He desires that his name shall be withheld, and there are peculiar circumstances that compel me to grant his request. You may be assured, gentlemen of the jury, that I am satisfied both as to the identity of the witness, and that he is in every way worthy of credence.'

  He nodded a signal to an officer, and through the judge's door to the witness box there walked a young man. He was dressed in a tightly fitting frock coat, and across the upper part of his face was a half mask.

  He leant lightly over the rail, looking at Manfred with a little smile on his clean-cut mouth, and Manfred's eyes challenged him.

  'You come to speak on behalf of the accused?' asked the judge.

  'Yes, my lord.'

  It was the next question that sent a gasp of surprise through the crowded court.

  'You claim equal responsibility for his actions?'

  'Yes, my lord!'

  'You are, in fact, a member of the organization known as the Four Just Men?'

  'I am.'

  He spoke calmly, and the thrill that the confession produced, left him unmoved.

  'You claim, too,' said the judge, consulting a paper before him, 'to have participated in their councils?'

  'I claim that.'

  There were long pauses between the questions, for the judge was checking the replies and counsel was writing busily.

  'And you say you are in accord both with their objects and their methods?'

  'Absolutely.'

  'You have helped carry out their judgment?'

  'I have.'

  'And have given it the seal of your approval?'

  'Yes.'

  'And you state that their judgments were animated with a high sense of their duty and responsibility to mankind?'

  'Those were my words.'

  'And that the men they killed were worthy of death?'

  'Of that I am satisfied.'

  'You state this as a result of your personal knowledge and investigation?'

  'I state this from personal knowledge in two instances, and from the investigations of myself and the independent testimony of high legal authority.'

  'Which brings me to my next question,' said the judge. 'Did you ever appoint a commission to investigate all the circumstances of the known cases in which the Four Just Men have been implicated?'

  'I did.'

  'Was it composed of a Chief Justice of a certain European State, and four eminent criminal lawyers?'

  'It was.'

  'And what you have said is the substance of the finding of that Commission?'

  'Yes.'

  The Judge nodded gravely and the public prosecutor rose to cross-examination.

  'Before I ask you any question,' he said, 'I can only express myself as being in complete agreement with his lordship on the policy of allowing your identity to remain hidden.' The young man bowed.

  'Now,' said the counsel, 'let me ask you this. How long have you been in association with the Four Just Men?'

  'Six months,' said the other.

  'So that really you are not in a position to give evidence regarding the merits of this case—which is five years old, remember.'

  'Save from the evidence of the Commission.'

  'Let me ask you this—but I must tell you that you need not answer unless you wish—are you satisfied that the Four Just Men were responsible for that tragedy?'

  'I do not doubt it,' said the young man instantly. 'Would anything make you doubt it?'

  'Yes,' said the witness smiling, 'if Manfred denied it, I should not only doubt it, but be firmly assured of his innocence.'

  'You say you approve both of their methods and their objects?'

  'Yes.'

  'Let us suppose you were the head of a great business firm controlling a thousand workmen, with rules and regulations for their guidance and a scale of fines and punishments for the preservation of discipline. And suppose you found one of those workmen had set himself up as an arbiter of conduct, and had superimposed upon your rules a code of his own.'

  'Well?'

  'Well, what would be your attitude toward that man?'

  'If the rules he initiated were wise and needful I would incorporate them in my code.'

  'Let me put another case. Suppose you governed a territory, administering the laws—'

  'I know what you are going to say,' interrupted the witness, 'and my answer is that the laws of a country are as so many closely-set palings erected for the benefit of the community. Yet try as you will, the interstices exist, and some men will go and come at their pleasure, squeezing through this fissure, or walking boldly through that gap.'

  'And you would welcome an unofficial form of justice that acted as a kind of moral stop-gap?'

  'I would welcome clean justice.'

  'If it were put to you as an abstract proposition, would you accept it?'

  The young man paused before he replied.

  'It is difficult to accommodate one's mind to the abstract, with such tangible evidence of the efficacy of the Four Just Men's system before one's eyes,' he said.

  'Perhaps it is,' said the counsel, and signified that he had finished.

  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.