The Last Miracle Part 12

"As you please," I said, and said no more, for I did not see that we needed any letters.

However, he wrote for letters, and it was some days--I forget how many--before he had all of the number which he asked for. By this time our date of departure, our very train, had been fixed by Miss Emily, it was now three weeks since Langler had first mooted his idea of going, and by now scores of persons all about must have known that he was going, and when.

During the day before our departure Langler gave a last look to every part of Swandale, and re-entering the house near five P.M., had tea with Miss Emily and me. We were having tea when I heard a noise in a corridor, and on asking was told by Miss Emily that it was "Aubrey's trunks being taken to the station." I could not at first understand why they were being taken that night till, on glancing through the door, I saw almost a cartload of baggage (swelled by books!). Miss Emily and I, standing at a window, she with the wren on her shoulder, watched all this luggage being put upon a cart--Langler had now left the room--and driven away; but a minute after it had gone Miss Emily, crying out something, ran from my side, and out of the cottage. I saw her hurry across the bridge, heard her call after the driver, who had disappeared, and soon she too disappeared beyond the bridge.

I a.s.sumed that she had run to give the man some forgotten instruction, and expected her back soon; but when she did not come I was not at all anxious, since I had no reason to be so. I was reading Bellarmine, I remember, in a wicker chair that rocked me, and it became so dark that I could hardly see the print. I heard Langler playing Gregorian chants on the organ in the oratory, for he had the habit of playing chants about that hour of the evening, but had rather given it up since the miracles.

Well, I was thus reading in the half dark when, suddenly, a man stood before me--the driver of the cart, who, having left the luggage at the station, was now returned. He seemed unable to speak: if ever I saw awe it was in that man's face; when I asked: "what is it?" his breath burst from his lips in his vain effort to answer me; his face rolled with sweat. At last when he was able to say something, it was in the words: "Miss Langler--come with me--don't say anything----"

I sped with him past two astonished girls in the pa.s.sage out of the cottage, he taking the way to the south-east, but having already run far he had now to make stoppages, and so hard he found it to speak that we had gone over a quarter of a mile, and were near the great gate, before I could gather from him aught of what was in his mind. He had led me down a path that ran between a brook and a rose-tree hedge, till we were within sight of the carriage-road, and there in a sort of glade, where a larch stood by the brook's bank, he stopped, and pointed--the same larch on which had been carved "Don't Go" and Langler's "I Will." At the foot of the tree, in a patch of reeds, I saw a female form lying like one asleep, or unconscious, or dead. It was my poor Miss Emily. When I peered nearer I perceived that her left hand had been pegged to the tree by a big nail. But she did not know it, nor reck, she lay in sleep, without any pain or care, her lips a little open, and two poor tears of her truce had trickled down her cheeks.

While I was still gloating over her I was aware, to my woe, that Langler was with us: one of the girls in the house, on seeing me run out, must have warned him of something wrong, and he had hasted at a rounder rate, though a sorry runner, than the exhausted man who had brought me could come; but the effort had been altogether too large for Aubrey's gauge: he was awfully breathed and gaunt. I saw him stand off, peering gingerly at his dear, asking: "_what is it_?" with his cheeks peaked up, poor Aubrey: and I had to leave her pierced, in order to turn to him.

CHAPTER XIV

CANTERBURY

After this weeks pa.s.sed before we knew whether Miss Emily would live or die, and the existence of Max Dees and of Styria was forgotten in Swandale, for our poor friend took a delirious fever, and had three relapses, so we others dragged our lives through many a black day while hers hung in the balance: weeks of watching: leaving not much outstanding in the memory, save the fact of a certain new quarry--a puny affair perhaps, but for ever a.s.sociated in my mind with the nightmare of that time, and somehow lending to it a strange awfulness; for it happened that someone had lately opened a quarry some miles north of Swandale, and was blasting the rock: so fifteen, twenty times a day we would hear it, not loud, but clear, a knock at the north door of heaven, and two seconds later an answer sounded in the south of heaven: and each time Langler would look at me with such a smile. So that this sound of blasting, all mingled as it was with Miss Langler's fight for life, has still for me whenever I hear it meanings the most momentous, as it were rumours of the guns and din of Armageddon, and the arbitrament of the doom of being. In the end, however, I managed to make terms with the owner, and the noises ceased.

About the same time--_i.e._ towards the end of the year--hope brightened for our wounded friend, and my mind found some breathing-s.p.a.ce to think out what I could do for her brother, who had been very gravely shocked and cowed. After a time I would get him into his study at night, and there read to him his acc.u.mulated correspondence, with a view to weaning his thoughts from a room three corridors away; for the letters, being mainly from men in the whirlpool, were full of history, and such as to reawaken his interest in things. Also I insisted upon answers to some of them being dictated to me; and also, at last, I read to him a little from books and newspapers.

At midnight of Christmas Day I was thus reading to him through the noise of the cascade, made noisier that night by stormy weather, when he said: "Europe and America, then, are again Christian in an ancient sense. How many visions in all have now been seen?"

I found among the newspapers on our half-round settle one containing a list of the miracles, with their dates, and saw that their number was twenty-three.

At this Langler seemed to wince, and we sat cowering over our wood fire in a bitter rumination, till after a while he said: "I have nothing to do with the defect in the world's fate, and don't wish to cause my voice to be any more heard: but still, Arthur, consider how the sins of nations do find them out."

I was pleased at his new tone of interest, but said that I did not know to what he referred.

"I refer," he answered, "to this proposed 'weeding out' of our refuse populations by the 'lethal chamber' method, and to the growth among men of a certain brute directness with which the nineteenth century was less tainted. Mind you, I interfere in nothing; but don't let us hide from each other the existence in our minds of certain ghastly suspicions with regard to these visions; and if such a thing can be, however large-minded the motive, think of it, Arthur! The growth of such a brute directness can only be the penalty, subtle yet terrible, of some sin in the body politic; nor is any seer needed to see that that sin is the mere discussion of such a step as this wholesale 'weeding out' of men's lives."

"I, too," I said, "have felt that such a thing was brutalising."

"But it is beastly!" he hissed. "Man's evolution, certainly, is henceforth in his own hands; but to want to beget taller sons with a strain of the thug in their blood! It is an instance, and a chief cause, of that brute directness which is tainting society, which perhaps culminates in these miracles, which I myself have experienced----"

"Never mind," I murmured.

"To strike me through _her_----"

I said quickly: "but this purpose of 'weeding out' the submerged seems to have died since the miracles, for the people are now Christian, Aubrey, in deed as well as in creed."

"But before we rejoice, let us ask for how long!" said he. "If what we have dared to suspect of the miracles--that they may be none--be true, is it not probable that they involve some plot unfriendly to the Church?

We have sure knowledge, for that matter, that someone who need not be named between us is no friend of churches. Since, therefore, the Church flourishes by the miracles, it can only be, _if_ there is a plot against her, that the miracles will in time be shown to be none: in which case, think of the moral swing back, huge enough perhaps to wreck the frame of society."

I said nothing, and for some time we bent over the fire in a silence of wormwood.

"_Is_ there a plot?" he began again: "if there is, I believe with her who lies hurt that the key to it may be found in a castle of--Austria.

But anon, when I remember that we here are the only three in the world into whom such a doubt has entered, it strikes me as even impious----"

"There is also Rivers who doubts," I said. "Lidcott, by the way, has written you an account of Rivers' secession and 'new religion' in Littlemore--a 'religion' with a following of six! Lidcott's letter also contains one from Burton about Rivers' secession: I'll read it you now, if you like."

"Well, then," said he; so I got and read the letters.

Rivers was an Oriel man of very brilliant reputation, one of the younger group of leaders of the so-called "Liberal Movement"--a church-party which had been making some noise in the world just before the miracles; he was a contemporary of Langler and myself, so we were familiar with his personality and church-idea, which had been called "anti-romantic"; he was one of the warmest admirers of Langler's criticism, and had set to sweet minor music some of Langler's songs. Well, when the miracles began, Ambrose Rivers, alone of thinkers, for some reason or other broke off from the Church, and started a new "religion" in Littlemore--with a following of six; and Dr Lidcott's letter to Langler was a description of this new flight of Rivers', containing also the following from Dr Burton: "The Chancery, Lincoln, In Festo Sanct. F. Xav. My dear Lidcott,--The tragedy of Rivers has been as great a heaviness to me as to you and the rest; how mysterious, too, now, when our Light is come.

Can nothing be done even now? It was a branch loaded with flowers and fruit, and though the very canker was in them, it is hard to see it lopped off at a stroke. Do reason with him, then, still a little; but, if he be obdurate and d.a.m.ned in error, you will leave him to the tormentors, warning him that the day is even at hand when Holy Church will no longer spare dissent and rebellion, but everywhere on the front of that chief of crimes will brand her effective anathema. Verb.u.m caro factum est, et habitavit in n.o.bis. Farewell. On the 13th inst. I leave this for St Paul's. Miserere mei, Deus, asperge me, Domine, hyssopo, et mundabor; and you, pray for me.--In haste, yours faithfully in Xt., John Burton."

"Well," said Langler when I had read the two letters, "but Rivers' doubt of the miracles is due to some trait of a wayward mind, if not to some wisdom of the man's really divine genius; but in our case the doubt has grown out of facts which have come before us, and since those facts are very meagre I say that _our_ doubt sometimes strikes me as impious. I think, however, that it will be justified if Dr Burton's rise so continues as strikingly to fulfil the prophecy that he is 'destined to be the greatest of churchmen.'"

"Oh, you think that," I said.

"Yes," said he; "for, _if_ there is a plot, there is no difficulty about divining its purposes: we can say with a.s.surance that those purposes are, firstly, to raise the Church to the height of power, in which case what she will surely do was foreseen: she will become harsh, will clash with the modern spirit. And to make this clash doubly certain a number of brisk churchmen would naturally be chosen out by the plotters to become generals of the Church--of whom Burton was chosen for England. It _is_ so. For we read of Burton: '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.' Now, it is clear that the 'Savonarola' and the 'brilliance' in Burton are one, and the 'Becket' and the 'arrogance' are one: for who was Becket? an arch-priest who flouted the civil power.

Therefore, _if_ there is a plot--for I state nothing, I interfere in nothing--_if_ there is one, I say that the Church is to be pushed to clash with the civil power. And now suppose, secondly, that at the height of that clash the miracles be shown to be none; and suppose further, thirdly, that it be then made to appear that these false miracles were contrived not by the enemies of the Church for her ruin, but by churchmen themselves for their own rise and rule: well, then--what then?... And shall no man be found to meddle in this, one with heart, head, hand, Arthur, though a sword pierce his own heart?"

"_I_ mean to meddle in it somehow," I said suddenly.

"Beware, however, Arthur," he murmured. "I too feel the _muth_ to venture--if it be not already too late.... In any case, let us hasten slowly, and wait till our doubt acquires some little cert.i.tude. I say that something of cert.i.tude will be ours, if Dr Burton's rise becomes so marked----"

"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 mult.i.tudes 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 cert.i.tude 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 s.p.a.ce----think of _that_!--the dumb empyrean, the leisure to be a man, the starry dream, and in those gra.s.sy 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 doc.u.ment, 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 pa.s.sed, 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 cla.s.sicism of his style and preaching.

Who, in fact, that ever knew him could fail to revere him? When only fifty his ma.s.s 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.

I can almost feel again, as I write, the mood of those days. One sometimes lost control of oneself! one had seizures of excitement, could hardly utter one's words! Langler in particular was strongly moved: his cheek at one spot would go pale, and quiver. By the 24th or 25th we at Swandale began to understand that Dr Todhunter would never more be seen; and I said then: "No! he will never more be seen; and in two months from to-day--wait and see!--Dr Burton will be primate of England."

"But will he _consent_?" asked Langler, pale with excitement: "does he not already--_suspect_? Will he plug up both his ears against _a hundred whispers_ that already throng in his consciousness?"

What grounds Langler had for a.s.suming these "hundred whispers" in Dr Burton's consciousness I do not know; but, if it was a guess, it may have been a shrewd one, for I have seen a letter of Burton's written about then, in which _twice_, occurs a certainly very suggestive prayer against "the deceitful man": "ab homine iniquo et doloso erue me"--twice in one letter.