AT BARNCASTLE HALL.
TOPPLETON'S surmises as to Barncastle's method of receiving him appeared
to be correct, for upon his arrival, green umbrella and carpet bag in
hand, at the Fenwick Merton station he was met by no less a person than
his host himself, who recognized him at once.
"I knew it was you," said Barncastle, as he held out his hand to grasp
Toppleton's. "I knew it was you as soon as I saw you. Your carpet bag,
and the fact that you are the only person on the train who travelled
first class, were the infallible signs which guided me."
"And I knew you, Barncastle, the minute I saw you," said Hopkins,
returning the compliment, "because you looked less like a lord than any
man on the platform. How goes it, anyhow?"
The Englishman's countenance wore a puzzled expression as Toppleton put
the question.
"How goes it?" he repeated slowly. "How goes what? The train?"
"Oh, no," laughed Hopkins. "How goes it is Rocky Mountain for how's
things, all your family well, and your creditors easy?"
"Ah! I see," said Barncastle with a smile. "All is well with us, thank
you. My daughter is awaiting your coming with very great interest; and
as for my creditors, my dear sir, I am really uncertain as to whether I
have any. My steward can tell you better than I how they feel."
"It's a great custom, ain't it?" said Hopkins with enthusiasm, "that of
being dunned by proxy, eh? I wish we could work it out my way. If you
don't ante up right off out in the Mountains, your grocer comes around
and collects at the point of his gun, and if you pay him in promises, he
gives you back your change in lead."
"Fancy!" said Barncastle. "How unpleasant it must be for the poor."
"Poor!" laughed Toppleton; "there's none of them in the Rockies. You
don't get a chance to get poor in a country where boys throw nuggets at
birds, and cats are removed from back-yard fences with silver
boot-jacks. Ever been in the Rockies, Barncastle?"
"No," returned the lord, "I have not, but if all you say is true, I
should like to visit that section very much."
"True, Barncastle?" said Toppleton, bristling up. "Why, my dear lord,
that if of yours would have dug your grave out near Pike's Peak."
"I meant no offence, my dear fellow," returned Barncastle,
apologetically.
"No need to tell me that," said Toppleton, affably. "The fact that you
still survive shows I knew it. What time is dinner? I'm ravenous."
"Eight o'clock," replied Lord Barncastle, looking at his watch. "It is
now only three."
"Phew!" ejaculated Toppleton. "Five hours to wait!"
"I thought we might take a little drive around the country until six,
and then we could return to the Hall and make ready for dinner," said
Barncastle.
"That suits me," returned Toppleton. "But I wish you'd send that
gentleman with the mutton-chop whiskers that drives your waggon to the
lunch counter and get me a snack before we start."
"No," said Barncastle, ushering Toppleton into his dog-cart. "We'll do
better than that. We'll give up the drive until later. I take you
directly to the Hall, and send a cold bird and a glass of wine to your
apartment."
"Good!" ejaculated Toppleton, with a smack of the lips. "You must live
pretty near as fine here as we do in our big hotels at home. They're the
only other places I know where you can get your appetite satisfied at
five minutes' notice."
Toppleton and his host then entered the carriage, and in a short time
they reached the Hall--a magnificently substantial structure, with
ivy-clad towers, great gables, large arched windows looking out upon
seductive vistas, and an air of comfortable antiquity about it that
moved Hopkins' tongue to an utterance somewhat at variance with his
assumed character.
"How beautiful and quiet it all is," he said, gazing about him in
undisguised admiration. "A home like this, my lord, ought to make a poet
of a man. The very air is an inspiration."
Barncastle shrugged his shoulders and laughed; and had Toppleton not
been looking in rapt silence out through the large bowed window at the
end of the hall they had entered, along an avenue of substantial oak
trees to the silver waters of the Barbundle at its other end, he might
have seen a strange greenish light come into the eyes of his host,
which would have worried him not a little. He did not see it, however,
and in a moment he remembered his mission and the means he had adopted
to bring it to a successful issue.
"It beats the deck!" he ejaculated, with a nervous glance at Barncastle,
fearful lest his enthusiasm had led him to betray himself.
"I find it a pleasant home," said Barncastle, quietly, ushering him into
a spacious and extremely comfortable room which Toppleton perceived in a
moment was the library, at the other end of which was a large open
fireplace, large enough to accommodate a small family, within whose
capacious depths three or four huge logs were blazing fiercely. Before
the fire sat a stately young woman, about twenty-five years of age, who
rose as the Lord of Burningford and his guest entered.
As she approached Toppleton would have given all he possessed to be rid
of the abominable costume he had on; and when the young heiress of
Burningford's eye rested upon the fearfully green cotton umbrella, he
felt as if nothing would so have pleased his soul as the casting of that
adjunct to an alleged Americanism into the fire; for Lady Alice was, if
he could judge from appearances, a woman for whose good opinion any man
might be willing to sacrifice immortality itself. But circumstances
would not permit him to falter, and, despite the fact that it hurt his
self-respect to do it, Hopkins remained true to the object he had in
view.
"Alice, this is Mr. Toppleton. My daughter, Lady Alice Chatford, Mr.
Toppleton," said Barncastle.
"Howdy," said Hopkins, making an awkward bow to Lady Alice. "She don't
need her title to show she's a lady," he added, turning to Barncastle,
who seemingly acquiesced in all that he said.
"My friend Toppleton, my dear," said Barncastle, "has paid me the
compliment of travelling all the way from his home in the Rocky
Mountains in the United States to see me. He is the author of that
wonderful sonnet I showed you the other night."
"Yes, I remember," said Lady Alice, with a gracious smile, which won
Toppleton's heart completely, "it was delightful. Lord Barncastle and I
are great admirers of your genius, Mr. Toppleton, and we sincerely hope
that we shall be able to make your stay with us here as pleasant for you
as it is for us."
Again Hopkins would have disappeared through the floor had he been able
to act upon the promptings of his own good taste. It made him feel
unutterably small to think that he had come here, under the guise of an
uncultivated, boorish clod with poetical tendencies, to work the
overthrow of the genius of the house.
"Thank you," he said, his voice husky with emotion. "I had not expected
so cordial a reception. In fact," he added, remembering his true
position, "I had a bet of ten to one with a friend of mine who is doing
the Lakes this afternoon that I'd get frozen stiff by a glance of your
ladyship's eye. I'm mighty glad I've lost the bet."
"He has some courtliness beneath his unpolished exterior," said Lady
Alice later, when recounting the first interview between them to some of
her friends. "I quite forgave his boorishness when he said he was glad
to lose his wager."
"Now, Mr. Toppleton," said his host, "if you care to go to your
apartment I will see that you get what you want. Just leave your
umbrella in the coat room, and let Parker take your bag up to your
room."
"Thanks, Barncastle, old fellow," said the Rocky Mountain poet, "I'll go
to my room gladly; but as for leaving that umbrella out of my sight, or
transferring the handle of that carpet bag to any other hand than my
own, I can't do it. They're my treasures, my lady," he added, turning
to Lady Alice. "That bag and I have been inseparable companions for
eight consecutive years, and as for the umbrella we haven't been parted
for five. It's my protector and friend, and since it saved my life in a
shooting scrape at the Papyrus Club dinner in Denver, I haven't wanted
to let it get away from me."
"How odd he is," said Lady Alice a moment later to her father, Toppleton
having gone to his room. "Are you sure he is not an impostor?"
"No, I'm not," returned Barncastle with a strange smile; "but I know he
is not a thief. I fancy he is amusing, and I believe he will be a
valuable acquisition to my circle of acquaintances. Have you heard from
the Duchess of Bangletop?"
"Yes, she will be here. I told her you had a real American this
time--not an imitation Englishman--a poet, and, as far as we could
judge, a character who would surely become a worthy addition to her
collection of oddities; a match, in fact, for her German worshipper of
Napoleon and that other strange freak of nature she had at her last
reception, the young Illinois widow who whistled the score of Parsifal."
"The duchess must have been pleased," said Barncastle with a laugh.
"This Toppleton will prove a perfect godsend to her, for she has
absolutely nothing that is _bizarre_ for her next reception."
Toppleton, upstairs in a magnificently appointed chamber, from the
windows of which were to be seen the most superb distances that he had
ever imagined, was a prey alternately to misery and to joy. He
felicitated himself upon the apparent success of his plan, while
bemoaning his unhappy lot in having to keep his true self under in a
society he felt himself capable of adorning, and to enter which he had
always aspired.
"It's too late to back out now, though," he said. "If I were to strike
my colours at this stage of the battle, I should deserve to be put in a
cask and thrown into the Barbundle yonder. When I look about me and see
all these magnificent acres, when I observe the sumptuous furnishing of
this superb mansion, when I see unequalled treasures of art scattered in
profusion about this castle, and then think of that poor devil of a
Chatford roaming about the world without a piece of bric-a-brac to his
name, or an acre, or a house, or bed, or chair, or table, of any kind,
without even a body, it makes me mad. Here his body, the inferior part
of man, the purely mortal section of his being, is living in affluence,
while his immortal soul is a very tramp, an outcast, a wanderer on the
face of the earth. Barncastle, Barncastle, you are indeed a villain of
the deepest--"
Here Toppleton paused, and looked apprehensively about him. He seemed to
be conscious of an eye resting upon him. A chill seized upon his heart,
and his breath came short and quick as it had done but once before when
his invisible client first betrayed his presence in No. 17.
"I wonder if this is one of those beastly castles with secret doors in
the wainscot and peep-holes in the pictures," he said nervously to
himself. "It would be just like Barncastle to have that sort of a house,
and of course nothing would please him better than to try a haunted
chamber on me. The conjunction of a ghost and a Rocky Mountain poet
would be great, but after my experience with Chatford, I don't believe
there is a ghost in all creation that could frighten me. Nevertheless, I
don't like being gazed at by an unseen eye. I'll have to investigate."
Then Toppleton investigated. He mounted chairs and tables to gaze into
the stolid, unresponsive oil-painted faces of somebody's ancestry, he
knew not whose. Not Barncastle's, he was sure, for Barncastle was an
upstart. Nothing wrong could be found there. The eyes were absolutely
proof against peeping Toms. Then he rolled the heavy bureau and several
antique chests away from the massive oak wainscoting that ran about the
room, eight feet in height and superbly carved. He tapped every panel
with his knuckles, and found them all solid as a rock.
"No secret door in that," he said; and then for a second time he
experienced that nervous sensation which comes to him who feels that he
is watched, and as the sensation grew more and more intense and
terrifying, an idea flashed across Toppleton's mind which heightened his
anxiety.
"By Jove!" he said; "I wonder if I am going mad. Can it be that Chatford
is an illusion, a fanciful creation of a weak mind? Am I become a prey
to hallucinations, and if so, am I not in grave danger of my personal
liberty here if Barncastle should discover my weakness?"
It was rather strange, indeed, that this had not occurred to Hopkins
before. It was the natural explanation of his curious experience, and
the sudden thought that he had foolishly lent himself to the impulses of
a phantasm, and was carrying on a campaign of destruction against one of
the world's most illustrious men, based solely upon a figment of a
diseased imagination, was prostrating. He staggered to the side of a
large tapestried easy-chair, and limp with fear, toppled over its broad
arm into its capacious depths an almost nerveless mass of flesh and
bones. He would have given worlds to be back in the land of the midnight
sun, in New York, in London, anywhere but here in the house of
Barncastle of Burningford, and he resolved then and there that he would
return to London the first thing in the morning, place himself in the
hands of a competent physician, and trifle with the creations of his
fancy no more.
A prey to these disquieting reflections, Toppleton lay in the chair for
at least an hour. The last rays of a setting sun trembled through the
leaves of the tree that shaded the western side of the room, and
darkness fell over all; and with the darkness there came into
Toppleton's life an experience that scattered his fears of a moment
since to the winds, and so tried and exercised his courage, that that
fast fading quality gained a renewed strength for the fearful battle
with a supernatural foe, in which he had, out of his goodness of heart,
undertaken to engage.
A clock in the hall outside began to strike the hour of six in deep
measured tones, that to Toppleton in his agitated state of mind was
uncomfortably suggestive of the bell in Coleridge's line that "Knells us
back to a world of death." At the last stroke of the hammer the tone
seemed to become discordant, and in a frenzy of nervous despair
Toppleton opened his eyes and sprang to his feet. As he did so, his
whole being became palpitant with terror, for staring at him out of the
darkness he perceived a small orb-like something whose hue was that of
an emerald in combustion. He clapped his hands over his eyes for a
moment, but that phosphorescent gleam penetrated them, and then he
perceived that it was not an eye that rested upon him, but a ray of
light shining through a small hole that had escaped his searching glance
in the wainscoting. The relief of this discovery was so great that it
gave him courage to investigate, and stepping lightly across the room,
noiseless as a particle of dust, he climbed upon a chair and peeped
through the aperture, though it nearly blinded him to do so. To shade
his eyes from the blinding light, he again covered them with his hand,
and again observed that its intensity was sufficient to pierce through
the obstruction and dazzle his vision. The hand so softened the light,
however, that he could see what there was on the other side of the wall,
though it was far from being a pretty sight that met his gaze.
What he saw was a small oblong room in which there was no window, and,
at first glance, no means of entrance or exit. It was high-ceiled like
the room in which he stood, and, with the exception of a narrow couch
covered with a black velvet robe, with a small pillow of the same
material at the far end, the room was bare of furniture. There was no
fire, no fixture of any kind, lamp or otherwise, from which illumination
could come, and yet the room was brilliant with that same green light
that Chatford had described to Hopkins at his office in the Temple. So
dazzling was it, that for a moment Hopkins had difficulty in
ascertaining just what there was in the apartment, but as he looked he
became conscious of forms which grew more and more distinct as his eye
accustomed itself to the light. On the couch in a moment appeared, rigid
as in death, the body of Barncastle; the eyes lustreless and staring,
the hands characterless and bluish even in the green light, the cheeks
sunken and the massive forehead white and cold as marble. The sight
chilled Toppleton to the marrow, and he averted his eyes from the
horrible spectacle only to see one even more dreadful, for on the other
side of the apartment, grinning fiendishly, the source of the wonderful
light that flooded the room, he now perceived the fiend, making ready
to assume once more the habiliments of mortality. He was stirring a
potion, and, as Hopkins watched him, he began to whistle a combination
of discords that went through Toppleton's ears like a knife.
The watcher became sick at heart. This was the frightful thing he had to
cope with! So frightful was it that he tried to remove his eye from the
peep-hole, and seek again the easy chair, when to his horror he found
that he could not move. If his eye had in reality been glued to the
aperture, he would not have found it more firmly fixed than it was at
present. As he struggled to get away from the vision that was every
moment being burned more and more indelibly into his mind, the fiend's
fearful mirth increased, at the close of one of the paroxysms of which
he lifted the cup in which the potion had been mixed to his lips, and
quaffed its contents to the very dregs. As the last drop trickled down
the fiend's throat, Hopkins was startled further to see the light
growing dim, and then he noticed that the fiend was rapidly decreasing
in size, shrinking slowly from a huge spectral presence into a hardly
visible ball of green fire which rolled across the apartment to where
the body lay; up the side of the couch to the pillow; along the pillow
to that marble white forehead, where it paused. A tremor passed through
the human frame lying prostrate there, and in a moment all was dark as
night. The ball of fire had disappeared through the forehead, and a deep
groan told Toppleton that the body of Barncastle was once more a living
thing having the semblance of humanity. A moment later another light
appeared in the apartment into which Toppleton still found himself
compelled to gaze. This time the light was more natural, for it was the
soft genial light of a lamp shining through a sliding panel at the other
end of the room, through which the Lord of Burningford passed. It lasted
but a moment, for as the defendant in this fearful case of Chatford _v._
Burningford passed into the room beyond, the slide flew back and all was
black once more.
With the departure of Barncastle, Toppleton was able to withdraw from
his uncomfortable position, and in less than a moment lay gasping in his
chair.
"It is too real!" he moaned to himself. "Chatford did not deceive me. I
am not the victim of hallucination. Alas! I wish I were."
A knock at the door put an end to his soliloquizing, and he was relieved
to hear it. Here was something earthly at last. He flew from his chair
across the room through the darkness to the door and threw it wide open.
"Come in," he cried, and Barncastle himself, still pale from the effects
of the ordeal he had passed through, entered the room.
"I have come to see if there is anything I can do for you," he said
pleasantly, touching an electric button which dissipated the darkness of
the room by lighting a hundred lamps. "The Duchess of Bangletop has
arrived and is anxious to meet you; but you look worn, Toppleton. You
are not ill, I hope?"
"No," stammered Toppleton, slightly overcome by Barncastle's coolness
and affability, "but I--I've been taking a nap and I've had the--the
most horrible dream I ever had."
"Which was?"
"That I--ah--why, that I was writing an obituary poem on--"
"Me?" queried Barncastle, calmly.
"No," said Toppleton. "On myself."