Vassall Morton. Francis Parkman
close of his college career, Morton sat in lonely meditation on a wooden bench, by the classic 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 passion 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 Assinnaboins, while I have been doing penance among bonds and mortgages, and title 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 balls, 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."
"And you mean to see them all?"
"Certainly."
"Your science is a convenient hobby. It carries you wherever you fancy to go."
"You could not do better than go with me."
"I know it; but, if wishes were horses—— I am training Dick to take my place. I am a model elder brother to that youngster in the way of cultivating his mind and morals; and when I have him up to the mark, I shall gain a year's furlough for my pains. But when is your next journey to begin—next week?"
"No, I mean to pin myself down here, and dig like a mole, for the next ten months, at least."
"If I had not had ocular proof of what a determined dig you can be, I should set down your studies as mere humbug."
"But I wish to hear the news."
"I would tell it willingly, if I knew any."
"Have the Primroses come home from Europe yet?"
"Yes."
"And the Everills?"
"I believe not."
"Nor the Leslies, I suppose."
"For a reasonably sensible and straightforward fellow, you have a queer way of making inquiries. You question like a lady's letter, with the pith in the postscript. You ask after the Primroses and the Everills, a stupid, priggish set, for whom you care nothing, as earnestly as if you were in love with them, and then grow indifferent when you come to the Leslies, whom you like."
"Did I?" said Morton, in some discomposure; "I ask their pardon. Have they come home?"
"Not yet, but I believe they mean to come as soon as they have staid their year out."
"And that will be very soon—early in the spring, or sooner."
"Now I think of it, I made the acquaintance, a few evenings ago, of a person who, I believe, is a relation or connection of yours—Miss Fanny Euston."
"O, yes, she is my third, fourth, or fifth cousin, or something of that sort; but I have not seen her since she was ten years old. She was a great romp, then, and very plain."
"That last failing is cured. She has grown very handsome."
"The first failing ought to be cured, too, by this time."
"I am not so clear on that point. She is a girl with an abundance of education, and a good deal of a certain kind of accomplishment—music, and so on—but no breeding at all. If she had had the training of good society, she would have been one of a thousand. As it is she cares for nobody, and does and says whatever comes into her mind, without the least regard to consequences or appearances."
"Does she affect naturalness, independence, and all that?"
"No, she affects nothing. The material is admirable. It only needs to be refined, polished, and toned down. It's unlucky,