Free The Handsome Road by Gwen Bristow Page A

Denis called to Plato that he could get something to eat from the kitchen while he waited, and he and Ann went up on the gallery. “Shall I order us some lemonade?” he asked her.
    “Why yes. And tell them to put in lots of ice.”
    “All right.”
    When he had left her Ann stood a moment on the gallery, thoughtfully striking one of the columns with her crop. Though she had visited Ardeith a hundred times in her life, it seemed to her that she had never seen its legended magnificence as clearly as she was seeing it this morning, now that she was seriously considering the probability that she would spend the rest of her life here. Dalroy, the town below the plantations, was often referred to as a city of palaces, and the road leading from Dalroy into the countryside was one of the noblest residential streets in America, but there was no other house along its length that could equal this one.
    A wrought-iron fence with wide gates at front and back divided the estate from the plantation fields. Many years ago the Larnes had brought a landscape artist from France to plan the gardens—mimosa, magnolias, myrtles, banana trees, a dozen kinds of palm, roses and azaleas and calla lilies and gardenias, fire-colored cannas and crimson hibiscus with long golden-feathered tongues, camellias, jasmine, oleanders, and lavender water-hyacinths with bulby stems. The house had been built of cypress beams cut from the Ardeith lands, for cypress is a wood that will outlast many lifetimes. Around its four verandas stood vast Doric columns. Over the double door in front was a cut glass fanlight, and the house stood with its back to the river so the fanlight would catch the morning sun like a rainbow. The great hall ran through to another double door opening on the back veranda.
    There were thirty rooms besides the quarters for the house-slaves, built sideways at the back, and the brick kitchen-house, which joined the main house by an arcade. The Sheramys had brought from Italy nine white and nine black marble mantels; the Larnes had chosen theirs all white, and they declined the further variation of Dresden china doorknobs. Every hinge and doorknob at Ardeith was silver, and so were the candle-sconces on either side of the marble fireplaces. The curtains were crimson brocade lined with white silk. The furniture of the master bedroom was so massive it had had to be brought up the river in pieces, and its cabinetmaker came with it to put it together.
    But the glory of Ardeith was its staircase.
    Ann went into the hall and looked up at the staircase. She had heard the story of its building over and over again. When this house was being erected by Denis’ grandfather, David Larne, he had wanted something that should distinguish Ardeith from every other house in Louisiana. Not merely marbles and silver and brocade—for the rawest dock-laborer given money to spend could have had those—but something that should demonstrate the great tradition Ardeith embodied for its people. Their ancestors had come into Louisiana when it was a jungle, and they had cut Ardeith out of the wilderness. The Larnes would come and go, they would grow up and marry and have children and die, they would know early illusions and later disappointments, but they must always have courage to go on. “For of course,” David Larne had said to his wife, “life moves always in a circle.”
    She had suggested, “I like to think it moves rather in a—spiral, shall we say?”
    So they had built the staircase. The architect had spent months on the calculations that would make it possible, and when the staircase was finished he had destroyed the plans. It was a miracle of architecture, a self-supporting spiral staircase with steps six feet across, making a complete turn in the air before it reached the second floor. The balustrades were hand-carved with a succession of floriated scrolls so deep it took two slaves an hour every morning to dust them, and at the bottom where the