Evered

by Ben Ames Williams

Evered had been a brilliant boy, active and wholly alive, his mind alert and keen, his muscles quick, his temper sharp. Yet his anger was accustomed to pass quickly, so that he had in him the stuff that makes friends; and he had friends in those days. Still in his teens he won the friendship of the older men, even as he dominated the boys of his own age. He and Lee Motley had grown up together. There had always been close sympathy between these two.

When he was nineteen he married, in the adventurous spirit of youth, a girl of the hills; a simple lovely child, not so old as he. Married her gaily, brought her home gaily. There had been affection between them, he knew now, but nothing more. He had thought himself heartbroken when, their boy child still a baby, she had died. But a year later he met Mary MacLure, and there had never been any other woman in the world for him thereafter.

Evered’s memories were very vivid; it needed no effort to bring back to him Mary’s face as he first saw her. A dance in the big hall halfway from North Fraternity to Montville. She came late, two men with her; and Evered saw her come into the door. He had come alone to the dance; he was free to devote himself to her, and within the half hour he had swept all others aside, and he and Mary MacLure danced and danced together, while their pulses sang in the soft air of the night, and their eyes, meeting, glowed and glowed.

Fraternity still talked of that swift, hot courtship. Evered had fought two men for her, and that fight was well remembered. He had fought for a clear field, and won it, though Mary MacLure scolded him for the winning, as long as she had heart to scold this man. From his first moment with her Evered had been lifted out of himself by the emotions she awoke in him. He loved her hotly and jealously and passionately; and in due course he won her.

Not too quickly, for Mary MacLure knew her worth and knew how to make herself dear to him. She humbled him, and at first he suffered this, till one night he came to her house when the flowers were abloom and the air was warm as a caress. And at first, seated on the steps of her porch with the man at her feet, she teased him lightly and provokingly, till he rose and stood above her. Something made her rise too; and then she was in his arms, lips yielding to his, trembling to his ardent whispers. For long minutes they stood so, conscious only of each other, drunk with the mutual ecstasy of conquest and of surrender, tempestuously embracing.

They were married, and he brought her home to the farm above the swamp, and because he loved her so well, because he loved her too well, he had watched over her with jealous eyes, had guarded her. She became a recluse. An isolation grew up about them. Evered wanted no human being in his life but her; and when the ardor of his love could find no other vent, it showed itself in cruel gibes at her, in reckless words.

Youth was still hot in the man. He and Mary might have weathered this hard period of adjustment, might have come to a quiet happiness together; but it was in these years that Evered killed Dave Riggs, a thing half accident. He had gone forth that day with bitterness in his heart; he had quarreled with Mary, and hated himself for it; and hated by proxy all the world besides. Riggs irritated him profoundly, roused the quick anger in the man. And when the hot clouds cleared from before his eyes Riggs was dead.

A thing that could not be undone, it had molded Evered’s soul into harsh and rugged lines. It was true, as he had told Darrin, that he had sought to make some amends; had offered help to the dead man’s wife, first openly, and then—when she cursed him from her door—in secret, hidden ways. But she left Fraternity and took her child, and they lost themselves in the outer world.

So Evered could not ease his conscience by the reparation he longed to make; and the thing lay with him always through the years thereafter. A thing fit to change a man in unpleasant fashion, the killing had shaped Evered’s whole life—to this black end that lay before him.

The man during this long night alone in his room thought back through all the years; and it was as though he sat in judgment on himself. There was, there had always been a native justice in him; he never deceived his own heart, never palliated even to himself his own ill deeds. There was no question in his mind now. He knew the thing he had done in all its ugly lights. And as he thought of it, sitting beside his bed, he played with the heavy knife which he had carried all these years. He fondled the thing in his hand, eyes half closed as he stared at it. He was not conscious that he held it. Yet it had become almost a part of him through long habit; and it was as much a part of him now as his own hand that held it. The heavy haft balanced so familiarly.