"Naw, Belle-Ann, I hain't wantin' t' say good-by; but I 'low I hev t'. But thar air one thing I air wantin' yo' t' promise me, Belle-Ann," he said soberly as he reached down and took her small, tanned hand.
Belle-Ann's heart was throbbing wildly now. This was the crucial moment she had foreseen, and now was the time to summon all the forces at her command.
"Mebby I cayn't promise hit, Lem," she rejoined almost inaudibly, with violet eyes that wandered guiltily away from his face.
He stared at her. There was a timbre in her tone that startled him. He saw and felt instinctively that she had discerned what he held in his mind. The fact that she had divined correctly, and answered in this way, filled him with a sudden, sinking apprehension.
Her words shocked him into a stupor. He thought that he knew her very soul as he knew his own soul. Had the years that had unfolded her young life before him, betrayed him and withheld deep things from his understanding? Things that would join in the pursuit with other searing grievances to sting and urge his being onward toward desperation? There was, in truth, a depth to this girl, whom he had known all her life, that his cursory penetration had failed utterly to fathom. When Lem's parents had been killed by the revenuer, then it was that an inexorable avowal had resolved itself in the soul of Belle-Ann. An inviolable thing, the evulsion of which could never obtain save at the shrine of death—the death of the hated Ghost-man. Lem had only a general and superficial conception of the intrinsic intensity of this thing that had taken hold of the girl. Little did he know of the doleful hours she had brooded away over this theme of vengeance. Long, brain-dulling hours during her waking time. Haunting, troublous hours during her dream-time. And always in the imaginings of her girl-heart she nurtured and built up an ideal, who would kill the revenuer. A hero who would hasten to her with the affiliating tribute, and lay the crimson laurels of the deed at her feet. She well knew that Lem thirsted for the life of this uncanny man, who had come and deprived him of his beloved mother and father. She knew that day and night as he traversed the hills he was ever waiting and watching for him. She was keen, and appreciatively sensible to this, and ever prayed that Lem would succeed. But all this was not the deed. Theoretically, it occupied the tenure of a debt. A premise that looked for no advancement save payment. Until this thing was done they would both suffer. She told herself over and over again that she would never betray her true feelings to Lem until he had killed Burton, and appeased her vengeance. Love him as she thought she did, some vital element was poignantly amiss. However unwarranted, and fatuous, an indefinable barrier would stand between them until the culmination of the yearning that had made ugly crosses in her heart.
Never could she forget the past. As she stood now before Lem, with downcast eyes, the past rushed upon her more vividly than ever. That sun-smitten day, made dark and dreadful, when she had hovered over the still form of Maw Lutts in the yard. Maw Lutts, who from Belle-Ann's baby-days to the woman's last minute in the yard, had never uttered to the girl a cross word, or cast her an impatient look. Her parting smile was rooted in Belle-Ann's soul, climbing and wrapping its tendrils around her heart like an evergreen.
Even at this instant in her gloomy retrospection, she could put her finger on her own bosom, precisely where the bullet had struck. That reddish-purple spot that did not bleed. Very often the vision of that small, round death-sore multiplied and floated in one gesticulating mirage before her eyes. Often they consolidated into one compact darkish background, against which would develop the satanic, puffed visage of the revenuer who had done this thing. When old Cap Lutts' spirit went out by the same hand, the girl's soul had sickened to a distortion of mingled fear and hate, which at times bade fair to drive her primitive mind bereft.
A devouring monitor of revenge had skulked into her life, following her better self relentlessly, as a panther stalks a spent beast. To her it was all like the happening of the past hour. Three weeks only had elapsed since she had witnessed the last withering stroke of this evil creature bent upon their destruction. Across her every mood the prickling echoes of that frantic bell-scream raked. It filled her ears when she strove to shut it out, and projected its curse into her slumbering hours.
She felt that unhallowed hour upon her—the moonlit night when the very trees shuddered as she and little Buddy, clinging to each other, had crept through the ghastly shadows back to the meeting-house after the mad bell's appeal had died and the demon had gone.
Never, while reason held its throne, could she obliterate from her eyes what they two saw in the church that night. So it was that Belle-Ann had long since, secretly, reared a citadel within her, and down in a remote grotto therein, had locked away her love; isolated it from her impulses and fealty.