Chapter Twenty Eight.
We reached La Guayra, and from thence Caracas, safely enough, in spite of the country just then passing through the acute stage of one of its periodical revolutions that had supervened on the top of an earthquake; which convulsions of nature and society are characteristic features of Venezuela, like as the chief products of its fertile soil are cocoa and “patriots,” the latter being almost as great an article of export as the former, especially after a political crisis, and consisting of all sorts and conditions of men who, whether born subjects or alien intriguers, are all desirous of serving their natural or adopted mother country for a consideration!
Colonel Vereker was largely interested in an extensive gold mine in the interior, where he put me as his overseer.
This was not an unwise measure for his own sake, apart from any motive he had in advancing my welfare—his real reason for appointing me to the post; for, with the exception of the captain of the mine, a Frenchman, the majority of those employed were half-caste Spaniards and Portuguese, all of whom studied their several individual pockets rather than the interest of their employer, while the main body of workers were péons and mezites, bastard mulattoes, with a large intermixture of negro blood, who valued their own lives as little as they did the lives of those with whom they had to deal.
I had plenty of work to do here, looking after all these scoundrels, having to keep my eyes open as much as possible in order to prevent wholesale robbery as far as I could, although it was utterly impossible to prevent petty pilfering of the ore on its way from the mine to Puerto Cabello, its general port for transhipment to Europe, to swell the treasure chest of the exiled.
However, by adopting the old Latin maxim, Suaviter in modo, fortiter in re, treating all without hauteur, which some of the insolent half-caste Spanish creoles affected, and yet keeping my revolver ready, with “my powder dry,” so as to be prepared for any emergency, I managed to get along very well with the mixed lot I was set over, winning golden opinions from every one but a few of the worst characters.
It sounds as if I were boasting, but this is something for a young Englishman to be able to say in a country which, though it is the veritable El Dorado of poor Drake’s dreams, and has possibly a future of wealth and prosperity before it when it comes under the rule of the Anglo-Saxon race—whether of ourselves, or of our cousins in Yankee land it does not much matter, for we are all of the same race and enterprising spirit—can be better described in respect of its present condition by a shorter and far more expressive word.
Amongst my other duties I had charge of all the colonel’s voluminous correspondence, he having a mortal hatred to all letter writing in any shape or form, and in addition to my good patron’s business communications, was entrusted with the task of despatching a lengthy epistle every other mail—they went fortnightly from La Guayra to France—informing Miss Elsie of our doings, the colonel himself adding the briefest of postscripts to his pequiña niña, as he invariably termed her and always enclosing some remembrance for his little daughter, to show that his love exceeded any epistolary proof of the same, as well as a more substantial token of a handsome cheque for her maintenance and education, forwarded to the care of the mother superior of the convent.
Of all my manifold duties this was the pleasantest I had to perform, being as grateful as water poured on the parched soil of my exile amongst an alien people, antagonistic to me in everything, and with whom I had to shape a steady course, and preserve a “stiff weather helm,” as sailors say, to avoid open rupture and assassination, the Venezuelese “sticking at nothing,” especially when that “nothing” happened to be one whom, for some sufficient reason to their minds, they deemed an enemy and they chanced to be behind his back—and as I told you before, I steered clear of many enemies, but I could never learn to trust them as a people.
Yes, my happiest hours at San Félipe were spent in writing to little Elsie, who answered my own letters, as well as those I despatched on behalf of the colonel, with unvarying punctuality, holding to the promise she spontaneously gave in England when we parted on her going to school, at which time she had no idea of my ever accompanying her father to South America.
Similarly, the saddest task that could have been laid on my shoulders fell to my lot five years later, when the mysterious attraction by which I had been drawn towards her as a boy had grown into the most absorbing affection—a love that filled my heart.
And I had to write and tell her—I, who would cheerfully have laid down my life to save her a pang—to tell her of her dear father’s death.
This occurred just as poor Colonel Vereker had arranged for my returning with him to the capital of the State, where another revolution—the sixth, I believe, since I had been in the country—had broken out, with the object, as the object of all these explosions of the mob invariably was, to depose the reigning party in power, and put the leaders of “the popular movement” for the time being, in the power of the deposed authorities.
The colonel, who had a good deal staked on the issue of the struggle, took up arms on the side of the cause he esteemed just—that to which the most respectable of the inhabitants to a man adhered—as he had taken up arms before for the party of law and order, amongst whom he was looked up to, not only as a skilled soldier and tactician, but a stalwart partisan, his very name being a tower of strength.
Alas! though, no opportunity was afforded him now to display his valour on the battlefield and lead his hosts to victory; for while we were en route for Caracas, a dastardly hound of a creole, whose blood was a mixture of the beast elements—part Spaniard, part Portuguese, part negro—well, this treacherous brute assassinated Colonel Vereker in the most cowardly fashion.
I was by and saw it all.
The vile murderer came up to my poor friend as we were resting in a posada on the road from San Félipe; and, while engaging him in an apparently friendly conversation respecting the political points of the rising, he suddenly stabbed the dear old man in the back with a long stiletto which he had hidden up his wide shirt sleeves.
Fortunately, I was there, and I had time to send a bullet through his brain from my revolver before the wretch could stir a yard from the spot; but this could not save my noble-hearted, kind, generous protector, a man who had been more than a father to me, and for whom I had the utmost affection and respect. No; the death of the scoundrel could not save him, for the wound the cowardly scoundrel had inflicted was mortal.
My dear friend and companion only survived long enough to confide his daughter to my care and give me his blessing ere he died, drawing his last breath in my arms, a smile on his face and dauntless to the end, as he pressed my hand and uttered the usual parting phrase he had learnt from his Spanish associates—“Hasta la mañaña—Good-bye till to-morrow!”
It was a long to-morrow, indeed!
After seeing the last tribute of respect paid to the colonel’s remains, the gallant fellow being buried close to the posada where he had met with his untimely end, and a cross which I carved myself placed above his lonely grave, sheltered by a noble palm that stood erect, as he had done when living, a monument of nature’s handiwork, I resumed my journey to Caracas, in order to carry out my lost friend’s last directions.
The alcalde, who acted as the colonel’s agent and was largely in his confidence, being an acquaintance of many years’ standing, produced a copy of Colonel Vereker’s will for my inspection, assuring me that this had been drawn up during his last visit to the State capital, while all his affairs were in the most perfect order, “the poor gentleman,” as the alcalde expressed it, “being under the opinion that he would not have long to live,” a presentiment of death I have often found many people to have had.
Generous and thoughtful for others to the end, he had not forgotten me in this his last testament, showing that the regard he had already displayed for my welfare was no mere temporary fancy!
On the contrary, much to my astonishment, he had bequeathed to me quite half his fortune—all his share, indeed, in the Gondifera mine—while all his realised property, which was invested in good English and American securities, out of the reach of the grasping hand of the hungerful Venezuelan patriots—all this he left to his daughter Elsie.
From a codicil, too, appended to the document, more in the form of a sacred charge than a legal instrument, “reading between the lines,” I could perceive that the large-hearted man had fathomed the secret desire of my heart, though secret it evidently was not to him, loving Elsie as he did, albeit in a different fashion; for after enjoining upon me to regard his little daughter’s interests even as he had studied mine, he added that should fate bring us together in the future as had happened so strangely in the past, his dearest wish would be gratified, for he had already learnt to care for me and to look upon me as his son!
Of course nothing of this was mentioned when writing to tell Elsie of the awful event and dreadful calamity that had befallen her, although later on, before I was able to return to England, when her education was completed and the good nuns wrote to me, as her father’s executor, to say the time had arrived for taking her away from the convent unless she wished to change her religion and join the sisterhood, to both of which courses I was, of course, bitterly opposed, and, as you may imagine, was delighted when Elsie herself requested to be allowed to leave.
I must, however, have accidentally have shown my feelings towards her and have “let the cat out of the bag” in the letter I sent home to my mother, in answer to the last communication from Neuilly, asking her to take charge of my darling Elsie until I came home to win and claim her.
I imagined this from something that leaked out afterwards, and from the somewhat altered tone of Elsie’s letters to me from the date of her leaving France to live with my mother; for, though affectionate enough, they had a certain little air of constraint about them, and though she spoke of various objects of interest to both of us, and of different persons whom she and I knew, and places she went to, she never by any chance ever mentioned herself, never after the letters she sent me containing the passionate outpouring of her inmost heart on receiving the news of her father’s death, albeit all this she would feel perfectly certain was to me a sacred confidence.
Slight as the change was in her subsequent correspondence, I noticed it and it worried me, and determined me to have the matter cleared up as soon as I possibly could.
Meanwhile, however, I had to fulfil the colonel’s last trust, and as I knew what his intentions had been in regard to the crisis in Venezuelan affairs at the time when an assassin’s hand prevented him from acting the part he intended to play in the existing revolution, I thought I should be only carrying out his wishes in putting myself in his place, as far as it lay in my power to do so.
So, soon after coming to Caracas and settling the details of the colonel’s last depositions, making my own will in my turn in case of accidents, though in what way is best known to myself, I went to the headquarters of the Government troops and joined the army of General Gomez.
Under this able leader I fought in several engagements that were fierce and sanguinary as all such fratricidal contests are and ever have been in the annals of civil war, at San Sebastien, Carapana, Tarasca, and elsewhere, our guerilla struggle extending over the whole extensive country in almost every direction, where there was a town to sack or property to plunder, until at last the insurgent “patriots” were conquered and peace restored.
All this took a long time; and then, having had enough and to spare of fighting and bloodshed, and tired of mining too, I disposed of my interest in the Gondifera mine, and at last sailed for Europe, bidding a long adieu to Venezuela and everything belonging to it, my journey home being hastened by a somewhat tenderer letter than usual from Elsie, who had read a paragraph in the papers about my having been wounded at the battle of San Sebastien, though, of course, I had not mentioned anything about the affair to her or my mother, as it was a mere flea bite and of no consequence, and I feared to have alarmed them needlessly had I said anything about it in my letters to them at home.