They were privileged people who gained admission to the Old Bailey, people with tickets from sheriffs, reporters, great actors, and very successful authors. The early editions of the evening newspapers announced the arrival of these latter spectators. The crowd outside the court contented themselves with discussing the past and the probable future of the prisoner.
The Megaphone had scored heavily again, for it published in extenso the particulars of the prisoner’s will. It referred to this in its editorial columns variously as “An Astounding Document” and “An Extraordinary Fragment”. It was remarkable alike for the amount bequeathed, and for the generosity of its legacies.
Nearly half a million was the sum disposed of, and of this the astonishing sum of £60,000 was bequeathed to “the sect known as the “Rational Faithers” for the furtherance of their campaign against capital punishment”, a staggering legacy remembering that the Four Just Men knew only one punishment for the people who came under its ban.
“You want this kept quiet, of course,” said the lawyer when the will had been attested.
“Not a bit,” said Manfred; “in fact I think you had better hand a copy to the Megaphone.”
“Are you serious?” asked the dumbfounded lawyer.
“Perfectly so,” said the other. “Who knows,” he smiled, “it might influence public opinion in—er—my favour.”
So the famous will became public property, and when Manfred, climbing the narrow wooden stairs that led to the dock of the Old Bailey, came before the crowded court, it was this latest freak of his that the humming court discussed.
“Silence!”
He looked round the big dock curiously, and when a warder pointed out the seat, he nodded, and sat down. He got up when the indictment was read.
“Are you guilty or not guilty?” he was asked, and replied briefly:
“I enter no plea.”
He was interested in the procedure. The scarlet-robed judge with his old, wise face and his quaint, detached air interested him mostly. The businesslike sheriffs in furs, the clergyman who sat with crossed legs, the triple row of wigged barristers, the slaving bench of reporters with their fierce whispers of instructions as they passed their copy to the waiting boys, and the strong force of police that held the court: they had all a special interest for him.
The leader for the Crown was a little man with a keen, strong face and a convincing dramatic delivery. He seemed to be possessed all the time with a desire to deal fairly with the issues, fairly to the Crown and fairly to the prisoner. He was not prepared, he said, to labour certain points which had been brought forward at the police-court inquiry, or to urge the jury that the accused man was wholly without redeeming qualities.
He would not even say that the man who had been killed, and with whose killing Manfred was charged, was a worthy or a desirable citizen of the country. Witnesses who had come forward to attest their knowledge of the deceased, were ominously silent on the point of his moral character. He was quite prepared to accept the statement he was a bad man, an evil influence on his associates, a corrupting influence on the young women whom he employed, a breaker of laws, a blackguard, a debauchée.
“But, gentlemen of the jury,” said the counsel impressively, “a civilized community such as ours has accepted a system—intricate and imperfect though it may be—by which the wicked and the evil-minded are punished. Generation upon generation of wise law-givers have moulded and amended a scale of punishment to meet every known delinquency. It has established its system laboriously, making great national sacrifices for the principles that system involved. It has wrested with its life-blood the charters of a great liberty—the liberty of a law administered by its chosen officers and applied in the spirit of untainted equity.”
So he went on to speak of the Four Just Men who had founded a machinery for punishment, who had gone outside and had overridden the law; who had condemned and executed their judgment independent and in defiance of the established code.