Israel Rank

by Roy Horniman

I think he was surprised when I involved him in a long discussion on the moral aspect of capital punishment. Perhaps he went away and said I was callous. This is the orthodox designation of a man who has strength of mind or courage enough to meet a humanly-devised punishment with indifference. The same quality used in a different field will earn a reputation for valour. The dear chaplain was true to his cloth, and evidently viewed the crime of an English peer with something more of indulgence than he would have felt for the guilt of a member of the lower classes. Indeed, his reiterations of ‘my lord’ in his religious discussions were so constant as to confuse me with regard to the particular individual he was addressing.

I received a letter from Esther Lane in cryptic language which I could not understand at the time, but which was to be fully revealed afterwards.

I do not care to dwell upon the farewell interviews with my wife. They were curiously and unexpectedly unpleasant. The Dowager Lady Gascoyne—I allude, of course, to the widow of my benefactor—who, strangely enough, had never had the least doubt of my innocence, also came to see me. I think that in a sense the farewell that cost me most was that from Grahame Hallward, the unobtrusive and consistent friend. I do not think that the hopeless agony in his face could have been more terrible had he been related to me by the nearest of blood ties. He assured me that he would devote the rest of his life to proving my innocence. Thus is the tragic often unconsciously allied to the ridiculous.

My mind was fully occupied. The chaplain’s visits and those of people who wished to say farewell, in addition to a great deal of time spent with my lawyer, with whom I had to make many arrangements, took up all the spare moments I did not devote to these memoirs. I should have liked to know whether my child was a boy, although in either case it would make no difference to the succession.

I was astonished to learn that there had been an extraordinary revulsion of feeling in my favour. I thought that the facts were really too plain to admit of an outburst of sentimentalism. I suppose the idea of a peer dying a sordid death shocked the British public as much as the idea of slaying a woman gently born had done some short time before. Hanging was good enough for the ignorant and poverty-stricken. The snobbery of the public is easier appealed to than its humanity.

The usual petition which my lawyer had prepared was signed by all sorts of unexpected people, even by some of those who had voted for my guilt.

The Home Secretary could not, however, find any loophole for interfering, and the Governor informed me of the date fixed, in a curious phraseology which was no doubt meant to modify facts.

I was getting a little feverish, as was only natural. I found it necessary to use some effort to brace myself up for the final ordeal. Thoughts of Sibella haunted me, and played upon my memory like the love motive on the lover’s brain in Berlioz’s Scarlet Symphony. She was the allure beckoning my thoughts back to life, and it was a strange confirmation of what I had always felt—viz., that she was my strongest human magnet. I had not heard from her since the day of my arrest, but two days before the end I received a letter. It gave me infinite pleasure, and I knew it was the one thing I had been waiting for. She did not know, she wrote, how she had managed in her agony to conceal the truth from Lionel, but so far he had suspected nothing; indeed, he was working night and day for me.

I became quite sentimental over this letter. My thoughts wandered back to the schoolroom in the Hallwards’ house on Clapham Common. I saw Sibella as a little school-girl with a host of boy admirers. I remembered her as she was that afternoon we came home from football and all had tea together. I remembered the kisses, beautiful and perfumed as roses, which we had exchanged as children, and I remembered the burning kiss, unexpected by both of us, exchanged that Sunday evening when Grahame left us alone. These things returned to me with the dull pain of melodies, associated with wild moments of joy, heard again in moments of desolation, phantoms of music wailing past in the haunted air.

Apart from the ineradicable desire to live, which is the chief vice of human beings, I was not very anxious for my friends to obtain a reprieve. In default of an absolute pardon, my reason taught me that it would be better for them to fail. I did not relish the idea of wearing out my life in chains. Thus, when the eve of the fatal day arrived, I experienced a certain relief.