Evered

by Ben Ames Williams

Thus it was now with him. He was afraid she had come to the spring; he was afraid the bull would come upon her there; and because he was afraid for her he was angry with her for coming.

He went forward across the level rocky ground, eyes and ears alert; and so came presently atop a little rise from which he could look down to the spring. And at what he saw the man stopped stock-still, and all the fires of hell flared up in his heart till he felt his whole body burn like a flaming ember.

His wife was there; she was sitting on a low smooth rock a little at one side of the spring. But that was not all; she was not alone. A man sat below her, a little at one side, looking up at her and talking earnestly; and Mary Evered’s head was drooping in thought as she listened.

Evered knew the man. The man was Dane Semler. Dane Semler and his wife, together here, talking so quietly.

They did not see him. Their backs were toward him, and they were oblivious and absorbed. Evered stood still for a moment; then he was so shaken by the fury of his own anger that he could not stand, and he dropped on one knee and knelt there, watching them. And the blood boiled in him, and the pulse pounded in his throat, and the breath choked in his lungs. His veins swelled, his face became purple. One watching him would have been appalled.

Evered was in that moment a terrible and dreadful spectacle, a man completely given over to the ugliest of angers, to the black and tempestuous fury of jealousy.

He did not stop to wonder, to guess the meaning of the scene before him. He did not wish to know its explanation. If he had thought soberly he must have known there was no wrong in Mary Evered. But he did not think soberly; he did not think at all. He gave himself to fury. Accustomed to yield to anger as a man yields to alcohol, accustomed to debauches of rage, Evered in this moment loosed all bounds on himself. He hated his wife as it is possible to hate only those whom we love; he hated Dane Semler consumingly, appallingly. He was drunk with it, shaking with it; his lips were so hot it was as though they smoked with rage.

The man and the woman below him did not move. He could catch, through the pounding in his own ears, the murmur of their voices. Semler spoke quickly, rapidly, lifting a hand now and then in an appealing gesture; the woman, when she spoke at all, raised her head a little to look at the man, and her voice was very low. Evered did not hear their words; he did not wish to. The very confidence and ease and intimacy of their bearing damned them unutterably in his eyes.

He was like a figure of stone, there on the knoll just above them. It seemed impossible that they could remain unconscious of his presence there. The unleashed demons in the man seemed to cry out, they were almost audible.

But the two were absorbed; they saw nothing and heard nothing; nothing save each other. And Evered above them, a concentrated fury, was as absorbed and oblivious as they. His whole being was so focused in attention on these two that he did not see the great red bull until it came ponderously round a shoulder of the hill, not thirty paces from where the man and woman sat together. He did not see it then until they turned their heads that way, until they came swiftly to their feet, the man with a cry, the woman in a proud and courageous silence.