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, mydear, 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 thebuffet, 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, ‘TheRosy 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 ofliqueurs, 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 thepièce 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 onher 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 Bohemiancamaraderiewere 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 Robledohad 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 tobe 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 loudernow, 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....”
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 theBoisfeasting his eyes on the olive-browns of its winter coloring. At dusk he made his way back to theBoulevards. 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 werethe 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 theAvenue 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.
“AndMadame 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 hadaged 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, andTorre 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 thatshouldn’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 forMadame 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 justcome 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 theAvenue 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 hehad 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 knowhope 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-fourhours 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 thisplan 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 longstanding, 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 satisfythem.... 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 havingsome 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....”
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 thismiracle. 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 arevenqueor 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. Andnow 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 mulattohad 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 therebenque!”
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 onthe 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-coloredplants 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, forminga 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 growinglow 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.