Chapter 26

THE PACKAGE OF OLD LETTERS

"I think you once told me, Uncle Richard," Abner said, later in the conversation with his uncle, "that Andrew Hite visited Lawsonville while my mother was living with you."

"Yes, he did," Dudley replied, "a week or so before she and Page were married."

"Did he learn of the cruel deception of which she was the victim?"

"Yes, I told him that, and of her approaching marriage and intended removal to Kentucky. She was in poor health, and I feared a decline, but she and Page thought her best chance for recovery was to marry, and to find a new home far from anything that could remind her of her connection with your father."

"This," said Abner, "explains Andrew Hite's will. He thought that my mother, being his nearest relative, had the first claim upon him; but, in case she died before he did--which doubtless appeared probable, owing to her frail health--he preferred that his property should go to his half-sister's child, rather than to me, the bastard son of a dastard father. I have, therefore, morally no claim whatsoever to this inheritance, and I will never touch a farthing of it. Oh, why," he went on bitterly, "was I not told, years ago, my true history? Had I always known it, the burden of shame which is my only lawful inheritance would have gradually adjusted itself to my strength, and would not now have such crushing weight. It is the contrast between what I thought I was and what I am that is the bitterest ingredient in my cup of misery."

"I deserve your reproaches, my poor boy," said Richard Dudley, sorrowfully; "but Heaven is my witness that my only motive in keeping this from you was to spare you shame and sorrow."

"Ah, I know that," cried Abner, "and it is ungrateful and cowardly to reproach you, my more than father. It was the suddenness of the shock that made me utter that unmanly plaint. Forgive me. I know you have been actuated in all that you have done by your regard for me."

"As to this inheritance," said Dudley presently, "it is lawfully yours. It was left to your mother, and you inherit it, not directly from Andrew Hite, but from her."

"No, no! The whole tenor of the will was to cut me out of all share in the estate. It would be infamous in me, knowing what I do, to claim it. Besides, my mother died before coming into possession of this property. How, then, could I inherit through her, when it was never actually hers?"

"Who, then, is heir under the will?" argued Dudley. "Not Sarah Pepper; for it is clearly set forth in the document that she inherits only under the condition that your mother be dead, leaving no legitimate heirs, before the date of the will."

"Then, the will must be declared null and void," firmly asserted the young man. "It is a mad will, anyway."

"In that case," retorted the doctor, "you being the only child of your mother, the next of kin, are, as you once pointed out, the rightful heir--at least, you are co-heir with Sarah Pepper."

But Abner stoutly adhered to his determination to have nothing to do with the property. It, therefore, became imperative to ascertain the whereabouts of Sarah Jane Pepper, or her heirs, if any.

That night Abner looked through his mother's papers. He found several letters beginning, "My Darling Wife:--" or, "My Own Mary:--." The signature to each of these epistles was, "Your affectionate husband, John Logan." The tone of each letter was thoughtful tender, solicitous. "These do not read like the letters of a villain," Abner thought, a momentary gleam of hope penetrating the thick gloom; "but then, the evidence to the contrary is conclusive. I must not allow myself to hope. I do not wonder, though, that my poor mother was deceived; for such words as these would mislead any simple, trusting heart like hers. He did love her, I suppose, as well as his craven, selfish nature would admit of his loving any one."

The last letter in the package gave the young man, alone in the low attic room, a shock of amazement. It was dated "Chestnut Hall, February 1, 1782," and was signed, "Your affectionate cousin, Sarah." It stated that the writer had returned to Chestnut Hall, after the death of the faithful Myra, and that she was now living alone with the negro attendants, in the home of her childhood; that she was betrothed to a man who held the rank of major in the Continental army. This man, she wrote, had been badly wounded the spring before in a skirmish with Arnold's raiders, near her home. He had been carried to the Hall, and she had nursed him back to complete recovery; and he was now in Kentucky looking for a suitable location for their future home. He intended to return in the course of a year, marry her, and remove to the new home across the mountains. The name of this man was Hiram Gilcrest. The letter likewise said that Major Gilcrest knew her to be a widow Logan, whose husband had fallen in battle, but that she had told her future husband none of the miserable details of her connection with John Logan except that he had treated her with great cruelty. She had extracted a promise from Major Gilcrest that no one in their new home in Kentucky should know that she had been a widow, and in order that this fact of her widowhood might the more easily be concealed, she had induced him to agree that if ever the question arose as to her maiden name, it was to be given as Jane Temple. Another motive, Sarah wrote, for this change of name from Pepper to Temple, was in order to prevent anybody knowing of her relationship to Fletcher Pepper, who had rendered the name of Pepper odious to all who had ever heard it, by his desertion of the patriot army to join the traitor Arnold.

Until he read that letter, Abner had, half unconsciously, clung to the hope that even though his father had been a dastardly villain who had wrecked the happiness of two trusting women, it might still be possible to establish his own legitimacy. Now, even that shadowy hope must be abandoned. "What!" he thought despairingly, "prove my right to wear my father's name at the cost of the fair repute of Betty's mother! Never, never! Rather will I accept the bar sinister for my own escutcheon."

He could bear no more. Thrusting the papers roughly aside, he rushed down the stairs and out into the darkness. Here, throwing himself face downward upon the ground, his hands dug into the sod, he cursed the day upon which he was born. But at last the soft serenity of the starry June night soothed him into a better mood. He arose, and, with a prayer for strength and guidance, re-entered the house.

"My first duty must be to write to Major Gilcrest and Betty," was his first waking thought next morning. "My precious, loving Betty, I must give you up; for even should you, after knowing my history, be willing to marry me, I love you too well to allow one so sweet and pure, so high in worldly position, to link her fate with a base-born earthworm such as I am. O Father in heaven, give me strength to do the right! Uncle Richard must take the necessary steps toward establishing Mrs. Gilcrest in possession of the Hite estates," he concluded after more reflection. "Not that she has any claim under the will, but because she (barring myself) is Andrew Hite's next of kin. However, all this is Uncle Richard's affair, not mine; but I hope the business can be accomplished without revealing to any one that dark page in Jane Gilcrest's early life. Betsy, at any cost, must be spared the knowledge."

Abner wrote to Major Gilcrest, renouncing all claim to Betsy, and enclosing a note for her, which he requested her father to give to her.

After this duty was performed, the young man fell into a state of dull despair which benumbed every faculty. Holmes has said, "A great calamity is as old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened. It stains backward through all the leaves we have turned over in the book of life, before its blot of tears and of blood is dry upon the page we are turning." For weeks after Abner had learned the secret of his birth, it seemed to him that this blighting, blackening misery which had laid low his pride, and killed every hope, permeated, not only all his past, but all his future. He seemed to have been born for nothing else but to experience this agony of loss and shame. He could make no plans. The future stretched out before him a desert waste; for, with the downfall of family pride and the loss of Betty, his ambition likewise had perished.

He was finally aroused by a communication from James Anson Drane. This communication stated that, owing to certain facts which had recently come into the writer's possession, he must decline to act any longer as "Mr. Logan's" agent. These facts, as Mr. Drane wrote, were as follows: The Mary Belle Hollis Page named in the will of the late Colonel Andrew Hite, of Crestlands, Sterling County, Virginia, had died and been buried at the village of Centerton, Virginia, March 9, 1782, nearly two months prior to the execution of the will; she had left no legitimate issue; and, therefore, Sarah Jane Pepper, daughter of Sarah Thornton, and now the wife of Hiram Gilcrest, of Cane Ridge, Bourbon County, Kentucky, was the sole lawful heir to the estates of the said Colonel Andrew Hite, deceased.

Mr. Drane then went on to give an account of the manner of Mary Page's death, and to explain that it was not until immediately after her burial at Centerton that her husband, Marshall Page, accompanied by his brother and sister-in-law and his little stepson, had gone on into Kentucky. Enclosed in Drane's letter was a loose slip of paper containing a copy of the half-effaced inscription upon the oak slab which marked the grave at Centerton. The slip was headed "Copied at Centerton by James Anson Drane, from the slab marking the grave of Mary Belle Hollis Page."

This communication served to awaken Abner from his apathy; for the statement conveyed in it respecting the time and place of Mary Page's death, if not proven false, would tend to very seriously reflect upon the integrity of Richard Dudley, executor of the Hite will, and would probably render him liable to arrest and trial on the charge of being party to a fraud.

Abner was thoroughly convinced that the statement in Drane's letter, concerning Mary's death, was false. He had full confidence in Richard Dudley's clear-sightedness and uprightness. Moreover, his own intuition and his faint recollection of episodes in his own early life made him sure that his mother had died that August night in the stockade fortress of Bryan Station. These dim, tantalizing recollections which had been first partially aroused that November night by Gilcrest's and Rogers' recital of the horrors of the famous Indian uprising of 1782, had been kindled into stronger life by what his uncle had recently told him of the attack upon the cabin of the Pages, the flight to Bryan's, the death there of Mary Page, and the return of her little orphaned boy to his Lawsonville people. But, although his faith in his uncle's honor and in his own intuitions and memories were to himself "confirmation strong as Holy Writ," they would not be accepted as evidence in a court of law. Hence it now behooved him and Dr. Dudley to learn something more of Marshall Page's brother.

Neither Richard nor Rachel Dudley knew anything of the man--not even his Christian name.

"This Page and his wife did not start for Kentucky from Lawsonville," Dr. Dudley said. "They came from Maryland, and joined Marshall and Mary at some appointed place--I do not now recall--on the road, many miles from Lawsonville."

"But when the man returned with me," asked Abner, "did you not then learn his full name, and something of his history?"

"I did not see him," was Dudley's reply. "I was away from home, and he stayed only an hour or so after committing you into your aunt's care. She was too shocked by the tidings he brought and by her pity and care for you, cold, sick, half starved, and bewildered as you were by the long, rough travel, to think of anything else."

"Could it be possible," thought Abner, "that the man deceived the Dudleys in regard to the woman who had died at Bryan's, and that it was his own wife instead of Marshall's? No, that could not be," he concluded; "he could have had no possible motive for the deception. Surely, there must be numbers of persons still living who were in the siege of Bryan Station, or the battle of Blue Licks, and who could not only remember this man's full name, but other circumstances that will be of service to us now. Mason Rogers can, I'm certain, find some person or persons who can give the evidence we need. I will communicate with him; and, in the meanwhile, I will go to Centerton."

Abner returned from Centerton without having gleaned any information that would throw additional light upon the mystery. He was further perplexed that no reply to his letter to Rogers had reached Williamsburg.

"I suppose I will have to go to Cane Ridge for information," he concluded when another month had passed bringing no word from Rogers, "although my soul revolts against revisiting the place of my lost happiness. But go I must, unless I soon hear from Mr. Rogers. I will tell everything to dear Mr. and Mrs. Rogers. They are noble-hearted, discreet and sympathetic, and they will still be my staunch friends. I will also while there make some disposition of my farm--I think I can easily find a buyer or a renter for it. Afterwards, I do not know what I shall do, nor does it matter much, either, what becomes of a nameless, baseborn--no, no!" he broke off, ashamed of his momentary weakness. "I will not let such unworthy sentiments master me. It is unmanly to give way like this, and is a wrong to my noble, unselfish foster mother and father. And even if they were not still left me, I must still be true to myself, and rise above the shameful circumstances which would pull me down. It would not do for me to return permanently to Cane Ridge. It would try my strength too far, to be daily in the neighborhood of my lost darling; nor would it be kind to her and her family for me to do so; and it would be a source of embarrassment and trouble to the Rogers family, and would perhaps estrange them still more from their old neighbors at Oaklands. But I will not hide my head in some far-away, obscure corner where my birth and antecedents are unknown. No! Here is my battleground. Here, where I received the blow which bereft me of my love and my position, will I fight the fight, and attain the victory. I will take up the study of the law, as Uncle Richard always wanted me to do; and I will strive to become useful and honored in my profession. I can nevermore be happy; but I can, and I will, make the name of Logan an honored one, in spite of all."