“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).