The Majesty of the Law—nay, in theory at least, the Majesty of England—sat enthroned at Raylesbury. In the big chair in the centre the Honourable Sir Christopher Lance, in his newly powdered wig and his scarlet robes—the "Red Judge" whose splendour solaces (so it is said) even the prisoners with a sense of their own importance. On his right the High Sheriff, splendid also in Deputy-Lieutenant's uniform, but bored, sleepy after a good lunch, and half-stifled by sitting indoors all day in bad air, instead of agreeably killing something under the open vault of Heaven. Beyond him the Chaplain, smooth-faced, ruddy, rather severe, in gown and cassock of silk so fine and stiff as to seem capable of standing up straight on its own account, even if His Reverence chanced not to be inside. At the end, the Under-Sheriff, unobtrusively ready to come to his Chief's assistance. On his Lordship's left—a sad falling off in impressiveness—Arthur in mufti, and on his other side Mr. Williams, the Judge's clerk, a fat man of constant but noiseless activity, ever coming in and going out, fetching nothing from nowhere and taking it back again (at any rate so far as the casual spectator could perceive). Behind, such county magistrates as were attracted by curiosity or by a laudable desire to take a lesson in doing justice. In front, to right and left, and down below, divided from this august company (for even on Marshal and Clerk fell rays of reflected dignity) the world of struggle—the Bar, the solicitors, jury, witnesses, prisoners, spectators, with great policemen planted at intervals like forest-trees amongst the scrub. For mainspring of the whole machine, the Clerk of Assize, a charming and courtly old gentleman, telling everybody what to do and when to do it, polite, though mostly unintelligible, to the prisoners, confidential and consolatory to the jury, profoundly anxious that nothing should ruffle so much as a hair of his lordship's wig.

In the morning they had tried a yokel for stealing a pig. The defence—a guinea's worth—eloquently advanced and ardently pressed—was that the prosecutor had presented the prisoner with the pig in a moment of conviviality. The prosecutor met the suggestion with amazement, the jury with smiles: one might get drunk, but no man was ever so drunk as to give his pig away! Verdict—Guilty. His Lordship passed a light sentence, faintly smiling over the ways of a world which, after nearly fifty years in the law and eighteen on the Bench, still remained to him rather remote and incomprehensible. This case of the pig was a merry case. It lent itself to jokes, and young Bertie Rackstraw's caricature (he solaced briefless days with art) of counsel for the defence arm-in-arm with a gowned and bewigged pig was circulated and much admired. Pignus amoris, another wag wrote under it.

Now, in the afternoon, a different atmosphere obtained in court. There were no jokes and no caricatures. People were very quiet. Counsel for the prosecution put his searching questions gravely and gently, almost with pitifulness; counsel for the defence was careful, earnest, anxious. Progress was slow, almost every word of the evidence had to go down in the Judge's red book, to be written down in Sir Christopher's neat precise handwriting. A man was on trial for his life and, as afternoon darkened into evening, the battle drew near its fateful issue.

He was a big, burly, stolid, honest-looking fellow, inarticulate, not able to help himself by his answers or to take proper advantage of the dexterous leads given him by his counsel, who strained his right to lead since life was at stake. In truth, though he was sorry that he had killed her—since his old tenderness for her had revived, and moreover he wished he had killed the other man instead—he could not see that he had done wrong. He knew that the law said he had, and drew therefrom a most formidable conclusion; but he did not feel convicted in his own heart. She had deceived him and, when discovered, had derided him with ugly words. Had he slain her then and there in his rage, the plea of manslaughter might well have prevailed. But he said nothing to her; in grim silence he had taken his way to the town and bought the knife, and waited for two days his opportunity; then cunningly laid in wait where she would come alone, and swiftly, in silence again, killed her. But may not rage—ungovernable rage—last two days and be cunning? Round this the battle raged. He had been cunning, calm, methodical.

It was seven o'clock when the Judge finished his summing-up, and the jury retired. His lordship did not leave the court, but listened to an application relating to a civil cause which was to be heard at the next town. Everybody seemed to turn to this matter with relief; and small noises—coughs and fidgetings—began to be audible again. But Mr. Williams rose and went out noiselessly, soon to return. This time he brought something from somewhere, and held it hidden beneath the Bench.

The jury came back, and the little noises were all hushed.

"How say you—Guilty or Not Guilty?"

"Guilty," the foreman answered. "But we wish to recommend him to mercy, my lord, in view of his great provocation."

The prisoner's eyes turned slowly from the foreman to the Judge. Mr. Williams slid what he had brought—the square of black cloth—into the Marshal's hand, and, under the Bench still, the Marshal gave it to the Judge.

The prisoner only shook his head in answer to the Clerk of Assize's question whether he had any reason why the Court should not pronounce sentence, and in due form sentence followed. The Judge delivered it in low and very gentle tones, with a high compassion. "The Jury's recommendation will receive the fullest consideration, but I may not bid you hope for mercy, save for that Mercy for which everyone of us equally must pray."

At the end the condemned man made a little bow to the Court, awkward but not without a pathetic dignity. "Thank you, my lord," he said with respectful simplicity. Then he was led downstairs, and the black square travelled back on its hidden way to Mr. Williams' custody. Mr. Williams stowed it in some invisible place, and issued his summons to all and sundry to attend again at half-past ten on the morrow. The Court rose; the work of the day was ended. It remained only for the Marshal to write to His Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for the Home Department, apprising him that Sentence of Death had been passed and that the Judge's notes would be sent to him without delay. His Lordship, the Sheriff, and the Chaplain passed out to the State carriage, attended by the Javelin-men.

"Do you think he's got any chance, my lord?" asked the High Sheriff, as they drove to the Judge's lodgings.

"Yes, Sir Quintin, an off-chance, I should say. In fact I think I shall help him, as far as I can—that's between ourselves, of course. He didn't seem to me a bad sort of man, but—" He smiled faintly—"very primitive! And the poor wretch of a woman certainly didn't let him down easy."

"I should like to have seen the other man in the dock beside him, my lord," said the Chaplain.

"Oh, well, Chaplain, he wasn't bound to anticipate murder, was he? As it is, he's thought it prudent to get out of the country—at some loss and inconvenience, no doubt; this man's friends were after him. But for that we should have had him here to-day."

"He wouldn't have been popular," the High Sheriff opined, with a shake of his glossy head.

Thus, as the days went by, at Raylesbury and the succeeding Assize towns, drama after drama was unfolded, and varieties of character revealed—knaves guileless and knaves quickwitted; fools without balance or self-restraint; mere animals—or such they seemed—doing animal deeds and confronted with a human standard to which they were not equal and which they regarded with a dull dismay. Incidentally there came to light ways of life and modes of thought astonishing, yet plainly accepted and related as things normal; the old hands on the circuit knew all about them and used their knowledge deftly in cross-examination. Now and then the dock was filled by a figure that seemed strange to it, by a denizen of the same world that Bench and Bar, High Sheriff and Marshal inhabited; in one place there was a solicitor who had been town-clerk and embezzled public moneys; in another a local magistrate stood to plead in the dock side by side with a labourer whom he himself had committed for trial; the labourer was acquitted, and the magistrate sent to prison—with nought to seek thence-forward but oblivion. Freaks of destiny and whirligigs of fortune! Yet these were the exception. The salient revelation was of a great world of people to whom there was nothing strange in finding themselves, their relatives or friends, in that dock, to whom it was an accident that might well happen to anybody, an incident in many a career. But they expected the game to be played; they were keen on that, and bitterly resented any sharp practice by the police; a "fair cop," on the other hand, begat no resentment. Lack of consideration as between man and man, however, stirred ire. One fellow's great grievance was that a zealous officer had arrested him at seven o'clock on a Sunday morning. "Why couldn't 'e let me 'ave my Sunday sleep out?" he demanded. "A bloke's not going to do a bunk at seven on a Sunday morning!" His lordship smilingly assured him that he should have seven days less in prison, but he was not appeased. "Seven of a Sunday, my lordship!" he growled still, in disappearing.

"Well, I shouldn't like it myself," said "my lordship" aside to the Marshal.

His lordship's "asides" added something to the Marshal's instruction and more to his amusement. Sir Christopher was not a reformer or a sociologist, nor even an emotionalist either. He took this Assize Court world as he found it, just as he took West-End drawing-rooms as he found them, at other times of the year. He knew the standards. He was never shocked, and nothing made him angry, except cruelty or a Jack-in-office. In presence of these he was coldly dangerous and deadly. To see him take in hand a policeman whose zeal outran the truth was a lesson in the art of flaying a man's skin off him strip by strip. The asides came often then; the artist would have the pupil note his skill and did not disdain his applause. Though the Marshal's share in the work of the court was of the smallest, his lordship liked him to be there, hearing the cases and qualifying himself for a gossip over them, on an afternoon walk or at dinner in the evening.

As the days went by, a pleasant intimacy between the old man and the young established itself, and grew into a mutual affection, quasi-paternal on the one side, almost filial on the other. A bachelor, without near kindred save an elderly maiden sister, the old Judge found in Arthur something of what a son gives his father—a vicarious and yet personal interest in the years to come—and he found amusement in discovering likenesses between himself and his protÉgÉ, or at least in speculating on their existence with a playful humour.

"Men differ in the way they look at their professions or businesses," he said. "Of course everybody's got to live, but, going deeper into it than that, you find one man to whom his profession is, first and foremost, a ladder, and another to whom it's a seat in the theatre—if you follow what I mean. That fellow Norton Ward's of the first class. He's never looking about him; his eyes are always turned upwards, towards an inspiring vision of himself at the top. But you and I like looking about us; we're not in a hurry to be always on the upward move. The scene delights us, even though we've no part in it, or only a small one. That's been true about me, and I think it's true about you, Arthur."

"Oh, I've my ambitions, sir," laughed Arthur. "Fits of ambition, anyhow."

"Fits and starts? That's rather it, I fancy. You probably won't go as far as Norton Ward in a professional way, but you may very likely make just as much mark on life really, besides enjoying it more; I mean in a richer broader way. Purely professional success—and I include politics as well as the law, because they're equally a profession to men like our friend—is rather a narrow thing. The man with more interests—the more human man—spreads himself wider and is more felt really; he gets remembered more too."

"The Idle Man's Apologia! Very ingenious!" said Arthur, smiling.

"No, no, you shan't put that on me. It's perfectly true. The greatest characters—I mean characters, not intellects—are by no means generally in the highest places; because, as I say, to climb up there you have to specialise too much. You have to lop off the branches to make the trunk grow. But I don't see you like that. The Burlington Theatre was hardly in the direct line of ascent, was it?"

"I shan't be quite such a fool as that again, sir."

"Not to that extent, and not perhaps in just that way—no. I don't know exactly how you came to go in for it; indeed you don't quite seem to know yourself, as far as I can gather from what you've said. But I take it that it was to see and find out things—to broaden your life and your world?"

Arthur hesitated. "Yes, I suppose so—complicated by—Well, I was rather excited at the time. I was coming new to a good many things."

Sir Christopher nodded his head, smiling. "You may safely assume that Esther has gossiped to me about you. Well now, take that lady—I don't mean Esther Norton Ward, of course. Men like us appreciate her. Apart from personal relations, she's something in the world to us—a notable part of the show. So we what is called waste a lot of time over her; she occupies us, and other women like her—though there aren't many."

"No, by Jove, there are not!" Arthur assented.

"It's a lucky thing, Arthur, that your good cousin isn't built on the lines of our friend at Raylesbury, isn't it? The world would have been the poorer! By the way, that fellow's going to get off; I had a note from Hurlstone's private secretary this morning." Mr Hurlstone was the Home Secretary. "It's a funny thing, but she kept coming into my mind when I was trying the case."

Arthur's nod confessed to a similar experience.

"We didn't know each other well enough to talk about it then," Sir Christopher observed, smiling. "Fancy if we'd had to try Godfrey Lisle! I hope you're going to stick to the Hilsey folk, Arthur? It's good for a man to have a family anchorage. I haven't got one, and I miss it."

"Yes, rather! I shall go down there in the Christmas vacation. I'm awfully fond of it."

The old man leant forward, warming his hands by the fire. "You'll often find funny parallels like that coming into your head, if you're ever a judge. Good thing too; it gives you a broad view."

"I never shall be a judge," said Arthur, laughing.

"Very likely not, if they go on appointing the best lawyers. Under that system, I should never have been one either."

"I think, on the whole, sir, that it's better fun to be a Marshal."

Certainly it was very good fun—an existence full of change and movement, richly peopled with various personalities. From the Bar they lived rather apart, except for three or four dinner-parties, but they entertained and were entertained by local notables. The High Sheriffs themselves afforded piquant contrasts. Bluff and glossy Sir Quintin, the country gentleman, was one type. Another was the self-made man, newly rich, proud of himself, but very nervous of doing something wrong, and with stories in his mind of judges savagely tenacious of their dignity and free with heavy fines for any breach of etiquette: many an anxious question from him about his lordship's likes and dislikes Arthur had to answer. And once the office was ornamented by the son and heir of a mighty Grandee, who did the thing most splendidly in the matter of equipage and escort—even though his liveries were only the family's "semi-state"—treated his lordship with a deference even beyond the custom, and dazzled Arthur, as they waited for Mr. Justice Lance (who was sometimes late), with easy and unaffected anecdotes of the youth of Princes with whom he had played in childhood—the perfect man of the Great World, with all its graces. Between this High Personage and the man who stole the pig there ranged surely Entire Humanity!

But the most gracious impression—one that made its abiding mark on memory—was more aloof from their work and everyday experience. It was of an old man, tall and thin, white-haired, very courtly, yet very simple and infinitely gentle in manner. He was an old friend of Sir Christopher's, a famous leader of his school of thought in the Church, and now, after long years of labour, was passing the evening of his days in the haven of his Deanery beneath the walls of a stately Cathedral. They spent Sunday in the city, and, after attending service, went to lunch with him. He knew little of their work, and had never known much of the world they moved in. But he knew the poor by his labours among them, and the hearts of men by the strangely keen intuition of holiness. There was no sanctimoniousness, no pursing-up of lips or turning-away of eyes; on the contrary, a very straight dealing with facts and reality. But all things were seen by him in a light which suffused the Universe, in the rays of a far-off yet surely dawning splendour; Sorrow endureth for the night, but Joy cometh in the morning.

As they walked back to the Lodgings, Sir Christopher was silent for awhile. Then he said abruptly: "That's a Saint! I don't know that it's much use for most of us to try to be saints—that's a matter of vocation, I think—but it does us good to meet one sometimes, doesn't it? All that you and I think—or, speaking for myself perhaps, used to think—so wonderful, so interesting, has for him no importance—hardly any real existence. It's at the most a sort of mist, or mirage, or something of that sort—or a disease of mortal eyes—what you like! Are you in any way a religious man?"

"No, I'm afraid I'm not." He hesitated a moment and went on: "I don't quite see how one can be, you know, sir."

"Not as he is, no—I don't either. And I suppose the world couldn't get on, as a working world, if by a miracle everybody became like him. The world wants its own children too—though no doubt it begets some devilishly extreme specimens, as you and I have seen in the last few weeks. Well, you'll probably make some sort of creed for yourself presently—oh, a very provisional sketchy sort of affair, I daresay, but still a bit better than club codes and that kind of thing. And——" He laid his hand on Arthur's shoulder—"the beginning of it may just as well be this: Earn your money honestly. Such work as you do get or take, put your back into it."

"That after all is just what the Dean has done with his job, isn't it?"

"Why, yes, so it is, though he doesn't do it for money—not even money of his currency. Upon my word, I believe he'd sooner be damned than let you or me be, if he could help it! So I've shown you one more variety of human nature, Arthur."

"It's at least as well worth seeing as any of the rest."

"Fit it in at leisure with your other specimens," Sir Christopher recommended.

It did not seem altogether easy to follow this advice—even after reflection.

But there had been other specimens, also not too easy to fit in with one another or with any neat and compact scheme of society, vindicating to complete satisfaction the ways of God to men and of men to one another. No symmetrical pattern emerged. Wherever he looked, life met his enquiring eyes with a baffling but stimulating smile.