Ghosts I Have Met and Some Others

My first meeting with Carleton Barker was a singular one.  A friend and I, in August, 18—­, were doing the English Lake District on foot, when, on nearing the base of the famous Mount Skiddaw, we observed on the road, some distance ahead of us, limping along and apparently in great pain, the man whose subsequent career so sorely puzzled us.  Noting his very evident distress, Parton and I quickened our pace and soon caught up with the stranger, who, as we reached his side, fell forward upon his face in a fainting condition—­as well he might, for not only must he have suffered great agony from a sprained ankle, but inspection of his person disclosed a most extraordinary gash in his right arm, made apparently with a sharp knife, and which was bleeding most profusely.  To stanch the flow of blood was our first care, and Parton, having recently been graduated in medicine, made short work of relieving the sufferer’s pain from his ankle, bandaging it about and applying such soothing properties as he had in his knapsack—­properties, by the way, with which, knowing the small perils to which pedestrians everywhere are liable, he was always provided.

Our patient soon recovered his senses and evinced no little gratitude for the service we had rendered him, insisting upon our accepting at his hands, merely, he said, as a souvenir of our good -Samaritanship, and as a token of his appreciation of the same, a small pocket-flask and an odd diamond-shaped stone pierced in the centre, which had hung from the end of his watch-chain, held in place by a minute gold ring.  The flask became the property of Parton, and to me fell the stone, the exact hue of which I was never able to determine, since it was chameleonic in its properties.  When it was placed in my hands by our “grateful patient” it was blood -red; when I looked upon it on the following morning it was of a livid, indescribable hue, yet lustrous as an opal.  To-day it is colorless and dull, as though some animating quality that it had once possessed had forever passed from it.

“You seem to have met with an accident,” said Parton, when the injured man had recovered sufficiently to speak.

“Yes,” he said, wincing with pain, “I have.  I set out for Saddleback this morning—­I wished to visit the Scales Tarn and get a glimpse of those noonday stars that are said to make its waters lustrous, and—­”

“And to catch the immortal fish?” I queried.

“No,” he replied, with a laugh.  “I should have been satisfied to see the stars—­and I did see the stars, but not the ones I set out to see.  I have always been more or less careless of my safety, walking with my head in the clouds and letting my feet look out for themselves.  The result was that I slipped on a moss-covered stone and fell over a very picturesque bit of scenery on to some more stones that, unfortunately, were not moss-covered.”

“But the cut in your arm?” said Parton, suspiciously.  “That looks as if somebody else had given it to you.”

The stranger’s face flushed as red as could be considering the amount of blood he had lost, and a look of absolute devilishness that made my flesh creep came into his eyes.  For a moment he did not speak, and then, covering the delay in his answer with a groan of anguish, he said: 

“Oh, that!  Yes—­I—­I did manage to cut myself rather badly and—­”

“I don’t see how you could, though,” insisted Parton.  “You couldn’t reach that part of yourself with a knife, if you tried.”

“That’s just the reason why you should see for yourself that it was caused by my falling on my knife.  I had it grasped in my right hand, intending to cut myself a stick, when I slipped.  As I slipped it flew from my hand and I landed on it, fortunately on the edge and not on the point,” he explained, his manner far from convincing, though the explanation seemed so simple that to doubt it were useless.

“Did you recover the knife?” asked Parton.  “It must have been a mighty sharp one, and rather larger than most people carry about with them on excursions like yours.”

“I am not on the witness-stand, sir,” returned the other, somewhat petulantly, “and so I fail to see why you should question me so closely in regard to so simple a matter—­as though you suspected me of some wrongdoing.”

“My friend is a doctor,” I explained; for while I was quite as much interested in the incident, its whys and wherefores, as was Parton, I had myself noticed that he was suspicious of his chance patient, and seemingly not so sympathetic as he would otherwise have been.  “He regards you as a case.”

“Not at all,” returned Parton.  “I am simply interested to know how you hurt yourself—­that is all.  I mean no offence, I am sure, and if anything I have said has hurt your feelings I apologize.”

“Don’t mention it, doctor,” replied the other, with an uneasy smile, holding his left hand out towards Parton as he spoke.  “I am in great pain, as you know, and perhaps I seem irritable.  I’m not an amiable man at best; as for the knife, in my agony I never thought to look for it again, though I suppose if I had looked I should not have found it, since it doubtless fell into the underbrush out of sight.  Let it rest there.  It has not done me a friendly service to-day and I shall waste no tears over it.”

With which effort at pleasantry he rose with some difficulty to his feet, and with the assistance of Parton and myself walked on and into Keswick, where we stopped for the night.  The stranger registered directly ahead of Parton and myself, writing the words, “Carleton Barker, Calcutta,” in the book, and immediately retired to his room, nor did we see him again that night.  After supper we looked for him, but as he was nowhere to be seen, we concluded that he had gone to bed to seek the recuperation of rest.  Parton and I lit our cigars and, though somewhat fatigued by our exertions, strolled quietly about the more or less somnolent burg in which we were, discussing the events of the day, and chiefly our new acquaintance.

“I don’t half like that fellow,” said Parton, with a dubious shake of the head.  “If a dead body should turn up near or on Skiddaw to-morrow morning, I wouldn’t like to wager that Mr. Carleton Barker hadn’t put it there.  He acted to me like a man who had something to conceal, and if I could have done it without seeming ungracious, I’d have flung his old flask as far into the fields as I could.  I’ve half a mind to show my contempt for it now by filling it with some of that beastly claret they have at the table d’hôte here, and chucking the whole thing into the lake.  It was an insult to offer those things to us.”

“I think you are unjust, Parton,” I said.  “He certainly did look as if he had been in a maul with somebody.  There was a nasty scratch on his face, and that cut on the arm was suspicious; but I can’t see but that his explanation was clear enough.  Your manner was too irritating.  I think if I had met with an accident and was assisted by an utter stranger who, after placing me under obligations to him, acted towards me as though I were an unconvicted criminal, I’d be as mad as he was; and as for the insult of his offering, in my eyes that was the only way he could soothe his injured feelings.  He was angry at your suspicions, and to be entirely your debtor for services didn’t please him.  His gift to me was made simply because he did not wish to pay you in substance and me in thanks.”

“I don’t go so far as to call him an unconvicted criminal, but I’ll swear his record isn’t clear as daylight, and I’m morally convinced that if men’s deeds were written on their foreheads Carleton Barker, esquire, would wear his hat down over his eyes.  I don’t like him.  I instinctively dislike him.  Did you see the look in his eyes when I mentioned the knife?”

“I did,” I replied.  “And it made me shudder.”

“It turned every drop of blood in my veins cold,” said Parton.  “It made me feel that if he had had that knife within reach he would have trampled it to powder, even if every stamp of his foot cut his flesh through to the bone.  Malignant is the word to describe that glance, and I’d rather encounter a rattle-snake than see it again.”

Parton spoke with such evident earnestness that I took refuge in silence.  I could see just where a man of Parton’s temperament—­which was cold and eminently judicial even when his affections were concerned—­could find that in Barker at which to cavil, but, for all that, I could not sympathize with the extreme view he took of his character.  I have known many a man upon whose face nature has set the stamp of the villain much more deeply than it was impressed upon Barker’s countenance, who has lived a life most irreproachable, whose every act has been one of unselfishness and for the good of mankind; and I have also seen outward appearing saints whose every instinct was base; and it seemed to me that the physiognomy of the unfortunate victim of the moss-covered rock and vindictive knife was just enough of a medium between that of the irredeemable sinner and the sterling saint to indicate that its owner was the average man in the matter of vices and virtues.  In fact, the malignancy of his expression when the knife was mentioned was to me the sole point against him, and had I been in his position I do not think I should have acted very differently, though I must add that if I thought myself capable of freezing any person’s blood with an expression of my eyes I should be strongly tempted to wear blue glasses when in company or before a mirror.

“I think I’ll send my card up to him, Jack,” I said to Parton, when we had returned to the hotel, “just to ask how he is.  Wouldn’t you?”

“No!” snapped Parton.  “But then I’m not you.  You can do as you please.  Don’t let me influence you against him—­if he’s to your taste.”

“He isn’t at all to my taste,” I retorted.  “I don’t care for him particularly, but it seems to me courtesy requires that we show a little interest in his welfare.”

“Be courteous, then, and show your interest,” said Parton.  “I don’t care as long as I am not dragged into it.”

I sent my card up by the boy, who, returning in a moment, said that the door was locked, adding that when he had knocked upon it there came no answer, from which he presumed that Mr. Barker had gone to sleep.

“He seemed all right when you took his supper to his room?” I queried.

“He said he wouldn’t have any supper.  Just wanted to be left alone,” said the boy.

“Sulking over the knife still, I imagine,” sneered Parton; and then he and I retired to our room and prepared for bed.

I do not suppose I had slept for more than an hour when I was awakened by Parton, who was pacing the floor like a caged tiger, his eyes all ablaze, and laboring under an intense nervous excitement.

“What’s the matter, Jack?” I asked, sitting up in bed.

“That d—­ned Barker has upset my nerves,” he replied.  “I can’t get him out of my mind.”

“Oh, pshaw!” I replied.  “Don’t be silly.  Forget him.”

“Silly?” he retorted, angrily.  “Silly?  Forget him?  Hang it, I would forget him if he’d let me—­but he won’t.”

“What has he got to do with it?”

“More than is decent,” ejaculated Parton.  “More than is decent.  He has just been peering in through that window there, and he means no good.”

“Why, you’re mad,” I remonstrated.  “He couldn’t peer in at the window—­we are on the fourth floor, and there is no possible way in which he could reach the window, much less peer in at it.”

“Nevertheless,” insisted Parton, “Carleton Barker for ten minutes previous to your waking was peering in at me through that window there, and in his glance was that same malignant, hateful quality that so set me against him to-day—­and another thing, Bob,” added Parton, stopping his nervous walk for a moment and shaking his finger impressively at me—­“another thing which I did not tell you before because I thought it would fill you with that same awful dread that has come to me since meeting Barker—­the blood from that man’s arm, the blood that stained his shirt-sleeve crimson, that besmeared his clothes, spurted out upon my cuff and coat-sleeve when I strove to stanch its flow!”

“Yes, I remember that,” said I.

“And now look at my cuff and sleeve!” whispered Parton, his face grown white.

I looked.

There was no stain of any sort whatsoever upon either!

Certainly there must have been something wrong about Carleton
Barker.