No trait is more to be emphasized in observing the Filipino people than their respect for womanhood. It is hardly less than phenomenal. In Burma the women may have as much power; in Filipinas they have power and respect as well as affection. Rizal was all of this order; the most sacred object in the world was his mother; the next most sacred the woman that should be his wife; after her came his sisters. He had developed in advance of his times a certain philosophy of feminism that has since become much more general. In his letters he dwelt upon it. He thought the Filipino woman might be one of the great instruments for the deliverance of the country, exercising her power and influence conscientiously for education and liberty. Therefore, every Filipino woman ought to prepare herself for this service by utilizing every road to knowledge and enlarging her understanding of the [[124]]nation and its possibilities. He believed that a general effort on these lines by the educated women would make a profound impression upon the young and be invaluable in the next generation.
There seems to have been no flaw in his attachment to Leonora; his career abroad has been searched in vain for a reminiscence of an escapade. He lived a life of purity and that self-control that he held to be the first demand of the moral code he professed. Seldom has the biographer a career like this to write in which appears not enough of human frailty to spice the narrative. He had made for himself certain rules of conduct—abstemiousness, temperance, chastity, no wasting of time, no wasting of health—and to these he adhered with the stern inflexibility of an ascetic. The artist is usually saved, says Edmund Clarence Stedman, by his devotion to beauty. Rizal was an artist, and never has knelt before the ideal of beauty a worshiper more devout. The beauty of righteousness seemed to rule out of him all promptings to the coltish excesses of youth; that, and the dignity of his love, and his conception of the gravity of his mission. He that is called to bring light to his people must not linger at the wayside inn nor ruin their hopes by capitulation to man’s grosser senses.
Meantime, the Riveras had moved from Manila to Dagupan, in the province then called Laguna. The reputation that Rizal had left behind him was not bettered by the handling it had from the governing class after his flight. Evil propaganda has always been easy to great power in any form. In his absence the spies and agents provocateurs of the Government [[125]]made it but the day’s work to smear with lies the name of Rizal. “Some of it will stick,” is the philosophy of the professional slanderer. In this case the word proved true enough. Mrs. Rivera seems to have been much affected by the sad decline and fall of her prospective son-in-law. She was an excellent lady but one that set exaggerated store by the verdict of society and what Shelley called the great god “They Say.” Among all colonists everywhere this is a deity of might. With the slender group of Filipinos that strove to grasp the skirts of a society drawn disdainfully away from them, the cult amounted sometimes to a frenzy.
The reports that came from Madrid about Leonora’s lover, or were affirmed to come thence, were no salve to the mother’s wounded sensibilities. He was said to associate with sad young dogs, revolutionists and outcasts and all that, with Filipinos that had been exiled after the governmental sand-dance of 1872 and with other agencies of treason. The thought of the career that such a man would probably have in the Philippines seems to have struck Mrs. Rivera with inexpressible terror. What her friends and social co-mates would say when her daughter should be married to one sure to be a pariah if not a victim of the garrote was beyond her strength to endure.
She had also the strange notion that steals into the minds of some subjugated people that intermarriage with the dominant color promises relief from the sting of inferiority. About this time the railroad was being extended to Dagupan, and a young English engineer, Henry C. Kipping, came to take charge of the building of the last section of the new line from Bayambang. [[126]]His work took him often to Dagupan, where he met and fell in love with Leonora. He seems to have urged his suit with ardor and persistence and to have had from the beginning an adroit partisan in Leonora’s mother. Here had come, as if by the order of Providence, a means to save her daughter from an unhappy marriage. How much better to wed an English engineer than a Filipino agitator! With joy she seized every opportunity to praise the ingenious Kipping, gave thanks (for she was of a resolute devotion) to the wisdom that had arranged all this, and even prepared to give it help of her own devising.[4]
Cold fell her eulogies on Leonora’s ears. When Kipping talked love to her she told him frankly that she was engaged to marry Rizal, whom she loved and would always love, and that another suitor was for her impossible.
Nothing in Kipping’s reports of these chilly receptions daunted Mrs. Rivera, her heart being set on this match. She knew well the weight of parental authority among her people. Also, she had faith in the effects of absence, if judiciously interpreted and assisted. She can hardly have read the novels of Charles Reade, but that eminent author would have found in her a character all made to his mind. She now had resort to an expedient that was one of favorite practice among his own villains. Many a reader of his it has left cold, deeming it impossible or extravagant. Behold, then, vindication for the novelist, and straight from history. Mrs. Rivera augmented the glacial effects of separation by stopping all letters [[127]]between the young lovers. To this end she bribed two postal clerks.[5] For a monthly stipend they agreed to bring to her all the letters that Leonora wrote to José and all the letters that José wrote to Leonora.
Months went by and not a word came from Madrid. Leonora began to droop under the suspense. Skilfully and industriously her mother plied her with insinuations and the wise shaking of the head so eloquent to the anxious. We could and if we would, and that line of ambiguous givings out. At last, she openly declared that Rizal had found another sweetheart. Leonora hysterically affirmed her faith in her lover. But the physical fact persisted that mail after mail arrived from Spain and not a line from Rizal. “He is sick,” said Leonora, “and I am here, I cannot take care of him.” The next time the expected letter failed she said deliberately, “I know José. He has given his word. He will die before he breaks it.”
The mother seems to have known how to beat down this spirit. At last she brought to an issue the slow, sure undermining in which she had been employing her wits. “If you truly love me, you ought to remember that, after God, you owe to me all you are, and after God, then, you owe me your duty. I urge this marriage, not because it means anything to me, but because I am your mother. I seek your true happiness. All the hope of my life is centered upon it. Do you wish to kill your mother?”
At this, Leonora capitulated. So great is the maternal influence in the Filipino household it is likely that most other Filipino girls in the same conditions would [[128]]have yielded. According to Miss Sevilla, Leonora’s sympathetic biographer, the daughter now fell into the mother’s arms and said: