Can Such Things Be?

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 pere 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the proud possessor of a sumptuous copy of the ancestral “poetical works” (printed at the family expense, and long ago withdrawn from an inhospitable market) was a rare Frayser indeed, there was an illogical indisposition to honor the great deceased in the person of his spiritual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.