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 Mrs. Suzanne Ravenal, wife of Jean Baptista Ravenal Esqr., one of his Majesty’s Council and Surveyor General of the Lands of this Province, who departed this life Octr 19t 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.
The play went on. The voice was silent. The time approached for the big speech of renunciation. It was here. “Sue, ef he loves yuh and you love him, go with him. Ef he——”
“Is ’at so!” drawled the amused voice, with an element of surprise in it now. “Is ’at so!”
Ravenal cast Kentucky Sue from him. “Well, if you will have it,” he threatened, grimly. He sprang over the footlights, down to the piano top, to the keyboard, to the piano stool, all in four swift strides, was up the aisle, had plucked the limp and sprawling figure out of his seat by the collar, clutched him then firmly by this collar hold and the seat of his pants, and was up the aisle again to the doorway, out of the door, across the gangplank, and into the darkness. He was down the aisle then in a moment, spatting his hands briskly as he came; was up on the piano stool, on to the piano keyboard, on the piano top, over the footlights, back in position. There he paused a moment, breathing fast. Nothing had been said. There had actually been no sound other than his footsteps and the discordant jangle of protest that the piano keyboard had emitted when he had stepped on its fingers. Now a little startled expression came into Ravenal’s face.
“Let’s see,” he said, aloud. “Where was I——”
And as one man the audience chanted, happily, “Sue, ef he loves yuh and you love him——”
What weapon has a Parthenia against a man like that? And what chance a Frank?
Drama leaped to him. There was, less than a week later, the incident of the minister. He happened to be a rather dirty little minister in a forlorn little Kentucky river town. He ran a second-hand store on the side, was new to the region, and all unaware of the popularity and good-will enjoyed by the members of the Cotton Blossom troupe. To him an actor was a burning brand. Doc had placarded the little town with dodgers and handbills. There was one, especially effective even in that day of crude photography, showing Magnolia in the angelic part of the ingénue lead in Tempest and Sunshine. These might be seen displayed in the windows of such ramshackle stores as the town’s river-front street boasted. Gaylord Ravenal, strolling disdainfully up into the sordid village that was little more than a welter of mud and flies and mules and Negroes, stopped aghast as his eye chanced to fall upon the words scrawled beneath a picture of Magnolia amidst the dusty disorderly mélange of the ministerial second-hand window. There was the likeness of the woman he loved looking, starry-eyed, out upon the passer-by. And beneath it, in the black fanatic penmanship of the itinerant parson:
A LOST SOUL
In his fine English clothes, swinging the slim malacca cane, Gaylord Ravenal, very narrow-eyed, entered the fusty shop and called to its owner to come forward. From the cobwebby gloom of the rear reaches emerged the merchant parson, a tall, shambling large-knuckled figure of the anaconda variety. You thought of Uriah Heep and of Ichabod Crane, experiencing meanwhile a sensation of distaste.
Ravenal, very elegant, very cool, very quiet, pointed with the tip of his cane. “Take that picture out of the window. Tear it up. Apologize.”
“I won’t do anything of the kind,” retorted the holy man. “You’re a this-and-that, and a such-and-such, and a so-and-so, and she’s another, and the whole boatload of you ought to be sunk in the river you contaminate.”
“Take off your coat,” said Ravenal, divesting himself neatly of his own faultless garment as he spoke.
A yellow flame of fear leaped into the man’s eyes. He edged toward the door. With a quick step Ravenal blocked his way. “Take it off before I rip it off. Or fight with your coat on.”
“You touch a man of God and I’ll put the law on you. The sheriff’s office is just next door. I’ll have you——”
Ravenal whirled him round, seized the collar of his grimy coat, peeled it dexterously off, revealing what was, perhaps, as ’maculate a shirt as ever defiled the human form. The Ravenal lip curled in disgust.
“If cleanliness is next to godliness,” he remarked, swiftly turning back his own snowy cuffs meanwhile, “you’ll be shovelling coal in hell.” And swung. The minister was taller and heavier than this slight and dandified figure. But Ravenal had an adrenal advantage, being stimulated by the fury of his anger. The godly one lay, a soiled heap, among his soiled wares. The usual demands of the victor.
“Take that thing out of the window! . . . Apologize to me! . . . Apologize publicly for defaming a lady!”
The man crept groaning to the window, plucked the picture, with its offensive caption, from amongst the miscellany there, handed it to Ravenal in response to a gesture from him. “Now then, I think you’re pretty badly bruised, but I doubt that anything’s broken. I’m going next door to the sheriff. You will write a public apology in letters corresponding to these and place it in your filthy window. I’ll be back.”
He resumed his coat, picked up the malacca cane, blithely sought out the sheriff, displayed the sign, heard that gallant Kentuckian’s most Southern expression of regard for Captain Andy Hawks, his wife and gifted daughter, together with a promise to see to it that the written apology remained in the varmint’s window throughout the day and until the departure of the Cotton Blossom. Ravenal then went his elegant and unruffled way up the sunny sleepy street.
By noon the story was known throughout the village, up and down the river for a distance of ten miles each way, and into the back-country, all in some mysterious word-of-mouth way peculiar to isolated districts. Ravenal, returning to the boat, was met by news of his own exploit. Business, which had been booming for this month or more, grew to phenomenal proportions. Ravenal became a sort of legendary figure on the rivers. Magnolia went to her mother. “I am never allowed to talk to him. I won’t stand it. You treat him like a criminal.”
“What else is he?”
“He’s the——” A long emotional speech, ringing with words such as hero, gentleman, wonderful, honourable, nobility, glorious—a speech such as Schultzy, in his show-boat days as director, would have designated as a so-and-so-and-so-and-so-and-so-and-so.
Ravenal went to Captain Andy. I am treated as an outcast. I’m a Ravenal. Nothing but the most honourable conduct. A leper. Never permitted to speak to your daughter. Humiliation. Prefer to discontinue connection which can only be distasteful to the Captain and Mrs. Hawks, in view of your conduct. Leaving the Cotton Blossom at Cairo.
In a panic Captain Andy scampered to his lady and declared for a more lenient chaperonage.
“Willing to sacrifice your own daughter, are you, for the sake of a picking up a few more dollars here and there with this miserable upstart!”
“Sacrificing her, is it, to tell her she can speak civilly to as handsome a young feller and good-mannered as I ever set eyes on, or you either!”
“Young squirt, that’s what he is.”
“I was a girl like Nollie I’d run off with him, by God, and that’s the truth. She had any spirit left in her after you’ve devilled her these eighteen years past, she’d do it.”
“That’s right! Put ideas into her head! How do you know who he is?”
“He’s a Rav——”
“He says he is.”
“Didn’t he show me the church——”
“Oh, Hawks, you’re a zany. I could show you gravestones. I could say my name was Bonaparte and show you Napoleon’s tomb, but that wouldn’t make him my grandfather, would it!”
After all, there was wisdom in what she said. She may even have been right, as she so often was in her shrewish intuition. Certainly they never learned more of this scion of the Ravenal family than the meagre information gleaned from the chronicles of the village church and graveyard.
Grudgingly, protestingly, she allowed the two to converse genteelly between the hours of five and six, after dinner. But no oriental princess was ever more heavily chaperoned than was Magnolia during these prim meetings. For a month, then, they met on the port side of the upper deck, forward. Their chairs were spaced well apart. On the starboard side, twenty-five feet away, sat Parthy in her chair, grim, watchful; radiating opposition.
Magnolia, feeling the gimlet eye boring her spine, would sit bolt upright, her long nervous fingers tightly interwoven, her ankles neatly crossed, the pleats and flounces of her skirts spread sedately enough yet seeming to vibrate with an electric force that gave them the effect of standing upright, a-quiver, like a kitten’s fur when she is agitated.
He sat, one arm negligently over the back of his chair, facing the girl. His knees were crossed. He seemed at ease, relaxed. Yet a slim foot in its well-made boot swung gently to and fro. And when Parthy made one of her sudden moves, as was her jerky habit, or when she coughed raspingly by way of emphasizing her presence, he could be felt, rather than seen, to tighten in all his nerves and muscles, and the idly swinging foot took a clonic leap.
The words they spoke with their lips and the words they spoke with their eyes were absurdly at variance.
“Have you really been in Paris, Mr. Ravenal! How I should love to see it!” (How handsome you are, sitting there like that. I really don’t care anything about Paris. I only care about you.)
“No doubt you will, some day, Miss Magnolia.” (You darling! How I should like to take you there. How I should like to take you in my arms.)
“Oh, I’ve never even seen Chicago. Only these river towns.” (I love the way your hair grows away from your temples in that clean line. I want to put my finger on it, and stroke it. My dear.)
“A sordid kind of city. Crude. Though it has some pleasant aspects. New York——” (What do I care if that old tabby is sitting there! What’s to prevent me from getting up and kissing you a long long while on your lovely pomegranate mouth.)
Lowering, inflexible, sat Parthy. “She’ll soon enough tire of that sort of popinjay talk,” she told herself. She saw the bland and almost vacuous expression on the countenance of the young man, and being ignorant of the fact that he was famous from St. Louis to Chicago for his perfect poker face, was equally ignorant of the tides that were seething and roaring within him now.
They were prisoners on this boat; together, yet miles apart. Guarded, watched. They had their scenes together on the stage. These were only aggravations. The rather high planes of Magnolia’s cheek-bones began to show a trifle too flat. Ravenal, as he walked along the grass-grown dusty streets of this or that little river town, switched viciously at weed and flower stalks with the slim malacca cane.
They hit upon a pathetic little scheme whereby they might occasionally, if lucky, steal the ecstasy of a good-night kiss. After the performance he would stroll carelessly out to the stern where stood the settling barrel. Ostensibly he was taking a bedtime drink of water. Magnolia was, if possible, to meet him there for a brief and perilous moment. It was rarely accomplished. The signal to him was the slamming of the screen door. But often the screen door slammed as he stood there, a tense quivering figure in the velvet dark of the Southern night, and it was Frank, or Mrs. Soaper, or Mis’ Means, or puny Mr. Means, coughing his bronchial wheeze. Crack! went the screen door. Disappointment. Often he sloshed down whole gallons of river water before she came—if she came at all.
He had managed to save almost a hundred dollars. He was restless, irritable. Except for a mild pinochle game now and then with the men of the company, he had not touched a card in weeks. If he could get into a real game, somehow; manage a sweepstakes. Chicago. St. Louis, even. These little rotten river towns. No chance here. If he could with luck get together enough to take her away with him. Away from the old hell-cat, and this tub, and these damned eternal rivers. God, but he was sick of them!
They were playing the Ohio River—Paducah, Kentucky. He found himself seated at mid-afternoon round a table in the back room of a waterfront saloon. What time is it? Five. Plenty of time. Just for that raise you five. A few hundred dollars would do it. Six o’clock. Seven. Seven-thirty. Eight. Half-past—Who said half-past! Ralph in the doorway. Can’t be! Been looking everywhere for you. This’s a fine way . . . Come on outa here you. . . . Christ! . . . Ten dollars in his pocket. The curtain up at eight. Out, the shouts of the men echoing in his ears. Down to the landing. A frantic company, Andy clawing at his whiskers. Magnolia in tears, Parthy grim but triumphant, Frank made up to go on in Ravenal’s part.
He dashed before the curtain, raised his shaking hand to quiet the cat-calling angry audience.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I ask your patience. There has been an unfortunate but unavoidable delay. The curtain will rise in exactly five minutes. In the name of the management I wish to offer you all apologies. We hope, by our performance, to make up for the inconvenience you have suffered. I thank you.” A wave of his hand.
The band.
Parthy in the wings. “Well, Captain Hawks, I guess this settles it. Maybe you’ll listen to your wife, after this. In a saloon—that’s where he was—gambling. If Ralph hadn’t found him—a pretty kettle of fish. Years building up a reputation on the rivers and then along comes a soft-soaping murdering gambler . . .”
Ravenal had got into his costume with the celerity of a fireman, and together he and Magnolia were giving a performance that was notable for its tempo and a certain vibratory quality. The drama that unrolled itself before the Paducah gaze was as nothing compared to the one that was being secretly enacted.
Between the lines of her part she whispered between immovable lips: “Oh, Gay, why did you do it?”
A wait, perhaps, of ten minutes before the business of the play brought him back within whispering distance of her.
“Money” (very difficult to whisper without moving the lips. It really emerged, “Uh-ney,” but she understood). “For you. Marry you. Take you away.”
All this while the lines of the play went on. When they stood close together it was fairly easy.
Magnolia (in the play): What! Have all your friends deserted you! (Mama’ll make Andy send you away.)
Ravenal: No, but friendship is too cold a passion to stir my heart now. (Will you come with me?)
Magnolia: Oh, give me a friend in preference to a sweetheart. (But how can I?)
Ravenal: My dear Miss Brown—Miss Lucy—— (Marry me).
Magnolia: Oh, please don’t call me Miss Brown. (When?)
Ravenal: Lucy! (Where do we play to-morrow? Marry me there.)
Magnolia: Defender of the fatherless! (Metropolis. I’m frightened.)
Ravenal: Will you be a poor man’s bride? (Darling!)
For fear of arousing suspicion, she did not dare put on her best dress in which to be married. One’s best dress does not escape the eye of a Parthy at ten o’clock in the morning, when the landing is Metropolis. With a sigh Magnolia donned her second best—the reseda sateen, basqued, its overskirt caught up coquettishly at the side. She determined on her Milan hat trimmed with the grosgrain ribbon and pink roses. After all, Parthy or no Parthy, if one has a hat with pink roses, the time to wear it is at one’s wedding, or never.
Ravenal vanished beyond the river bank immediately after breakfast next day; a meal which he had eaten in haste and in silence. He did not, the general opinion ran, look as crushed as his misdemeanour warranted. He had, after all, been guilty of the crime of crimes in the theatre, be it a Texas tent show or an all-star production on Broadway; he had held up the performance. For once the Cotton Blossom troupe felt that Mrs. Hawks’ bristling attitude was justified. All through the breakfast hour the stern ribbon bow on her breakfast cap had quivered like a seismographic needle registering the degree of her inward upheaval.
“I think,” said Magnolia, drinking her coffee in very small sips, and eating nothing, “I’ll just go to town and match the ribbon on my grosgrain striped silk——”
“You’ll do nothing of the kind, miss, and so I tell you.”
“But, Mama, why? You’d think I was a child instead of a——”
“You are, and no more. I can’t go with you. So you’ll stop at home.”
“But Mis’ Means is going with me. I promised her I’d go. She wants to get some ointment for Mr. Means’ chest. And a yard of elastic. And half a dozen oranges. . . . Papa, don’t you think it’s unreasonable to make me suffer just because everybody’s in a bad temper this morning? I’m sure I haven’t done anything. I’m sure I——”
Captain Andy clawed his whiskers in a frenzy. “Don’t come to me with your yards of elastic and your oranges. God A’mighty!” He rushed off, a distraught little figure, as well he might be after a wretched night during which Mrs. Hawks had out-caudled Mrs. Caudle. When finally he had dropped off to sleep to the sound of the monotonously nagging voice, it was to dream of murderous gamblers abducting Magnolia who always turned out to be Parthy.
In her second best sateen and the Milan with the pink roses Magnolia went off to town at a pace that rather inconvenienced the short-breathed Mis’ Means.
“What’s your hurry!” wheezed that lady, puffing up the steep cinder path to the levee.
“We’re late.”
“Late! Late for what? Nothing to do all day till four, far’s I know.”
“Oh, I just meant—uh—I mean we started kind of late——” her voice trailed off, lamely.
Fifteen minutes later Mis’ Means stood in indecision before a counter crawling with unwound bolts of elastic that twined all about her like garter snakes. The little general store smelled of old apples and broom straw and kerosene and bacon and potatoes and burlap and mice. Sixteen minutes later she turned to ask Magnolia’s advice. White elastic half an inch wide? Black elastic three-quarters of an inch wide? Magnolia had vanished from her side. Mis’ Means peered through the dimness of the fusty little shop. Magnolia! White elastic in one hand, black in the other, Mis’ Means scurried to the door. Magnolia had gone.
Magnolia had gone to be married in her second best dress and her hat with the pink roses. She flew down the street. Mis’ Means certainly could have achieved no such gait; much less could she have bettered it to the extent of overtaking Magnolia. Magnolia made such speed that when her waiting bridegroom, leaning against the white picket fence in front of the minister’s house next the church, espied her and came swiftly to meet her, she was so breathless a bride that he could make nothing out of her panted—“Elastic . . . Mis’ Means . . . ran away . . .”
She leaned against the picket fence to catch her breath, a lovely flushed figure, and not a little frightened. And though it was early April with Easter just gone, there was a dogwood in bridal bloom in the minister’s front yard, and a magnolia as well. And along the inside of the picket fence tulips and jonquils lifted their radiant heads. She looked at Gaylord Ravenal then and smiled her wide and gorgeous smile. “Let’s go,” she said, “and be married. I’ve caught my breath.”
“All right,” said Ravenal. Then he took from his pocket the diamond ring that was much too large for her. “Let’s be engaged first, while we go up the path.” And slipped it on her finger.
“Why, Gay! It’s a diamond! Look what the sun does to it! Gay!”
“That’s nothing compared to what the sun does to you,” he said; and leaned toward her.
“Right at noon, in the minister’s front yard!”
“I know. But I’ve had only those few moments in the dark by the settling barrel—it’s been terrible.”
The minister’s wife opened the door. She looked at the two.
“I saw you from the parlour window. We were wondering—I thought maybe you’d like to be married in the church. The Easter decorations are still up. It looks lovely, all palms and lilies and smilax, too, from down South, sent up. The altar’s banked with it. Mr. Seldon’s gone there.”
“Oh, I’d love to be married in church. Oh, Gay, I’d love to be married in church.”
The minister’s wife smoothed the front of her dress with one hand, and the back of her hair with the other, and, having made these preparations for the rôle of bridal attendant, conducted them to the little flower-banked church next door.
Magnolia never did remember very clearly the brief ceremony that followed. There were Easter lilies—whole rows of them—and palms and smilax, as the minister’s wife had said. And the sun shone, picture-book fashion, through the crude yellows and blues and scarlets of the windows. And there was the Reverend Something-or-other Seldon, saying solemn words. But these things, strangely enough, seemed unimportant. Two little pig-tailed girls, passing by from school, had seen them enter the church and had tiptoed in, scenting a wedding. Now they were up in the choir loft, tittering hysterically. Magnolia could hear them above the Reverend Seldon’s intonings. In sickness and in health—tee-hee-hee—for richer, for poorer—tee-hee-hee—for better, for worse—tee-hee-hee.
They were kneeling. Ravenal was wearing his elegantly sharp-pointed shoes. As he knelt his heels began to describe an arc—small at first, then wider and wider as he trembled more and more, until, at the end, they were all but striking the floor from side to side. Outwardly Magnolia was the bride of tradition, calm and pale.
. . . pronounce you man and wife.
Ravenal had a ten-dollar bill—that last ten-dollar bill—all neatly folded in his waistcoat pocket. This he now transferred to the Reverend Seldon’s somewhat surprised palm.
“And,” the minister’s wife was saying, “while it isn’t much—we’re church mice, you see—you’re welcome to it, and we’d be happy to have you take your wedding dinner with us. Veal loaf, I’m afraid, and butter beets——”
So Magnolia Ravenal was married in church, as proper as could be. And had her wedding dinner with the minister vis-à-vis. And when she came out of the church, the two little giggling girls, rather bold and rather frightened, but romantically stirred, pelted her with flowers. Pelted may be rather an exaggeration, because one threw a jonquil at her, and one a tulip, and both missed her. But it helped, enormously. They went to the minister’s house and ate veal loaf and buttered beets and bread pudding, or ambrosia or whatever it was. And so they lived h—— and so they lived . . . ever after.
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