Deep Summer by Gwen Bristow Page A

without getting up,” he said.
    Judith glanced at her father, who was dumb before such luxury. “There’s another bell in the parlor and another in the dining-room,” said Philip, “to save you running about for the servants.”
    He led them to the dining-room, where there was a table big enough for twenty or thirty diners, with a fan of turkey feathers hanging over it from the ceiling. Outdoors was the kitchen-house, with a fireplace twelve feet wide and four cranes for pots and kettles.
    Judith couldn’t say anything. She wanted to cry. Her father took her hands gravely.
    “You must pray the Lord to save you from pride, daughter,” he said, “living in such opulence as this.”
    Judith was hurting all over with too much happiness. She could see herself mistress of this house, summoning her slaves with bells and queening it at that great table. That she could have come from the flatboat via the log cabin to this was too much to be borne. She snatched her baby out of the nurse’s arms and ran to the master bedroom and dropped on her knees by the bed. David was so soft and sweet in her arms; Philip had promised that her child would be lord of a kingdom, but she hadn’t been able to imagine anything like this. She tried without success to smother the sobs in her throat, and began to pray in broken little whispers.
    “Please, God, help me to be good. Make me good enough to deserve everything—the big kitchen and slave-bells and glass in the windows. Make David a good boy and kind to poor people who haven’t got a palace like this to live in.”
    Then she saw, crawling over the cypress floor as though they had as much right here as she did, a thin wavy line of ants. She shuddered and sprang up, and a grasshopper leaped out of a corner and watched her. She added another prayer.
    “And please, Lord, help me not to call Louisiana a bug-hole where Philip can hear me.”
    Before she had been in her new house a month Judith agreed with the proverb that the mistress of a plantation was the biggest slave on it.
    She had to supervise the spinning, weaving and sewing, plan a flower-garden in front, and give dinners that were veritable banquets. Philip loved to entertain and by this time the circle of his friends had grown to include most of the important planters and business men on the Dalroy bluff. Judith had nine house-servants including Angelique, but they were never finished with what had to be done. Besides, the new ones spoke nothing but gumbo French and though she had picked up some French from Gervaise she was thankful to have Angelique as interpreter. But for Angelique, Judith wondered how she would ever have run her house. Angelique knew everything; how to dry bay leaves in the shade to make the powdered filé that seasoned okra gumbo, how to extract oil from pine to take out the sting of mosquito bites, and how to pile Judith’s hair over a frame to make the castle-like structures fashionable these days. Angelique showed her where to put piles of arsenic on the galleries to lessen the plague of grasshoppers attracted by the indigo around the house. It was Angelique too who advised that the beds be taken apart twice a year and the cracks painted with quicksilver beaten up with the white of egg.
    “What’s that for?” Judith inquired.
    “Bedbugs,” said Angelique succinctly.
    “Oh my God,” said Judith. She wondered impatiently why decent people should try to live at all in Louisiana, which looked like such a paradise and wasn’t really a paradise for anything but bugs of one sort or another. But she painted the beds with frantic conscientiousness after that, and made the slaves in the quarters paint theirs so often that Philip said she was going to pauperize him with so much buying of quicksilver. The stuff was expensive, didn’t she know that—for it had to be imported from Europe, and since the American war started imports had doubled and tripled in price. To which Judith retorted tartly that if he’d