Part 49 (1/2)

”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 s.h.i.+eld 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. s.h.i.+vering, 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.