The Last Miracle

by M. P. Shiel

"But surely, Aubrey," I said, "we need not wait for that. Look at things in Germany and Russia, look at France: in France ever since the Separation Act, the Church was a dead thing; then came the miracles, and to-day France is on her knees. It is touching: there never was an age so hungry for faith. This week there have been eleven pilgrimages in France alone to the spots of the miracles—caravans counting their hundreds of thousands. Things have been moving, you know. Italy is more a theocracy now than under Alexander VI.; one quarter of the Austrian Abgeordneten House is already given over to churchmen; in our own election in October forty people of churchman type were tided into Parliament, and in the Lords the bishops awe, so how it would be there under Dr Burton one may imagine; when Burton was preaching at St Paul's crowds vaster than the cathedral could contain waited all the night through—nowhere, it seems, are there enough churches, and women hourly swoon in the crowds round certain churches; not a few rich men have stripped themselves to endow the Church; as for charity, here is the high day of Christ's sick and needy: everyone is giving apparently, everyone is muttering prayers—merchants over their cargoes, doctors over their charges; in November two New York negroes, by pretending to have seen the vision on a country-road, and asking for funds to open a church, became vastly rich, and now have disappeared; even the bourses have caught the rapture, gambling is going out, all sorts of personal oddities of behaviour and costume abound, as in Puritan days, saints arise, newspapers no more print certain kinds of matter, in the Commons during prayers members are as if in pews; as for the Nonconformists, they are hardly any longer even the political clubs and caucuses which they had become, since most of them have gone over to the Church of the miracles. If you would bear to hear me read, you would see for yourself the millionfold modification of everything. A certain Father Mathieu, in whose church at Windau the second of the visions appeared, is followed by multitudes to be healed by his touch; while the once Vicar-Apostolic of Bayeux, a man of Burton's very temper, is now Metropolitan of Paris. It was about him, by the way, that I wanted to tell you, for since his rise is complete, we needn't wait for Dr Burton's to become so, in order to get that certitude as to a plot——"

"Well, let that be so," said Langler; "but ah, Arthur, what touch shall be found, both gentle and strong, to heal all this fevered world? If the Master were indeed here, with the stars of night in his eyes! As for me, I confess, my longing is for escape. I have read a tale of a tiny world which struck our earth, tore up a field or two, and carried off someone into space——think of that!—the dumb empyrean, the leisure to be a man, the starry dream, and in those grassy graves, too, of Ritching churchyard——"

"But things are as they are," I murmured; "we can't escape them."

"True," he answered; "life is a sterner dreaming than dreams, but surely a diviner; and in His plan be our good."

"Well, then," said I, "this being so, what I, for myself, propose to do now is to write a letter to the Styrian authorities, stating what I know of Father Max Dees, and giving hints as to the place of his imprisonment, without breaking any law of libel. Dees may thus be liberated; whereupon, if he knows anything of a plot, he will divulge it."

"Well, we might think that over," said Langler, "and see if we find it to be our duty."

In the end this was determined upon between us, and from the next morning I set about it, writing first to consult my solicitors as to the proper authority to whom to address ourselves: this, they answered, was the Public Safety Bureau of Upper Styria; so Langler and I set to work to draw up the document, and on the 7th of January it was posted.

This work quite warmed us anew, and we were eager for a reply, sometimes discussing whether it would come in one week, in two, or in three: but a month passed, Miss Emily was being allowed to sit up, and no reply had come.

Those were the days when England was at the height of the excitement over the disappearance of the Bishop of Bristol. On the death, three weeks before, of Archbishop Kempe, the question who would succeed him had raised a simmering of interest, not in church-circles only, but in the nation: a very distinguished Cambridge man was a rumour, also Dr Todhunter, Bishop of Bristol, while Dr Burton, now Bishop of Winchester, was the popular choice. For us at Swandale, however, only two of these were really in the running, for we lived too near to Goodford not to know that Mr Edwards would never of his free will set such a spirit as Burton over the province of Canterbury. Edwards' majority in the House was now only twenty-three, and, apart from that, everything in him shied at Dr Burton's whole State-idea and order of mind; so when Dr Todhunter's appointment was made known Langler said to me, "you see, now, it is as we said."

Three days after Edwards' letter of invitation to Dr Todhunter the doctor wrote to Langler, stating that he had accepted the primacy, and closing with a very tender reference to our wounded friend. We two had known and loved him since undergraduate days, and Langler in particular had a kind of devotion for the classicism of his style and preaching. Who, in fact, that ever knew him could fail to revere him? When only fifty his mass of hair was quite wool-white, and no saintlier face, surely, ever lifted towards the skies. Well, his election by dean-and-chapter had taken place by the 17th of February; on the 19th the archbishop elect took a trip to London, meaning to be back in Bristol by the 21st; but from the hour of two p.m. on the 20th nothing appears ever to have been seen of him. At that hour of two—high daytime!—the old man parted from the Rev. William Vaux, Dean of the Arches, on the pavement in Whitehall, and—walked away into nothingness; nor, I think, has one ray of real light ever been thrown upon his disappearance.