The Last Miracle. M. P. Shiel

cracks now, and beneath peers the very saffron of death and putrescence imminent. Look where you like, from the event at Canterbury to our 'now I am happy all the day,' and do not the signs bode the passing-bell and the sexton? Judging only from our experiences of to-day, may we not say with some assurance that we now listen to those chimes for about the last time?"

CHAPTER V

       Table of Contents

THE TRAIL

       Table of Contents

      Langler, let me repeat here, was a man of some luck in prophecy; and though those bells of Ritching, which he said that we then listened to for about "the last time," were about to clash over Europe carillons of summons, shaking the hearts of men, yet even here, it will be said, he was not quite at fault: for death more often than not is forerun by this very kind of flickering: slow decay, then a rage and show of life, then the end and darkness—that appears to be the way.

      On the Monday morning after our visit to Ritching, as I entered the breakfast-room a few minutes early, there at a casement stood Miss Emily, and I see her once more as she was then, as fresh as the morning, or as the twines of roses that climbed within the small marble casement. Like her brother, she was not tall, but her figure was highly spirited, with a quite French outpush of bust, reminding one always of Gainsborough's "Duchess."

      We two were speaking together in low voices when I heard the steps of Langler coming. I may say that I had been begging her for a rose, but she had not given it me. I had prayed, and she was saying, "but I thought that 'blue is the hue for folk who hope,'" when I heard the steps of Langler, and whispered her, "then some forget-me-nots."

      The room was gaily feted out with flowers, and she glanced round to find what I had asked for; but there were none, and she was saying, "there are none; it is rather late—" when Langler walked in. I was angry with fate, for it was an anniversary date with her and me; and jealous, for into his jacket she pinned a rosebud.

      On sitting to table she said to her brother: "Aubrey, Mrs. Edwards wants you and me to go over to Goodford. I have just answered that we have a guest, and, of course, she will ask us to bring him too."

      "Would you care?" Langler asked me: "they are crude but worthy folk, as you know, and their guests are often well chosen."

      I said that I should be glad to go.

      "But as to Mrs. Robinson?" asked Langler of his sister.

      "She died just before nine," answered Miss Emily. "I came home with John after eleven, so wouldn't disturb you, as I had made all the arrangements. Dr. Burton went away at seven, came back after Compline, frowned excommunications at me, sprinkled the body, said a prayer from the Alexandrine Liturgy of St. Basil, and groaned 'poor sheep!' with the very tenderness of the Good Shepherd. I should revere that man, if I didn't despise him."

      "Ah? is that so?" asked Langler, with his smile.

      We spoke through breakfast of Mrs. Robinson and her missing son, of the Prime Minister's guests at Goodford, of our probable visit to him, and again of the missing man.

      "Do you know," said Miss Emily in her dry way, hardly meaning, I think, to be taken seriously, "I have my theory of Robinson? Given a village like Ritching, where nothing odd ever happens, when two odd things happen in it those two will be related. Is that a fair statement of a law of probability?"

      "Excellent, I think," I answered.

      Langler did not answer, but was listening, one could see, attentively.

      "Then," said Miss Emily, "I say that three tourists at the Calf's Head is one thing, and Robinson's disappearance is another thing; and my theory is that these strangers have kidnapped Robinson."

      "But with what motive?" asked Langler, glancing sharply at her.

      "Because," she answered, while the nerves of her face screwed up into a little energy of shrewdness—"because he was beautiful."

      We were silent at this, till Langler remarked: "ah, there you are hardly convincing."

      "I suppose not," she replied. "But what other reason? There was nothing special about Robinson except that one thing, his beauty, and that is how I feel. Find out some reason why one English and two foreign tourists should need to kill or capture a specially handsome man and you solve the mystery of Robinson."

      Langler answered nothing more, and we spoke of other matters. He afterwards said that he would be absent during most of the day, and, as some letter-writing kept me from going with him, I saw him ride down the course of the brook and vanish behind the arches of the abbey.

      He returned before dinner, and some hours later, when the house was asleep, we two were down by the lake's brim, the night murky and autumnal, but we could just see some moor-hen or wild-fowl briskly breast the waters, like boats in a choppy channel, moored, yet seeming to move forward, as when the moon is flying through cloud.

      I asked Langler if he had been able to do anything for the captive, Father Max Dees; he puffed at his pipe several times before replying, and then said: "Father Max Dees is becoming too interesting, Arthur—so much so that he threatens to overwhelm my interest in all life outside himself. How if I tell you that this man, so remote from me and mine, speaking with me from afar by a bird, now seems connected in some way with the disappearance of Robinson?"

      "It sounds queer," I said.

      "Yet it is true; and, since true, mark the luck of Emily in this matter. She said that the mere singularity of two such things as the strangers and the disappearance of Robinson was sufficient to make her think those things connected. Well, the singularity is not sufficient, she was not convincing: but we know that her guesses are of a quality not very common, and it will be some time, I promise, before I again permit myself to slight one of them."

      "You have discovered, then, that she was right?"

      "Not directly," he answered; "but I believe so by one of those processes of the mind which, if they be not reason, resemble it. You will understand me when I remind you of a third event among us about that time—the wren, namely, and its message. Now, by Emily's guess all the three should be interconnected; and if I tell you that two of them are, in fact, connected, I think you will jump to the conclusion that all are so."

      "But which two are connected?" I asked.

      "The wren and the strangers."

      "Tell me."

      "I rode out to-day with the object of making some inquiries about these strangers, and also of finding somewhere a list of Styrian barons. Well, then, I went first to the Calf's Head, and what I gathered there was this: that the strangers are now gone; that they were 'certainly' unknown to one another; and that at the hour when Robinson vanished one of the foreigners was sitting on the doorstep of the inn studying the county-map, one was sipping beer in the bar-parlour, while the third, the Englishman, was leaning against Lang's smithy-door: so that Brown, the landlord, had all these men under his eyes on that Thursday noon when poor Robinson was undergoing his mystery. However, I had no sooner heard of this tableau vivant than my own instinct of wrong, vague before, started into liveliness, the word which stirred my anger being Brown's 'certainly' in saying that the three were strangers to one another. He said it because he had never seen them speak together. Yet these men for days ate, smoked, etc., together, under which conditions men do exchange a word; so what could have kept these apart, except a wish to appear unacquainted?—a wish which argues that they were not so. But their pose at the moment of the tragedy! Brown says that 'they were like that most of the afternoon.' Imagine, therefore, the tale of sips taken by one of them, the countless interest of the second in the county-map, the resource in chat of the last at the smithy-door of Lang—all under the benign, remarking eye of Brown. One can almost assert that,