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.
The boy's thoughts rushed back upon him with a picture that forbade
contemplation--a barren, dismal prospect--a measure of life that did not
embrace Belle-Ann. He would choose death, he told himself, rather than
gain and mislead her. Even had he sought to, he knew he could not
withstand his own lie to her. She whose limpid, steadfast, child-eyes
could read every line that crossed his soul--every thought that passed
his eyes. He knew a lie would sheathe itself in its own being.
In his extremity, he stalked madly about the confines of this
moon-touched mount. His perturbation waxed to a volcanic upheaval that
now inflicted a physical pain. To him it was as if these two conflicting
forces had confiscated his corporal structure for a ravaging melee,
augmented by two combative rivals struggling in his own heart. His mad
love for Belle-Ann--his blind adherence and faith in the code-honor of
his hillman lineage. That there was something amiss in this faith his
mind could not deny but, oddly enough, his heart hotly rejected it all,
stirring him to mad, reckless action. Belle-Ann filled up the whole of
Lem's wild, humble life. Without her the future held no hope. Without
hope he wanted to die. His vain effort to dislodge the scourge within
his soul, goaded him to maniacal thoughts.
Then, in an unlooked-for instant, an awful wrong shaped itself to a
determination. He would hurl his tortured self over the cliff. He told
himself that he was not fearful of the fall. In proof thereof, he rushed
to the jagged brink of the ledge and looked down into hazy moonlit space
and was unafraid.
With a desperate movement he snatched his hat off and cast it down at
his feet. His toes inched over the abyss in his aberration. He gathered
a long breath. His knees bent to the leap. His heels raised slowly under
him; when in this instant a memory dashed upon him, and he straightened
and stiffened, electrified.
The thought of Caleb Peevy rived into his muddled, benumbed mind. Caleb
Peevy, who had jumped wilfully off Henhawk's Knob into Hellsfork three
years since, and had gone to hell, so they said. A check of repugnance
swept him as he recalled the lasting scorn and contempt of the mountain
folk, and the epithet of coward--coward that followed Peevy past the
grave with its two-edged stigma that linked, inseparably, to his memory
to-night.
Lem drew back, stung with self-shame. A hope drifted back into his
distraught breast. He looked upward into the astral sky for God's
guiding star that Maw Lutts had shown to him. All a-quiver, he watched
for the flambeau of Belle-Ann's pious prophecy: "Know ye the truth and
the truth shall make ye free!" A divine revelation ebbed across his
chaotic senses.
With a sudden replenished faith he looked to God, as he recalled the
despised, loathsome dead man now lying on the altar of the
church--asleep now, across the crimson picture that his, now dead, hand
had shaped with the blood of Lem's father. Surely none but God's hand
had wrought this retribution. Verily, this Omnipotent Being would not
forsake him now?
He was now sensible to the God-sent monitor that had saved him from
McGill. He was sensible to the Providential agency that saved him from
the Judas, Orlick.
With praises, he remembered Belle-Ann's escape from this vampire. Surely
this self-same God would not deny him now. Lem did not mumble
disjointedly now. He did not whisper incoherent, aimless pleas.
Now, from the crest of the world, his aching breast heaving, and his
erring feet firm upon his ancestral Rock of Ages, he lifted his face up
to the trembling stars, as with outstretched, pleading arms he cried out
vociferously to God for Him to come to him--called out, in ringing,
fulsome words that carried afar, for Him to hasten, lest he perish in
the conflict that made blind agony within him.
And ere his wet, quivering lips had closed, and while still his eyes
were upward, and his two arms imploring Heaven, the two forces that had,
like live combatants, met midway of his soul for supremacy, did
separate.
The white purity of Righteousness had come into his evil heart, and the
blackness dropped away and out of his life! And all the old poisonous
venom, festering soul sores and gnawing misery ebbed out of the boy's
being and left it receptive to the influx of harmony and heart-peace
that he saw in Belle-Ann and which he so ardently craved.
Panting like a spent man at the end of a long run, Lem now fell down on
his knees in his copious gratitude.
On his knees, his head on his arm, in a divine lethargy, he rested. With
prayerful, oft-said words he pondered vaguely upon this miracle. So
engrossed in his felicitude and deep thanksgiving was he that he did not
see the gruesome spectacle at his back.
Belle-Ann sat upon the witch-elm block and strained her eager eyes
upward. Aloft there on Eagle Crown she could see Lem against the
moon-laved night. Now she could discern his figure full--now his upper
half. Again his head only would make a blot. Moving--always moving. She
divined the terrible struggle going on in his breast, in his will to
renounce the hurtful creed that heredity had written in his blood, and
she realized that the conflict was all for her own sake. She measured
the boy's love and honor with ample adoration. He would not come to her
with a lie on his lips to disguise the heritage of murder coiled in his
heart.
As Belle-Ann waited and watched tensely, a pulsing anxiety swept her
heart, like recurring waves gale-driven. Suddenly she leaped with a
bound from the witch-elm block, her eyes full of a startling picture.
The moon on the descent had caught Eagle Crown rock in its mystic grip,
holding it out like a mighty bauble adorning the breast of the mountain.
Lem's full figure, framed within the moon's disk, was etched in magical
proportions, like the portrayal of a powerful night glass.
Enraptured, she looked and saw Lem on the brink of the cliff, seemingly
so near that she instinctively stretched out a hand to attract him. As
she looked she saw him stretch his two arms outward and upward, and she
understood their pantomimic plea.
The next instant the sound of his voice, faintly audible, reached her
ear. She heard his inarticulate utterance, as with a fervent cry he
called out to God, from his dire distraught heart.
Belle-Ann's white bosom heaved and caught a sob of salient joy as she
darted up the trail toward Eagle Crown. She would fly to his side now.
Lem needed her now. He needed her, who was a part of his life, there to
succor him in this the blackest bereft hour of his existence. She knew
that God had heard his abandoned supplications. She knew that God was
reaching down to him a staff of righteous strength. She would hurry to
his side, with the re-enforcement of her own great love while God was
there helping him.
Belle-Ann darted to the rock-runged ladder that led the jagged, perilous
way up to Eagle Crown. She climbed and climbed and climbed. Many times
did she pause for breath. Then she climbed again and turned and twisted
and clung on and pulled herself upward, always upward, insensible to
fatigue. At last her eyes reached the level of the great jutting boulder
and her gaze fell off into moonlit space. She drew her lithe self up
and, half turning, beheld Lem's recumbent form bowed down beside a dun
indenture in the table rock. He was unconscious of her presence. There
was pathos in his crouching, still form.
There was dazed, mute ecstasy in the dark violet of Belle-Ann's eyes
which never lifted from this penitent figure. She stood, to still her
pounding heart, and waited for him to feel her nearness, or turn his
face to her. The satin lustre of her curls was moist and her bosom
lifted, palpitating with the advent of the new, great joyous thing that
stood upon the threshold of her life to enter and spread its felicity
and untold bliss.
All oblivious, Lem was kneeling amidst this new-found grace, and the
quiet of a peace that cometh only to the righteous. Belle-Ann had
suffered its pangs. She had reaped its peace. She knew the pathology of
the pestilent revenge-sore that blights the lives of men. And she
experienced all that Lem felt.
With her eyes still upon him, Belle-Ann took one quick, short step
forward. She spoke his name, low and soft and vibrant with adoration.
As though he expected her, he looked up, smiling and tranquil, and his
every radiant feature told of the triumph that compassed his renovated
soul, purged now and wholly clean of its vindictive lust.
His apostasy was full and complete. He rose up strong now and bigger and
taller than she had noted an hour since. And there was plain in his face
at that instant a certain nobility and greatness.
He stretched his eager, long arms out to her.
"I'll let yo' lead me,--I'll let yo' lead me now, Belle-Ann!" he cried
out, his happy eyes aglow with emotion and untold, deathless love.
She tossed the curls back from her lovely be-dimpled features, all
aflush now. With a finger upon her bowed lips she answered:
"Kiss me heah--Lem," and walked into his waiting arms.