The excitement among all classes was great.  Francis and Francis’s few English adherents described the Governor-General and the Chief justice as the worst of murderers.  Clavering, it was said, swore that even at the foot of the gallows, Nuncomar should be rescued.  The bulk of the European society, though strongly attached to the Governor-General, could not but feel compassion for a man who, with all his crimes, had so long filled so large a space in their sight, who had been great and powerful before the British empire in India began to exist, and to whom, in the old times, governors and members of Council, then mere commercial factors, had paid court for protection.  The feeling of the Hindoos was infinitely stronger.  They were, indeed, not a people to strike one blow for their countryman.  But his sentence filled them with sorrow and dismay.  Tried even by their low standard of morality, he was a bad man.  But bad as he was, he was the head of their race and religion, a Brahmin of the Brahmins.  He had inherited the purest and highest caste.  He had practised with the greatest punctuality all those ceremonies to which the superstitious Bengalees ascribe far more importance than to the correct discharge of the social duties.  They felt, therefore, as a devout Catholic in the dark ages would have felt, at seeing a prelate of the highest dignity sent to the gallows by a secular tribunal.  According to their old national laws, a Brahmin could not be put to death for any crime whatever.  And the crime for which Nuncomar was about to die was regarded by them in much the same light in which the selling of an unsound horse, for a sound price, is regarded by a Yorkshire jockey.

The Mussulmans alone appear to have seen with exultation the fate of the powerful Hindoo, who had attempted to rise by means of the ruin of Mahommed Reza Khan.  The Mahommedan historian of those times takes delight in aggravating the charge.  He assures us that in Nuncomar’s house a casket was found containing counterfeits of the seals of all the richest men of the province.  We have never fallen in with any other authority for this story, which in itself is by no means improbable.

The day drew near; and Nuncomar prepared himself to die with that quiet fortitude with which the Bengalee, so effeminately timid in personal conflict, often encounters calamities for which there is no remedy.  The sheriff, with the humanity which is seldom wanting in an English gentleman, visited the prisoner on the eve of the execution, and assured him that no indulgence, consistent with the law, should be refused to him.  Nuncomar expressed his gratitude with great politeness and unaltered composure.  Not a muscle of his face moved.  No a sigh broke from him.  He put his finger to his forehead, and calmly said that fate would have its way, and that there was no resisting the pleasure of God.  He sent his compliments to Francis, Clavering, and Monson, and charged them to protect Rajah Goordas, who was about to become the head of the Brahmins of Bengal.  The sheriff withdrew, greatly agitated by what had passed, and Nuncomar sat composedly down to write notes and examine accounts.