Vassall Morton Part 5

"Be gad, Vinal, he will bait his hook differently when he fishes for you."

"How will that be, d.i.c.k?" said Meredith.

"With a five dollar bank note, and a lying puff in a newspaper; and Vinal will jump at it like a mackerel at a red rag."

Vinal laughed, but with a bad grace.

"Riches and fame!" said Chester, anxious to smooth away all traces of irritation--"riches and fame! I call those legitimate objects of pursuit; and the black eye is positively praiseworthy. Come, Morton, let us hear your plan. You have not told it yet."

"I defer to Rosny--he is my senior. d.i.c.k, some ten or twelve years from this, I suppose I shall vote against you for the presidency."

"Thank you. By that time you will have no whig party left to vote with. The democrats will have it all their own way."

"I have often wondered what could have induced a driving man of the world like you to come to college at all. You have been here more than a year; and in the same time, with your previous knowledge, you might have learned as much any where else at half the cost. You are not the fellow to regard a degree of A. M. with superst.i.tious veneration."

"You are right there, colonel. I am of no kith nor kin to some of your New England old fogies, who would give their souls for a D. D. or an LL. D.--and get it, too, though they know no more Greek or Hebrew than I know of Choctaw, and can barely manage to stumble along through the Latin Testament. What's a piece of sheep's skin to me? Humbug is the current coin all the world over, and just as much in this free and enlightened country as any where else. I have schemes on foot,--not political,--no matter what they are,--out in the western country; and I happen to know that a degree from Harvard University is the medicine that suits my case; with that for my credentials, I shall carry it over all compet.i.tors. Yes, boys, gammon is the word; and the man who would rise in the world must use the stepping stones."

"You're a victim of the national disease, Rosny," said Chester.

"Rising in the world!--that's the idea that ruins us. It's that that makes us lean, starveling, nervous, restless, dyspeptic, hypochondriac,--the most prosperous and most uncomfortable people on earth. Sit down, man, and take your ease. What garden will thrive if every plant in it must be dug up every day, and set out in a better place?"

"Ah, that's good doctrine for you. You have got nothing to gain, and a good deal to lose. Stand up for the _status quo_, old boy; I would, in your place. Look at me, though. I was cut adrift at fourteen,--parents dead,--not a cent in my pocket,--and since then I have tumbled along through the world as I could. You can't kill me. I have more lives than a cat. I have been thrown on my back a dozen times; but the harder I was flung down, the higher I bounced up again. Why, I have known the time when I was glad to earn a s.h.i.+lling by shovelling snow off a sidewalk. I have tried my hand at every thing,--printer's work, lecturing, politics, editing, keeping school,--and do you suppose I shall be content to rest in the mud all my days? Not a bit of it. I know my cue better. The time will come when you'll see me shooting up like a rocket."

Here a broad glare against the window interrupted him, and, looking out, his auditors saw a bonfire blazing with peculiar splendor under the windows of the chamber where the Faculty were at that moment in solemn session. Three proctors and a tutor were hastening towards the scene of outrage, when a stentorian voice from the adjacent darkness roared forth a warning that there was a canister of gunpowder in the fire expected every moment to explode. The prudent officers therefore kept their distance, busying themselves with noting down the names of several innocent spectators, while the bonfire subsided to a natural death, the gunpowder hoax having perfectly succeeded.

Mr. Wren's guests resumed their seats, mingling with graver matters the usual badinage of a college gathering; and when at length they separated, only a lonely light or two glimmered from among the many windows of the academic barracks which overlook the college green.

CHAPTER VI.

As if with Heaven a bargain they had made To practise goodness--and to be well paid, They, too, devoutly as their fathers did, Sin, sack, and sugar, equally forbid; Holding each hour unpardonably spent That on the leger leaves no monument.--_Parsons_.

Mr. Erastus Flintlock sat at his counting room, in his old leather-bottomed arm chair. Va.s.sall Morton, his newly emanc.i.p.ated ward, just twenty-one, stood before him, the undisputed master of his father's ample wealth.

"What, no profession, Mr. Morton? None whatever, sir?"

"No, sir, none whatever."

The old man's leathery countenance expressed mingled wrath and concern.

Flintlock was a stanch old New Englander, boasting himself a true descendant of the Puritans, whose religious tenets he inherited, along with most of their faults, and not a few of their virtues. He was narrow as a vinegar cruet, and just in all his dealings. There were three subjects on which he could converse with more or less intelligence--politics, theology, and business. Beyond these, he knew nothing; and except American history and practical science, he had an indistinct idea that any thing more came of evil. He distrusted a foreigner, and abhorred a Roman Catholic. All poetry, but Milton and the hymn book, was an abomination in his eyes; and he looked upon fiction as an emanation of the devil. To the list of the cardinal virtues he added another, namely, attention to business. In his early days, he had come from his native Connecticut with letters to Morton's father, who, seeing his value, took him as a clerk, placed unbounded trust in him, and at last made him his partner. He was a youth of slow parts, solid judgment, solemn countenance, steady habits, and a most unpliable conscience. He had no follies, allowed himself no indulgences, and could enjoy no other pleasures than business and church-going. He attended service morning, afternoon, and evening, and never smiled on Sundays. His old age was as upright and stiff-necked as might have been augured from such a youth. He thought the rising generation were in a very bad way, and once gave his son a scorching lecture on vanity and arrogance, because the latter, who had been two years at college, very modestly begged to be excused from carrying a roll of sample cotton, a yard and a half long, from his father's store at one end of the town, to the shop of a retail dealer at the other.

"What, no profession, Mr. Morton?"

"None whatever, sir."

Morton was prepared for the consequence of these fatal words, and sought to arm himself with the needful patience. It would be folly, he knew, to debate the point with his guardian, who was tough and unmanageable as a hickory stump; who would never see any side of a question but his own, and on whose impervious brain reasons fell like rain drops on a tarpauline. Flintlock, therefore, opened fire unanswered, and discoursed for a full hour on duty, propriety, and a due respect for what he called the general sense of the community, which, as he a.s.sured his auditor, demands that every one should have some fixed and stated calling, by which he may be recognized as a worthy and useful member of society. Sometimes he grew angry, and scolded his ward with great vehemence; then subsided into a pathetic strain, and exhorted him, for the sake of his excellent father, not to grow old in idleness and frivolity. Morton, respectful, but obdurate, heard him to an end, a.s.sured him that, though renouncing commerce and the professions, his life would by no means be an idle one, thanked him for his care of his property, and took his leave; while the old merchant sank back into his chair, and groaned dismally, because the son of his respected patron was on the road to perdition.

A moment's retrogression will explain the young man's recusancy.

On a May evening, some two months before the close of his college career, Morton sat in lonely meditation on a wooden bench, by the cla.s.sic border of Fresh Pond. By every canon of polite fiction, his meditation ought to have been engrossed by some object of romantic devotion; but in truth they were of a nature wholly mundane and sublunary.

He had been much exercised of late upon the choice of a career for his future life. He liked none of the professions for itself, and had no need to embrace it for support. He loved action, and loved study; was ambitious and fond of applause. He had, moreover, enough of the American in his composition never to be happy except when in pursuit of something; together with a disposition not very rare among young men in New England, though seldom there, or elsewhere, joined to his abounding health and youthful spirits--a tendency to live for the future, and look at acts and things with an eye to their final issues.

Thierry's Norman Conquest had fallen into his hands soon after he entered college. The whole delighted him; but he read and re-read the opening chapters, which exhibit the movements of the various races in their occupancy of the west of Europe. This first gave him an impulse towards ethnological inquiries. He soon began to find an absorbing interest in tracing the distinctions, moral, intellectual, and physical, of different races, as shown in their history, their mythologies, their languages, their legends, their primitive art, literature, and way of life. The idea grew upon him of devoting his life to such studies.

Seated on the wooden bench at the edge of Fresh Pond, he revolved, for the hundredth time, his proposed scheme, and summed up what he regarded as its manifold advantages. It would enable him to indulge his pa.s.sion for travel, lead him over rocks, deserts, and mountains, conduct him to Tartar tents and Cossack hovels, make him intimate with the most savage and disgusting of barbarians; in short, give full swing to his favorite propensities, and call into life all his energies of body and mind. In view of this prospect, he clinched his long-cherished purpose, devoting himself to ethnology for the rest of his days.

He had a youthful way of thinking that any resolution deliberately adopted by him must needs be final and conclusive, and was fully convinced that his present determination was a species of destiny, involving one of three results--that he should meet an early death, which he thought very likely; that he should be wholly disabled by illness, which he thought scarcely possible; or that, in the fulness of time, say twenty or twenty-five years, his labors would have issue in some prodigious work, redounding to his own honor and the unspeakable profit of science.

CHAPTER VII.

'Tis a dull thing to travel like a mill horse, Still in the place he was born in, round and blinded.

_Beaumont and Fletcher_.

A novel-maker may claim a privilege which his betters must forego. So, in the teeth of dramatic unities, let the story leap a chasm of some two years.

Not that the void was a void to Morton. His nature spurred him into perpetual action; but his wanderings were over at length; and he and Meredith sat under the porch of Morton's house, a few miles from town.

The features of the latter were swarthy from exposures, while those of his friend were somewhat pale, and had the expression of one insufferably bored.

"Colonel, you are the luckiest fellow I know. Here you have been following the backbone of the continent from Darien to the head of the Missouri, mixing yourself up with Spaniards and Aztecs, poking sticks into the crater of Popocatapetl, and living hand and glove with Blackfeet and a.s.sinnaboins, while I have been doing penance among bonds and mortgages, and t.i.tle deeds and leases. My father has thrown up responsibility and gone to Europe--and so has every body else--and left all on my shoulders."

"Your time will come."

"I hope so."

"But what news is there?"

"Nothing."

"What, nothing since I went away?"

"The old story. You know it as well as I. Now and then, a new engagement came out. Mrs. A. approved it, and Mrs. B. didn't; and then characters were discussed on both sides. Something has been said of the b.a.l.l.s, the opera, and what not; with the usual talk about the wickedness of the democrats and the fanaticism of the abolitionists."

"You appear to have led a gay life."

"Very!--we need a war, an invasion,--something of the sort. It would put life into us, and rid us of a great deal of nonsense. You were born with a stimulus in yourself, and can stand this stagnant sort of existence; but I need something more lively."

"Then go with me on my next journey."

"Are you thinking of another already? Rest in peace, and thank Heaven that you have come home in a whole skin."

"I have done the North American continent; but there are four more left, not to mention the islands."