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.
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: