"Pardon me," said I, maliciously, "since you are acquainted with the lady, why not write and offer it yourself? It would be a good chance to renew your acquaintance."
Bolton's countenance changed, and he remained a moment silent.
"Henderson," he said, "there are very painful circumstances connected with my acquaintance with your cousin. I never wish to meet her, or renew my acquaintance with her. Sometime I will tell you why," he added.
The next evening I found on my table the following letter from Bolton:
Dear Henderson:—You need feel no hesitancy about accepting in full every advantage in the position I propose to you, since you may find it weighted with disadvantages and incumbrances you do not dream of. In short, I shall ask of you services for which no money can pay, and till I knew you there was no man in the world of whom I had dared to ask them. I want a friend, courageous, calm, and true, capable of thinking broadly and justly, one superior to ordinary prejudices, who may be to me another, and in some hours a stronger, self.
I can fancy your surprise at this language, and yet I have not read you aright if you are not one of a thousand on whom I may rest this hope.
You often rally me on my lack of enterprise and ambition, on my hermit habits. The truth is, Henderson, I am a strained and unseaworthy craft, for whom the harbor and shore are the safest quarters. I have lost trust in myself, and dare not put out to sea without feeling the strong hand of a friend with me.
I suppose no young fellow ever entered the course of life with more self-confidence. I had splendid health, high spirits, great power of application, and great social powers. I lived freely and carelessly on the abundance of my physical resources. I could ride, and row, and wrestle with the best. I could lead in all social gaieties, yet keep the head of my class, as I did the first two years of my college life. It seems hardly fair to us human beings that we should be so buoyed up with ignorant hope and confidence in the beginning of our life, and that we should be left in our ignorance to make mistakes which no after years can retrieve. I thought I was perfectly sure of myself; I thought my health and strength were inexhaustible, and that I could carry weights that no man else could. The drain of my wide-awake exhausting life upon my nervous system I made up by the insidious use of stimulants. I was like a man habitually overdrawing his capital, and ignorant to what extent. In my third college year this began to tell perceptibly on my nerves. I was losing self-control, losing my way in life; I was excitable, irritable, impatient of guidance or reproof, and at times horribly depressed. I sought refuge from this depression in social exhilaration, and having lost control of myself became a marked man among the college authorities; in short, I was overtaken in a convivial row, brought under college discipline, and suspended.
It was at this time that I went into your neighborhood to study and teach. I found no difficulty in getting the highest recommendations as to scholarship from some of the college officers who were for giving me a chance to recover myself; and for the rest I was thoroughly sobered and determined on a new course. Here commenced my acquaintance with your cousin, and there followed a few months remembered ever since as the purest happiness of my life. I loved her with all there was in me,—heart, soul, mind and strength,—with a love which can never die. She also loved me, more perhaps than she dared to say, for she was young, hardly come to full consciousness of herself. She was then scarcely sixteen, ignorant of her own nature, ignorant of life, and almost frightened at the intensity of the feeling which she excited in me, yet she loved me. But before we could arrive at anything like a calm understanding, her father came between us. He was a trustee of the Academy, and a dispute arose between him and me in which he treated me with an overbearing haughtiness which aroused the spirit of opposition in me. I was in the right and knew I was, and I defended my course before the other trustees in a manner which won them over to my way of thinking—a victory which he never forgave.
Previously to this encounter I had been in the habit of visiting in his family quite intimately. Caroline and I enjoyed that kind of unwatched freedom which the customs of New England allow to young people. I always attended her home from the singing-school and the weekly lectures, and the evening after my encounter with the trustees I did the same. At the door of his house he met us, and as Caroline passed in he stopped me, and briefly saying that my visits there would no longer be permitted, closed the door in my face. I tried to obtain an interview soon after, when he sternly upbraided me as one that had stolen into the village and won their confidence on false pretences, adding that if he and the trustees had known the full history of my college life I should never have been permitted to teach in their village or have access to their families. It was in vain to attempt a defense to a man determined to take the very worst view of facts which I did not pretend to deny. I knew that I had been irreproachable as to my record in the school, that I had been faithful in my duties, that the majority of parents and pupils were on my side; but I could not deny the harsh facts which he had been enabled to obtain from some secret enemy, and which he thought justified him in saying that he would rather see his daughter in her grave than to see her my wife. The next day Caroline did not appear in school. Her father, with prompt energy, took her immediately to an academy fifty miles away.