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.