"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.