The Gamble (I) Read Online Free PDF Page A

stood and rubbed the back of his neck. Lord, it was quiet. Getting close to suppertime. Ivory had deserted the piano downstairs and Jack had gone to eat. Gandy glanced out the window, hooked his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets, and absently drummed a rhythm on the silk. The view outside offered little to buoy him. Unpainted frame buildings, muddy streets, and prairie. Nothing but prairie. No spreading water oak trees festooned with Spanish moss,no scent of magnolia drifting in on the spring breeze, no mockingbirds. He missed the mockingbirds.
    This time of day at Waverley, the family used to gather on the wide back veranda and sip glasses of minted iced tea, and Delia would toss cracked corn to the mockingbirds, trying to entice them to eat from her hand. He could see her yet, squatting in a billow of hooped skirts, cupping the corn in her palm. Golden head with ringlets down to her shoulders. Skin as white as milk. Fiddle-waisted. And her eyes, as dark and arresting as the notches on a dogwood petal, forever alluring.
    “Why don’t you feed the peacocks?” his father would call to her.
    But Delia would kneel patiently, cupped hand extended. “Because the peacocks are too audacious. And besides”—Delia would rest her chin on one shoulder and look back at her husband—“no fun tryin’ to get a tame bird to eat from your hand, is there, Scotty?” she would say teasingly.
    And his mother would glance his way and smile at the look she saw on her son’s face. But he never cared who knew it. He was as smitten with Delia as he’d been the first time he’d kissed her when they were fourteen years old.
    Then Leatrice would waddle to the door—good old Leatrice, with her skin as dark as sorghum syrup and breasts the size of watermelons. He wondered where she was now. “Suppuh, suh,” she’d announce. “Pipin’.”
    And Dorian Gandy would take his wife’s arm, and Scott himself would rise from his chair and slowly extend a hand to Delia. And she’d smile up at him with a promise for later and let herself be tugged to her feet. Then, hand in hand, they would follow his parents inside beneath the high, cool ceilings.
    But those days were gone forever.
    Gandy stared at the prairie. He blinked once, hard. His stomach rumbled, reminding him it was suppertime now. With a deep sigh, he turned from the window toward the desk and glanced at the calendar. Nearly four weeks he’d been here. Jubilee and the girls would arrive any day. They couldn’t get here fast enough to suit him. Things were dull without Jube.
    Leaving his office by a second door, he entered the adjoining sitting room of his private apartment. It was much cheerier, with burgundy draperies, a factory-made rug, and sturdy, masculine furniture. It held a leather settee with matching chairs, heavy mahogany tables, and two banquet lamps. To his left a door led directly to the hall; to his right a dresser held his humidor and hat block. On the wall above it hung a watercolor behind which was stuck a branch from a cotton plant, its three bolls grayed in their brown clawlike husks. The painting was that of a pillared mansion with a wide front veranda, flanked by lush greenery and sprawling lawns on which stood two poised peacocks.
    Waverley.
    His gaze lingered on the picture while he placed his hat on the block. Nostalgia hit him with the force of a blow. From the humidor he took a cheroot, as rich and brown as the soil from which that cotton boll had sprung, the rich Mississippi bottomlands of the great Tombigbee River. Lost in thought, he forgot to light his cigar, but absently stroked its length. He thought about Waverley for so long that he eventually laid the cheroot on the dresser, unused.
    He wandered into the adjoining bedroom and tossed his jacket onto a double bed. He recalled the rosewood fourposter at Waverley where he’d brought his bride and bedded her for the first time. The gauzy netting hanging all around, circling them in a private haven of