For by death is wrought
greater change than hath been shown. Whereas in general the spirit that
removed cometh back upon occasion, and is sometimes
seen of those in flesh (appearing
in the form of the body it bore) yet it hath happened that the veritable
body without the spirit hath walked. And it is attested of those encountering
who have lived to speak thereon that a lich so raised up hath no natural
affection, nor remembrance thereof, but only hate. Also, it is known that
some spirits which in life were benign become by death evil altogether.-HALL.
ONE dark night in midsummer a man waking from a dreamless sleep in a forest
lifted his head from the earth, and staring a few moments into the blackness,
said: “Catharine Larue.” He said nothing more; no reason was known to him
why he should have said so much.
The man was Halpin Frayser. He lived in St. Helena, but where he lives
now is uncertain, for he is dead. One who practises sleeping in the woods
with nothing under him but the dry leaves and the damp earth, and nothing
over him but the branches from which the leaves have fallen and the sky
from which the earth has fallen, cannot hope for great longevity, and Frayser
had already attained the age of thirty-two. There are persons in this world,
millions of persons, and far and away the best persons, who regard that
as a very advanced age. They are the children. To those who view the voyage
of life from the port of departure the bark that has accomplished any considerable
distance appears already in close approach to the farther shore. However,
it is not certain that Halpin Frayser came to his death by exposure.
He had been all day in the hills west of the Napa Valley, looking for doves
and such small game as was in season. Late in the afternoon it had come
on to be cloudy, and he had lost his bearings; and although he had only
to go always downhill-everywhere the way to safety when one is lost-the
absence of trails had so impeded him that he was overtaken by night while
still in the forest. Unable in the darkness to penetrate the thickets of
manzanita and other undergrowth, utterly bewildered and overcome with fatigue,
he had lain down near the root of a large madrono and fallen into a dreamless
sleep. It was hours later, in the very middle of the night, that one of
God's mysterious messengers, gliding ahead of the incalculable host of
his companions sweeping westward with the dawn line, pronounced the awakening
word in the ear of the sleeper, who sat upright and spoke, he knew not
why, a name, he knew not whose.
Halpin Frayser was not much of a philosopher, nor a scientist. The circumstance
that, waking from a deep sleep at night in the midst of a forest, he had
spoken aloud a name that he had not in memory and hardly had in mind did
not arouse an enlightened curiosity to investigate the phenomenon. He thought
it odd, and with a little perfunctory shiver, as if in deference to a seasonal
presumption that the night was chill, he lay down again and went to sleep.
But his sleep was no longer dreamless.
He thought he was walking along a dusty road that showed white in the gathering
darkness of a summer night. Whence and whither it led, and why he travelled
it, he did not know, though all seemed simple and natural, as is the way
in dreams; for in the Land Beyond the Bed surprises cease from troubling
and the judgment is at rest. Soon he came to a parting of the ways; leading
from the highway was a road less travelled, having the appearance, indeed,
of having been long abandoned, because, he thought, it led to something
evil; yet he turned into it without hesitation, impelled by some imperious
necessity.
As he pressed forward he became conscious that his way was haunted by invisible
existences whom he could not definitely figure to his mind. From among
the trees on either side he caught broken and incoherent whispers in a
strange tongue which yet he partly understood. They seemed to him fragmentary
utterances of a monstrous conspiracy against his body and soul.
It was now long after nightfall, yet the interminable forest through which
he journeyed was lit with a wan glimmer having no point of diffusion, for
in its mysterious lumination nothing cast a shadow. A shallow pool in the
guttered depression of an old wheel rut, as from a recent rain, met his
eye with a crimson gleam. He stooped and plunged his hand into it. It stained
his fingers; it was blood! Blood, he then observed, was about him everywhere.
The weeds growing rankly by the roadside showed it in blots and splashes
on their big, broad leaves. Patches of dry dust between the wheel-ways
were pitted and spattered as with a red rain. Defiling the trunks of the
trees were broad maculations of crimson, and blood dripped like dew from
their foliage.
All this he observed with a terror which seemed not incompatible with the
fulfilment of a natural expectation. It seemed to him that it was all in
expiation of some crime which, though conscious of his guilt, he could
not rightly remember. To the menaces and mysteries of his surroundings
the consciousness was an added horror. Vainly he sought, by tracing life
backward in memory, to reproduce the moment of his sin; scenes and incidents
came crowding tumultuously into his mind, one picture effacing another,
or commingling with it in confusion and obscurity, but nowhere could he
catch a glimpse of what he sought. The failure augmented his terror; he
felt as one who has murdered in the dark, not knowing whom nor why. So
frightful was the situation-the mysterious light burned with so silent
and awful a menace; the noxious plants, the trees that by common consent
are invested with a melancholy or baleful character, so openly in his sight
conspired against his peace; from overhead and all about came so audible
and startling whispers and the sighs of creatures so obviously not of earth-that
he could endure it no longer, and with a great effort to break some malign
spell that bound his faculties to silence and inaction, he shouted with
the full strength of his lungs! His voice, broken, it seemed, into an infinite
multitude of unfamiliar sounds, went babbling and stammering away into
the distant reaches of the forest, died into silence, and all was as before.
But he had made a beginning at resistance and was encouraged. He said:
“I will not submit unheard. There may be powers that are not malignant
travelling this accursed road. I shall leave them a record and an appeal.
I shall relate my wrongs, the persecutions that I endure- I, a helpless
mortal, a penitent, an unoffending poet!” Halpin Frayser was a poet only
as he was a penitent: in his dream.
Taking from his clothing a small red-leather pocket-book one half of which
was leaved for memoranda, he discovered that he was without a pencil. He
broke a twig from a bush, dipped it into a pool of blood and wrote rapidly.
He had hardly touched the paper with the point of his twig when a low,
wild peal of laughter broke out at a measureless distance away, and growing
ever louder, seemed approaching ever nearer; a soulless, heartless, and
unjoyous laugh, like that of the loon, solitary by the lakeside at midnight;
a laugh which culminated in an unearthly shout close at hand, then died
away by slow gradations, as if the accursed being that uttered it had withdrawn
over the verge of the world whence it had come. But the man felt that this
was not so-that it was near by and had not moved.
A strange sensation began slowly to take possession of his body and his
mind. He could not have said which, if any, of his senses was affected;
he felt it rather as a consciousness-a mysterious mental assurance of some
overpowering presence-some supernatural malevolence different in kind from
the invisible existences that swarmed about him, and superior to them in
power. He knew that it had uttered that hideous laugh. And now it seemed
to be approaching him; from what direction he did not know-dared not conjecture.
All his former fears were forgotten or merged in the gigantic terror that
now held him in thrall. Apart from that, he had but one thought: to complete
his written appeal to the benign powers who, traversing the haunted wood,
might sometime rescue him if he should be denied the blessing of annihilation.
He wrote with terrible rapidity, the twig in his fingers rilling blood
without renewal; but in the middle of a sentence his hands denied their
service to his will, his arms fell to his sides, the book to the earth;
and powerless to move or cry out, he found himself staring into the sharply
drawn face and blank, dead eyes of his own mother, standing white and silent
in the garments of the grave!
II
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 honour 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 metre. 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 manners
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 tell-tale 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.
End Part One... Go to
Part Two... 
