Читать книгу Marivosa - Baroness Orczy - Страница 5

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All this occurred little more than fifty years ago. Nothing for years was heard of the little band of fanatics who had given the Republican Government so much trouble at the time; only a very few of them could have survived the final suppression of that so-called rebellion, and they presumably went back to their hard life and their peaceful avocation of cattle-rearing.

But, strangely enough, some twenty-five years later, a new turbulent element had sprung up in the Sertao. It seemed all of a sudden as if the strange events of the late ‘nineties were being repeated, though in a different form. Again there arose a mystic leader with power to gather round him a band of enthusiastic and devoted followers recruited from among the half-civilized dwellers of these rocky fastnesses. Unlike Antonio Conselheiro, however, this new prophet—or whatever one chooses to call him—was not a religious enthusiast. He preached neither the coming of the Kingdom of God nor the end of the World and the Advent of Christ. In fact, he did not preach anything at all. He left this part of the business to his enthusiastic lieutenants. Nor was his life as ascetic or his aims as disinterested as those of the great Antonio. Who he was, or whence he came, no one knew. Everything was mere conjecture. But those of his followers whom the exigencies of business or labour brought into contact with the outside world spoke with bated breath of the man whom they called the Great Unknown.

Vaqueiros, farmers, herdsmen, as well as outcasts of every sort, Negroes, Indians, half-breeds, and a few gaol-birds, made up the sum total of the followers of this new prophet. The illiterate, uneducated, primitive, declared that he was Antonio Conselheiro come to life again: whilst those who were more enlightened, those who occasionally consorted with their fellow-men and who came from time to time to Bonfim or Joazeiro to sell their cattle or their hides, averred that the Great Unknown was the grandson of Dom Pedro II, the last Emperor of Brazil, come to claim the throne of his forebears. How they worked that out nobody could quite make out: certain it is that a political atmosphere as well as a religious one hung over this new version of an old story. The Sertao appeared now like a second Vendée where men loyal to the old dynasty rallied round the person of their dispossessed sovereign and were apparently prepared to fight and die in his cause. The fact that the grandsons of the late Emperor over in France cared nothing about these fanatical upholders of their cause, nor for the throne of Brazil for that matter, would not have obtained credence in the Sertao for one moment. Nor did these new Vendéans worry their heads as to the exact genealogy of the man they had decided to champion. They stood for a principle and a dynasty, not for an individual, and they believed in the Great Unknown. Heroes like Lescure and La Rochejaquelin were to find their counterpart in men like Gamalleria and Ouvidor, the fierce and fearsome lieutenants of the Great Unknown.

At first nothing very serious happened to throw disquiet into the minds of the Government up at Rio. The only fact that could be called disquieting was that the number of recruits to the banner of the mysterious leader was growing with amazing rapidity. The two men, Gamalleria and Ouvidor, well known to the police as lawless marauders, escaped gaol-birds in fact, were daily pushing their way to outlying villages, farms, and even small towns, loudly heralding the Second Advent of the Lord and the last Day of Judgment, whilst proclaiming the Great Unknown as the prophet Antonio Conselheiro resurrected from the dead or, alternatively, as Dom Pedro III of Bragança, rightful Emperor of Brazil.

It was a clever way of rousing superstitious enthusiasm and allying it with supposed loyalty to the dispossessed dynasty. The more ignorant crowd took up with fervour the idea of the mysterious leader being the resurrected prophet, whilst to the more educated amongst them the thought of overthrowing the present Government, which insisted on levying and collecting taxes, made a strong appeal.

And, generally speaking, the personality of the Great Unknown made an appeal stronger still to the mystically inclined minds of the Sertanejos. His band soon rose to a horde. He collected them about him and presently established his headquarters at Canudos, the spot where Antonio Conselheiro had built his mammoth church. Here he built himself a dwelling-house, using for the purpose the very stones which for over twenty years had stood, a crumbling mass, as a mausoleum over the body of the sacred Counsellor; and here he had dwelt for the past four or five years in barbaric splendour, with half a hundred women to serve him and half a thousand men to scour the country round, robbing, looting, stealing from peaceable farmers and town dwellers the food which he needed for his table and the luxuries which he required for his house.

His face was never seen save by an intimate few—a dozen lieutenants, his body-guard—wild, marauding outlaws and escaped convicts with tempers more fierce than the rest, voices more authoritative and powers to compel obedience through ruthlessness and cruelty. They alone were privileged to see the face of the Great Unknown who, when he walked abroad, kept his head wrapped in a veil. He wore a long flowing robe which reached to his ankles; his feet were encased in sandals; his hand was often stretched out for greeting or benediction. Half a dozen Negroes walked before him to beat down the scrub and thorns in his path.

Within the past year or two bitter complaints had reached Bahia of numberless depredations carried on with savage impudence on outlying farms and cattle ranches, of hold-ups—not only on the roads, but even on the railway north of Queimadas—of petty larceny and highway robbery. The police of the province, not being numerous, were powerless, and Bahia sent the complaints up to Rio. The Government, after saying ‘Damn!’ once or twice through the mouth of its officials, found itself compelled to give the matter more or less serious consideration.

‘We must do something about it, I suppose,’ one important gentleman said between two yawns.

‘Must we?’ said another.

It was very, very hot—even in Rio. Great Lord! what must it be like in that God-forsaken hole, the Sertao? And on the road between the railhead and Canudos, where there is not a single tree to afford shade to panting mule or man, where every drop of water has to be carried for miles and invariably falls short of the needs of the moment, where ... but what is the good of talking about it all when it is so hot?

‘Must we?’

‘Really! Must we?’

Which is just what English Government officials would say in similar circumstances. Some there were here who had grown hoary in the service of their country and who remembered the many ill-fated expeditions that were sent out in the far-back ’nineties against Antonio Conselheiro.

‘We must not underestimate,’ they said, ‘the strength of these fellows. They are tough. They know every inch of their God-forsaken country, and they have stolen enough arms to equip three regiments. Do not let us repeat,’ they said, ‘the mistakes of the past.’

They swore that they would not—but they did.

They sent a couple of hundred men who, after indescribable sufferings, parched with thirst, half-dead with fatigue, their skin ravaged by insects, their clothing torn to shreds in the scrub, finally reached one of the outlying townships some forty kilometres from Canudos, in a condition that left them quite unfit to meet even the most despicable enemy, let alone a lot of wild men from the bush, well equipped with stolen rifles and other weapons, inured to every kind of hardship, burning with enthusiasm, and to whom a kind of guerrilla warfare was as easy as drawing breath.

Disaster, complete and hopeless, overtook the first expedition. Disaster, even more complete and even more hopeless, overtook the second—one composed this time of five hundred men under the command of a colonel of Teuton descent, who was believed to be a genius in military tactics.

The Great Unknown and his followers were unconquered still, and the two victories had enhanced their prestige and fanned their impudence.

‘They are invincible,’ said the ignorant and the superstitious; and while the Government busied itself in a desultory way with organizing yet another expedition against the brigands, recruits to the banner of the mysterious leader came in in shoals. The Sertao had become a La Vendée in very truth, and an unconquered one at that. And as, previously, Antonio Conselheiro had preached the Second Advent of Christ, the Kingdom of God, and the destruction of the World, so now the followers of the Great Unknown prophesied the return of Dom Pedro III to the throne of his forebears, the fall of the Republic, and the re-establishment of the Empire of Brazil.

It was time the Government up at Rio got a serious move on, or some of these prophecies might be coming true.

There was a talk of sending out Colonel Perraz with two thousand men. Two thousand well-armed, well-trained, disciplined Government troops against a handful of uneducated, semi-savage cattle-raisers! It had to be done, of course, but in secrecy—or the rest of the world would laugh.

No laughing matter, this Great Unknown and his fanatical hordes!