“Unless the senhora gives me six hundred thousand reis I shall not give up the letters,” she responded at last, with determination.
“Six hundred thousand reis![10] And where do you expect me to find that sum?”
“In hell!” shouted Juliana. “Either you give me six hundred thousand reis, or as sure as I am standing here, when your husband comes back I will read them to him.”
Luiza threw herself on a chair, completely overwhelmed.
“What have I done, my God, that this should happen to me?” she cried.
Juliana placed herself insolently in front of her mistress.
“The senhora says well,” she said. “I am a thief, it is true. I took one letter from the rubbish, and the others I took from the bureau-drawer. And I did this that I might be paid for giving them back.” And she added, frantically taking off and putting on her shawl alternately, “My turn had to come; I have had suffering enough, and I am tired of it. Find the money wherever you wish, but it shall not be five reis less than I have said. I have spent years and years in misery. While the senhora is amusing herself I am slaving myself to death from morning till night to earn fifty reals[11] a month. I rise at six o’clock in the morning, and without a moment’s delay set to work to sweep, to dust, to put in order, while the senhora is lying comfortably in bed without a care. For a month past I have been rising at daybreak to wash and iron; and the senhora never thinks of all the clothes she soils; she goes wherever she wishes to go, and here is the slave with the heart-disease, with the iron in her hand, working herself to death. For the senhora all is pleasure,—parties, carriages, silk gowns, everything she takes a fancy to; but the slave,—let her kill herself working!”
Luiza, overwhelmed, without the strength to answer, cowered under the weight of Juliana’s anger, like a bird in the fowler’s net; while the latter was stimulated to still greater violence by the angry sound of her own voice and by the recollection of the hardships she had undergone and the humiliations she had suffered, which heated her blood like the glowing breath from a furnace.
“Why, what did you think,” she continued,—“that I should go on eating the leavings, and the senhora the tidbits? Who would give me a drop of wine if I should want it, after working hard all day? I must buy it for myself. Has the senhora seen my room? There are so many insects in it that I have to sleep with my clothes on; while if the senhora should feel a single bite, she has the slave take her bed apart, and clean it for her. The servant is a beast of burden; let her work if she can, if not, to the street or to the hospital with her! But my turn has come at last!” she ended, striking her breast with revengeful fury. “It is I who am mistress now!”
Luiza sobbed in silence.