bewilderment. He looked up at her. Her gaze was directed over his head
at someone standing in the doorway. Andy creaked hastily around in the
ancient swivel chair. Ravenal, of course, in the doorway. Andy pursed
his lips in the sky-rocket whistle, starting high and ending low,
expressive of surprise and admiration.
“How beautiful you look!” said Magnolia again; and clasped her hands
like a child.
“And you, Miss Magnolia,” said Ravenal; and advanced into the cubby-hole
that was the office, and took one of Magnolia’s surprised hands
delicately in his, and bent over it, and kissed it. Magnolia was an
excellent enough actress, and sufficiently the daughter of the gallant
and Gallic Andy, to acknowledge this salute with a little gracious
inclination of the head, and no apparent surprise whatever. Andy himself
showed nothing of astonishment at the sight of this suave and elegant
figure bent over his daughter’s hand. He looked rather pleased than
otherwise. But suddenly then the look on his face changed to one of
alarm. He jumped to his feet. He scratched the mutton-chop whiskers,
sure evidence of perturbation.
“Look here, Ravenal! That ain’t a sign you’re leaving, is it? Those
clothes, and now kissing Nollie’s hand. God A’mighty, Ravenal, you ain’t
leaving us!”
Ravenal flicked an imaginary bit of dust from the cuff of his flawless
sleeve. “These are my ordinary clothes, Captain Hawks, sir. I mean to
say, I usually am attired as you now see me. When first we met I was in
temporary difficulties. The sort of thing that can happen to any
gentleman.”
“Certainly can,” Andy agreed, heartily and hastily. “Sure can. Well, you
gave me a turn. I thought you come in to give me notice. And while we’re
on it, you’re foolish to quit at Natchez like you said, Ravenal. I don’t
know what you been doing, but you’re cut out for a show-boat actor, and
that’s the truth. Stick with us and I’ll raise you to twenty—” as
Ravenal shook his head—“twenty-five—” again the shake of the
head—“thirty! And, God A’mighty, they ain’t a juvenile lead on the
rivers ever got anywheres near that.”
Ravenal held up one white shapely hand. “Let’s not talk money now,
Captain. Though if you would care to advance me a fifty, I . . . Thanks
. . . I was going to say I came in to ask if you and Mrs. Hawks and Miss
Magnolia here would do me the honour to dine with me ashore this
evening, and go to the theatre. I know a little French restaurant——”
“Papa!” She swooped down upon little Andy then, enveloping him in her
ruffles, in her surah silk, her rose velvet, her perfume. Her arms were
about his neck. Her fresh young cheek pressed the top of his grizzled
head. Her eyes were enormous—and they looked into Ravenal’s eyes.
“Papa!”
But years of contact with the prim Parthy had taught him caution. “Your
ma——” he began, feebly.
Magnolia deserted him, flew to Ravenal, clutched his arm. Her lovely
eyes held tears. Involuntarily his free hand covered her hand that clung
so appealingly to his sleeve. “He promised me. And now, because he’s got
all that money to count because Doc was delayed at Baton Rouge and
didn’t meet us here like he expected he would this afternoon and Mama’s
gone ashore and we were to drive to Lake Pontchartrain and have dinner
and he hasn’t even changed his clothes and it’s almost four
o’clock—probably is four by now—and he keeps counting that old
money——”
“Magnolia!” shouted Andy in a French frenzy, clutching the whiskers as
though to raise himself by them from the floor.
Magnolia must have been enjoying the situation. Here were two men, both
of whom adored her, and she them. She therefore set about testing their
love. Her expression became tragic—but not so tragic as to mar her
delightful appearance. To the one who loved her most deeply and
unselfishly she said:
“You don’t care anything about me or my happiness. It’s all this old
boat, and business, and money. Haven’t I worked, night after night, year
in, year out! And now, when I have a chance to enjoy myself—it isn’t as
if you hadn’t promised me——”
“We’re going, I tell you, Nollie. But your ma isn’t even here. And how
did I know Doc was going to be stuck at Baton Rouge! We got plenty of
time to have dinner ashore and go to the theatre, but we’ll have to give
up the drive to Pontchartrain——”
A heartbroken wail from Magnolia. Her great dark eyes turned in appeal
to Ravenal. “It’s the drive I like better than anything in the world.
And horses. I’m crazy about horses, and I don’t get a chance to
drive—oh, well—” at an objection from Andy—“sometimes; but what kind
of horses do they have in those little towns! And here you can get a
splendid pair, all shiny, and their nostrils working, and a victoria and
lovely long tails and a clanky harness and fawn cushions and the lake
and soft-shell crabs——” She was becoming incoherent, but remained as
lovely as ever, and grew more appealing by the moment.
Ravenal resisted a mad urge to take her in his arms. He addressed
himself earnestly to the agonized Andy. “If you will trust me, Captain
Hawks, I have a plan which I have just thought of. I know New Orleans
very well and I am—uh—very well known in New Orleans. Miss Magnolia
has set her heart on this little holiday. I know where I can get a
splendid turnout. Chestnuts—very high steppers, but quite safe.” An
unadult squeal of delight from Magnolia. “If we start immediately, we
can enjoy quite a drive—Miss Magnolia and I. If you like, we can take
Mrs. Means with us, or Mrs. Soaper——”
“No,” from the brazen beauty.
“—and return in time to meet you and Mrs. Hawks at, say, Antoine’s for
dinner.”
“Oh, Papa!” cried Magnolia now. “Oh, Papa!”
“Your ma——” began Andy again, feebly. The stacks and piles still lay
uncounted on the desk. This thing must be settled somehow. He scuttled
to the window, scanned the wharf, the streets that led up from it. “I
don’t know where she’s got to.” He turned from the window to survey the
pair, helplessly. Something about them—the very fitness of their
standing there together, so young, so beautiful, so eager, so alive, so
vibrant—melted the romantic heart within him. Magnolia in her holiday
garb; Ravenal in his tailored perfection. “Oh, well, I don’t see how
it’ll hurt any. Your ma and I will meet you at Antoine’s at, say,
half-past six——”
They were off. It was as if they had been lifted bodily and blown
together out of the little office, across the gangplank to the landing.
Flat Foot stared after them almost benignly.
Andy returned to his desk. Resumed his contented crooning. Four o’clock
struck. Half-past four. His pencil beat a rat-a-tat-tat as he jotted
down the splendid figures. A gold mine, this Ravenal. A fine figger of a
boy. Cheap at thirty. Rat-a-tat-tat. And fifty’s one thousand. And
twenty-five’s one thousand twenty-five. And fifty’s—and fifty’s—twelve
twenty-five—gosh a’mighty!——
A shriek. A bouncing across the gangplank and into the cubby-hole just
as Andy was rounding, happily, into thirteen hundred. A hand clutching
his shoulder frantically, whirling him bodily out of the creaking swivel
chair. Parthy, hat awry, bosom palpitating, eyes starting, mouth
working.
“On Canal Street!” she wheezed. It was as though the shriek she had
intended were choked in her throat by the very force of the feeling
behind it, so that it emerged a strangled thing. “Canal Street! The two
of them . . . with my own eyes . . . driving . . . in a . . . in a——”
She sank into a chair. There seemed to be no pretense about this. Andy,
for once, was alarmed. The tall shambling figure of Frank, the heavy,
passed the little ticket window, blocked the low doorway. He stared,
open-mouthed, at the almost recumbent Parthy. He was breathing heavily
and looked aggrieved.
“She ran away from me,” he said. “Sees ’em in the crowd, driving, and
tries to run after the carriage on Canal, with everybody thinking she’s
gone loony. Then she runs down here to the landing, me after her. Woman
her age. What d’yah take me for, anyway!”
But Parthy did not hear him. He did not exist. Her face was ashen. “He’s
a murderer!” she now gasped.
Andy’s patience, never too long-suffering, snapped under the strain of
the afternoon’s happenings. “What’s wrong with you, woman! Have you gone
clean crazy! Who’s a murderer! Frank? Who’s he murdered? For two cents
I’d murder the both of you, come howling in here when a man’s trying to
run his business _like_ a business and not like a yowling insane
asylum——”
Parthy stood up, shaking. Her voice was high and quavering. “Listen to
me, you fool. I talked to the man on the docks—the one he was talking
to—and he wouldn’t tell me anything and he said I could ask the chief
of police if I wanted to know about anybody, and I went to the chief of
police, and a perfect gentleman if there ever was one, and he’s killed a
man.”
“The chief of police! Killed a man! What man!”
“No!” shrieked Parthy. “Ravenal! Ravenal’s killed a man.”
“God A’mighty, when?” He started as though to rescue Magnolia.
“A year ago. A year ago, in this very town.”
The shock of relief was too much for Andy. He was furious. “They didn’t
hang him for it, did they?”
“Hang who?” asked Parthy, feebly.
“Who! Ravenal! They didn’t hang him?”
“Why, no, they let him go. He said he shot him in self——”
“He killed a man and they let him go. What does that prove? He’d a right
to. All right. What of it!”
“What of it! Your own daughter is out driving in an open carriage this
minute with a murderer, that’s what, Andy Hawks. I saw them with my own
eyes. There I was, out trying to protect her from contamination by
finding out . . . and I saw her the minute my back was turned . . . your
doings . . . your own daughter driving in the open streets in an open
carriage with a murderer——”
“Oh, open murderer be damned!” squeaked Andy in his falsetto of utter
rage. “I killed a man when I was nineteen, Mrs. Hawks, ma’am, and I’ve
been twenty-five years and more as respected a man as there is on the
rivers, and that’s the truth if you want to talk about mur——”
But Parthenia Ann Hawks, for the first time in her vigorous life, had
fainted.
X
Gaylord Ravenal had not meant to fall in love. Certainly he had not
dreamed of marrying. He was not, he would have told you, a marrying man.
Yet Natchez had come and gone, and here he was, still playing juvenile
leads on the _Cotton Blossom_; still planning, days ahead, for an
opportunity to outwit Mrs. Hawks and see Magnolia alone. He was
thoroughly and devastatingly in love. Alternately he pranced and
cringed. To-day he would leave this dingy scow. What was he, Gaylord
Ravenal, doing aboard a show boat, play-acting for a miserable thirty
dollars a week! He who had won (and lost) a thousand a night at poker or
faro. To-morrow he was resolved to give up gambling for ever; to make
himself worthy of this lovely creature; to make himself indispensable to
Andy; to find the weak chink in Parthy’s armour.
He had met all sorts of women in his twenty-four years. He had loved
some of them, and many of them had loved him. He had never met a woman
like Magnolia. She was a paradoxical product of the life she had led.
The contact with the curious and unconventional characters that made up
the _Cotton Blossom_ troupe; the sights and sounds of river life,
sordid, romantic, homely, Rabelaisian, tragic, humorous; the tolerant
and meaty wisdom imbibed from her sprightly little father; the spirit of
_laissez faire_ that pervaded the whole atmosphere about her, had given
her a flavour, a mellowness, a camaraderie found usually only in women
twice her age and a hundredfold more experienced. Weaving in and out of
this was an engaging primness directly traceable to Parthy. She had,
too, a certain dignity that was, perhaps, the result of years of being
deferred to as the daughter of a river captain. Sometimes she looked at
Ravenal with the wide-eyed gaze of a child. At such times he wished that
he might leap into the Mississippi (though muddy) and wash himself clean
of his sins as did the pilgrims in the River Jordan.
On that day following Parthy’s excursion ashore at New Orleans there had
been between her and Captain Andy a struggle, brief and bitter, from
which Andy had emerged battered but victorious.
“That murdering gambler goes or I go,” Parthy had announced, rashly. It
was one of those pronunciamentos that can only bring embarrassment to
one who utters it.
“He stays.” Andy was iron for once.
He stayed. So did Parthy, of course.
You saw the two—Parthy and Ravenal—eyeing each other, backs to the
wall, waiting for a chance to lunge and thrust.
_Cotton Blossom_ business was booming. News of the show boat’s ingénue
and juvenile lead filtered up and down the rivers. During the more
romantic scenes of this or that play Parthy invariably stationed herself
in the wings and glowered and made muttering sounds to which the two on
stage—Magnolia starry-eyed as the heroine, Ravenal ardent and
passionate as the lover—were oblivious. It was their only opportunity
to express to each other what they actually felt. It probably was, too,
the most public and convincing love-making that ever graced the stage of
this or any other theatre.
Ravenal made himself useful in many ways. He took in hand, for example,
the _Cotton Blossom’s_ battered scenery. It was customary on all show
boats to use both sides of a set. One canvas side would represent,
perhaps, a drawing room. Its reverse would show the greens and browns of
leaves and tree trunks in a forest scene. Both economy and lack of stage
space were responsible for this. Painted by a clumsy and unimaginative
hand, each leaf daubed as a leaf, each inch of wainscoting drawn to
scale, the effect of any _Cotton Blossom_ set, when viewed from the
other side of the footlights, was unconvincing even to rural and
inexperienced eyes. Ravenal set to work with paint and brush and evolved
two sets of double scenery which brought forth shrieks of ridicule and
protest from the company grouped about the stage.
“It isn’t supposed to look like a forest,” Ravenal explained, slapping
on the green paint with a lavish hand. “It’s supposed to give the effect
of a forest. The audience isn’t going to sit on the stage, is it? Well,
then! Here—this is to be a gate. Well, there’s no use trying to paint a
flat thing with slats that nobody will ever believe looks like a gate.
I’ll just do this . . . and this . . .”
“It does!” cried Magnolia from the middle of the house where she had
stationed herself, head held critically on one side. “It does make you
think there’s a gate there, without its actually being . . . Look, Papa!
. . . And the trees. All those lumpy green spots we used to have somehow
never looked like leaves.”
All unconsciously Ravenal was using in that day, and in that crude
milieu, a method which was to make a certain Bobby Jones famous in the
New York theatre of a quarter of a century later.
“Where did you learn to——” some one of the troupe would marvel;
Magnolia, perhaps, or Mis’ Means, or Ralph.
“Paris,” Ravenal would reply, briefly. Yet he had never spoken of Paris.
He often referred thus casually to a mysterious past.
“Paris fiddlesticks!” rapped out Parthy, promptly. “No more Paris than
he’s a Ravenal of Tennessee, or whatever rascally highfalutin story he’s
made up for himself.”
Whereupon, when they were playing Tennessee, weeks later, he strolled
one day with Magnolia and Andy into the old vine-covered church of the
village, its churchyard fragrant and mysterious with magnolia and ilex;
its doorstep worn, its pillars sagging. And there, in a glass case,
together with a tattered leather-bound Bible a century and a half old,
you saw a time-yellowed document. The black of the ink strokes had,
perhaps, taken on a tinge of gray, but the handwriting, clear and
legible, met the eye.
Will of Jean Baptista Ravenal.
I, Jean Baptista Ravenal, of this Province, being through the
mercy of Almighty God of sound mind and memory do make, appoint,
declare and ordain this and this only to be my last Will and
Testament. It is my will that my sons have their estates
delivered to them as they severally arrive at the age of twenty
and one years, the eldest being Samuel, the second Jean, the
third Gaylord.
I will that my slaves be kept to work on my lands that my estate
be managed to the best advantage so as my sons may have as
liberal an education as the profits thereof will afford. Let
them be taught to read and write and be introduced into the
practical part of Arithmetic, not too hastily hurrying them to
Latin and Grammar. To my sons, when they arrive at age I
recommend the pursuit and study of some profession or business
(I would wish one to ye Law, the other to Merchandise).
“The other?” cried Magnolia softly then, looking up very bright-eyed and
flushed from the case over which she had been bending. “But the third?
Gaylord? It doesn’t say——”
“The black sheep. My great-grandfather. There always was a Gaylord. And
he always was the black sheep. My grandfather, Gaylord Ravenal and my
father Gaylord Ravenal, and——” he bowed.
“Black too, are you?” said Andy then, drily.
“As pitch.”
Magnolia bent again to the book, her brow thoughtful, her lips forming
the words and uttering them softly as she deciphered the quaint script.
I give and bequeath unto my son Samuel the lands called Ashwood,
which are situated, lying and being on the South Side of the
Cumberland River, together with my other land on the North side
of said River. . . .
I give and bequeath unto my son Jean, to him and his heirs and
assigns for ever a tract of land containing seven hundred and
forty acres lying on Stumpy Sound . . . also another tract
containing one thousand acres . . .
I give and bequeath to my son Samuel four hundred and fifty
acres lying above William Lowrie’s plantation on the main branch
of Old Town Creek . . .
Magnolia stood erect. Indignation blazed in her fine eyes. “But,
Gaylord!” she said.
“Yes!” Certainly she had never before called him that.
“I mean this Gaylord. I mean the one who came after Samuel and Jean. Why
isn’t—why didn’t——”
“Naughty boy,” said Ravenal, with his charming smile.
She actually yearned toward him then. He could not have said anything
more calculated to bind his enchantment for her. They swayed toward each
other over the top of the little glass-encased relic. Andy coughed
hastily. They swayed gently apart. They were as though mesmerized.
“Folks out here in the churchyard?” inquired Andy, briskly, to break the
spell. “Ravenal kin?”
“Acres of ’em,” Gaylord assured him, cheerfully. “Son of . . . and
daughter of . . . and beloved father of. . . . For that matter, there’s
one just beside you.”
Andy side-stepped hastily, with a little exclamation. He cast a somewhat
fearful glance at the spot toward which Ravenal so carelessly pointed. A
neat gray stone slab set in the wall. Andy peered at the lettering it
bore; stooped a little. “Here—you read it, Nollie. You’ve got young
eyes.”
Her fresh young cheek so near the cold gray slab, she read in her lovely
flexible voice:
Here lies the body of M^{rs}. Suzanne Ravenal, wife of Jean
Baptista Ravenal Esq^{r}., one of his Majesty’s Council and
Surveyor General of the Lands of this Province, who departed
this life Oct^{r} 19^{t} 1765. Aged 37 Years. After labouring
ten of them under the severest Bodily afflictions brought on by
Change of Climate, and tho’ she went to her native land received
no relief but returned and bore them with uncommon Resolution
and Resignation to the last.
Magnolia rose, slowly, from the petals of her flounced skirt spread
about her as she had stooped to read. “Poor darling!” Her eyes were soft
with pity. Again the two seemed to sway a little toward each other, as
though blown by a gust of passion. And this time little Captain Andy
turned his back and clattered down the aisle. When they emerged again
into the sunshine they found him, a pixie figure, leaning pensively
against the great black trunk of a live oak. He was smoking a pipe
somewhat apologetically, as though he hoped the recumbent Ravenals would
not find it objectionable.
“I guess,” he remarked, as Magnolia and Ravenal came up to him, “I’ll
have to bring your ma over. She’s partial to history, her having been a
schoolma’am, and all.”
Like the stage sets he so cleverly devised for the show boat, Gaylord
Ravenal had a gift for painting about himself the scenery of romance.
These settings, too, did not bear the test of too close scrutiny. But in
a favourable light, and viewed from a distance, they were charmingly
effective and convincing.
His sense of the dramatic did not confine itself to the stage. He was
the juvenile lead, on or off. Audiences adored him. Mid-western village
housewives, good mothers and helpmates for years, were, for days after
seeing him as the heroic figure of some gore-and-glory drama,
mysteriously silent and irritably waspish by turn. Disfavour was writ
large on their faces as they viewed their good commonplace dull husbands
across the midday table set with steaming vegetables and meat.
“Why’n’t you shave once in a while middle of the week,” they would snap,
“’stead of coming to the table looking like a gorilla?”
Mild surprise on the part of the husband. “I shaved Sat’dy, like
always.”
“Lookit your hands!”
“Hands? . . . Say, Bella, what in time’s got into you, anyway?”
“Nothing.” A relapse into moody silence on the part of Bella.
Mrs. Hawks fought a good fight, but what chance had her maternal
jealousy against youth and love and romance? For a week she would pour
poison into Magnolia’s unwilling ear. Only making a fool of you . . .
probably walk off and leave the show any day . . . common gambler . . .
look at his eyes . . . murderer and you know it . . . rather see you in
your grave. . . .
Then, in one brief moment, Ravenal, by some act of courage or grace or
sheer deviltry, would show Parthy that all her pains were for nothing.
That night, for example, when they were playing Kentucky Sue. Ravenal’s
part was what is known as a blue-shirt lead—the rough brave woodsman,
with the uncouth speech and the heart of gold. Magnolia, naturally, was
Sue. They were playing Gains Landing, always a tough town, often good
for a fight. It was a capacity audience and a surprisingly well-behaved
and attentive. Midway in the play’s progress a drawling drunken voice
from the middle of the house began a taunting and ridiculous chant whose
burden was, “Is _’at_ so!” After each thrilling speech; punctuating each
flowery period, “Is _’at_ so!” came the maddening and disrupting
refrain. You had to step carefully at Gains Landing. The _Cotton
Blossom_ troupe knew that. One word at the wrong moment, and knives
flashed, guns popped. Still, this could not go on.
“Don’t mind him,” Magnolia whispered fearfully to Ravenal. “He’s drunk.
He’ll stop. Don’t pay any attention.”
The scene was theirs. They were approaching the big moment in the play
when the brave Kentuckian renounces his love that Kentucky Sue may be
happy with her villainous bridegroom-to-be (Frank, of course). Show-boat
audiences up and down the rivers had known that play for years; had
committed the speech word for word, through long familiarity. “Sue,” it
ran, “ef he loves yuh and you love him, go with him. Ef he h’ain’t good
to yuh, come back where there’s honest hearts under homespun shirts.
Back to Kaintucky and home!”
Thus the speech ran. But as they approached it the blurred and mocking
voice from the middle of the house kept up its drawling skepticism. “Is
_’at_ so! Is _’at_ so!”
“Damned drunken lout!” said Ravenal under his breath, looking
unutterable love meanwhile at the languishing Kentucky Sue.
“Oh, dear!” said Magnolia, feeling Ravenal’s muscles tightening under
the blue shirt sleeves; seeing the telltale white ridge of mounting
anger under the grease paint of his jaw line. “Do be careful.”
Ravenal stepped out of his part. He came down to the footlights. The
house, restless and irritable, suddenly became quiet. He looked out over
the faces of the audience. “See here, pardner, there’s others here want
to hear this, even if you don’t.”
The voice subsided. There was a little desultory applause from the
audience and some cries of, “That’s right! Make him shut up.” They
refused to manhandle one of their own, but they ached to see someone
else do it.