At Santiago guard was mounted [171] upon the mild reformer and man of peace as if he had been some ferocious bandit captured red-handed and likely to burst his bars. Sentinels stood day and night over his cell door; no communication was allowed with his friends; and grown men in the official service went through the theatrics of pretending that there was danger of an attempt to rescue him. The next day a decree was issued ordering his exile to Dapitan, a town on the northeastern coast of the island of Mindanao. Upon what charge? The charge of sacrilege and sedition made against him the day he sailed from Hong-Kong, reinforced with Lucia’s damnable pillow-cases. On these he had been adjudged guilty offhand, as one would drown cats or blind puppies. He was not even allowed to know who were his accusers; for that matter, he did not even know that he was accused. “This fellow has committed sacrilege and sedition,” says some one in the ear of the governor-general. “Exile him,” replies the governor-general, and signs the order committing him to a living death. It is like the scene between the governor-general and his secretary in “El Filibusterismo”; if a man may have foreknowledge of his fate, Rizal had glimpsed this in his novel. There was the matter of the safe-conduct, the promise of protection, given by this same governor-general, under which Rizal had left Hong-Kong. It seems to have been not a feather-weight against the Interests that cried for his blood. There need be no mystery as to the source of these perfidies. Exile was the price Rizal paid for writing “Noli Me Tangere”; the powers that now pushed him upon the savage coast of Mindanao as an outcast sent there to die was the power of the friars, enraged by these pictures of themselves. They demanded Rizal’s blood; Despujol seems to have been incapable of the firing-squad and only wicked enough to consent to exile.