Elias warns him of what is afoot and urges him to escape; innocent as he is, he shall have no chance for his life before the tribunal that will try him if he waits for arrest. He will not go until he has had word with Maria Clara. The last scene between them is excellent drama; he gets under her window in a boat and climbs up the vines. For the charge of complicity in the stage rebellion is no basis except a letter that seven years before he had written to her. Some phrases that might be construed to suggest a vague discontent with conditions in the Philippines make up the entire case. On slighter evidence many a man has been tortured first and gone next to the Golgotha at Bagumbayan Field. The friars have this letter. How did they get it when for so many years it had been one of the dearest possessions of Maria Clara? Ibarra can surmise only that she has willingly surrendered it and so betrayed him. In that last interview he learns that it was filched from her by the friar Silva, whose interest in her has been more than ecclesiastical and who on the same occasion has disclosed to her the facts as to her own parentage. She is not the daughter of Capitán Tiago but of Father Damaso—an illegitimate daughter. Satisfied that she is innocent, Ibarra now consents to escape from his foes. Elias, the pilot, who has so often befriended him, is waiting below in the banca. They row up the Pasig River. When they approach a soldier, Ibarra hides himself in the bottom of the boat under the freight. At last the Civil Guards are in pursuit. Elias tries to escape by hard rowing. The Guards begin to fire. Elias slips overboard. Taking him for Ibarra, the Guards follow in their banca, firing constantly. The hunted man is seen to sink. When the Guards come up they think they see blood. They take the news back to Manila that Ibarra, the desperate revolutionist, trying to escape, has been shot and killed. At the word Maria Clara gives up all earthly hope and flees to a nunnery. CHAPTER VI LEONORA RIVERA By the title of his novel Rizal meant not that he was touching a person forbidden, but a subject. The words he had found in a Latin version of the New Testament in the passage where the risen Christ is beheld by Mary Magdalene; but he used these words in a sense wholly different from the scriptural significance. Conditions in the Philippines he had thought of as having become a social cancer that persisted first because of a notion that nobody must treat or touch it. Of all the men of his times and country, he was the only man that had the courage to break through this barrier and the skill and perfect knowledge to dissect the hideous growth behind. With one of the first copies that came from the press he wrote to his close friend, Dr. Blumentritt, a letter in which he lays bare his own idea of his work: [77]