Sisa had been in the barracks since her arrest the day before. The alférez, fearing she might become the sport of the crowd, had ordered her to be kept until the fête 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. Doña 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. Doña 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. Doña 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 contributed to giving her lessons.
Sisa had been happy enough not to understand. The forehead of the shrew unknotted a bit, and a look of satisfaction animated her face.
“Tell this woman to sing!” she said to the orderly. “She doesn’t understand; she doesn’t know Spanish!”
The orderly spoke to Sisa, and she began at once the “Night Song.”
At first Doña Consolacion listened with a mocking smile, but little by little it left her lips. She became attentive, then serious. Her dry and withered heart received the rain. “The sadness, the cold, the dew come down from the sky in the mantle of the night,” seemed to fall upon her heart; she understood “the flower, full of vanity, and prodigal with its splendors in the sun, now, at the fall of day, withered and stained, repentant and disillusioned, trying to raise its poor petals toward heaven, begging a shade to hide it from the mockery of the sun, who had seen it in its pomp, and was laughing at the impotence of its pride; begging also a drop of dew to be let fall upon it.”