The Last Miracle

by M. P. Shiel

The next morning I came upon our Hanska in Speisendorf street, hands in pockets, whistling (as ever) at the crucifix on the mountain. This knit little chit of a man had a pride in his cylinders and some flea of flight in his brain; he and his car were well ready for me, and we reached Gratz in the early afternoon after a charming ride.

I had no hope that affairs would go flyingly with me in Gratz, and thought to myself, "this will be a matter of some days"; but it was three weeks before I left the town.

Whether those were trying weeks for me will be divined: I was afraid for Dees, afraid for Langler up there alone in the mountains, and afraid to open the letters from Swandale which he forwarded on to me. Miss Emily had, in truth, become awfully eager and anxious! all too eager and anxious, I thought. Why the delay, she wished to know! I had begged Langler to write her fully of everything as it happened, but no, he chose to be general and vague, and this only enlarged, instead of lulling, her fears. She was now back in Swandale, living partly with the Misses Chambers, and was quite well, she said. But something in me boded that she was not so well as she said.

Hence those weeks in Gratz were rather to me like three years. Among Langler's letters of introduction was one to a Herr Müller, a grain-merchant in the Holz Platz, upon whom I first called; he received me heartily, and introduced me to a certain Herr von Dungern, a lawyer, who said to me in his office on the morning after my arrival: "I'm afraid that that letter of yours written from England to Public Safety—foh! foh!—unsupported by evidence as it was, will now be against you." He was a fine, soldierly man, but afflicted with something which caused him to mix in all his talk this foh! foh! flung sideways with venom. "But," said I, "that old letter of ours must be forgotten by now." "Oh no," he answered; "there it still lies in the Evidenz-bureau, and you know that interest in a question once dead is not easily revived." "That may be," said I, "but I can now take oath that I have seen the Pater Dees in his dungeon, and here is Mr Langler's written statement, which you will duly formalise for me." "True, true," said he, "very true. Well, it is a matter—foh! foh!—for the Blessed Virgin and Herr Oberpolizeirath."

I now know that this Herr von Dungern was a tenant of land under Baron Kolár, but still, I can't accuse him of untrustiness to me, only of slowness—of intentional slowness, I think. It was not till the following morning that I was brought to the bureaux with the affidavits, and then it was from bureau to bureau, each interview somehow filling up the better part of a day, and everyone as it were laying his hand over his mouth at the high scandal which I was so bold as to air. "But," said I to Herr von Dungern as we drove away on the fourth evening, "someone must be the final authority! I have now been referred up and up from a common Sicherheits-wache-serjeant to two Polizeiraths, and still no end to it." "Lands, manners," said he, with a shrug—"every country has its usages." "Just so," said I, "but I am still at a loss to know why I have spent my afternoon with Herr Polizeirath of Central Inquiry in a case where there is nothing to inquire into." "Well," said he, hardly very honestly, "one, of course, must see Herr Polizeirath before one can see Herr Oberpolizeirath." "Yes," said I, "Herr Polizeirath of Safety, but why, after all, Herr Polizeirath of Inquiry? the interview seems to have been as needless as it was long!" "You do not—foh! foh!—understand," said he. "No," said I, "I do not, and it is very trying." "I am grieved from the heart," said he, "for I foresee that your patience is about to be tried; but you must amuse yourself, since everyone in our city is eager to entertain you, and the good Lord, thank God, does not grudge us any innocent gaieties; my wife and daughters in especial look forward with keenness to seeing you at our birthday-ball." "But that is a week hence!" said I: "do you anticipate that I shall still be in Gratz?" "Ah, it may be!" said he, "we shall see: to-morrow at eleven we appear before Herr Oberpolizeirath of Safety himself...."

This Herr Oberpolizeirath, whose name was Tiarks, was a gross old man, all slashed and epauletted, with a nose like a bunch of blackberries in August. I was received by him in a chamber which brought back to my mind the scented answer which he had sent to our letter from Swandale, and from the first I had little hope in this old man. "But what, sir," he asked me, "is your motive in this affair?" "A motive of humanity," I answered: "a bird sent out by the captive with a note bound about its leg came to the house of my friend; we felt bound to investigate the matter; we have done so; and we now place it with confidence in your hands." "But," said he, "in order to see this captive, you must have entered upon Schweinstein Castle by stealth?" "Yes," I answered cuttingly, "but that, I take it, is not a point which will distract your Honour's attention from the proved fact of an outrage committed within the scope of your jurisdiction." "But," said he, his face flushing purpler, "perhaps you will find, sir, that the Austrian authorities are not inclined to allow themselves to be pleased with chords (pretensions) strung too high." "I have already found it, Herr Oberpolizeirath," said I. "Ach, it is an affair, this!" sighed he faintly to himself, with a waved hand, and eyes cast upward.

In the greater part of the interview I had no share, but sat staring at the apple-green walls, while Tiarks and von Dungern laid their heads together apart. Such shrugs, such spreadings of both palms, and gazings over the rims of spectacles, one never saw! Then came the proposal that I should drop my plaint for a time, till the baron should be given a chance to set free his captive; to which I answered angrily: "But is Baron Kolár to be forewarned by those who should be his judges? He will never of himself set free this captive, and if he be given hints and nudges in the dark I shall consider that both justice and myself have been betrayed." "Eh, eh, we know that the English hold no leaf before the mouth!" cried Herr Oberpolizeirath, with a waved hand: "but do you imagine, sir, that the baron does not already know what is being done? Poh, he knows; all Gratz knows. And would you not prefer to withdraw the plaint a little, rather than see it referred to the President at Vienna, and then perhaps up to the Provincial Diet itself after several months? Come, take your lawyer's advice; and meantime, if you stay on in Gratz—why, we know that every young man craves for the society of the opposite sex—saving the claims of religion, mind you, saving the claims of religion; but between us three here, you can't beat Gratz for female loveliness: what, von Dungern? Yes, sir, drop the plaint a little, and on the 7th of the month you have the Statthalterei Ball, on the 8th Count Attem's, on the 9th the Prince-bishop of Seckau comes into residence, with street-processions, church-rites"—and more of this sort. In this way this old fogey thought to stroke my beard with honey, as the Germans say. Of course, I did not drop the plaint, and it was formally heard the next day before a lower commissary: but I might as well have dropped it! From the tenth day I began to despair, for I had by then been put through even the formality of giving the date of my mother's birth, had interviewed at the rathhaus, land-hause, Schlossberg people whose relation with the affair seemed to be as remote and entangled as possible; and I said then to myself: "Max Dees was right: they don't mean to interfere."

Meantime I wrote daily to, and heard from, Langler, and enclosed in his letters came some from Swandale which made the delays of the authorities maddening to me, because of a panting for our return which those letters now appeared to reveal. Alas, at the bottom of her heart Miss Emily did not believe that we should ever return to her, I think; but mixed with this under-despair was that hope which is common to all the living, and I believe that it was this hope battling for breath against this despair which gave rise to this sort of fierce haste that now possessed and hissed in her to see our faces yet once again.

Gratz, meantime, was as lively a town, both in a social and religious way, as it is ever a charming one. I saw the fête of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin, and that of the Precious Blood on the Sunday following, and each time I peeped into St Ægidius it was full of people praying, with a priest or two pacing among them, like well-satisfied shepherds, while in the lesser churches also was much the same sight. I had nothing to do at night, and to escape from myself went to two balls, at the first of which a little German monk, who reminded me of Luther, gave a homily on the lawfulness of innocent amusements. But I was sick of Gratz by the eleventh day, and was wrought to throw up everything, when something gave me a new thought.

On that eleventh day I was strolling in an alley of the Stadt Park when I saw coming towards me a girl whom I had long known—a particularly pretty little girl named Rosie, who for some years had been in the service of my sister, Lady Burney, but now was in the service of the Duchess of St Albans. When I expressed my surprise at seeing her, her answer was: "the duchess is on the way to Vienna, but stopped at Gratz to have an interview with Baron Kolár; she understood in London that the baron is at Schweinstein, but he isn't, as it turns out, and no one seems to know where he is somehow, so I don't know what our next move will be."