This, although but left-handed and imperfect revenge, accorded with the ideas and practices of the governing class. The grievances of the judge and the lieutenant, if they had any, were against Mr. Mercado; they evened the score by striking not at him but at his wife. Incomprehensible or almost insane as this will seem to a healthier sense of honor, it was a custom of which we shall find other and more painful instances. Suppose the governing class, or a member of it, to believe the much cherished supremacy of the white race to demand that an example be made of an offending native. No nice discrimination was deemed necessary. If the offender was not available, retribution could still be inflicted upon the offender’s wife, or upon his children or even upon his brother-in-law or his great aunt, if he had no children, or if his wife was not within striking distance. In fairness to the Spaniards we are to note that this singular reversion was not a product of nationality but of geography; many a man defended vicarious vengeance in the Philippines that would have scorned it in Spain, so wonderful are the moral idiocies into which imperialism drives us.
Mrs. Mercado was ordered from her home to the prison at Santa Cruz, the provincial capital, at the other side of the lake. Ordinarily, traffic with Calamba was by steamer; but a road, rough and ill made, led along the shore. The more to taste the pleasures of [[10]]his revenge, the judge ordered Mrs. Mercado to be conducted by this road and on foot; that is to say, about twenty miles and in the sun.
It will later appear in this narrative that she was no ordinary woman; she came from a household that believed in liberty; she seems to have had a lofty spirit and a certain dignified self-mastery not rare among Filipino women. All about that part of the province she was known for her charities and good neighborliness. Her compatriots liked her. When, therefore, trudging along the shore road under the custody of a guard, she came at the evening of the first day to a village, she was received by its inhabitants with outpourings of sympathy and an invitation to lodge at the best house in the place instead of the village lockup as the judge had thoughtfully intended. She accepted the invitation; but with insatiable malice he had followed to see how his orders were obeyed. When he found the prisoner well bestowed instead of undergoing the miseries of the filthy prison, a madness of rage came upon him. He broke down the door of the house where his victim was sheltered, and, judge as he was, hesitated not to assault with his cane both the unlucky guard that had shown her lenity and the owner of the house that had received her.[6]
He was as merciful as the judicial system he adorned; as intelligent and as well ordered. One of the least of its offenses was that this same hedge-row magistrate, at whose order she had been arrested to gratify his spite, was also to be the prosecuting attorney, [[11]]when she should be brought to trial, and the judge before whom her fate should be decided. Mr. Mercado, meanwhile, had been putting forth every peaceful means to rescue his wife from this disaster. He had secured an attorney, who now presented a petition that her case should not be allowed to come before a judge so manifestly prejudiced against her. While Mrs. Mercado lay in jail, this appeal went before the supreme court, which sustained it and ordered the prisoner’s release. Before she could be set free the unjust judge brought a new charge against her, that her petition alleging prejudice on his part constituted contempt of court.
On this she continued to be a prisoner until another appeal could be made to the supreme assize. When it had been reached and argued, Dogberry wisdom seated upon this august bench upheld the court below and found that such a petition was indeed contempt. How, that being the case, a prisoner could ever escape from a court or judge manifestly hostile to her, these eminent authorities did not suggest. But as Mrs. Mercado had already been in jail much longer than the term of the sentence passed upon her for contempt, they ordered her liberation.
It was now to be supposed that the end of this business had been reached, vengeance had been satisfied, the crime of not feeding the lieutenant’s horse had been atoned for, and the woman might return to her family. Not in the Philippines, certainly. Before the prison doors could open, a new charge was brought against her. [[12]]
She was alleged by the judge-prosecutor-tribunal to have committed theft.[7]
Here is an incident luminous upon the society of that day and region; we had better pursue it. All this time, Mrs. Mercado’s half-brother, José Alberto, the engineer, whose unfortunate marriage had wrought so much of trouble, had been a prisoner in the same jail, similarly beset with accusing inventions. He had a moderate fortune; therefore the story went around that he had much money concealed about him. The scent of the peso was ever strong in the nostrils of the jail officials and court attendants. When the gold could not be found in José Alberto’s cell, the searchers for it reasonably concluded that the half-sister must have taken it, possibly by means of an astral presence or through some form of witchcraft.
For this rank imagining there was even less of basis than there had been for the conspiracy charge; yet it was months in falling apart. When it had dissolved in its own absurdity another quite as unfounded took its place. Justice à la espagnole—in the Philippines. Two years passed in these futilities. It was apparently the purpose of the authorities to keep their helpless victim in prison the rest of her life.
From such a fate she was now rescued by another incident not less than her imprisonment typical of misgovernment under which the country groaned. The governor-general of all the Philippines, representative in his single person of the might and majesty of Spain, [[13]]came to Calamba on a tour. Among the entertainments offered in his honor was dancing by children. One of the little girls by her grace and beauty particularly won the governor-general’s applause. He asked her what he could do for her. She said he could release her mother from prison. She was Mrs. Mercado’s daughter, and by this detour and purified recrudescence of Salome and Herod was Mrs. Mercado snatched at last from her persecutors and got again to her home.[8]