The Last Miracle

by M. P. Shiel

"Hang the man," said he, "I have had four men out on his trail for an hour...."

I said that I had understood earlier in the day that the baron was at Dr Burton's.

"He was," answered Edwards, "but he isn't now. It is precisely about Dr Burton that I want to see him, for the Bishop of Lincoln offers Burton the nomination to the vacant Chancellorship and Residentiary Canonry, on condition that I accept at once. Properly speaking, you know, the whole job lies miles outside my interest, and I only wish——God forgive me."

"But why all the flurry?" I asked.

"Well," he answered, "the country, of course, looks to me now to rush Dr Burton into some Grand Lamaship—as though one could at a moment's notice like this! I assure you, Mr Templeton, soft isn't the word for the hundreds of unpractical suggestions that have been made me this day by leading men in the country, so what we are coming to from a business point of view is rather hard to say. Oxford is a place up in the clouds! and Cambridge isn't far below.... I don't seem to have even a spare deanery into which to fit Burton, and the whole to-do is rather hard on me—all extraneous work and worry—for I haven't studied Church-organisation! if anyone were to ask me who is the real head of it all as things are, the King or the Pope, I believe I'd be put to it to give him a straight answer. However, there's this Lincoln Chancellorship, and I'm hunting down Baron Kolár to see whether or not he'll have it for Dr Burton just for the time being...."

At this I could not help exclaiming: "but what voice has Baron Kolár in the matter of the career of Dr Burton?"

"Oh, well," said Mr Edwards, "you would hardly see the inwardness of it off-hand by the light of nature, for it is delicate in a diplomatic way. You know that Baron Kolár fills such a place both in and out of the Reichsrath that he is one of the four men who really have the world's peace in the hollow of their hand, but perhaps you don't know by how far he is probably the most dangerous of the four, for the bottom meanings of that man's polity remain an unknown quantity, and in order to get at them you would have first of all to draw his teeth, for his mind lurks in a stronghold of which his teeth are the ramparts, and it takes a pretty tricky one to see much that's behind 'em. Anyway, the Foreign Minister of a country whose chief asset is peace would rather stand personally well with Baron Kolár with a view to sound sleep at night than with, I was going to say his—own—wife."

"Quite so," said I; "but still, what can be the grounds of this interest of the baron in Dr Burton? not political?"

"It is, somehow," said Edwards, "though I don't pretend quite to fathom the lees of this particular mind; but from the first he adopted Burton, and, of course, when a man like him chooses to chaperon a parish-priest up the mountains of preferment——"

At this point a clerk ran up to deliver some message to Mr Edwards, who went off with him, I, for my part, continuing my stroll through the covert till I came out upon a road, where the first thing which I saw was Baron Kolár's valet reclining in a meadow, smoking. I went through a gate to him, and asked where his master was. His answer was in the words: "perhaps can you that house there under see? there is he."