But he was no longer the same man, self-denying and generous, as all had once known him.
Enclosed in his egotism, like the turtle in his shell, he rejoiced that all Lima knew that he was again rich; but they likewise knew that he refused to give even a grain of rice to St. Peter's cock.
As for the rest, Don Pedro, so merry and communicative before, became changed into a misanthrope. He walked alone, he never returned a salutation, he visited no one save a well-known Jesuit, with whom he would remain hours together in secret converse.
All at once it became rumoured that Campos de Ayala had called a notary, made his will, and left all his immense fortune to the College of St. Paul.
But did he repent him of this, or was it that some new matter weighed heavily on his soul? At any rate, a month later he revoked his former will and made another, in which he distributed his fortune in equal proportions among the various convents and monasteries of Lima; setting apart a whole capital for masses for his soul, making a few handsome legacies, and among them one in favour of a nephew of the Biscayan of long ago.
Those were the times when, as a contemporary writer very graphically says, 'the Jesuit and the Friar scratched under the pillows of the dying to get possession of a will.'
Not many days passed after that revocation, when one night the Viceroy, the Marquis de Castil-dos-Rius, received a long anonymous letter which, after reading and re-reading, made his excellency cogitate, and the result of his cogitation was to send for a magistrate whom he charged without loss of time with the apprehension of Don Pedro Campos de Ayala, whom he was to lodge in the prison of the court.
II.
Don Manuel Omms de Santa Pau Olim de Sentmanat y de Lanuza, Grandee of Spain and Marquis de Castil-dos-Rius, was ambassador in Paris when happened the death of Charles II, and which involved the monarchy in a bloody war of succession. The Marquis not only presented to Louis XIV the will in which the Bewitched one carried the crown to the Duke of Anjou, but openly declared himself a partisan of the Bourbon, and also procured that his relatives commenced hostilities against the Archduke of Austria. In one of the battles, the firstborn of the Marquis de Castil-dos-Rius died.
It is well known that the American Colonies accepted the will of Charles II acknowledging Philip V as their legitimate sovereign. He, after the termination of the civil war, hastened to reward the services of Castil-dos-Rius, and he named him Viceroy of Peru.