Watson. With a sudden right-about she turned her back on the intruder, and at the same time ordered Watson to fix one of her spurs, which, so she said, had come loose.

The youth, after kneeling at her feet for a moment, found the spur quite firmly in place, and was about to get up. But she was determined to keep him on his knees.

“I tell you, gringuito, that I’m going to lose it! Please fasten it better!”

And it was only when she saw that Elena, offended, and well aware of the girl’s hostility and strategem, had turned her horse about and was riding away, that she allowed him to get up.

A little before sunset Elena’s party rode up the main street of the town. In front of Pirovani’s house, which she now looked upon as hers, Elena dismounted, leaning on Moreno, who, as she stepped to the ground, had anticipated the Captain’s move to help her.

Offended, the Frenchman saluted with military abruptness, and rode away without waiting until Elena had gone into the house. Another day spoiled! He was furious with the others, and with himself.

Pirovani appeared, issuing from a side-street. As soon as the contractor caught sight of Moreno who was going toward his house, he ran after him, eager to hear about the episodes of an excursion to which he had not been invited. With the easy credulity of the jealous, he believed that Canterac must have won a great advance on him during that short ride with the marquesa.

With childish satisfaction he smiled when the government employee told him how, several times, the señora marquesa had asked him to help her keep the Frenchman at a proper distance.

“Of course I know that she can’t stand him,” said the Italian. “I’m not so stupid that I can’t see that! But, as he’s the engineer in charge of the works, and can do favors for Robledo and her husband, she doesn’t dare tell him what she thinks of him....”

But his delight took a sharp fall when Moreno went on to tell him of the encounter with Manos Duras, and the “presumption” with which the fellow had talked to the “señora marquesa.”

This was too much for the contractor!

“All these people think they are everybody’s equal just because we are all together here in this desert,” he exclaimed, scandalized. “Some fine day this cattle thief will take it into his head to come to the marquesa’s parties, just as though he were one of us.... It’s outrageous!”

“By the way,” said Moreno, “the Captain doesn’t want any more meat to be bought of Manos Duras, nor any business done with him whatever. That’s more in your hands than Canterac’s.”

Pirovani agreed with vehement signs of assent.

“And I’ll see to it! That Frenchman has the right idea for once. This is the first time in weeks that he’s said anything I could see any sense in!”