The Last Miracle. M. P. Shiel

it would be in just such poses of statuesque guilelessness that they would parade themselves. … At all events, I left Brown with the expectation of finding that other foreigners than these had been in our midst on that mid-day of mystery.

      "I then rode over to Goodford, and was told that three weeks previously two strangers had been there—one a foreigner. I went to Ayeling, Mins, St. Peter's, Up Hatherley—all within eight miles of Ritching—and learned that the neighbourhood within the last months has been liable to quite a little epidemic of 'strangers,' foreign and English, who did not seem acquainted. I asked whether any of the strangers had been absent on the noon of mystery. In every case I gathered that they had gone for good before that day, or else on that day had remained conspicuously present in the villages.

      "But at Mins a very odd accident brought into my way something of a character so wild that my eyes almost could not credit it. You know, Arthur, the unconsciousness of people when in a foreign land that anyone in it can understand their speech: I had this fact in my mind when at each of the villages I inquired whether the strangers had left behind no leaves, no fragments of paper. I pried into waste-paper baskets, even poked into dust-heaps, but could find nothing. However, I was leading the horse from the door of the Crown at Mins towards the gate when I saw a little stick, so to speak, of paper in the hedge. It had been crumpled up to be used as a pipe-light perhaps—you know the habitual frugality of foreigners as to matches—and was scorched at one end, smeared, too, with soap and atoms of hair, so that someone had used it to wipe his razor on. However, it had on it some German writing, still mostly legible, and I got six almost perfect lines. These were the words which I read: ' … now—the 15th of June—I have been here three weeks, so I know him well. I am sure that he will do for England. He is another Max Dees, as arrogant as he is brilliant, a union of Becket and Savonarola. His name is Burton, and he is rector at a place called Ritching. Your Excellency should find some way of coming down here, for … ' and I can't tell you, Arthur, the queer feeling which chilled my veins at the instant when, in an inn-yard of Mins, I chanced upon those words: 'Max Dees.'"

      "It is very astonishing," I breathed.

      "But mark," continued Langler, "the point at which I had now arrived. I had already decided that, if other strangers were about on the day of Robinson's disappearance, then the three at Ritching were conscious of what was going on, and that if the three were conscious, then all might be concerned. But at least one of those concerned had that name of Father Max Dees familiarly on his pen's point; and, looking at the bald record of his captivity which Dees sent forth by the wren, we may conclude that that captivity is unknown to his world—that, in fact he vanished from his world more or less in the manner of Robinson; whereupon one's mind no longer pauses, but, in lack of knowledge, says at once: 'in each case the same agents, in each the same motive.'

      "But, given two disappearances, my divination went on to a surmise which would never have been suggested to me by one only, and I asked myself, 'since there are more than one, may there not be more than two?' And this question no sooner occurred to me than I spurred my horse, and hurried to Alresford, where I have spent my afternoon. At the library I obtained some volumes of the county papers, and though my search was, of course, very hurried, I harked back nearly a year, and what I half-expected I found.

      "Most dark, Arthur, is the path of some power which now, to-night, is at work within this Europe of ours—a phantom of whose being and trend one's fancy can form no dream, walking vast though invisible among us, amorphous, yet most actual. And I do not speak of a probability. I am pretty sure now that this is so, and Father Max Dees and Robinson, if they live, are sure also.

      "One of the oddest things which I have noticed is the slumber of understanding and of memory—especially of memory—with which we modern people look through the newspapers. I have been reading to-day, with dismay, details which I had undoubtedly read before, but at the first reading must have dully cast out of my consciousness as devoid of interest. May we not, then, define man as 'a dormouse who wakes during earthquakes'?

      "The bits of news which I mean were mostly printed small, in obscure corners, and the significance of their considerable number in the papers which I perused is big when one considers that they are country papers, not formal chronicles of world-news. If, then, you find in them mention of two disappearances of fishermen within four months on the north French coast, you may conceive that not two, but four, may have been the actual number: men vanished; caught quite away like leaves on the midnight wind; and one in the Harz Mountains; and one in London; and one in Naples; and two in Hungary; and one in Belgium; and three in Russia; and one in Catalonia; and one in Savoy——"

      "My good Aubrey!" I breathed.

      "Vanished, Arthur," he said—"gone into the gorge of that dragon. There it stands printed, and all have read it, but none has seen it, so unrelated seems each case in its isolated chronicle. I, however, have been able to read with a larger eye; and as to the palace of torment of at least one of the victims we are not in the dark."

      "Have you discovered, then," I said, "the full name of the Styrian baron who has imprisoned Max Dees?"

      "Unfortunately," he answered, "there are no less than three Styrian barons part of whose name is Gregor—one a Dirnbach, one a Strass, and one a Kolár—possibly the well-known Kolár——"

      At that name an exclamation escaped me.

      "Well?" said Langler.

      "But have I said nothing at all to you since I have been here, about Baron Gregor Kolár?" I asked.

      "I think not," he answered.

      "Then it is a singular chance," I said: "why, I came down with him in the same carriage, I have his card in my pocket now. It never once entered my head that he might be Styrian! He is over at Goodford at this moment, a guest of Mr. Edwards."

      "Well, then, that fact seems to narrow our round of inquiry to two," said Langler: "our Gregor will doubtless now be found to be a Strass or a Dirnbach."

      I made no answer, and we sat there some time silent, looking where some moor-hen or wild-fowl breasted the streaming of a surface agitated by the inrush of the cascade, stationary, yet seeming to move forward, like the moon ranging through flights of cloud.

CHAPTER VI

       Table of Contents

THE MEETING

       Table of Contents

      The next day we were at Goodford. The mansion is Queen Anne, square and grave, standing on grounds which slope towards the exterior of the domain into oak-dotted swards that droop down to a wooded valley.

      That first day at dinner I was able to point out to Langler the sneer of Baron Kolár at the part of the table where he droned amid the silence of his neighbours; and the next afternoon, when some men who had been shooting were standing in a group on a terrace, Baron Kolár, who was among them, left them to lower himself upon a bench close to that on which Langler and I were sitting.

      It was just then that I heard someone in the standing group remark: "here comes our eloquent divine." And I heard Mr. Edwards, who had looked round, say in his characteristic way: "what, he still on that same temperance job, I wonder?"

      This remarkable man (who started life as a puddler's-boy in South Wales, then became a typewriter in a London newspaper-office, then editor of a boys' paper, then of a financial paper, then speculator and millionaire, then—without eloquence, stateliness, "brilliance" of any sort—Prime Minister of his country at the age of thirty-seven)—this remarkable man, I say, gave by his mere manners and appearance some hint of the reasons which underlay his elevation; he himself always accounted for it by declaring that "he alone knew how to run the Empire on purely business lines"; and, in truth, he looked like a man who could do this.

      His face at this period was still fresh