IN his youth Halpin Frayser had lived with his parents in Nashville,
Tennessee. The Fraysers were well-to-do, having a good position in such
society as had survived the wreck wrought by civil war. Their children
had the social and educational opportunities of their time and place, and
had responded to good associations and instruction with agreeable manners
and cultivated minds. Halpin being the youngest and not over robust was
perhaps a trifle “spoiled.” He had the double disadvantage of a mother’s
assiduity and a father’s neglect. Frayser père was what no Southern man
of means is not—a politician. His country, or rather his section and
State, made demands upon his time and attention so exacting that to those
of his family he was compelled to turn an ear partly deafened by the
thunder of the political captains and the shouting, his own included.
Young Halpin was of a dreamy, indolent and rather romantic turn, somewhat
more addicted to literature than law, the profession to which he was
bred. Among those of his relations who professed the modern faith of
heredity it was well understood that in him the character of the late
Myron Bayne, a maternal great-grandfather, had revisited the glimpses of
the moon—by which orb Bayne had in his lifetime been sufficiently
affected to be a poet of no small Colonial distinction. If not specially
observed, it was observable that while a Frayser who was not the proud
possessor of a sumptuous copy of the ancestral “poetical works” (printed
at the family expense, and long ago withdrawn from an inhospitable
market) was a rare Frayser indeed, there was an illogical indisposition
to honor the great deceased in the person of his spiritual successor.
Halpin was pretty generally deprecated as an intellectual black sheep who
was likely at any moment to disgrace the flock by bleating in meter. The
Tennessee Fraysers were a practical folk—not practical in the popular
sense of devotion to sordid pursuits, but having a robust contempt for
any qualities unfitting a man for the wholesome vocation of politics.
In justice to young Halpin it should be said that while in him were
pretty faithfully reproduced most of the mental and moral characteristics
ascribed by history and family tradition to the famous Colonial bard, his
succession to the gift and faculty divine was purely inferential. Not
only had he never been known to court the muse, but in truth he could not
have written correctly a line of verse to save himself from the Killer of
the Wise. Still, there was no knowing when the dormant faculty might
wake and smite the lyre.
In the meantime the young man was rather a loose fish, anyhow. Between
him and his mother was the most perfect sympathy, for secretly the lady
was herself a devout disciple of the late and great Myron Bayne, though
with the tact so generally and justly admired in her sex (despite the
hardy calumniators who insist that it is essentially the same thing as
cunning) she had always taken care to conceal her weakness from all eyes
but those of him who shared it. Their common guilt in respect of that
was an added tie between them. If in Halpin’s youth his mother had
“spoiled” him, he had assuredly done his part toward being spoiled. As
he grew to such manhood as is attainable by a Southerner who does not
care which way elections go the attachment between him and his beautiful
mother—whom from early childhood he had called Katy—became yearly
stronger and more tender. In these two romantic natures was manifest in
a signal way that neglected phenomenon, the dominance of the sexual
element in all the relations of life, strengthening, softening, and
beautifying even those of consanguinity. The two were nearly
inseparable, and by strangers observing their manner were not
infrequently mistaken for lovers.
Entering his mother’s boudoir one day Halpin Frayser kissed her upon the
forehead, toyed for a moment with a lock of her dark hair which had
escaped from its confining pins, and said, with an obvious effort at
calmness:
“Would you greatly mind, Katy, if I were called away to California for a
few weeks?”
It was hardly needful for Katy to answer with her lips a question to
which her telltale cheeks had made instant reply. Evidently she would
greatly mind; and the tears, too, sprang into her large brown eyes as
corroborative testimony.
“Ah, my son,” she said, looking up into his face with infinite
tenderness, “I should have known that this was coming. Did I not lie
awake a half of the night weeping because, during the other half,
Grandfather Bayne had come to me in a dream, and standing by his
portrait—young, too, and handsome as that—pointed to yours on the same
wall? And when I looked it seemed that I could not see the features; you
had been painted with a face cloth, such as we put upon the dead. Your
father has laughed at me, but you and I, dear, know that such things are
not for nothing. And I saw below the edge of the cloth the marks of
hands on your throat—forgive me, but we have not been used to keep such
things from each other. Perhaps you have another interpretation.
Perhaps it does not mean that you will go to California. Or maybe you
will take me with you?”
It must be confessed that this ingenious interpretation of the dream in
the light of newly discovered evidence did not wholly commend itself to
the son’s more logical mind; he had, for the moment at least, a
conviction that it foreshadowed a more simple and immediate, if less
tragic, disaster than a visit to the Pacific Coast. It was Halpin
Frayser’s impression that he was to be garroted on his native heath.
“Are there not medicinal springs in California?” Mrs. Frayser resumed
before he had time to give her the true reading of the dream—“places
where one recovers from rheumatism and neuralgia? Look—my fingers feel
so stiff; and I am almost sure they have been giving me great pain while
I slept.”
She held out her hands for his inspection. What diagnosis of her case
the young man may have thought it best to conceal with a smile the
historian is unable to state, but for himself he feels bound to say that
fingers looking less stiff, and showing fewer evidences of even
insensible pain, have seldom been submitted for medical inspection by
even the fairest patient desiring a prescription of unfamiliar scenes.
The outcome of it was that of these two odd persons having equally odd
notions of duty, the one went to California, as the interest of his
client required, and the other remained at home in compliance with a wish
that her husband was scarcely conscious of entertaining.
While in San Francisco Halpin Frayser was walking one dark night along
the water front of the city, when, with a suddenness that surprised and
disconcerted him, he became a sailor. He was in fact “shanghaied” aboard
a gallant, gallant ship, and sailed for a far countree. Nor did his
misfortunes end with the voyage; for the ship was cast ashore on an
island of the South Pacific, and it was six years afterward when the
survivors were taken off by a venturesome trading schooner and brought
back to San Francisco.
Though poor in purse, Frayser was no less proud in spirit than he had
been in the years that seemed ages and ages ago. He would accept no
assistance from strangers, and it was while living with a fellow survivor
near the town of St. Helena, awaiting news and remittances from home,
that he had gone gunning and dreaming.