The captain-general was speaking to him.
“I should like your company at table. We will talk to those children who have disappeared,” he said.
Crisóstomo, looking at the general without seeing him, asked himself under his breath: “Can I be the cause?” And he followed the governor mechanically.
XXXIII.
Doña Consolacion.
Why were the windows of the house of the alférez not only without lanterns, but shuttered? Where, when the procession passed, were the masculine head with its great veins and purple lips, the flannel shirt, and the big cigar of the “Muse of the Municipal Guard”?
The house was sad, as Sinang said, because the people were gay. Had not a sentinel paced as usual before the door one might have thought the place uninhabited.
A feeble light showed the disorder of the room, where the alféreza was sitting, and pierced the dusty and spider-webbed conches of the windows. The dame, according 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. Doña 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.