The Rose in the Ring

by George Barr McCutcheon

We will forsake David Jenison for the time being. He is well started on his journey to the home of his forefathers, where complete restoration and the newspaper reporters await him. Let the imagination picture the welcome he is to receive; if possible, let it also describe the attitude of the community which had hunted him with dogs and deadly weapons, but which now stood ready to cast itself without reserve at the feet of the boy who had been so cruelly wronged.

Picture Mr. Blake's disgust at learning from David's own lips how he had been outwitted by the circus people, and contrast it with his sincere relief in contemplation of the fact that he had not captured the boy in those days of prejudice.

We leave all these details to the generous intelligence of the reader, for he knows that the heir to Jenison Hall has come unto his own again; and he also knows that in spite of all that can be done to make life bright and cheerful for David, there is still a shadow in the background that turns the world into a bleak and desolate waste for him.

Two weeks passed over his head before he was able to turn away from the bewildering mass of legal requirements and look once more to the West, whither his heart was forever journeying. Not all the excitement that filled the fortnight to overflowing, nor all the homage that came to him, could ease the dull, insistent pain of separation from interests so vital to his young heart.

He stole away one night, accompanied by a single servant—for now he was "lord of the manor" and traveled only as a true gentleman of the South should travel. Half-way to his destination he stopped off to draw from the savings bank the money he had placed there. With this small fortune in his possession he resumed the journey, now closely guarded by old Jeff, who always had been a slave to the Jenisons and would be till he died, Abraham Lincoln to the contrary.

David's constant prayer was that he might not be too late.

He was destined to find many changes in Van Slye's Great and Only Mammoth Shows.

Let us go back to the night after the one which saw David's departure from the show. For two days Thomas Braddock had slunk about the show grounds, morose, ugly, taciturn. He avoided every one except those with whom he was obliged to consult. His wife and daughter caught fleeting glimpses of him; Colonel Grand and the others saw him but little more. He held aloof, brooding over his wrongs, accumulating a vast resentment against the world and all of its inhabitants, obsessed by the single desire to make some one else suffer for the ignominy that had come to him.

Strangely enough, his most bitter resentment was lodged against the wife who had stood by him all these years, through thick and thin, through incessant storm and hardship, with a staunchness that now maddened him, because, down in his heart, he could see no guile in her. She was too good for him; she held herself above him; she made him to feel that he was not of her world—from the beginning. She was loyal because it would have put her in his class if she had lifted her voice in public complaint. He knew that she loathed him; he hated her for the virtue which gave her the right to despise him and yet to remain loyal to him. His sodden, debased soul resented the odious comparison that his own flesh and blood justly could make. There had been bitter moments when this maudlin wretch almost convinced himself that he could rejoice in the discovery that Christine was not of his flesh and blood, that this too virtuous woman was not pure, after all.

His sullen despair brought him to even lower depths. In half-sober moments he began to realize that his daughter feared and despised him. She had come to feel the distinction between her parents, and she had done the perfectly obvious thing in following the instincts of the gentle blood that was in her: she had cast her lot with her mother. He forgot his own aspirations and hopes for her in this bitter hour. He wanted to hurt her, so that she might cry out with him in ugly rage against the smug, serene paragon. If he only could bring Mary to his level, so that Christine might no longer be so arrogantly proud of the blood that came through the Portmans.