The Story of a Mother.
Sisa was running toward her poor little home. She had experienced one of those convulsions of being which we know at the hour of a great misfortune, when we see no possible refuge and all our hopes take flight. If then a ray of light illumine some little corner, we fly toward it without stopping to question.
Sisa ran swiftly, pursued by many fears and dark presentiments. Had they already taken her Basilio? Where had her Crispin hidden?
As she neared her home, she saw two soldiers coming out of the little garden. She lifted her eyes to heaven; heaven was smiling in its ineffable light; little white clouds swam in the transparent blue.
The soldiers had left her house; they were coming away without her children. Sisa breathed once more; her senses came back.
She looked again, this time with grateful eyes, at the sky, furrowed now by a band of garzas, those clouds of airy gray peculiar to the Philippines; confidence sprang again in her heart; she walked on. Once past those dreadful men, she would have run, but prudence checked her. She had not gone far, when she heard herself called imperiously. She turned, pale and trembling in spite of herself. One of the guards beckoned her.
Mechanically she obeyed: she felt her tongue grow paralyzed, her throat parch.
“Speak the truth, or we’ll tie you to this tree and shoot you,” said one of the guards.
Sisa could do nothing but look at the tree.
“You are the mother of the thieves?”