"I am going in the morning, Lem," she answered decisively, though a note of utter sorrow crept into her gentle tones. "You have had your opportunity. You told me Johnse Hatfteld offered you five hundred dollars for your interests heah. Surely you could have gone down to Blue-grass with my grandpa and taken Buddy and Slab along, and—I—I—could then—but you want to stay here and feed your soul on blood. Could you ask a more bitter punishment for the revenuer than what you saw to-night? I implore for the last time, Lem—put that evil life behind you, Lem. Ask God to help you, and take my heart and hand on it that He will not forsake you. You will come through as I did. Will you try, Lem?" she pleaded softly, with a toss of curls and a tender, compelling light in her sweet, sad eyes. "Let me lead you, Lem," she whispered.
The boy's face paled suddenly. It was the advent of a terrible upheaval coming upon him. Belle-Ann saw and divined his intent.
With no backward word, only a look that embraced an untold, profound meaning, he hurried from her, spiritless and disconsolate and tumultuous. Her eyes followed him, enthralled. She knew where he was bound! She prayed devoutly that the web, traced by destiny, wrapping their two lives into a unit, would not now, at this crisis, burst its ligatures asunder. She prayed with all the fervent strength of her young heart that Lem would come down from Eagle Crown and take her in his arms,—take her willing life to him irrevocably, with a new precept written in his heart.
CHAPTER XL
HIS ROCK OF AGES
But as Lem climbed upward, a withering despair mounted abreast with him, like the shadow cast by evil. By the time he had reached the giddy apex of the cliff, he was staggering amidst the chaos of a battle with himself that was slowly outdoing his soul.
His mind had come, miraculously, to nurture the holy dogma that Belle-Ann had brought back to him. He could see its wonderful sequence plain in Belle-Ann's beautiful face. In her angelic violet eyes he beheld its wholesome, serene pictures. He could hear it, vocal, in the anthem-music of her soft, new speech. Her very sweet, divine presence irradiated its palpable truths. All that was good in him was calling out for her.
But in the under-tide of some indefinable, contending, compelling element he was drifting apart. While his mind opened its portals to all the logic so earnestly tendered and tutored by Belle-Ann, his back-standing, immutable mountain heart fought it off like a destroyer,—repelled its invasion with a titanic force that his willing energies could not subjugate. The tentacles of his father's creed promptly admonished and enmeshed his rebellious heart, protecting its odium, cleaving to its tenancy of "eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth." Which adjuration only lent impetus to an endless cycle of strife and distress, rolling his feverish soul back amidst bones that curse the dead years—that warp the souls of men, and bow down hearts that God made to beat through life upstanding, radiant with harmony and hope and buoyancy.
In the growing vortex of this tumult of mind and heart, Lem stood like one distraught, circling the limits of the table rock, caged by empty space,—scarce knowing that his feet lifted, oblivious to his whereabouts. Through this seething, tangled skein, his thoughts seeped for an instant and fled backward. He viewed the past. He saw only two sodden graves side by side. His beset pilgrim mind then turned toward the future, and groped out into the years to come in a vain quest for succor and some element of honest hope.