Читать книгу The Friar's Daughter - Charles Lincoln Phifer - Страница 3
I. “AND THE SUN COMES UP LIKE THUNDER.”
ОглавлениеUp 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.”
“I wish it might be, Camillo,” replied the girl. “But if my father hears you have returned, he will kill you, and nothing can appease his wrath now.”
It might be mentioned that when the insurrection led by Saguanaldo had failed and his banishment was decreed, Bishop Lonzello, at the intercession of Ambrosia, had procured for him an allowance of $20,000 on which to live in China. Ambrosia had intended it as a kindness to him, and the bishop regarded it as a bribe, but now that he had returned there was no doubt that Lonzello would prosecute him and if possible secure his death.
“I shall be safe.” replied the youth. “I used that $20,000 in buying guns and ammunition, and have already a stronger force than I ever had. My troops are near at hand even now, and Manila is not so peaceful as she seems.”
“You do not know. The heavy guns of the battleships have been mounted at Corregidor and Caney, and the 160,000 Spanish troops in the city laugh at the idea of America ever being able to take it.”
“Yet America will take it. The American fleet will be here and will win, and then they will give us freedom. Within a few months the Filipinos will be free, and then Ambrosia Lonzello will become Ambrosia de Saguanaldo.”
The young girl flushed with combined embarrassment and pleasure.
“It can not be,” she said. “I am not worthy of you. I shall seek with you the freedom of the Filipinos and then I shall die and leave you free to marry a woman who has a name.”
“Fie, Ambrosia. I will give you my name, and there will be none in Luzon more honored than that. Many have tried for the good that now we shall attain. It must come. The very fact that we have waited for it so long proves that it must be near. Luz de mi vida2, it is so.”
“I wish,” the girl began wistfully, then stopped abruptly. “Father is so bitter against you. I always wish you with me, yet you never come but I am anxious you should go, lest staying mean your death.”
“Fear not, Ambrosia,” said the youth. “They call me the Fox of Luzon, and I find my way where they do not suspect. I was with your father yesterday and he never knew.”
“Oh, take no risk,” plead the girl, throwing herself in his arms. “Te amo con todo el corazon.3 You must, you must be careful. Oh, it is sad, so sad. If they would only let us have a chance the people might be so happy. Luzon is a beautiful island. It seems to me like Paradise, the garden of the Lord; and yet for us it is purgatory.”
“Some day we shall be released from purgatory, chuleta4. The prayers of our forefathers will prevail.”
“Camillo, come inside, or they will see you.”
She drew the young man into the shadows, and into the house. There the lovers talked undisturbed. They talked of things that to them were the most momentous—their own loves and their individual plans, the hope and future of the island which had been their home all their lives. Little did they know that time was working for them and through them more momentous changes that should affect continents and end completely the feudal in the capitalistic.
On the following morning Manila was awakened by the roar of artillery. It was still dark save for the star light, yet quickly the streets were in turmoil. Some grasped the things they most valued and rushed to most ridiculous places for safety. One man took to the woods with a fighting cock under his arm. A few of the bravest mounted to the roofs of the dwellings and the towers of the churches in order to view the fight that had been anticipated, but which had come sooner than expected. From these vantage points they looked on a scene such as falls to the lot of man to observe only once in a thousand lives.
In answer to the challenge of Cavite the American fleet was forming in battle array. In single file, as if in gala parade, they came, like actors entering from the wings of a great stage or circus performers from the dressing room, crawling over the white bay like living things. The dawn had come, suddenly as in the tropics, come with the roar of artillery. For once it had literally realized Kipling’s line—
“Dawn comes up like thunder outer China ’crost the bay.”
At last the fleet, the tool of the new order of capitalism, was ready. The command had gone forth from Admiral Rainey: “You may fire when you are ready.” The American flag ship shot a line of fire, and from the smoke that arose a great roar resounded. Boom, boom! Fire and shell and smoke and action swept from consciousness the peace of nature and thought of the world of life. Now and then the white veil of smoke would lift, and the watcher on the towers could see in those intervals splintered masts and laboring vessels, specks that were men struggling in the waves, and wrecks that lined the shore. It did not seem possible that all those specks were men, with hopes and plans and families, and hearts and bodies that suffered; the watchers on the towers could not know that decks of vessels were slippery from blood, and that nerves were racked with pain and hearts were sore from loss. The American vessels, crawling like water mites over the white mirror spread below them, circled together about first one and then another of the Spanish ships; and ever as they moved flashes like fiery legs stretched from their sides. This red venom of death touched the Spanish ships that appeared to wither and consume before it. Here a Spanish ship ran to shore, as though a living, wounded thing, seeking a place to die, and, trembling, sank beneath the waves. There a vessel lay under the pitiless pelting of fire, till there was a heavy explosion, and the ship was torn to shreds that sprinkled the water, while dots that represented men struggled in the waves. Yonder a vessel was on fire, and as it bore to shore specks that were men dived into the water to save themselves, and the red flames licked life from the redder decks.
With what precision the stranger ships came on, circling, and pouring death into the helpless vessels whose wooden hulks graft had left exposed to shell! How aimlessly and helplessly the Spanish vessels floundered, unable to fight, and finding no escape! It was war, glorious and terrible. In Spain a thousand widows and orphans would weep and miss forever that which had been taken from them in a quarrel in which the fighters had no interest. In America a million would scream for joy and tingle with the glory of slaughter and the thought of being splendid fighters. Within half an hour nearly four hundred able-bodied men perished and twenty million dollars’ worth of property that should have been used to make life happier and better was destroyed. It was a great drama, in a splendid amphitheatre, with the lifting curtains of night to show it forth, enacted for the few in the towers. Ambrosia had seen and understood and was silenced by the grandeur and horror of it. She felt for the dying, and could hardly restrain herself from crying out in agony when the American fleet ceased firing and calmly moved away to prepare, within sight of the wrecks and the sacrifice, breakfast for the living, after their hour’s toil.
“Oh, God, but this is horrible,” she muttered, faint with her feelings. As she spoke, once again she was startled with a voice at her side. She turned to behold an old man with a long beard, but she knew the voice, the voice of Saguanaldo, and it said:
“Ambrosia, chuleta, it is the dawn, not only of a new day, but also of a new era.”
2 Luz de mi vida—Light of my life. ↑
3 Te amo con todo el corazon—I love you with all my heart. ↑
