The speech of leading counsel for the Crown was short: a letter, found
on the prisoner, would be produced, in which some busybody had falsely
informed the prisoner that Mr. Frankl would meet his sister under a
certain elm-tree: and the prisoner, in a crisis of passion, had hurried
from the pulpit to that tree, on observing that his sister had left the
chapel (to keep a real appointment with Mr. Frankl elsewhere). Under
that tree the prisoner had encountered the murdered man, whose Oriental
dress on a dark night would give him a resemblance to Mr. Frankl,
himself a Jew. The prisoner had then shot the deceased, mistaking him
for Mr. Frankl, and had been found holding the smoking weapon, which
he admitted to be his own. It was a painful case; but the chain of
inference was not assailable.
“Not assailable” found an echo in the minds of solicitor and counsel for
Hogarth, who with growing anxiety were awaiting the coming of Margaret
with her story of the weapons. Margaret was where her name was changed
to Rachel.
Now was the régime of examining counsel for the prosecution. The usher
called: “Baruch Frankl!”
A voice in the gallery shouted: “Caps and tassels!” while Frankl, in the
witness box, bowed largely to both bench and bar. He put his palms on
the red-hot rail, caught them up, put them again, caught up, put them;
and still he bowed, while a trembling of the chin gave to his beard a
downward waving.
“Now explain to the court the reasons for the state of the prisoner's
feelings toward you”.
“For one thing I had turned him out, because he could not pay his rent;
for another, his sister was inclined, my lord, to be a little bit weak
on my account--”
“A little bit _what_?” asked his lordship.
“Just a little bit weak, my lord”.
“A _reciprocal_ weakness?”
“Well, my lord, you know the world--so do the gentlemen of the jury--”
“And of the Jewry!” screamed his lordship, amid laughter from the merry
wigs.
As Frankl stepped down, a name was called at which Hogarth went cold as
a ghost: “Rebekah Frankl”.
And in she stepped splendent, to stand like a Nubian woman, with that
retreat of the hips, her ears torn with their load of gold, her throat
and breast ablaze, she bringing into that English court the gaudy heat
of the Orient, Baal and Astarté, orgies of Hindoo women in temples of
Parvati, the pallid passion of Bacchantes. Though not tall, she was
lofty, and her ebon eyes had that very royalty of the stare of the bent
form in the dock, whose heart throbbed quick like paddle-wheels that
thrash the sea, she his wild divinity, wild wife of his wild youth....
At her shocking beauty the Court stood hushed.
She suggested the East: but in her speech was the energy of the
West--sharp--a bass almost like her father's.
“You recognize the prisoner?”
“Yes”. She smiled.
“You were present on the day of the 11th November when the prisoner
entered your father's house, and attempted to strike him?”
“Did strike him”.
“He did?”
“Yes”.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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