Evil Brings Forth Evil

It is said that evil days bring forth good men to match them. It is equally true that evil men bring forth evil days, and Reynold Walkden Staithes was an evil man that greatly magnified the evils of his days. The best thing anyone could say about him, and the best thing anyone ever did say about him, was that he was a Yorkshireman. After that, they were stuck for words. Stuck for commendable words, that is. They had plenty to say about him that was uncomplimentary. Most people feared him because he was mean and spiteful and exacted awful vengeance on those he knew to be and those he took to be his enemies. He trusted no one apart from men with whom he had done business for many years, and even then he suspicioned that they would do him wrong if they could.

Staithes was a robust man in his middle forties. He stood a little less than six feet in contrast to the shorter sinewy men of Yorkshire, made hard and wiry by toil in fields and mills. Staithes’ face played host to a sneering look that hardly ever gave way to a smile. Some that had known him for years could not remember him smiling. His coldness did not encourage men to be familiar, which suited him because he had no wish to be agreeable, or to be mistakenly thought so. He had a gruff manner and voice as if the effort of speaking was too much for him except when he was angry, and then his words came as freely as water pouring from a downspout. He was a man whose temper was best avoided for he exercised no restraint when castigating or condemning. His words of praise and appreciation were sparse. However, when he was in one of his hypercritical moods he was more than generous with his opinions. His paranoia and hostility denied him the camaraderie of good men, and his dark disp...

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...re of comfort was overcome by the gnawing fear that someone could discover it and bring him to ruin. But what he did not know that he was not the only one that knew about it.

In addition to these roiling tensions, he had a distinctly dark lust and entertained an overpowering but unrequited attraction to one of his female workers. Unwisely, and on more than one occasion, he intimated his attraction to her, and more than once had embraced her against her will in dark corners, and once occasion he had done much worse. She had resisted him and warned him that his attentions would meet with condign retribution, so he let the impediment lie fallow for a season, but continued to hold his insatiable hunger for the beautiful girl, Sarah Gledhill, neē Cartwright, in his tormented soul.

If it is my labour you are saving, then you are condemning me to death from starvation.