On the basis of evidence so untrustworthy the tale was fabricated that he had retracted his political views. It was brazen impudence that put out this fable and simple credulity that believed it. Much that happened in the last scenes of his tragedy is and always will be uncertain, but the one thing about which is no doubt is that he went to his death unshaken in his loyalty to the great causes to which he had dedicated his life and labors, to the rights, emancipation, and progress of his country. If from the tangled accounts now available to us we wish to build a surmise, it is likely that Rizal affirmed his religious faith, renounced masonry, [218] was reconciled to the church, received the sacrament, and then had [219] performed the ecclesiastical marriage rites between him and his wife that he had so desired in vain at Dapitan. Even as to this there is no record, but the correlative facts are strong. To his mother and sisters he now said the last farewell; said it with the calm and gentle resignation that from the first had marked his conduct. Even in that crux of his sufferings his command upon himself and all his faculties seems never to have wavered. He knew well that all his effects would be searched and any papers he might leave would be seized and destroyed; yet he desired to give to his countrymen the song of parting he had written for them. At the interview with his mother and sisters they were kept separated from him by a space of some feet under the pretended fear that poison might be passed to him and so might he cheat revenge of blood-drops for which it thirsted. To transmit the poem, therefore, was difficult, but the resourceful mind of Rizal did not fail him now. The little alcohol lamp by which he had written his song and read and studied in his cell had been the gift of a friend in Europe. In the Islands it was something of a curiosity. This he managed to bequeath to his sister Trinidad and when he told her about it he added quickly in English, “There is something inside.” [220] Even in these last hours efforts were made by his friends to rescue him from the jaws that had opened to rend him. Relatives and friends besieged the governor-general; he would not even admit them to his presence. In Spain fervent appeals were made to the National Government. All scientific and sympathetic Europe was horror-stricken at the impending murder of one of the most learned men of the age. There is a story that the Spanish prime minister wished to yield to these demands. It was the queen regent that he found implacable. Something in one of Rizal’s books had mortally offended her. She, too, was determined to have his blood.