Now comes a second mystery,—Morton himself disappears. George Miller, succeeding to his mother’s inheritance, takes over the manor house in the ancient wood by Swallowfield, and finds his stepfather gone no one knows where. Nothing remains to tell of the advocate of Cliffords who stepped so strangely into this tangle of lives and wills; even his hunting dog has disappeared. Silence in the old house. One hears George Miller shout some dull-tongued foulness in a tone that is blend of anger and relief, and then away he rides, this prince of cads, wondering how he may best defraud the minor heirs.
Where was the man of Cliffords Inn? The Elizabethan adventurer in him had led him travelling. Did he seek forgetfulness? His wife dead, the long, turbulent dispute settled in a kind of way, had he sought to close a door on the makers of strife and the memories of disorder? He had surely vagabonded to the south, for he once set down this, “I am not of opinion with Aristotle, that the landes under Torrida Zona are altogether uninhabited, I myself having been so neare to the equinoctiall line that I have had the sun for my Zenith.”
Suddenly he emerges again into the light of history. Something brings him in touch with one Captain Wollaston, an English trader who is fitting out a ship for a trading expedition to America. This Wollaston has gathered thirty young and youngish Englishmen, “his servants,” and with their labour he will establish a trading post on the still uninhabited coast of New England.
It is a day in the early spring of 1625, and Wollaston’s ship is going to sea. Upon the upper deck of the Mayflower-like vessel, stands the vagabond advocate, muffled in the great cloak of the period. A hunting dog stands near.
Surely Thomas Morton “of Cliffords Inn, Gent.” thus bidding farewell to England, must have remembered the manor at Swallowfield,—the woodsy afternoons and the long, long twilights, the hunts with dog and gun, the falcons leaping to the blue, and the call of the hunter’s horn far away in the forest,—the most beautiful, the most melancholy-golden music in the world. And because it was the early spring, perhaps he recalled to mind the May day revels of the village, the dance about the garlanded pole, the merry, rustic clowneries, and the shouts and laughter. Alas! something was happening to his Merry England. Bottom and Peter Quince had taken to reading the theology of St. Paul, and cracking each other’s pates over its precise interpretation. Whither might it not lead? Perhaps even to civil war.
Thomas Morton was accompanying Wollaston as an investor in the trading enterprise. He was now a man of robust middle age, nearer fifty than forty, and mellowed by years, books, and a genial philosophy of life.
Unless all signs fail, there was a copy of Don Quixote in his baggage. Little did he know that he was soon to have his own battle with the windmills!
III
“The Great Bay of the Massachusees,” for so was Boston Harbor anciently known, is a pleasant place with its long, whaleback islands, its countrified, hillocky shores, drumlin mounds, and inland glimpse of the little mountains known as the Blue Hills; it still retains something of a sylvan air; in 1625 it was a sylvan wilderness. Until very recent years, the most conspicuous feature of the bay was a vast field, almost a domain, sloping from a thicket of inland trees to the curving beach of the pleasant Quincy shore. In July, when the grass of the field had ripened to yellow hay, this pleasant open land poured down to the sea like a river mouth of gold. Cleared and cultivated, by the Indians long before the arrival of the whites, the old domain had that mellow quality which Nature sometimes assumes when long allied with man.