“I don’t think that you could do anything that would be very evil, Byron, no matter how it looked to folks.
But are you going to undertake to say just how far evil extends into the appearance of evil? just where between doing and appearing evil stops?”
“No,” Byron says.
Then he moves slightly; he speaks as if he too were waking: “I hope not.
I reckon I am trying to do the right thing by my lights.”—‘And that,’ Hightower thinks, ‘is the firt lie he ever told me.
Ever told anyone, man or woman, perhaps including himself.’
He looks across the desk at the stubborn, dogged, sober face that has not yet looked at him.
‘Or maybe it is not lie yet because he does not know himself that it is so.’
He says:
“Well.” He speaks now with a kind of spurious brusqueness which, flabbyjowled and darkcaverneyed, his face belies. “That is settled, then.
You’ll take her out there, to his house, and you’ll see that she is comfortable and you’ll see that she is not disturbed until this is over.
And then you’ll tell that man—Bunch, Brown—that she is here.”
“And he’ll run,” Byron says.
He does not look up, yet through him there seems to go a wave of exultation, of triumph, before he can curb and hide it, when it is too late to try.
For the moment he does not attempt to curb it; backthrust too in his hard chair, looking for the first time at the minister, with a face confident and bold and suffused.
The other meets his gaze steadily.
“Is that what you want him to do?” Hightower says.
They sit so in the lamplight.
Through the open window comes the hot, myriad silence of the breathless night. “Think what you are doing.
You are attempting to come between man and wife.”
Byron has caught himself.
His face is no longer triumphant.
But he looks steadily at the older man.
Perhaps he tried to catch his voice too.
But he cannot yet.
“They aint man and wife yet,” he says.
“Does she think that?
Do you believe that she will say that?” They look at one another. “Ah, Byron, Byron.
What are a few mumbled words before God, before the steadfastness of a woman’s nature?
Before that child?”
“Well, he may not run.
If he gets that reward, that money.
Like enough he will be drunk enough on a thousand dollars to do anything, even marry.”
“Ah, Byron, Byron.”
“Then what do you think we—I ought to do?
What do you advise?”
“Go away. Leave Jefferson.”
They look at one another. “No,” Hightower says. “You don’t need my help.
You are already being helped by someone stronger than I am.”
For a moment Byron does not speak.
They look at one another, steadily.
“Helped by who?”
“By the devil,” Hightower says.
‘And the devil is looking after him, too,’ Hightower thinks.
He is in midstride, halfway home, his laden small market basket on his arm.
‘Him, too.
Him, too,’ he thinks, walking.
It is hot.
He is in his shirt sleeves, tall, with thin blackclad legs and spare, gaunt arms and shoulders, and with that flabby and obese stomach like some monstrous pregnancy.
The shirt is white, but it is not fresh; his collar is toiled, as is the white lawn cravat carelessly knotted, and he has not shaved for two or three days.