The Reign of Greed | Page 2

brought about through agents of Padre Salvi, and the leadership is ascribed to Ibarra to ruin him. He is warned by a mysterious friend, an outlaw called Elias, whose life he had accidentally saved; but desiring first to see Maria Clara, he refuses to make his escape, and when the outbreak occurs he is arrested as the instigator of it and thrown into prison in Manila.
On the evening when Capitan Tiago gives a ball in his Manila house to celebrate his supposed daughter's engagement, Ibarra makes his escape from prison and succeeds in seeing Maria Clara alone. He begins to reproach her because it is a letter written to her before he went to Europe which forms the basis of the charge against him, but she clears herself of treachery to him. The letter had been secured from her by false representations and in exchange for two others written by her mother just before her birth, which prove that Padre Damaso is her real father. These letters had been accidentally discovered in the convento by Padre Salvi, who made use of them to intimidate the girl and get possession of Ibarra's letter, from which he forged others to incriminate the young man. She tells him that she will marry the young Spaniard, sacrificing herself thus to save her mother's name and Capitan Tiago's honor and to prevent a public scandal, but that she will always remain true to him.
Ibarra's escape had been effected by Elias, who conveys him in a banka up the Pasig to the Lake, where they are so closely beset by the Civil Guard that Elias leaps into the water and draws the pursuers away from the boat, in which Ibarra lies concealed.
On Christmas Eve, at the tomb of the Ibarras in a gloomy wood, Elias appears, wounded and dying, to find there a boy named Basilio beside the corpse of his mother, a poor woman who had been driven to insanity by her husband's neglect and abuses on the part of the Civil Guard, her younger son having disappeared some time before in the convento, where he was a sacristan. Basilio, who is ignorant of Elias's identity, helps him to build a funeral pyre, on which his corpse and the madwoman's are to be burned.
Upon learning of the reported death of Ibarra in the chase on the Lake, Maria Clara becomes disconsolate and begs her supposed godfather, Fray Damaso, to put her in a nunnery. Unconscious of her knowledge of their true relationship, the friar breaks down and confesses that all the trouble he has stirred up with the Ibarras has been to prevent her from marrying a native, which would condemn her and her children to the oppressed and enslaved class. He finally yields to her entreaties and she enters the nunnery of St. Clara, to which Padre Salvi is soon assigned in a ministerial capacity.

O masters, lords, and rulers in all lands, Is this the handiwork you give to God, This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched? How will you ever straighten up this shape-; Touch it again with immortality; Give back the upward looking and the light; Rebuild in it the music and the dream; Make right the immemorial infamies, Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?
O masters, lords, and rulers in all lands, How will the future reckon with this man? How answer his brute question in that hour When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world? How will it be with kingdoms and with kings-- With those who shaped him to the thing he is-- When this dumb terror shall reply to God, After the silence of the centuries?
Edwin Markham

Contents
I. On the Upper Deck II. On the Lower Deck III. Legends IV. Cabesang Tales V. A Cochero's Christmas Eve VI. Basilio VII. Simoun VIII. Merry Christmas IX. Pilates X. Wealth and Want XI. Los Ba?os XII. Placido Penitente XIII. The Class in Physics XIV. In the House of the Students XV. Se?or Pasta XVI. The Tribulations of a Chinese XVII. The Quiapo Pair XVIII. Legerdemain XIX. The Fuse XX. The Arbiter XXI. Manila Types XXII. The Performance XXIII. A Corpse XXIV. Dreams XXV. Smiles and Tears XXVI. Pasquinades XXVII. The Friar and the Filipino XXVIII. Tatakut XXIX. Exit Capitan Tiago XXX. Juli XXXI. The High Official XXXII. Effect of the Pasquinades XXXIII. La Ultima Raz��n XXXIV. The Wedding XXXV. The Fiesta XXXVI. Ben-Zayb's Afflictions XXXVII. The Mystery XXXVIII. Fatality XXXIX. Conclusion

CHAPTER I
On the Upper Deck
Sic itur ad astra.
One morning in December the steamer Tabo was laboriously ascending the tortuous course of the Pasig, carrying a large crowd of passengers toward the province of La Laguna. She was a heavily built steamer, almost round, like the tab�� from which she derived her name, quite dirty in spite of her pretensions to whiteness, majestic and grave from her