BARNCASTLE CONFIDES IN HOPKINS.
TOPPLETON had not long to wait. His nerves had hardly resumed their
normal condition when he heard a tottering step in the hall outside,
followed by a soft tapping at the door.
"Who's there?" he cried.
"It is I, Toppleton--Barncastle. Let me in and be quick. I have
something very important to say to you."
Hopkins ran to the door and opened it, and Barncastle entered, his face
pale and his general aspect that of a man who had passed through a
terrible ordeal.
"By Jove! I've landed my man!" said Toppleton to himself. Then he added
aloud, "My dear Barncastle, you don't know what a turn you gave me
downstairs. I sincerely hope you are not ill?"
"I am ill, Toppleton; ill almost unto death, and it is you who have made
me so."
"I?" cried Hopkins, with well-feigned surprise. "I don't quite catch
your drift."
"Your accursed faculty for reading character in the face, and searching
out the soul of man in the depths of his eyes has made you the only man
I have ever feared. We must come to some understanding in this matter. I
want to know what your object is in coming here to expose me before my
friends, to lay bare--"
"Object? What is my object?" returned Hopkins, with capital
dissemblance. "Why, my dear fellow, what object could I have? I read
your face and searched your eyes for indications of your character at
your own request, and with your permission made known what I saw
there--for it is there, Barncastle, plain as any material object in this
room."
"It is dreadful! dreadful!" said Barncastle, covering his eyes with his
hands and quivering with emotion and fear. "I had no idea your power was
so great. Do you suppose for an instant that had I known how unerringly
accurate you are as a reader of mind and face, that I would ever have
asked you to lay bare to those people--"
"Dear me, Barncastle," said Toppleton, rising and putting his hand on
the other's shoulder in a caressing manner, "really you ought to lie
down and rest. This thing will all pass off with a night's sleep.
You--you don't seem to be quite yourself to-night. You mustn't mind
what I have said."
"You do not know, Toppleton, you do not know. You have done that
to-night which has shown me that a dreadful secret which I have carried
locked in my breast for thirty years, is as easily to be wrested from me
by you as my jewels by a house-breaker."
"But, my dear fellow," said Toppleton, his spirit growing with pride at
his success in bringing down his game with so little effort, "I--I
understand that this is only one of the exceptions to the rules which
govern the mind-reader's art. I do not really believe, of course, that
what I seem to see beneath the surface is actually there. I--"
"Do not try to deceive me, Mr. Toppleton," sobbed Barncastle. "I, too,
am something of a reader of character, as I told you, and I know exactly
what you believe and what you do not believe. Had I been in such a
position at dinner as would have permitted me to look as deeply into
your eyes as you looked into mine, I should not have asked you to
divulge what you saw. In fact, Toppleton, as you have probably seen for
yourself, I have all along under-estimated your abilities, which do not,
I confess, show up as advantageously as they might. You Americans are a
cleverer people than you appear to be, and you have a faculty of
dissemblance that is baffling to us in the older world, who have
acquired candour through our conceit. We are so conscious of our
superiority and ultimate ability to gain the upper hand in all that we
undertake, that we do not consider it necessary to cloak our real
feelings. The whole world speaks of the Briton's brutal frankness, and
speaks justly. We are candid often against our best interests. We are
impulsively frank where you Americans are diplomatically reserved. It is
this trait in my people that makes it difficult for our Government to
find suitable diplomats to fill the various foreign missions that must
be filled, while your Government finds it difficult to find missions for
all the diplomats who must be provided for. We have to train our
Ministers and Ambassadors in the hard school of experience, as
_attaches_ to legations, while you have only to go to your newspaper
offices, to your great political organizations, or to your flourishing
business concerns to find all the Envoys Extraordinary you need with a
comfortable reserve force standing always ready to step into any shoes
that death, advancement, or revulsion of popular sentiment may make
vacant. You are a great people; greater far than you seem on the
surface, and it is this fact, unheeded by me who should have known
better, that deceived me. I judged you from the standpoint of your
exterior; I saw that you were a character, but beyond the green umbrella
and carpet-bag indications I failed to look, and I thought I might
safely venture the act which has come so nearly to my undoing. I see you
now as you are. I apologize for underrating your ability, and I say to
you frankly, that I rejoice all the more greatly in your proffered
friendship since I have come to see that it is an honour not lightly to
be worn."
"My dear Barncastle," ejaculated Hopkins, breathless with wonder and
pride. "I assure you that your words overwhelm me. Your kind heart, I
fear, has led you into over-estimating my poor character as much as you
claim to have under-estimated it. I am by no means all that--"
"Ah, Toppleton!" said Barncastle, "let us not waste words. I know you as
you are at last, and you need cloak your real self from me no more. I
feared for an instant that you might be my enemy, though why you should
be I do not know, and to have you read my secret as though it were
printed upon an open page before you, filled my soul with terror. You
have found me out, but you do not and you cannot know what has brought
me to this unless I tell you, and I must insist that you become
acquainted with my story, that you may the better judge of my innocence
in the matter. When I have told you this story, I wish to exact from you
a promise never to reveal it, for once revealed it would be my ruin."
"I do not wish, my dear Barncastle," said Toppleton, burning with
anxiety to hear the other's story, and yet desirous of appearing
unconcerned in order that Barncastle might throw himself unreservedly in
his hands. "I have no desire to pry into another man's secrets, to wrest
unwilling confidences from any man. If I have discovered one of your
secrets, I have done so unwittingly, and I do not wish you to feel that
I am holding you up, to use one of our Western expressions, for
confidences. Keep your secret if it is one you wish to hold inviolate. I
shall never tell what I have seen or what you have said to me."
"You are a generous, high-minded person, Toppleton. A poet at soul and a
gentleman as well; but you must hear my story, for it is my
justification in your eyes, and that is as necessary to my happiness,
now that I know you for the man you are, as justification in the eyes of
the world would become were the world to suspect what you have seen. I
did not mind any portion of what you said at the table to-night,
Toppleton, until you delivered yourself of the opinion that the soul of
a man of a hundred and more years was dwelling in this body of mine, a
body many years younger. Mr. Toppleton, I do not want you to think me
mad. I want you to believe me when I say that what you saw is absolutely
a fact. My soul has lived precisely one hundred and twenty-six years, my
body sixty-one!"
Toppleton's expression of surprise as Barncastle spoke would have done
credit to a tragedian of the highest rank.
"Excuse me, Barncastle," he said, kindly. "I really think you'd better
let me send for Lady Alice and have the family physician summoned. Your
mind is somewhat affected."
"Come with me," said Barncastle, rising from his chair and leading
Toppleton out through the door into and along the hallway until they
reached his private apartment. "I want you on entering this room to
swear never to divulge what you shall see within, for I shall prove the
truth of my assertion respecting my soul before you leave it, and,
Toppleton, the maintenance of my secret is a matter of life and death to
me."
"Of course, my lord, I shall not tell anyone of this interview except
for your good. It is truly painful to me, for in spite of your apparent
clearness of head I cannot help feeling that the excitement of this
evening, together with the responsibilities a man of your position must
necessarily assume, have made you feverish and slightly delirious."
"I shall dispel all such ideas as that," said Barncastle, opening the
door and ushering Hopkins into his room. "Pray be seated," he said, "and
do not leave your seat until I request you to."
"I hear and obey," quoted Toppleton, his mind reverting to the Arabian
Tales, the splendour of his surroundings and the generally uncanny
quality of his experience reminding him forcibly of the land of the
Genii.
"I am going to prove to you now," said Barncastle, "that what I have
said about my soul is true. Excuse me for being absent from the room for
just five minutes, and also pardon me if I extinguish the light here.
Darkness is necessary to convince you that what I say is truth; and,
above all, Toppleton, look to your nerves."
Barncastle suited his action to his words. He extinguished the light and
disappeared. In five minutes, during which time Hopkins sat in the inky
darkness alone trying to formulate a plan for future action, a panel in
the wainscot was moved softly to one side and Toppleton found himself
face to face with the fiend.
For a moment he was numb with fear, but when the green shadow moved
toward him and spoke in soft insinuating tones and appeared to fear him
quite as much as he feared it, his courage returned.
"What the deuce is this?" he cried, springing to his feet.
"I am the soul of Barncastle. Barncastle lies prostrate as in death in
the den beyond the wall. I am also the soul of Horace Calderwood who
died forty-five years ago at the age of eighty, whose body lies buried
in the yard of Monckton Chapel, at Kennelly Manor, Kent."
"What is the meaning of it--how--how has it come that you--that you are
here?" cried Hopkins, with well-feigned terror. "What awful power have
you that you can leave your body and appear as you do now?"
"Calm yourself, Toppleton. There is no awful power about it," said the
fiend. "It is a simple enough matter when you understand it. I am simply
an immortal soul with mortal cravings. I love this world. It delights me
to live in this sphere, and it is given to the soul to return here if it
sees fit. That is what makes heaven heaven. The soul is free to do
whatsoever it wills."
"But how is it," said Toppleton, "that this has never happened before?"
"It has happened before. It is happening all the time, only you mortals
never find it out. You want instances? The soul of Macchiavelli returned
to earth and entered the body of a Jew; result, Beaconsfield. The soul
of Caesar returned to earth and entered the body of a puny Corsican;
result, Bonaparte. The soul of Horace returned to earth and entered the
body of an English boy; therefore, Thackeray. The soul of Diogenes
returned to earth and entered the body of another English boy; result,
Thomas Carlyle. Six souls, those of Terence, Plato, AEsculapius, Cicero,
Caesar, Chaucer, combined and, returning to earth, took possession of the
body of a wayward child of Warwickshire; whence, Shakespeare."
"And the real souls of these men?" cried Hopkins.
"Became a part of space, and still so remain. How else account for the
evolution of genius? Did you ever know a genius in his infancy?"
"No; I can't say that I ever did," said Toppleton.
"Well, with very rare exceptions geniuses are the stupidest of babies,
or, supposing that in youth they give great promise, the valedictorian
of his college class ends his life oftener than not without distinction,
a third-rate lawyer, perhaps a poor doctor, a prosy clergyman, or as
Mrs. Somebody's husband. The man who is graduated at the foot of his
class has oftener won the laurels than he. How is it accounted for? How
did Keats, son of a stableman, become the sweetest of our sonneteers? In
your own country, how did Lincoln and Grant spring from nothing to
greatness? Was the germ of greatness discoverable in them in their
youth? Would the most reckless of prophets have dared assert that the
heavy tanner's boy would become the immortal hero of the Wilderness, the
saviour of the Republic, the uncrowned ruler of fifty millions of people
even with a thousand years of life to live? I tell you, Toppleton, the
mystery of this life is more mysterious than you think. There are things
happening every minute of the day, every second of the minute, the
knowledge of which would drive a mortal mind--that is, a mind which has
never put on immortality by passing into the other world--to despair."
"But, Barncastle," said Hopkins, his knees growing weak and his blood
running cold, this time in actual terror, "how comes it that I, a
mortal, inspire you, an immortal, with fear, as you claim I have done?"
"There is a point beyond which an immortal mind cannot with safety
indulge in mortal habiliments. Have you never observed how men of
genius outlive their genius? Did Bonaparte die at the height of his
glory? Did Grant die at the zenith of his power?"
"D'Israeli did."
"D'Israeli embodied Macchiavelli, and Macchiavelli made no mistakes. I
have made a mistake. I have lived too long as Barncastle, and every day
beyond the day on which I should have left this body has lessened my
greatness, my power, until I am become as weak as though I had never put
on immortality. It is my craving to be among men, that has been my
weakening, if not my ruin. The love of contact with mankind is as strong
with me as is the love of drink with others. I cannot give it up."
"And the poor soul whose place you took?" said Toppleton.
"Don't speak of him," said the fiend. "I have made his name a great one.
I have suffered more than he in my efforts to lift his personality to a
plane it would never have reached had he been left to go his own way, to
occupy his own person. He is my debtor, Toppleton. I have no feelings of
regret for him. I went to him in a spirit of fairness and honesty, and
offered to make him a famous man. He declined the offer. I assumed the
risk of compelling him, and after the first compulsion he was
acquiescent but not candid. When Horace Calderwood died, and I, his
soul, for the first time learned that it was possible for a spirit to
return to earth and do these things, the idea of depriving a fellow-soul
of material existence was repellent to me, and seemed not to be strictly
honest. He should enjoy, it seemed to me, something more than the
consciousness of his greatness. He should be permitted to taste _in
propria persona_ the delights of fame. And I resolved that I would not
do as these others before me had done, and drive the real spirit of
my,--ah--well, call him my victim if you choose--I resolved that I would
not drive the real spirit of my victim out into space, leaving him to
sigh and bewail his unhappy estate throughout all eternity. My plan was
to go shares. To assume possession only so far as was necessary to
insure the winning of the laurel; to let the other return to his
corporeal estate in hours of leisure. I should have continued of this
mind until to-day had I not had the misfortune to select for my
operations an uncandid person, who had no genius, save that for tearing
down what I was up-building. It became necessary for me to exile him for
ever to save him from himself. He had been made a great man, and had I
deserted him he would have become a conspicuous failure; his name would
have been disgraced in proportion to the greatness it had had thrust
upon it, and the soul of that one would have lived a life of humiliation
and misery. What I did was the humane thing. I exiled him from himself,
and I have no regrets for having done so."
"Well, of course," said Toppleton, "you know more about it than I do,
but it seems to me it's a mighty rough thing to condemn a soul to
perpetual existence on this earth deprived of the only means which can
put him in a position to enjoy that life. If you are not joking with me,
Barncastle, and your present appearance is pretty good proof that you
are not, it seems to me that you have been guilty of a wrong, although
your reasons for believing that you have done right are worthy of
consideration. It strikes me that an omniscient, such as you pretended
to be, ought not to have been bothered by the lack of candour of a
purely finite mind; and, after all, it was but a bit of superb conceit
on your part to think that you could do things differently from those
who had gone before you."
"But my motive, Toppleton. Credit me with a proper motive," pleaded the
fiend.
"Yes, I do," said Hopkins. "But out in the Rocky Mountains, my lord, we
have lynched several thieves who stole to keep their families from
starving. Their motives were all right, but they were suspended just the
same. But let me ask you one question. To what extent do you retain that
remarkable omniscient quality? I want to know, for candidly, much as I
admire you, Barncastle, it rather awes me to think that you can
penetrate to the innermost recesses of my brain--"
"I can no longer do that," said Barncastle. "My power through long
confinement to mortal habitations has materially lessened, as I have
already told you. Do you suppose, my dear sir, that, were it not so, I
should be here, at this moment, unbosoming myself to you, and begging
you in the name of humanity never to utter one word of what has passed
between us? Do you think that I, who was once able to destroy a mortal's
reason by one glance of my eye, would be so overcome by the words of a
mind-reading American poet if I still had the power to subject his will
to mine?"
"No one would believe me were I to tell him your horrible secret," said
Hopkins. "Indeed, I don't know that I believe it myself. There is, of
course plenty of evidence of which I have had ocular demonstration, but
this may be all a dream. I may wake up to-morrow and find myself in my
hammock in Blue-bird Gulch."
"No, it is no dream," said the fiend. "It is all too real, but you will
not expose me, Toppleton. There are those who would believe it, some who
half suspect me even now would gain re-enforcement in their suspicions.
My daughter would be shocked beyond expression and--"
"That, my lord," said Hopkins "is your convincing argument. Lady Alice's
peace of mind must be held inviolate, and I shall be dumb; but I think
you might let the exiled spirit enter once more into bodily life. The
allotted days of the body you have wrested from him must be growing few
in number. Why not atone for the past by admitting him once more?"
"There are two reasons, Toppleton," said Barncastle, fixing his eye with
great intensity upon Hopkins, who maintained his composure with great
difficulty. "In the first place, there are responsibilities which still
devolve upon the Lord of Burningford which he would be utterly unable to
assume. You might assume them, for you are a clever man. You have the
making of a brilliant man in you, but he has not, and never will have.
He is the most pusillanimous soul in the universe, and with him in
charge, that body would die in less than six months. In the second place
I have lost sight of him of late years, or rather lost consciousness of
him, for he has been visible at no time since he departed from his
normal condition, and since the day of my marriage, whose happiness he
made a mad public endeavour to destroy, I have had no dealings with him.
Where he is now, I have not the slightest idea."
"Well, I know!" ejaculated Toppleton, forgetting himself and throwing
caution to the winds.
"You know what? Where he is?" returned the fiend, with a look that
restored Toppleton's senses and showed him that he had made a mistake.
"Oh, no!" he replied, his face getting red with confusion. "Oh, no, not
that. You interrupted me. I was going to say that I know--er--I know how
difficult your--er--your position is in the matter, and--er--that I
hardly knew what to advise."
"Ah!" returned the fiend, with a smile that to Toppleton's eyes
betokened relief. "You have taken a load off my mind. Do you know, my
dear fellow, that for one instant I half believed that you really knew
of the original Chatford's whereabouts, and that perhaps you were in
league with him against me. I see, however, how unfounded the impression
was."
"How could you suspect me of that?" said Toppleton, reproachfully, his
heart beating wildly at the narrowness of the escape. "But you don't
intend to let him back?"
"Not if I can help myself, Toppleton," said the fiend. "I shall hang on
here as long as I can, not only for my own sake and for that of my
daughter, but also for the peace of mind of the exiled soul. You will
respect my confidence, will you not?"
"I shall, Barncastle. You may count on me," said Toppleton.
"Good. Now I will resume the mortal habitation for which I have so long
been a trustee, and we can rejoin the ladies."
Ten minutes later Barncastle and the Poet of the Rockies entered the
drawing-room.
"Did you enjoy your walk, Mr. Toppleton?" queried Lady Alice.
"Well, I guess!" returned Toppleton. "Your father has one of the finest
estates I have ever seen since I left Colorado, and as for your moon, it
fairly out-moons any moon I've seen in the Rockies in all my life."
"It's the same moon that everybody else has," said the Duchess of
Bangletop with a smile.
"Yes, Duchess," returned Toppleton, sitting beside her. "But you've
furnished it better than we have. That Barbundle River gives it a
setting beside which the creek in Blue-bird Gulch is as a plate-glass
window to a sea of diamonds."