Page:Don Quixote (Cervantes, Ormsby) Volume 1.djvu/36

 xxvi should have submitted to this; and stranger still that Philip should have condescended to countenance negotiations of the sort, and formally recognize the Redemptorist Fathers as his agents, when probably a tenth of the force he was employing to stamp out heresy among his Flemish subjects would have sufficed to destroy the nest of pirates that was the centre of the trade. To this pass had "one-man power" already brought Spain in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. As is unhappily often the case with philanthropic efforts, the exertions of the good Redemptorist Fathers aggravated the evil. They supplied an additional motive for capturing Christians by affording facilities for converting captives into cash, and by making them valuable as property added to their misery.

By means of a ransomed fellow-captive the brothers contrived to inform their family of their condition, and the poor people at Alcalá at once strove to raise the ransom money, the father disposing of all he possessed, and the two sisters giving up their marriage portions. But Dali Mami had found on Cervantes the letters addressed to the King by Don John and the Duke of Sesa, and, concluding that his prize must be a person of great consequence, when the money came he refused it scornfully as being altogether insufficient. The owner of Rodrigo, however, was more easily satisfied; ransom was accepted in his case, and it was arranged between the brothers that he should return to Spain and procure a vessel in which he was to come back to Algiers and take off Miguel and as many of their comrades as possible. This was not the first attempt to escape that Cervantes had made. Soon after the commencement of his captivity he induced several of his companions to join him in trying to reach Oran, then a Spanish post, on foot; but after the first day's journey, the Moor who had agreed to act as their guide deserted them, and they had no choice but to return. The second attempt was more disastrous. In a garden outside the city on the seashore, he constructed, with the help of the gardener, a Spaniard, a hiding-place, to which he brought, one by one, fourteen of his fellow-captives, keeping them there in secrecy for several months, and supplying them with food through a renegade known as El Dorador, "the Gilder." How he, a captive himself, contrived to do all this, is one of the mysteries of the story. Wild as the project may appear, it was very nearly successful. The vessel procured by Rodrigo made its