Chapter XVIII

Evered had not slept the night before. There was no sleep in the man. And this was not because he was torn and agonized; it was because he had never been so fully alive, so alert of mind and body.

Darrin’s accusation had come to him as no shock; Darrin’s proof that his wife was loyal had come as no surprise. He had expected neither; yet when they came it seemed to the man that he must have known they would come. It seemed to him that all the world must know what he had done; and it seemed to him that he must always have known his wife was--his wife forever.

His principal reaction was a great relief of spirit. He was unhappy, sorrowful; yet there was a pleasant ease and solace in his very unhappiness. For he was rid now, at last, of doubts and of uncertainties; his mind was no more beclouded; there were no more shadows of mystery and questioning. All was clear before him; all that there was to know he knew. And--his secret need no longer be borne alone. Darrin knew; it was as though the whole world knew. He was indescribably relieved by this certainty.

He did not at first look into the future at all. He let himself breathe the present. He came back to the farm and ate his supper and went to his room; and there was something that sang softly within him. It was almost as though his wife waited for him, comfortingly, there. Physically a little restless, he moved about for a time; but his mind was steady, his thoughts were calm.

His thoughts were memories, harking backward through the years.

Evered was at this time almost fifty years old. He was born in North Fraternity, in the house of his mother’s father, to which she had gone when her time came near. Evered’s own father had died weeks before, in the quiet fashion of the countryside. That had been on this hillside farm above the swamp, which Evered’s father had owned. His mother stayed upon the farm for a little, and when the time came she went to her home, and when Evered was a month old she had brought him back to the farm again.

She died, Evered remembered, when he was still a boy, nine or ten years old. She had not married a second time, but her brother had come to live with her, and he survived her and kept the farm alive and producing. He taught Evered the work that lay before him. He had been a butcher, and it was from him Evered learned the trade. A kind man, Evered remembered, but not over wise; and he had lacked understanding of the boy.

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.

The night, and then the day. A steady calm possessed him. His memories flowed smoothly past, like the eternal cycle of the days. The man’s face did not change; he was expressionless. He was sunk so deep in his own thoughts that the turmoil there did not disturb his outward aspect. His countenance was grave and still. No tears flowed; this was no time for tears. It was an hour too deep for tears, a sorrow beyond weeping.

During the storm that day he went to the window now and then. And once in the morning he heard the red bull bellow in its pen; and once or twice thereafter, as the afternoon drove slowly on. Each time he heard this sound it was as though the man’s attention was caught and held. He stood still in a listening attitude, as though waiting for the bellow to be repeated; and it would be minutes on end before his eyes clouded with his own thoughts again.

It would be easy to say that Evered during this solitary night and day went mad with grief and self-condemning, but it would not be true. The man was never more sane. His thoughts were profound, but they were quiet and slow and unperturbed. They were almost impersonal. There is in most men--though in few women--this power to withdraw out of oneself or into an inner deeper self; this power to stand as spectator of one’s own actions. It is a manifestation of a deeper, more remote consciousness. It is as though there were a man within a man. And this inner soul has no emotions. It is unmoved by love or passion, by anger or hatred, by sorrow or grief, by hunger or by thirst. It watches warm caresses, it hears ardent words, it sees fierce blows, and listens to curses and lamentations with the same inscrutable and immutable calm. It can approve, it can condemn; but it neither rejoices nor bemoans. It is always conscious that the moment is nothing, eternity everything; that the whole alone has portent and importance. This inner self has a depth beyond plumbing; it has a strength unshakable; it has understanding beyond belief. It is not conscience, for it sets itself up as no arbiter of acts or deeds. It is simply a consciousness that that which is done is good or evil, kind or harsh, wise or foolish. This calm inner soul of souls might be called God in man.

Evered this day lived in this inner consciousness. As though he sat remote above the stream he watched the years of his memories flow by. He was, after the first moments, torn by no racking grief and wrenched by no remorseful torments and burned by no agonizing fires. He was without emotion, but not without judgment and not without decision. He moved through his thoughts as though to a definitely appointed and pre-determined end. A strange numbness possessed him, in which only his mind was alive.

He did not pity himself; neither did he damn himself. He did not pray that he might cancel all the past, for this inner consciousness knew the past could never be canceled. He simply thought upon it, with grave and sober consideration.

When his thoughts evidenced themselves in actions it was done slowly, and as though he did know not what he did. He got up from where he had been sitting and went to the window and looked out. The snow had ceased; the sun was breaking through. The world was never more beautiful, never more gloriously white and clean.

The man had held in his hands for most of the day that heavy knife of his. He put it now back in its sheath. Then he took off his shirt and washed himself. There was no fire of purpose in his eye; he was utterly calm and unhurried.

He put on a clean shirt. It was checked blue and white. Mary Evered had made it for him, as she was accustomed to make most of his clothes. When it was buttoned he drew his belt about him and buckled it snug. Then he sat down and took off his slippers--old, faded, rundown things that had eased his tired feet night by night for years. He took off these slippers and put on hobnailed shoes, lacing them securely.

When this was done the man stood for a little in the room, and he looked steadily before him. His eyes did not move to this side and that; there was no suggestion that he was taking farewell of the familiar things about him. It was more as though he looked upon something which other eyes could never see. And his face lighted a little; it was near smiling. There was peace in it.

I do not believe that there was any deadly purpose in Evered’s heart when he left his room. Fraternity thinks so; Fraternity has never thought anything else about the matter. He took his knife, in its sheath. That is proof enough for Fraternity. “He went to do the bull, and the bull done him.” That is what they say, have always said.

It does not occur to them that the man took the knife because he was a man; because it was not in him to lay down his life supinely; because battle had always been in his blood and was his instinct. It does not occur to them that there was in Evered’s mind this day the purpose of atonement, and nothing more. For Fraternity had never plumbed the man, had never understood him.

No matter. No need to dig for hidden things. Enough to know what Evered did.

He went from his room into the kitchen. No one was there. Ruth and John and Darrin were outside in front of the house. Thus they did not see him come out into the barnyard and go steadily and surely across and past the corner of the barn, till he came to the high-boarded walls of the red bull’s pen.

He put his hand against these board walls for a moment, with a gesture not unlike that of a blind man. One watching would have supposed that he walked unseeingly or that his eyes were closed. He went along the wall of the pen until he came to the narrow gate, set between two of the cedar posts, through which it was possible to enter.

Evered opened this gate, stepped inside the pen and shut the gate behind him. He took half a dozen paces forward, into the center of the inclosure, and stood still.

The red bull had heard the gate open; and the creature turned in its stall and came to the door between stall and pen. It saw Evered standing there; and after a moment the beast came slowly out, moving one foot at a time, carefully, like a watchful antagonist--came out till it was clear of the stall; till it and the man faced each other, not twenty feet apart.

After a moment the bull lowered its great head and emitted a harsh and angry bellow that was like a roar.