The Rose in the Ring Part 49

"Dearest, I want you to be my wife. You urge me to think in time.

Haven't I thought it all out? What more is there for me to think about, save my love for you? You are not presenting new conditions to me, sweetheart. They are old ones. I do not intend that either of us shall sail under false colors. When you go to Jenison Hall as my wife, it shall also be as the daughter of Thomas Braddock, the showman."

"But, David, he may have fallen so low--he may have sunk to the very lowest--oh, you must understand. We have heard nothing from him. We don't know where he is, nor what his life has been. Suppose--oh, I can't bear to think of it."

He put his hands on her cheeks and turned her face so that he could look squarely into her eyes. He saw the trouble there, the agony of doubt.

"Look at me, Christine," he said gently. The light in his eyes held her. "It doesn't matter what he was, what he is or what he may become.

I love you, as I have always loved you. You are going to be my wife.

That is the end of it all."

His heart was sinking, however, under the weight of the thing he knew, the thing she was yet to know. He would have given all he possessed in the world for the power to shield her from the blow that was yet to fall.

There came swiftly to mind the hazy, indistinct interior of a dressing-tent, with its mysterious lights and strange people, just as it had appeared to him on that first, never-to-be-forgotten night. He felt himself again emerging from that state of insensibility to look upon the queer, unfamiliar things that were to become quite real to him. And out of the phantasmalian group of objects there grew a single slim, well-remembered figure in red, to dazzle him with her strange, unexpected beauty, and to soothe him with an unspoken faith that began then and had not yet faltered in her lovely eyes. She had given him food. She had said he was no thief. It all came back to him. He had looked upon her as an angel then--a strange, unfamiliar angel in the garb she wore, but an angel, just the same.

Now he knew that love began with the first glimpse he had of her. It was as if she had been revealed to him in a vision. His mind swept along over the rough days that followed. He saw her again in the ring, in the dressing-tent--everywhere. Then there was that night under the grocer's awning--that sweetest of all nights in his life!

And now she was here, with him again, but amidst vastly different surroundings. She was here, and she would need him now as he had needed her then. It was for him now to present himself as the bulwark between her and the fickle, disdainful world of which she had become a part.

She was no longer the self-reliant, petted creature of the circus, where environment and adversity formed a training-school for disaster, but a delicate, refined flower set out in a new soil to thrive or wither as the winds of prejudice blow. In the other days she could have laughed with glee at the vagaries of that self-same wind, but now, ah, now it was different. She was not Little Starbright.

He drew her closer. She trembled in the clasp of his arms. Her firm, full young breast rose and fell in quick response to the driving heart-beats. Again his thoughts shot back to the prophetic, perfect figure of the girl at fifteen. He fought off a certain delicious, overpowering intoxication, and forced himself to a bewildered contemplation of her present powers of resistance to the hard problems of life. She was strong of body, strong of heart, strong of spirit, but was she strongly fortified with the endurance that must stand unshaken through a period of sorrow and shame and--disgrace?

Again he looked into her half-closed eyes. He saw there the serene integrity of Mary Braddock; the light of that woman's character was strongly entrenched in the soul of Christine Braddock. He experienced a sudden sense of relief, of comfort. She was made of the flesh and spirit that endures. Product was she of Thomas Braddock in his physically honest days, and of Mary, his wife, in whose veins flowed the strain of a refinement elementally so pure that the bitterest things in life had proved incapable of destroying a single drop of its sweetness.

"What are you thinking of, David?" she asked, impressed by the look in his eyes and the unconscious nodding of his head.

"Of you," he said, catching himself up quickly. "Always of you, dearest."

"You were thinking of what I said to you a moment ago," she said steadily.

"Yes," he agreed, "and of what you said to me five years ago."

Soon afterward he prepared to depart. She ran upstairs to tell her mother that he wanted to see her. She had kissed him good night. He did not see her again. Later on, she stood straight and tense, in the center of her bedroom floor, her hands to her breast, waiting for her mother's return. Vaguely she felt that something harsh and bitter was to be made known to her before she slept that night.

In lowered tones David Jenison was saying to Mary Braddock: "She must be told everything to-night. It isn't safe to put it off. She is strong and she knows that I am staunch. Nothing else should matter. We don't know what to-morrow may bring, but she must be as fully prepared for the worst as we are. It isn't fair to her. Tell her everything."

"Yes," she said steadily. "And you will try to find him to-night?"

"I will," he said.

CHAPTER VI

DOOR-STEPS

David hurried off toward the car-line, bent on reaching Joey's home before that worthy retired for the night.

At the top of a flight of stone steps leading to the doors of an imposing mansion across the street from the Portman home a motionless figure sat, as bleak as the shadows in which it was shrouded. Like a malevolent gargoyle it glowered out upon the deserted street; a tense, immovable chin rested in a pair of clenched hands, knees supporting the elbows. This desolate, forbidding figure had been there for an hour or more--ever since Christine's return from the concert. Not once were the burning eyes removed from the lighted windows across the way. At last, long after the footsteps of the anxious Virginian had died away in the night, and the lights were extinguished in the house opposite, the silent watcher moved for the first time. Slowly he came to his feet, his eyes still upon the solitary window in which a light had lingered long after all the others were gone.

"Well, they're through discussing me," muttered Tom Braddock, thinking aloud. Shivering, as if from a mighty chill, although the night was warm, he stalked down from his perch and went swiftly up the street, a gaunt, broad-shouldered figure whose step seemed to suggest purpose more than stealth.

As he slunk past the approach to a bas.e.m.e.nt hard-by, a stealthy figure slipped out from the recess and kept pace with him, not twenty feet behind. A block farther up the street this second watcher quickened his pace. He came alongside the man ahead.

"h.e.l.lo, Brad," fell upon the ears of the stalked. He betrayed no surprise, no sign of alarm. He did not check his pace, nor look around.

"Confound you, d.i.c.k," he said, as if p.r.o.nouncing sentence, "if you don't quit d.o.g.g.i.ng me like this I'll kill you, so help me G.o.d."

"You might have known I'd be somewhere around," said the other quietly.

They were now side by side, gaunt, slouching figures, both of them.

"I thought I'd given you the slip."

"Umph," was the expressive comment.

"What did you follow me over here to-night for?" demanded Braddock fiercely, after thirty steps.

"You know why, Brad. Don't ask."

"This is my affair," went on the big man. "I was doing no harm, sitting across there. Can't a man sneak off for a single look at his own child--in the dark, at that--without being hounded by--Say, you must stop d.o.g.g.i.ng me, d' you hear? I'm not a rat. I'm a human being. I've got feelings. I wanted to have a look at her. She's my girl and--"

"Not so loud, Brad. Remember who you are with. You are in bad company, old man. Don't draw attention to the fact. Take a word of advice from me. Keep away from that house. Don't--"

"I don't want to hear anything more out of you," grated Braddock. "I know what I'm doing. I'm living up to my promise, ain't I? Didn't I say I'd see Mary before I--Say," he broke off incontinently, his thoughts leaping backward, "that was my girl that said good night to the swells back there--mine! Did you see how prettily she was dressed? Did you hear how sweet her voice was? I--I--" Something came up in the man's throat to cut off the words; and a long silence fell between them.

Not until they were turning into Fourth Avenue did d.i.c.k Cronk speak again. Somehow he felt the emotion that struggled in the breast of the man beside him. For the first time in his life he was sorry for him.

"Where are you going now, Tom?" he asked, knowing full well what the spiritless answer would be.

"To that h.e.l.l-hole of a place you call home," said Braddock. d.i.c.k slipped his hand through the other's arm; they turned oft into one of the cross streets, wending their way through the sodden community, one with his head erect, the other with his chin on his breast, his hands in his coat pockets.

Half an hour later a cab stopped at a corner not far from a Pell Street intersection. Two men got down and picked their way through the vile street, searching out the house numbers as they progressed. They pa.s.sed the all-night dives and brothels, whence came the sounds of unrestrained and unrefined revelry, and came at last to a spot beneath a huge wooden boot that hung suspended above the door of the most unholy structure in the narrow street. A man in his shirt sleeves sat back in the shadow of the tumbledown stoop, smoking a pipe. At his left a narrow, black pa.s.sage led down between two squalid buildings, one of which was dark, the other lighted so that the vicious revelers within might see and be seen.

The uncertain, timorous actions of the strangers in Thieves' Alley brought a fantastic smile to the lips of the smoker. He watched them as they looked up at the boot and compared notes in rather subdued tones.

"This must be the place," said one of the men. There was no mistaking the note of disgust in his voice.

"Looking for some one, gents?" demanded the smoker, without rising from the stool on which he sat leaning against the wall.

"Is this No. 24--h.e.l.lo! It's d.i.c.k!"

"Ain't you afraid to be seen down here, Joey?" asked the man on the stool, chuckling.

"It's worth an honest man's life to be seen 'ere," said Joey Noakes, in hushed tones. "G.o.d 'elp 'im as can't 'elp 'isself if he ever strolls in 'ere unawares."

"It's rather late in the night for any one to be about," said d.i.c.k Cronk. "Still, I've been expecting you, gents. That's why I'm sitting out here, takin' things easy--and makin' things easy for you. If you don't mind I'll keep my seat, David. It ain't wise to be seen hobn.o.bbin' with swell gents at this time o' night--in h.e.l.l's Kitchen particularly. I know what you're here for. _He's_ back there asleep.

Don't worry. I've got him safely sidetracked."

He jerked his thumb over his shoulder to indicate the narrow pa.s.sage.