"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 propriâ personâ 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."