The witness hesitated before leaving the box, looking at the prisoner, but Manfred shook his head smilingly, and the straight slim figure of the young man passed out of court by the way he had come.
The unrestrained buzz of conversation that followed his departure was allowed to go unchecked as judge and counsel consulted earnestly across the bench.
Garrett, down amongst the journalists, put into words the vague thought that had been present in every mind in court.
“Do you notice, Jimmy,” he said to James Sinclair of the Review, “how blessed unreal this trial is? Don’t you miss the very essence of a murder trial, the mournfulness of it and the horror of it? Here’s a feller been killed and not once has the prosecution talked about ‘this poor man struck down in the prime of life’ or said anything that made you look at the prisoner to see how he takes it. It’s a philosophical discussion with a hanging at the end of it.”
“Sure,” said Jimmy.
“Because,” said Garrett, “if they find him guilty, he’s got to die. There’s no doubt about that; if they don’t hang him, crack! goes the British Constitution, the Magna Charta, the Diet of Worms, and a few other things that Bill Seddon was gassing about.”
His irreverent reference was to the prosecutor’s opening speech.
Now Sir William Seddon was on his feet again, beginning his closing address to the jury. He applied himself to the evidence that had been given, to the prisoner’s refusal to call that evidence into question, and conventionally traced step by step the points that told against the man in the dock. He touched on the appearance of the masked figure in the witness-box. For what it was worth it deserved their consideration, but it did not affect the issue before the court. The jury were there to formulate a verdict in accordance with the law as it existed, not as if it did not exist at all, to apply the law, not to create it—that was their duty. The prisoner would be offered an opportunity to speak in his own defence. Counsel for the Crown had waived his right to make the final address. They would, if he spoke, listen attentively to the prisoner, giving him the benefit of any doubt that might be present in their minds. But he could not see, he could not conceivably imagine, how the jury could return any but one verdict.
It seemed for a while that Manfred did not intend availing himself of the opportunity, for he made no sign, then he rose to his feet, and, resting his hands on the inkstand ledge before him:
“My lord,” he said, and turned apologetically to the jury, “and gentlemen.”
The court was so still that he could hear the scratchings of the reporters’ pens, and unexpected noises came from the street outside.
“I doubt either the wisdom or the value of speaking,” he said, “not that I suggest that you have settled in your minds the question of my guilt without very excellent and convincing reasons.
“I am under an obligation to Counsel for the Treasury,” he bowed to the watchful prosecutor, “because he spared me those banalities of speech which I feared would mar this trial. He did not attempt to whitewash the man we killed, or to exonerate him from his gross and sordid crimes. Rather, he made plain the exact position of the law in relation to myself, and with all he said I am in complete agreement. The inequalities of the law are notorious, and I recognize the impossibility, as society is constituted, of amending the law so that crimes such as we have dealt with shall be punished as they deserve. I do not rail against the fate that sent me here. When I undertook my mission, I undertook it with my eyes open, for I, too,” he smiled at the upturned faces at the counsels’ bench, “I too am learned in the law—and other things.
“There are those who imagine that I am consumed with a burning desire to alter the laws of this country; that is not so. Set canons, inflexible in their construction, cannot be adapted according to the merits of a case, and particularly is this so when the very question of ‘merit’ is a contentious point. The laws of England are good laws, wise and just and equitable. What other commendation is necessary than this one fact, that I recognize that my life is forfeit by those laws, and assent to the justice which condemns me?
“None the less, when I am free again,” he went on easily, “I shall continue to merit your judgment because there is that within me, which shows clearly which way my path lies, and how best I may serve humanity. If you say that to choose a victim here and a victim there for condemnation, touching only the veriest fringe of the world of rascaldom, I am myself unjust—since I leave the many and punish the few—I answer that for every man we slew, a hundred turned at the terror of our name and walked straightly; that the example of one death saved thousands. And if you should seriously ask: Have you helped reform mankind, I answer as seriously—Yes.”
He talked all this time to the judge.
“It would be madness to expect a civilized country to revert to the barbarism of an age in which death was the penalty for every other crime, and I will not insult your intelligence by denying that such a return to the bad days was ever suggested by me. But there has come into existence a spurious form of humanitarianism, the exponents of which have, it would appear, lost their sense of proportion, and have promoted the Fear of Pain to a religion; who have forgotten that the age of Reason is not yet, and that men who are animal in all but human semblance share the animal’s obedience to corrective discipline,
