I.
“AND THE SUN COMES UP LIKE THUNDER.”
Up till midnight Manila was at play. In mediæval Luzon they had not then lost the sportive instinct of the healthy animal or been lost in the chase of the dollar. The shops were closed, but the places of amusement were open. The Lunita, outside the city wall, was thronged with carriages, and at each end of the Plaza de Gotta a band was playing. Spanish grandees and beautiful donnas were driving or promenading there. Inside the wall churches and theatres were open, the churches being first visited and then the play houses. In the amphitheater, built up of bamboo, a crowd of the poorer people were gathered, and while the braver battles were not in progress at this time, cock fighting was attracting the attention of many. Under the walls of the old city, the city that best represented the ancient order, the city of this story, in cloisters arched over where stock was being housed, groups of men were throwing dice or playing cards. It was like a picture of the middle ages projected into the closing days of April, 1898.
What an anomaly it was! Walls of the middle ages, surrounded by a great moat, and within a cosmopolitan group, including Spaniards, Chinese and natives of the Northern islands; yet adjoining it to the east lay a modern city; and Cavite, eight miles to the west, was a fort manned by modern guns. Yellow clay houses of one and two stories roofed with red tile, some with courts in the center, here in old Manila, and to the east modern places of business and houses well plumbed, lighted with electricity. Churches and cathedrals, conventos and nunneries everywhere here, and beyond the Passig river modern amusement places and Protestant churches.
In the magnificent harbor that lay north of Manila, small crafts of many kinds were grouped at the piers, and in the distance the modern fleet of Spain lay at anchor. It was the one portion of the old order that yet remained; and the world was pressing upon it, and change was near.
Ambrosia Lonzello, the Friar’s Daughter, stood at the gate in front of her mother’s home, gazing down the street, dreaming the dreams of oriental maidenhood. She had inherited the symmetry of proportion that belonged to her mother’s tribe in Cebu, and from her father, Bishop Lonzello, had the Spaniard’s dark eyes and charming vivacity. It had been twenty years since Friar Lonzello, a young priest then located in Cebu, had met the young native woman who became Ambrosia’s mother; and though it was forbidden priests to marry, Lonzello yet supported the woman he had then loved and the daughter that had been born to them. If it was a strange thing to a European, it was rather the rule than the exception in that oriental, mediaeval country, and as the daughter of the Bishop, Ambrosia was one of the prominent young women of the walled city. She stood, gazing down the street and up at the stars, dreaming her own dreams, a girl without experience in the ways of the world, when she heard a voice at her side:
“Ambrosia! Buenos dias!”[1]
Ambrosia started. She knew the voice. But she supposed the possessor, Camillo Saguanaldo, was across the bay in China. A few months before he had been banished because of leading an insurrection against the friars, who were practically the rulers of the Philippines, and his return involved great danger for him. So Ambrosia said:
“I thought you were in China, Camillo. Do you not know it is dangerous for you to be in Luzon?”
“My duty calls me here, Ambrosia, and here I must be,” replied the youth. “It is not so dangerous now as it has been in the past. At last our prayers are to be answered and America, the great land that loves liberty, is to give us a chance to secure our freedom. If we do our part we shall be free. When I was in China I talked with Admiral Rainey, of the American fleet that was anchored there, and he told me that the United States was about to go to war with Spain solely to secure liberty for the Cubans; and when I told him how it was in the Philippines, that we had been struggling for liberty for three hundred years, he said that it might be that Uncle Sam would do for us what he meant to do for the reconcentrados of Cuba. So I came over in advance to help when the only chance the Filipinos ever had shall come to them.”