Israel Rank

by Roy Horniman

When I declared that I must accept their invitation, or Mrs. Parsons and her children would be hurt, I fancy Miss Gascoyne’s face lighted. I was sure that she had endowed me with all sorts of good qualities to which I could lay no claim. She was touched at my consideration for the Parsons’ feelings. She was a woman incapable of giving love where she could not give respect.

The world only knowing me through the medium of a trial for murder has no doubt made up its mind that anyone who could respect me must have been a very bad judge of character. The world, however, is not itself a very good judge of character. To man, his fellow-creatures are as a rule divided into two classes, viz.: the penny plain and twopence coloured. If Mr. Brown has been found with Mr. Jones’s wife, Mr. Brown is a complete and wholly irreclaimable blackguard. That he has been an honest citizen, an attentive husband, and an irreproachable father hitherto counts for nothing. These virtues only aggravate the offence, inasmuch as they are shown by the nature of his guilt to have been mere hypocrisies. Public exposure is the real guilt in his fellow-men’s eyes. The old, old crime of being found out is the unforgivable offence. They know in their hearts that he is rather a fine fellow, that his slip is what might have happened to any of them. They have probably some such little liability still unpaid standing to their own account, but this does not make them one whit the less severe in judging their foolish fellow who has been discovered. It is thus. A man who has been in the dock and has been convicted loses the right to claim any virtues. As for a man who has been convicted of murder! What can be said for him? Just as he has been found guilty of the crime the law holds most wicked, so must he be capable of committing all those crimes which murder is supposed to take precedence of.

Yet Miss Gascoyne was right, and the world was wrong. She had seen the best side of me, and—at the risk of appearing egotistical and conceited—there was much to respect in my character, especially as seen by her, and it was by no means all spurious virtue. I had a sound judgment. I was no snob, and I was not only well read, but I had musical accomplishments, which—strange in a woman of her birth and country breeding—she did not despise. She deemed me loyal, and so I was, with limitations. Above all, she loved me—of that I was now sure—and everything I had to show in the shape of goodness shone, as will do the deeds of her lover in the eyes of woman. She took a much truer view of my character than the public have done so far. I was kind-hearted; this she had discovered for herself, and, curiously enough, without my putting the fact too obviously before her.

I already saw myself married to her, and I could not help thinking of the importance it would give me in the eyes of the world to have been accepted by the beautiful Miss Gascoyne, who had refused almost the finest match in England. People would hardly credit it, and it certainly was necessary to know Miss Gascoyne in order thoroughly to understand her action.

I went on my visit to the imaginary Parsons family, and when I returned was compelled to invent still further details for Miss Gascoyne’s benefit. She was interested in everything I did, and asked all manner of questions about them, down to minute details as to what young Parsons grew most on his farm.

“Really,” I laughed, “I didn’t ask.”

“That’s not very like you, Mr. Rank. You generally want to know everything. Your capacity for picking up information has always surprised me.”

“We were too occupied in talking over old times,” I answered, and the conversation was diverted to a good-natured bantering on my inquisitive ways.

I had, however, seen the Reverend Henry Gascoyne, and had even heard him preach. The village of Lye lay right out in the midst of the fens of Lincolnshire. In the autumn—the time at which I visited it—it looked well enough, but in the winter I should think it must have been dreary beyond description. The village itself clustered round the church, a fine old building dating from about the year twelve hundred. It was partly in ruin; indeed, it was a question whether it had ever really been completed. The interior depended for its beauty on the design, for it had all the coldness and inhospitable aspect of the average English country church where the incumbent has been untouched by the High Church movement. There was a Communion Table which might have been anything, but for its position, and a dusty Litany lay on the desk. The walls were covered with memorials to the Hutchins, the family of Mr. Gascoyne’s wife, from whom he had received the living.

There was a brand-new bronze tablet—somewhat of a relief after the black-edged marble mementoes of the rest of the Hutchins family—to the memory of Mary Gascoyne, the beloved wife of Henry Gascoyne, incumbent of the parish, with a space for the name of the Reverend Henry when he should be carried, by a power stronger than his own, from the comforts of Lye Rectory to that land, the glories and happinesses of which he expatiated upon every Sunday, but which he was in no hurry to set out for.