This Side of Glory Read Online Free Page A

and Lysiane St. Clair.”
    He had a younger brother and sister. The three births were the last of the records. She lifted her eyes again.
    “Isn’t it somehow awesome, to see yourself at the end of such a line?”
    “Why no. Why should it be?”
    “Oh—I mean—doesn’t it make you feel like a link in an endless chain?”
    “Aren’t we all?” asked Kester, laughing a little.
    They closed the Bible and went back into the hall. Bending down, Kester showed her the dent of a horseshoe on the bottom step of the spiral staircase. It was clearly marked, though in later years the stairs had been carefully repainted. That had been put there during the invasion of Louisiana in the eighteen-sixties, when a troop of soldiers had ransacked the house and one of them had ridden his horse into the hall.
    “It’s fascinating as you tell it,” said Eleanor. “I studied about all that sort of thing in school, of course, but here it seems so real!”
    “Anybody hearing you,” he said with amusement, “would think you came from ten thousand miles away.”
    “I was born in a levee camp in West Feliciana Parish,” she returned, “but that’s a long way from things like this. Am I tiring you, making you talk so much?”
    “Well ma’am,” said Kester, “I could do with that coffee.”
    Eleanor laughed apologetically, and they crossed the hall into the parlor opposite the library. This was the main living-room, and here were deep mahogany sofas, and a great square rosewood piano, and modernity represented by a phonograph. Like the library, this room had a white marble fireplace, but in this one a fire danced behind brass andirons. On the wall hung a bellcord of the sort ladies used to embroider to while away a journey up the river in the old steamboat days.
    “Does that still work?” Eleanor asked.
    “Why yes.” Kester gave it a pull.
    A Negro man in a funereal black coat came in answer to the summons. Kester called him Cameo. He ordered coffee, and Cameo approached Eleanor with grave courtesy.
    “Rest yo’ wrap, miss?” he inquired.
    Eleanor gave him her coat. As Cameo went out she observed that the door had a silver knob and silver hinges, shining with the soft glow of time, and she remembered that the door of the library had them too. For a moment she stood still. It was her first glimpse of the dignity of plantation life, and she was conscious of a heightened awareness, as though all her senses had been sharpened to rare appreciation. She began to understand what people might be like when they had lived for generations in this quiet grandeur, their instincts curbed by the standards of their culture till they had no uncertainties, their characters polished by their knowledge in all circumstances of what was expected of them. The house, the staircase, the portraits, the ancient oaks, all suggested the same self-assurance she had observed in Kester. It was easy now to understand it.
    Kester had begun to play a ragtime record on the phonograph. He turned it off as Cameo came in and placed a tray with a silver coffee service on a low table in front of the fire. Kester and Eleanor curled up on the floor, facing each other, and Eleanor poured the coffee.
    “What a beautiful set this is,” she observed, watching the firelight stroke the pot. “It looks like a wedding present.”
    “I believe it was.”
    “Your mother’s?”
    “No, earlier than that. My great-grandmother’s, I think—there’s a monogram on it.”
    Eleanor turned the pot to find the initials. “F. D. L.,” she read. “Is that Frances Durham?—I saw a line in the big Bible about her wedding. But Kester!” she broke off sharply.
    “What is it?”
    “It’s none of my business,” said Eleanor, “but one of your servants has been frightfully careless. Did you know there was a big dent in the side, just over the monogram?”
    Kester gave a low chuckle. “We’ve been meaning to do something about that dent for forty years. That’s where a spade