6. 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. Vassall Morton, his newly
emancipated 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 assured 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, assured 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 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.
