“Go!” they said, “Call to your aid all the angels of your heaven, and the help of the demons who are one with me in hell, that you may save me from the gallows. My Soul is your Soul; if I die, you also must die with me. Keep the rope from me; for you are fighting for your own life. Go!”
I went out of the chill jail corridors a madman. I raved against the hellish destiny. What use? I must save him, or I must die with him. No one understood. I told no one my secret. Early and late; day and night I worked unceasingly to get him pardoned. God! how I worked to save him. I tried every conceivable means to secure him his life. I exhausted all methods known to the law. I spent money as a mill-wheel runs water.
“You believe him innocent?—this fiend!” my friends cried aghast—amazed at my mad eagerness to get him acquittal.
“No! not that!” I answered in my agony, “but he must not die—shall not hang! Shall not! Do you hear? Innocent or guilty—what do I care? Only he must live, that I shall not die.”
But no one understood.
It has been in vain. At eleven o’clock he is to be hung. The death-watch is with him. And the death-watch is here, too, with me. Two are here; and the name of one is Horror, and the other’s name is Fear. Down below I hear the rattle of traffic on the streets, and in the hotel corridors I hear the voices of people talking—just now I heard one laugh. They do not know. And Lucille—— Ah, my poor Lucille!
The tide of life is running out, and the end is drawing nigh. I have come to find at last that evil is always stronger than good; and in that way he draws me after him. I cannot hold the half of his Soul back. Closer and closer together we come. A Divided Soul—his and mine. His body has housed the evil half—mine the good. His is all that is vile, and bestial, and bloodthirsty; mine has always striven after the best. Yet because of his sin I, too, must die.
At the hour of eleven he will hang for the murder of Carmen de la Guerra. At eleven I, too, must die. As the sheriff cuts the rope, and the evil Divided Soul swings out eternity-ward from the body which has housed it evilly, so will I die at that instant—death by strangulation. For a Divided Soul may not live when its twin is gone. Death. And then one body in the rosewood casket, and one in its box of pine.