After receiving Rogers' letter, Abner Logan lost no time in returning to Kentucky. The day following his arrival at Cane Ridge, he sent Major Gilcrest a note asking for an interview. The messenger brought back the note unopened and the verbal message from Gilcrest declining to hold any intercourse with Abner or to receive any written communication from him.
Rogers then advised communicating with the Major through a lawyer, but Abner felt that he must see Betty before he could decide upon this course. He contrived, through Aunt Dilsey, to convey a note to the girl. She wrote back that she would meet him that afternoon at their former trysting-place. Here, accordingly, the two lovers met, after a separation of over half a year, and renewed their vows of love and fealty.
Abner gave Betsy a full account of everything, and consulted with her as to the best way to communicate with her father; for it was imperative that Major Gilcrest should immediately be made acquainted with Abner's true history and his right to the Hite inheritance. Betsy urged her lover not to place his affairs in the hands of a lawyer until she had first tried what she could do with her father. She also thought that her mother, first of all, should be told everything. To this Abner agreed.
That night Betsy had a long talk with her mother. Poor Mrs. Gilcrest, who for many years had been oppressed by the dark secret of her early life, felt now, when she had learned all that her daughter had to reveal, as if a great burden was lifted from her spirit. She rejoiced not only in the certainty that her own clandestine marriage was valid, and that her cousin had been a lawfully wedded wife, but also because of the knowledge that Abner Logan, whom she had always greatly liked, was the son of her well-beloved cousin and foster sister, Mary Hollis, and that he was in every respect a suitable mate for Betsy.
In her relief and joy she felt that she now had courage to confess all to her husband. The next evening she nerved herself for this ordeal.
Mrs. Gilcrest could not have chosen a less favorable occasion for her purpose; for Major Gilcrest had just learned, through one of the servants, that Betsy had met her lover the afternoon before. He was furiously exasperated that his daughter had thus set at naught his commands; and he raved in so frenzied a style of disobedience, deception, and of the infamy of any girl who would hold clandestine meetings with a man, that poor, cowardly Mrs. Gilcrest's newly acquired valor evaporated before the fire of her husband's wrath, and she dared not confess the secret she had withheld during all their married life. She did, however, intercede for Abner, venturing her conviction that in birth and character he was fit to wed with Betsy. But the poor creature was so cowed by her habitual awe of her lord and master, and by his present irascible temper, as well as by the burden of her own yet unconfessed secret, that the stammering, incoherent tale she told of the two John Logans, of the time and place of Mary Hollis' death, and of Abner's being Andrew Hite's legal heir, was anything but convincing. Her feeble attempt at explanation and intercession, instead of softening the obstinate Major, only wrought him up to a still higher pitch of exasperation.
Mrs. Gilcrest's effort to enlighten her husband having failed, young Logan engaged an attorney, through whom the lord of Oaklands was perforce convinced of Abner's legitimacy and right to the Hite possessions.
But there still remained in the secret drawer of the Major's escritoire those documentary proofs against "A. D.'s" political integrity, and in the Major's mind those convictions of the young man's connection with dangerous Spanish intrigues. More than that, there was the Major's ingrained obstinacy and his aversion to confessing himself in the wrong. So that, although he was not unduly covetous of the Hite inheritance, and although, had he not been so harassed and imbittered by his daughter's defiance, he would have rejoiced that Abner Logan was well born and prosperous, just now he was in a humor the reverse of rejoicing or yielding. Therefore his opposition to Betsy's suitor was as firm as ever; and the two lovers appeared as far as ever from the attainment of their hopes.
CHAPTER XXIX.