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.