The White Witch of Rosehall
Chapter 3: Experiences
In twenty-four hours Robert Rutherford had learnt a great deal. As he sat on his horse the morning after he entered upon his duties at Rosehall, watching a scene which he knew would shortly develop in a fashion revolting to his feelings, he concluded that a mere description of the position of a book-keeper, however detailed, could never have brought home to his mind the nature of that employment as his brief personal experience of it had done.
Robert was a man in splendid condition; but even he already felt horrified at the tax put upon an unfortunate book-keeper during crop time on a sugar estate. Yesterday he had picked up the rudiments of his work and had discovered that he would not have a single book to keep (all that sort of thing being done by the overseer), but that he was expected, after a day in the field, or in the boiling-house watching the sugar made, to spend every other night in the still-house where was kept the fermented spirit and in which it was poured into puncheons for shipment at a little port two or three miles away. Last night he had taken up his post of watchman in the still-house. There he had to remain from about nine until four o’clock in the morning. He had seen the rum drawn out of the huge vats in which it was stored, had seen the puncheons filled and sealed by the workers, had seen to it that they were carefully loaded on to the wagons that were to convey them away, and even during the intervals when there was little or nothing to do he had hardly dared to close his eyes for a few minutes’ sleep. He had been warned against this; the slaves would steal at the slightest opportunity, he had been told, and he would be held responsible. He had observed, too, that the slaves, half a dozen men, watched him furtively, evidently hoping for some lapse on his part. Once he had pretended to fall asleep, and presently there was a movement on the part of two men towards a rum vat: one of these men had a bucket in his hand. Robert had stood up suddenly and the men had melted into the shadows. How one book-keeper could perform a night of watching in this still-house three times a week, and accomplish his ordinary work in the daytime, seemed to him a problem which he himself would hardly be able to solve. Yet Burbridge appeared to manage it, sheer necessity compelling.
On leaving the still-house with its reeking rum, Robert, fatigued though he was, had out of curiosity wandered over to the boiling-house where the sugar was being made. All night the estate had been in feverish activity. It was customary during the taking off of the crop for a good deal of night-work to be done, and on this his first night as a book-keeper at Rosehall a night-spell had been in full operation.
At four o’clock in the morning there was as yet no glimmer of light, no sign of the dawn which would break later on; but the gloom was pierced and illumined by millions of burning stars which, in that clear atmo