Short Fiction O. Henry (comprehension books TXT) 📖

“Ah you Miss Cook?” she asked, in the soft slurring accent.

I bowed.

“Ah am Mrs. DeVere,” she said. “Come in, and look out for that dam mule. I can’t keep him out of the house.”

I went in the parlor and looked about me in amazement. The room was magnificently furnished, but I could see the Southern sloth and carelessness visible everywhere. A wheelbarrow full of dried mortar stood in one corner that had been left there when the masons built the house. Five or six chickens were roosting on the piano and a pair of pants were hanging on the chandelier.

Mrs. DeVere had a pale, aristocratic face, with Grecian features, and snowy hair arranged carefully in becoming ringlets. She was dressed in black satin and wore flashing diamonds on her hands and at her throat. Her eyes were black and piercing and her eyebrows dark. As I took my seat, she drew a long piece of plug tobacco from a silver card receiver, and bit off a chew.

“Do you indulge?” she asked smilingly.

I shook my head.

“The h⁠⸺⁠l you don’t!” she replied.

Just then a horse dashed up to the verandah⁠—or gallery, as they call it in Texas⁠—and someone dismounted and entered the room.

I shall never forget my first sight of Aubrey DeVere.

He was fully seven feet in height, and his face was perfect. It was the absolute image of Andrea del Sarto’s painting of the young Saint John. His eyes were immense, dark, and filled with a haunting sadness, and his pale, patrician features and air of haut monde stamped him at once as the descendant of a long line of aristocrats.

He wore a dress suit of the latest cut, but I noticed that he was barefooted, and down from each side of his mouth trickled a dark brown stream of tobacco juice.

On his head was an enormous Mexican sombrero. He wore no shirt, but his dress coat, thrown back from his broad chest, revealed an enormous scintillating diamond tied with a piece of twine strung into the meshes of his gauze undershirt.

“My son, Aubrey; Miss Cook,” said Mrs. DeVere languidly.

Mr. DeVere took a chew of tobacco from his mouth and tossed it behind the piano.

“The lady who has kindly consented to assume our scholastic duties, I presume,” he said, in a deep musical baritone.

I inclined my head.

“I know your countrymen,” he said with a dark frown upon his handsome face. “They still grope among their benighted traditions of ignorance and prejudice. What do you think of Jefferson Davis?”

I looked into his flashing eye without flinching.

“He was a traitor,” I said.

Mr. DeVere laughed musically, and stooping down drew a pine splinter from one of his toes. Then he approached his mother and saluted her with that chivalrous reverence and courtesy that still lingers among sons of the South.

“What shall we have for supper, mammy?” he said.

“Whatever you d⁠⸺ please,” said Mrs. DeVere.

Aubrey DeVere reached out his hand and seized one of the chickens that roosted upon the piano. He wrung its neck and threw its quivering and fluttering body upon the delicate Brussels carpet. He took a long stride and stood before me, towering like an avenging god, with one arm upraised, the other pointing to the fowl, struggling in its death agonies.

“That is the South,” he cried, in a voice of thunder; “the bleeding and dying South after Gettysburg. Tonight you will feast upon its carcass, as your countrymen have been doing for the last thirty years.”

He hurled the head of the chicken into my face with a terrible oath, and then dropped on one knee and bowed his kingly head.

“Pardon me, Miss Cook,” he said, “I do not mean to offend you. Twenty-eight years ago today, my father was killed at the battle of Shiloh.”

When the supper bell rang I was invited into a long, lofty room, wainscoted with dark oak and lighted by paraffine candles.

Aubrey DeVere sat at the foot of the table and carved. He had taken off his coat, and his clinging undershirt revealed every muscle of a torso as grand as that of the Dying Gladiator in the Vatican at Rome. The supper was truly a Southern one. At one end was an enormous grinning opossum and sweet potatoes, while the table was covered with dishes of cabbage, fried chicken, fruit cake, persimmons, hot raw biscuits, blackhaws, Maypops, fried catfish, maple syrup, hominy, ice cream, sausages, bananas, crackling bread, pineapples, squashes, wild grapes and apple pies.

Pete, the colored man, waited upon us, and once in handing Mr. DeVere the gravy he spilled a little of it upon the tablecloth. With a yell like a tiger, Aubrey DeVere sprang to his feet and hurled his carving knife to the handle in Pete’s breast. The poor colored man fell to the floor, and I ran and lifted his head.

“Goodbye, missie,” he whispered. “I hear de angels singing, and I sees de bressed Mars Abraham Linkum smilin’ at me from near de great white th’one. Goodbye missie, Ol’ Pete am goin’ home.”

I rose and faced Mr. DeVere.

“Inhuman monster!” I cried. “You have killed him!”

He touched a silver bell and another servant appeared.

“Take this body out and bring me a clean knife,” he commanded. “Resume your seat, Miss Cook. Like all your countrymen, you evince a penchant for dark meat. Mammy, dear, can I send you a choice bit of the ’possum?”

The next day I met the four DeVere children, and found them very bright and lovable. Two were boys and two girls, ranging from 10 to 16 years of age. The little school house was half a mile away down a beautiful country lane, full of grass and flowers. I had fifteen scholars in my school, and except for a few things my life at Vereton would have been like Paradise. The first month I saved up $42. My salary was $40, and I made the other two by loaning small sums to my scholars for a few days at a time, for which they paid me from 10