The Rose in the Ring Part 10

David's heart leaped. He followed the old clown into the open tent, his eyes bright with the eagerness to look once more upon the strange, lovely friend of the night before,--his true guardian angel.

She was standing near the entrance to the main tent, talking with half a dozen of the women performers, all of whom were in street attire. As soon as she saw him she smiled and motioned for him to join the group.

He was not slow to obey the summons. To the amazement of the interested group the young Virginian lifted her hand to his lips. Mrs. Braddock flushed warmly, an exquisite smile of appreciation leaping to her rather sombre eyes.

"You must let me introduce you to these ladies," she said, after a few low words of greeting. "This is Jack Snipe, our new clown," she said, naming for his benefit the riders, the ropewalker, the snake-charmer and the boneless wonder. David was profoundly polite, almost old-fashioned in his acknowledgment of the introduction. The women were suddenly conscious of a new-found glory in themselves. The "boneless wonder" talked of his elegance for weeks, and always without resorting to slang.

"Where is Miss Christine?" asked David, turning to Mrs. Braddock with a shy smile.

She did not answer at once. When she did, it was with palpable uneasiness. "My daughter usually takes her sleep at this time, Dav--Jack."

David's cheek slowly turned red. He remembered what Braddock had said to him.

"You are all very good to me," he murmured, for want of anything better to say. His sensitive heart was thumping quickly, driven by humiliation. She looked steadily into his eyes without speaking and then walked away from the group, directing him to follow. They sat down upon the tumbler's pad, just where they had been seated the night before.

"My husband is hard sometimes, David," she said gently. "It will last for a few days, that is all. We must not aggravate him now. In a little while he will forget that he has--has said certain things. Then, I hope that you and Christine will be good friends. I--I want her to know you well, David. I want her to be with--with some one who is different from the people here. You understand, don't you?"

"Yes," said David, suddenly enlightened. "I know what you mean. I shall be very happy, too."

"Ah, how gently you did that," she cried, a wistful gleam in her dark eyes. "How the blood tells its story! Yes, David, I want her to know you; I want her to--to be with her own kind." Her face flamed with sudden fervor; he was struck by the almost pathetic eagerness that leaped into her eyes, transfiguring them. "I have tried so hard to give her something of what I had myself, David, when I was a girl.

Everything depends on the next year or two. She is thinking for herself now. It is the turning-point. You must know, David, you must see that she is not like the others here."

"She is like you," he said, very simply.

The blood surged once more to her cheeks; her lips parted with the quick breath of joy and grat.i.tude. She thanked him very gently, very gravely. No word was uttered against the man who was Christine's father.

"I prayed last night, David, that you might stay with the show until the end of this season. I am determined that it shall be her last, no matter what it may cost both of us."

"Cost both of us," thought he, and at once knew what she meant. The cost, if necessary, would be the husband and father.

Then she told him, in hurried sentences, that she had watched him in the ring, and that her daughter had come back to her with glowing reports of his composure and cleverness. David's pride, at least, was appeased. She _had_ looked at him, after all, and was interested.

He was struck by the sudden, curious change that came over Mrs.

Braddock's face. She was looking past him toward the entrance to the circus tent. All the color, all the eagerness left her face in a flash; the warmth died out in her big brown eyes and in its stead appeared a look of positive dread and uneasiness--it might have been repugnance.

Her lips grew tense, and he could see that she started ever so slightly, as if in surprise.

He glanced over his shoulder. Thomas Braddock was approaching, his face red with anger and drink. At his side walked a tall, exceedingly well-dressed stranger, who carried his silk hat in his hand and was smiling blandly upon the proprietor's wife.

"Oh, that man again!" he heard her say between her stiff lips. There was a world of loathing in the half-whispered sentence, which was so low that it barely reached his ears. He looked up quickly, and saw her face go darkly red again--the red of humiliation, he could have sworn.

"Go!" she said to David, quietly but firmly.

He turned away, vaguely conscious that the newcomer was more to be feared than Thomas Braddock himself. Instinctively the boy experienced a singular, instantaneous aversion to this immaculate intruder.

"Get out!" he heard Braddock roar after him as he paused at the part.i.tion to look once more at the stranger.

The man was bowing low before the straight, motionless figure of Mary Braddock. Her chin was high in the air, and David could almost have sworn that he saw her nostrils dilate.

From a place beyond the flap in the part.i.tion he surveyed this disturbing visitor.

CHAPTER V

SOMETHING ABOUT THE BRADDOCKS

He was not long in supplying a reason for the sudden antipathy he felt toward this man whom he had never seen before.

A somewhat prolonged study from the security of the dressing-room had the effect of settling the aversion more firmly in his mind. In the first place, the man's face was a peculiarly evil one. His dark eyes were set quite close together under a bulging forehead. His eyebrows were straw-colored, and so thin that they were almost invisible. A broad, flat nose, with spreading nostrils, not unlike that of an Ethiopian, gave to the upper part of his face a sheep-like expression.

His lower lip, thick and blue and loose, protruded with flabby insistence beyond its mate, which was short and straight. The chin receded, but was of surprising length and breadth. His ears sat very low on his head and were ludicrously small. Above them rose a ma.s.sive dome, covered with thick, well-brushed hair of a yellowish hue, parted exactly in the middle. His cheeks were white and flaccid, and there was a fullness in front of the jaw-point that suggested approaching bagginess. He smiled with his lips closed, and broadly at that. The picture was even less alluring than when his face was in repose. In the subdued, gray light of the tent his complexion was singularly colorless; David thought of a very sick man he had once seen.

But this man was apparently in the best of health. He was spare, and his sloping shoulders did not suggest breadth or strength; yet there was that about him which made for force and virility. His hands were long and slim and very white. A huge diamond glittered on one of the fingers of the left hand; another quite as large adorned the bosom of his shirt. It required no clever mind to see that he was not an out-of-doors man. One would say, guessing, that he was thirty six or eight years of age. As a matter of fact, he was fifty-five.

David noticed that he never allowed his gaze to leave the face of Mary Braddock, except to occasionally traverse her figure from crown to foot. The boy's dislike grew to actual resentment. He experienced a fierce desire to rush out and strike the man across the eyes.

He could not hear what they were talking about. Broddock, tipsy as usual, was urging something on her in low, insistent tones. His manner was that of one who espouses a forlorn hope; he argued with the insinuating, doubting earnestness so characteristic of the man who knows that he is operating against his own best interests in the face of one who fully understands the weakness that impels him. Mrs.

Braddock stood before him, cold, pa.s.sive, unconvinced. Her greeting for the newcomer had been most unfriendly. She deliberately turned her back on him, after the first short "good afternoon." As for the stranger, he did not take part in the conversation. He stood close to her elbow, the trace of a smile on his lips.

Suddenly her tense body relaxed. Her chin dropped forward and she nodded her head dejectedly. Braddock's next remark, uttered with considerable gusto, came to David's ears.

"Good!" he said, biting his cigar with approving energy. "We can talk it over there. I think you will see it my way, Mary. You'll see if I'm not right! Come on, Bob. This is no place to talk."

She preceded them without another word, an air of utter weariness characterizing her movements. The stranger smiled his bland, hateful smile. When Braddock, in genial relief, essayed to take his arm, the tall man coldly withdrew himself from the contact, displaying a far from mild aversion to the advances of the tipsy showman. Braddock dropped back, like a cowed dog, permitting the other to pa.s.s through the sidewall ahead of him, a step or two behind the unhappy Mary Braddock on whose back his steady gaze was leveled with unswerving intentness.

David hurried to a rent in the canvas and peered out into the sunlight of the waning day. The stranger had come up beside Mrs. Braddock, talking to her as they crossed the lot in the direction of the street.

She apparently paid no heed to his remarks. Braddock made no effort to keep up with them, but loafed behind, simulating interest in the most conveniently propinquitous of his possessions, with now and then a furtive glance at the couple a half-dozen paces ahead.

David was sorely puzzled and distressed. He knew that something was going cruelly wrong with his friend and supporter, but what it was he could not even venture a guess, knowing so little about the people and conditions attached to his new world.

"So, he's 'ere again, is he?"

He whirled quickly to find Grinaldi peering over his shoulder, his erstwhile merry face as black as a thunder cloud.

"Who is he?" demanded David.

The clown did not answer at once. His eyes were glittering. It was not until the trio pa.s.sed from view beyond a "snack-stand" that he sighed mightily and jammed his hands into his coat pockets, still clenched.

Even then, he stared long at David before replying.

"That man?" he said harshly. "That's Colonel Bob Grand."

"What has he got to do with the show, Mr. Noakes?"

"Call me Joey. Everybody does, my lad." He looked around cautiously. No one was near them. Nevertheless, he lowered his voice. "That's just wot all of us would like to know ourselves, Jacky. He's a race-horse man and a gambler. Oh, don't you get it into your 'ead that he follows the show in _them_ capacities. Not he. He's too big a guy for that. No, sirree. He pinches the dollars by the thousands, that chap does. No ten-dollar rube games for 'im. But I'll tell you all about 'im at supper. There's Ruby waiting for us at the door. I'm 'aving supper brought over 'ere for us three and Casey. He's a nice chap, Casey is.

Brad says you are not to go to the cook-top until we're out of the woods." Before starting off to join his daughter, Grinaldi looked again through the hole in the canvas, muttering a dejected oath.

Ruby Noakes, very pretty and quite demure in a simple frock of brown, without the prevailing bustle and paniers, was directing the contortionist in his efforts to construct a table out of three "blue seats" and a couple of property trunks, or "keesters," as they were called.

"I insist on having a table that I can put my legs under," she said when he argued that the trunks alone would make an "elegant" table. "We can sit on the boxes. Here, dad, you and Jack get the boxes up. The boys will be here with supper in a minute or two. Oh, I say, isn't it going to be fun? Just like a supper party in Delmonico's--only I've never been to one there. Goodness, how I'd love to eat at Delmonico's!"

"You wouldn't like it a bit, Ruby," announced Casey. "You got to understand French to eat what they have there. If you can't understand French, you're sure to eat something that won't agree with you, not bein' able to tell soup from pickled pigs' feet."