An hour later Roger was drinking a botde of wine with Philippe. The inn was crowded to capacity, but the Frenchman, eager to repay Roger in some measure for the fortune he was now making, at once volunteered to turn out the guest who was occupying his old room, so that he could install himself there for as long as he wished; and said that he would get for him a slave as a personal servant.
Next morning Baob arrived with a note from Lisala. It was brief but poignant. I am utterly distraught. I could kill my father for having turned you out. You must find some way to come to me at nights. You must. You must.
Her window was at least clearly, the only means of the house, then round the
At ten o'clock that night Roger was outside the house, reconnoitring it for a possible means of getting up to Lisala's bedroom. He knew already that, like every other house in Rio, the heavy doors were securely bolted and the ground-floor windows shuttered and barred, as a protection against the innumerable thieves and half-starved, desperate men who swarmed in the city. Had Lisala's room been at the front of the house, he might have climbed to it by way of the verandah; but hers and that of the Dona Christina were at the back and on that side there was not even a creeper that might have given him a handhold to scale the wall. Her window was at least fifteen feet above the ground and clearly the only way of reaching it was by a ladder.
Moodily, he walked all round the house then round the outbuildings. In a loft above the big barn the slaves slept on a thin layer of infrequently-changed straw, and no precautions were taken to prevent desperadoes entering there. The door of the barn was a little open, so he went in. The starlight was just sufficient for him to make out a long ladder against the wall; but a glance was enough to tell him that it was far too heavy for him to lift unaided.
On recrossing the yard, he saw that Lisala's window was now dimly lit. Evidently she was expecting him; but not that he would have arrived so early. Apparently she had been listening intently, so had caught the sound of his careful footsteps, as the curtain was pulled aside and she put her head out of the window.
'Roger, Roger my love, come up to me,' she whispered.
'I cannot,' he whispered back. 'How can I without a ladder? And the one in the barn is too heavy for me to lift. You must come down and let me in.'
She shook her head. 'No. You know those bolts, bars and chains on the doors as well as I do. Undoing them would make such a clatter it's certain I'd be heard.'
At that moment there came the screech of ill-fitting wood on wood, as the Dona Christina threw up her window. Roger had just time to dive behind a wagon that was standing in the yard, then came the high-pitched voice of the old woman:
‘Who's that? Who is that out there?'
Lisala had drawn in her head and swiftly snuffed her candle. Roger held his breath and remained crouching behind the wagon. Minutes passed; the silence was intense. At last the duenna decided that she had been mistaken in thinking that someone was outside, gave a raucous cough and shut her window. Before moving, Roger slowly counted up to a thousand; then he tiptoed away.
Next day Baob brought another note from Lisala. In it she implored Roger to find some way to come to her and heaped curses on her father.
Roger wrote back, saying that the only way in which he might reach her room was for her to secure somehow a rope ladder, or at least a knotted rope, which she could lower to him so that he could climb up.
The following day she replied to the effect that he must surely realise how impossible it was for her to come by a rope, or hide it if she did; so he must suggest some other means of coming to her.
Although he had brooded over the question for hours, he could think of none, and wrote to tell her so, ending by assuring her that he shared her distress, and of his unfailing devotion.
There, for the time being, their correspondence ended; and he endeavoured to reconcile himself to their unhappy situation. Now and then they met at the houses of mutual friends, but had no opportunity to exchange even a few words together unheard by others. On such occasions her huge tawny eyes silently reproached him, but he could do no more than acknowledge her glances by an almost imperceptible shrug, and little helpless gestures.
With February there came Lent and a fervid display of the religious fanaticism that obsessed the population of Rio. There were fasts, processions in which hundreds of people followed sacred relics of the saints, crawling on their knees along the ground, public flagellations and votive offerings, out of which the unwashed priesthood lined their coffers.
From dawn to dusk the big Candelabra Church and all the others were packed with penitents beating their breasts and wailing repentance for their sins. Out of curiosity, Roger visited a few of the churches, but left again almost at once, repelled by the stench, not only of the living but also of the dead.
For there were no cemeteries in Rio. Everyone of importance was buried either under the floor or in cavities in the walls of the churches. Owing to the high rate of mortality, there had been recent interments in all of them and, quite often, the stones had not been securely replaced, with the result that the horrible emanations from rotting corpses pervaded these places of worship.
Slaves and the destitute who died in the gutters were not buried at all. Their bodies were roughly bundled up in straw, thrown into carts, then dumped on the waste ground outside the city. Great flights of vultures descended upon them and, within a few hours, picked the bones clean.
One day Roger rode out to see the slave market at Vallonga. It was situated in a long, narrow valley between two wooded hills, one of which ended in a high cliff dropping sheer to the sparkling sea. On it stood a small, whitewashed Chapel to the
Virgin and the big warehouses into which the human cargoes from Africa were herded, after the tax upon them had been paid to the Crown.
Their sufferings during the long crossing were so terrible that it was a miracle that any of them survived. Three hundred and more were packed into the holds of small ships, where they lay for weeks head to foot like sardines, manacled and bound. To weaken them and so decrease the possibility of mutineering, they were deliberately half-starved. Even so, a,t times they were seized by a suicidal despair. Groups of them staggered to their feet; then, weeping and cursing, beat with their handcuffs on the iron gratings that confined them. The frenzy spread until the hold became a seething mass of screaming men and women. But their hopes of deliverance were invariably crushed. A dozen of the crew would descend with muskets and pour volley after volley of buckshot into the demented swarm of Negroes, killing some, wounding others so that they soon died from untended wounds, and cowing the remainder into submission.
When the survivors were flogged ashore, their bodies were those of living skeletons, scarcely able to walk, their ribs sucking out under the taut skin of their chests. Still manacled, they were kept in the long warehouses for several weeks while being fattened up for sale. Their stomachs shrunken from many weeks of semi-starvation, they were unable to keep down the quantities of corn mush with which they were forcibly fed, and spewed it up. Lying in their vomit and excrement, they gradually put on weight until they were thought sufficiently saleable to be auctioned.
Roger knew, too, that their last days would be scarcely less terrible. In the Southern States of America, it was the custom that, when the cotton-picking slaves became too old to work any longer in the fields, they were allowed to sit idle in the sun and given enough food to support them. But that was not so here in Brazil. When slaves, through illness or old age, became a charge upon their master, they were turned out to fend for themselves. For a year or two they might continue a miserable existence begging their bread in the streets then, incapable from weakness or disease of doing so any longer, they died like pariah dogs; and the sanctimonious frequenters of the so-called Christian churches did not even spare a glance for the wasted bodies of such human offal.