ding to her idle custom, was dozing in a
fauteuil. To deaden the sound of the bombs, she had coifed her head
in a handkerchief, from which escaped her tangled hair, short and
thin. This morning she had not been to mass, not because she did not
wish it, but because her husband had not permitted it, accompanying
his prohibition with oaths and threats of blows. Dona Consolacion
was now dreaming of revenge. She bestirred herself at last and ran
over the house from one end to the other, her dark face disquieting
to look at. A spark flashed from her eyes like that from the pupil
of a serpent trapped and about to be crushed. It was cold, luminous,
penetrating; it was viscous, cruel, repulsive. The smallest error on
the part of a servant, the least noise, drew forth words injurious
enough to smirch the soul; but nobody replied; to offer excuse would
have been to commit another crime.

In this way the day passed. Meeting no opposition--her husband had
been invited to the gobernadorcillo's--she stored up spleen; the
cells of her organism seemed slowly charging with electric force,
which burst out, later on, in a tempest.

Sisa had been in the barracks since her arrest the day before. The
alferez, fearing she might become the sport of the crowd, had ordered
her to be kept until the fete was over.

This evening, whether she had heard the song of Maria Clara, whether
the bands had recalled airs that she knew, for some reason she began to
chant, in her sympathetic voice, the songs of her youth. The soldiers
heard and became still; they knew these airs, had sung them themselves
when they were young and free and innocent. Dona Consolacion heard,
too, and inquired for the singer.

"Have her come up at once," she said, after a moment's reflection,
something like a smile flickering on her dry lips.

The soldiers brought Sisa, who came without fear or question. When
she entered she seemed to see no one, which wounded the vanity of
the dreadful muse. Dona Consolacion coughed, motioned the soldiers
to withdraw, and, taking down her husband's riding whip, said in a
sinister voice:

"Vamos, magcanter icau!"

It was an order to sing, in a mixture of Castilian and Tagalo. Dona
Consolacion affected ignorance of her native tongue, thinking thus to
give herself the air of a veritable Orofea, as she said in her attempt
at Europea. For if she martyred the Tagalo, she treated Castilian
worse, though her husband, and chairs and shoes, had cont