The katydids began to purl. A symphony of crickets trilled away in the darkling rhododendron thickets. The tree-frogs piped an avalanche of pleading notes amid the ruby-throated magnolias. The silvery treble of the nightingale floated down from afar, and the hilarious killdeers, king of all-night revelers, screamed aloft and flapped their speckled wings in the early starlight. And above this, in soughing, alternate waves of sound, a titanic rhythm trailed into this medley of wilderness voices—the savage, deathless music of the cascade ranting in the rock-barbed throat of Hellsfork, dying, swelling, reverberating like the barbaric boom of a tom-tom.
That night Belle-Ann occupied her own little crude apartment in the four-room cabin. She slept soundly and sweetly in this little wooden bed, which Slab had reverently preserved unaltered for her coming. And the night air drifted in upon her face, pungent with the scent of pine, and the old sweet odors that summoned a hundred memories to vivid life. There were the self-same multiplicity of night enunciations, consolidated and merged into a soothing litany, harping a pulsing consonance that lured the girl's senses away to the fantastic shoals of dreamdom. And betimes, the same great, friendly moon that had followed her abroad, came now and stood at her window.
CHAPTER XXXVII
THE GHOST-MAN
Lem had said little, but upon his honest, pleasing face there was now etched the momentous outlines of the most serious, profound problem that had ever confronted his tempestuous life. With the sober, solemn realization of this vital issue that had come upon him, he found himself mentally reaching out for sustenance. Seemingly he stood upon the pinnacle of an epochal summit, with all the threads governing his life, past and future, dangling limply beneath him. It was the tensest hour of his existence.
They sat in the moonshine on the witch-elm block, and the whip-poor-will was calling. They came here in the whispering gloaming ere twilight and night had parted. They still sat there; the girl talking incessantly. Time galloped by unheeded with the flight of an affrighted Pegasus. Phantom shadows grew and gesticulated and stretched their wraith-like arms out toward them. And the moon slipped over the spur and laved them with an effulgent benediction. Lem sat non-committal and stoic.
Belle-Ann's curls bobbed in the moonlight as she tossed them back restlessly. For more than an hour she had been pouring into his ears all the things that lay in her heart which had been re-cast in a new mould of understanding and burnished with ethics of education. The titanic moment she had anticipated had arrived. The dawn of the morrow was to part them forevermore, or it was to bind their lives together irrevocably. He had again begged her to promise to marry him, and this was her answer. Her low, dulcet tones rippled on and on. Her little hands fluttered appealingly in their flights of emphasis. Her violet orbs were starry with the truths that hurried across her lips, and her whole being throbbed with the vibrant force of this conquest. He spoke for the first time.
"Ef yo' keep on a talkin' thet away, Belle-Ann,—yo'll make me lie t' yo'," he predicted dolefully, casting yearning eyes upon her. As yet not once had he kissed that red-mouthed, dimpled face. Not yet had he clasped that withy, supple form to him. The price now of that treasured kiss, and that longed-for embrace, and her priceless love, was his whole and complete repudiation of his bloody creed of feudalism.
"I am not afraid of your deceiving me, Lem—you have never lied to me in the past, and I'll trust you-all in the future. I mean to lift you up," she went on earnestly,—"to show you a worthy goal that I know is thah awaiting your acknowledgment. As I have said over and over, Lem, I do not expect you to understand it all now, but I hoped that you would believe me, who have gone through it all with its blighting misery. Your whole life is now and always will be made furtive and fear-ridden, while you cling to this blood-dogma of revenge—always looking for the blood of your enemies, and when at last you get that blood and delude yourself into the thought that you are satisfied, you find springing out of that very act other enemies waiting in your path. It is an endless chain of fight and flight and blood that is harrowing. I saw an example of it yesterday before my very eyes, because I know you would have killed Sap McGill had I not been thah. It is all fundamentally wicked. Oh, Lem! It is all hideously wrong. Now that I am rid of that awful sting, I cannot and will not link my life to one who harbors these awful things to drag us both down.