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.