. Had the young
man been so minded, with the aid of a glass he might have seen, in that
radiant atmosphere, a vision. It was a young girl, of exceeding beauty,
wearing the picturesque costume of the Philippines. A semicircle
of courtiers was round her. Spaniards, Chinese, natives, soldiers,
curates, old and young, intoxicated with the light and music, were
talking, gesturing, disputing with animation. Even Brother Sibyla
deigned to address this queen, in whose splendid hair Dona Victorina
was wreathing a diadem of pearls and brilliants. She was white,
too white perhaps, and her deep eyes, often lowered, when she raised
them showed the purity of her soul. About her fair and rounded neck,
through the transparent tissue of the pina, winked, as say the Tagals,
the joyous eyes of a necklace of brilliants. One man alone seemed
unreached by all this light and loveliness; it was a young Franciscan,
slim, gaunt, pale, who watched all from a distance, still as a statue.

But Ibarra sees none of this. Another spectacle appears to his fancy,
commands his eyes. Four walls, bare and dank, enclose a narrow
cell, lighted by a single streak of day. On the moist and noisome
floor is a mat; on the mat an old man dying. Beaten down by fever,
he lies and looks about him, calling a name, in strangling voice,
with tears. No one--a clanking chain, an echoed groan somewhere;
that was all. And away off in the bright world, laughing, singing,
drenching flowers with wine, a young man.... One by one the lights
go out in the festal house: no more of noise, or song, or harp;
but in Ibarra's ears always the agonizing cry.

Silence has drawn her deep breath over Manila; all its life seems
gone out, save that a cock's crow alternates with the bells of clock
towers and the melancholy watch-cry of the guard. A quarter moon comes
up, flooding with its pale light the universal sleep. Even Ibarra,
wearied more perhaps with his sad thoughts than his long voyage, sleeps
too. Only the young Franciscan, silent and motionless just now at the
feast, awake still. His elbow on the window-place of his little cell,
his chin sunk in his palm, he watches a glittering star. The star
pales, goes out, the slender moon loses her gentle light, but the monk
stays on; motionless, he looks toward the horizon, lost now behind
the morning mists, over the field of Bagumbayan, over the sleeping sea.

VI.

CAPTAIN TIAGO AND MARIA.

While our friends are still asleep