Marie glanced at the head lines and then started on a vigorous run for the building in which the Spanish military court was sitting. Rushing in, past an armed guard, she began to plead for her lover’s life. But he had already been tried, convicted and sentenced to death by strangulation in the old chute at Cavite. Dimiguez never moved a muscle when he saw Marie. Armed guards forced her abruptly out of the building and ordered her to leave.
Inside of two hours, on the same day, April 7, the anniversary of Marie’s birth, he was taken to the little town of Cavite, seven miles southwest of Manila, and was there placed in the lower end of a long chute built out into Manila Bay. This chute was just wide enough for a man to enter. Its sides, top and bottom were all built of heavy planks. The side planks lacked a few inches of connecting with the top, although of course the side posts ran clear up and the top was firmly bolted to them. The entrance to it was well elevated near the docks. The lower end protruded into the bay, so that it was visible about eighteen inches above the water during the period of low tide, and submerged several feet during high tide.
Tides come in slowly at Cavite, each succeeding wave rising but a trifle higher than the others, until the usual height is reached. Thus, a prisoner placed in this chute, forced to the lower end and then fastened securely during low tide, can look out over the side planks at the hideous spectators, watch the tide as it begins to rise and see slow death approaching. It was in this chute that Marie’s lover met his death.
Marie saw the launch that carried him away as it left Manila. She rushed down to the Pasig river, loosened her little boat from the tree to which it was tied, jumped in, seized the oars and started in pursuit. The launch on which he was being carried had for its power a gasoline engine, and, of course, it soon left her far behind. When she first started, the swells caused by the launch rocked her little canoe quite roughly and impeded her progress. As she approached the mouth of the river, passed the monument of Magellan and came between the walled-city on the southern bank and the docks on the northern bank, a crowd of excited natives thronged the shore, and many of them recognized her. She heard some one cry out, “Vive Marie!” With might and main she strove forward.
The launch made its seven-mile run to Cavite; the victim was placed in the chute; the tide had risen to the danger line; her lover, with his head thrown back, had just begun to gurgle the salt water, when Marie, in frantic agony, almost exhausted, rowed around the lower end of the chute and came near enough to the dying hero to be recognized by him. Straining ever muscle to keep his head above the water a second longer, he cried out in chocking tones that were interrupted by the merciless sea which was rapidly filling his mouth, “Goodby, Marie, God bless you. Avenge my death!”
Hush! At this moment another tidal wave engulfed the apex of the chute. Not a sound could be heard save the slight flapping of the waves against the pier, and the dismal chant of three priests, who stood on the shore near by, and who had not been permitted to attend the young spy before his death. Marie trembled; she dropped the oars; her eyes fell; for a moment it seemed that her young heart stood still: then her face flushed; the tears stopped flowing; anguish gave vent to determined revenge; pent-up sorrows yielded to out-spoken threats; and in tones sufficiently audible to be heard ashore, she cried, “I’ll do it.”
The Spaniard knows no pity. If Marie were to have stepped ashore immediately after her lover’s strangulation, she might have come to grief. It is strange that she escaped punishment for having followed. She, therefore, rowed directly east and landed on the beach of the bay, about four miles south of Manila, just west of the little city of Paranaque.
From sheer exhaustion, she needed food; therefore, she walked northward along the shore until she found a Mango tree heavily laden with fruit. After eating a few luscious mangoes, she crept into a clump of bamboo and had a good cry: tears so ease a woman’s soul.
From her position on the beach she could readily see the Spaniards as they took her dead lover from the chute when the tide had lowered toward evening. She saw them even strike his corpse, and she bit her finger nails as she watched them place him in a rough wooden box and haul him up through the streets of the village on an old two-wheeled cart drawn by a caribou.
With the approach of sunset, things grew strangely quiet. The spring zephyr that had blown modestly during the day died away. There was no longer even a dimple in the blue surface of Manila Bay. Not a leaf was astir. It seemed to Marie that the only sound she could hear was the the throbbing of her own heart. To her the whole world seemed like an open sepulcher. Looking down she discovered that she was unconsciously sitting on a flowery terrace and that all about her was life. She pulled one of those exquisite white flowers with wide pink veins, peculiar alone to the Philippines, and pressed it to her lips.