"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 a.s.sumed 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 s.p.a.ce, leaving him to sigh and bewail his unhappy estate throughout all eternity. My plan was to go shares. To a.s.sume 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sume. You might a.s.sume 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!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed 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 d.u.c.h.ess of Bangletop with a smile.
"Yes, d.u.c.h.ess," 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-gla.s.s window to a sea of diamonds."
CHAPTER XVI.
MR. HOPKINS TOPPLETON MAKES A DISCOVERY.
IT is hardly to be wondered at that Toppleton did not sleep much that night at Barncastle Hall. The state of his nerves was not calculated to permit him to sleep even had he been willing to do so. The experiences of the day were not of a nature to give him such confidence in his surroundings as would have enabled him to woo rest with a serene sense of safety. Furthermore, it was his desire to push his endeavour through to as immediate a conclusion as was possible, and time was too precious to waste in rest. Hence it was that the dawning of another day found him utterly f.a.gged out, awake, and still meditating upon the means most likely to crown his efforts with success.
"I am afraid," he said, as he turned the matter over and over in his mind, "I am afraid it"s going to be a harder task than I thought. My plan has worked admirably up to a certain point, but there it has ceased to result as I had antic.i.p.ated. He is frightened, that is certain; but he cannot be frightened into a rest.i.tution. He is too selfish to give up Chatford"s body and take his chances of getting another, and his rather natural distrust of Chatford"s ability to sustain the greatness of the name of Barncastle re-enforces his selfishness. I can"t blame him either. I haven"t a doubt that Chatford"s spirit would prove too weak to keep the body going a year at the outside, and yet it is his, and he ought to have it. He ought to--have--"
Here wearied Nature a.s.serted herself, and Hopkins" head dropped back on the soft cushion of his couch, and he lost consciousness in a sleep that knew no dreams.
The morning hours pa.s.sed away and still he slept. Afternoon gave place to night, and as the moon rose over the Barbundle and bathed the beautiful scene as with silver, Hopkins opened his eyes again and looked about him. He was annoyed to find that his vision had in some manner become slightly obscured; he seemed to see everything through a faint suggestion of a haze, and an object ten feet distant that he remembered admiring as he lay on his couch the afternoon before, its every detail clear cut and distinct to the eye, was now a confused jumble of lines only, suggestive of nothing in particular, though the moonlight streaming in through the window shone directly upon it.
"Dear me!" he said, pa.s.sing his hands over his eyes as if to sweep away the filmy web that interfered with his sight. "I seem to have a slight vertigo, and yet I cannot understand why I should. I hardly drank anything last night, and as for what I ate it was simplicity itself. But I wonder how long I have been asleep; let me see." Here he consulted his watch, the great silver timepiece he had brought with him.
"Humph," he said; "half-past seven. I must have slept nearly thirteen hours; unlucky number that. No wonder I have vertigo."
He rose from the couch and walked, or rather tottered, to the window to look out upon the beautifully serene Barbundle.
"Mercy! How weak I am!" he cried, grasping the sill for support. "This trouble seems to have gone to my knees as well. I can hardly stand, and--ow--there is a touch of rheumatism in my right arm! I shall have to ring for Parker to bring me a little resolution in the form of a stiff horn of whiskey. These old English homes I"m afraid are a little damp."
He touched the bell at the side of the doorway and staggered back to the couch, falling upon it in a heap in sheer weakness, and as he did so he again became conscious of someone gazing at him from the other side of the room, and as he looked, the fiend in his emerald disembodiment took shape and approached him.
"Ah, Barncastle," said Toppleton, to whom custom had rendered the fiend"s appearance less terrible. "I am glad to see you. I"m afraid I am ill. I have the most unaccountable weakness in my knees. My eyesight seems to have grown dim, and I am conscious of my head which is really a new sensation to me. I wish you"d send your butler up here with some whiskey."
"All right, I"ll send him," returned the fiend with, or so it seemed to Toppleton, a lack of friendly interest in his tone which rather surprised him, for Barncastle had hitherto been the quintessence of politeness. "I fancy you"ll be better in the morning; and between you and me I"d let whiskey alone. Brandy and soda is my drink, and I think it will do you more good in your present state than whiskey."
"Very well, Barncastle," Hopkins began.
"Don"t call me Barncastle," returned the fiend, impatiently. "Your discovery of my secret has made all that intolerable to me, and I intend hereafter to spend as little of my time in that form as is consistent with propriety. I did not realize until you came here how long confinement within anatomical limits had weakened my powers, and to find myself at this period of my existence almost, if not quite, as incompetent to meet the grave crises of life as any mortal, is galling in the extreme. Call me anything you please, but drop Barncastle."
"Very well," again replied Toppleton. "I will call you my friend Greene."
"Humorous to the last, Toppleton," laughed the fiend. "That"s a truly American characteristic. I believe you"ll jest with your dying breath."
"Quite likely," said Hopkins, lightly. "That is if I ever draw it."
"Ah! Have you discovered an Elixir of Life, then?" queried the fiend.
"Not yet," returned Hopkins. "But I am sure I cannot see why, with your a.s.sistance, I should not do so. If you know all the secrets of the universe, I think you might confide at least one of them to me, and the only one I ask is, what shall I do to live for ever?"
"You are an insinuating young man," returned the fiend. "And I must say I like you, Toppleton, in spite of your abominable poetry, for now I am going to be candid with you."
"So much, then, is gained," said Hopkins, cheerfully. "If you like me, give me the recipe of life."
"I would, my boy," the fiend replied with a harsh laugh, "I would do it gladly, if I hadn"t forgotten it. Some day I shall take a day off from these mundane operations of mine, and return to the spirit vale and freshen up my formulae. Then perhaps I can help you. But I have something very important to say to you, and if you will come with me to my own quarters I will say it. This room is too chilly for a spirit with nothing on."