The Rose in the Ring

by George Barr McCutcheon

The rainy weather continued and business got worse and worse. There was an air of downright gloom about the circus. Men, women and children were in the "dumps," a most unnatural condition to exist among these whilom, light-hearted adventurers. When they lifted up their heads, it was to deliver continuous anathemas to the leaden skies; when they allowed them to droop, it was to curse the soggy earth.

The new clown saw but little of Mrs. Braddock and Christine. Braddock's failure to extract money from him made that worthy so disagreeable that his wife and daughter were in mortal terror of his threats to turn the boy adrift if he caught them "coddling" him.

David's close associates were the Noakeses, the contortionist and two or three rather engaging acrobats. As for the women of the company, he had but little to do with them, except in the most perfunctory way. He was always polite, gallant and agreeable, and they made much over him when the opportunity presented itself. They were warm-hearted and demonstrative, sometimes to such an exaggerated degree that he was embarrassed. He was some time in getting accustomed to their effusive friendliness; it dawned on him at last that they were not graceless, flippant creatures, but big-hearted, honest women, in whom tradition had planted the value of virtue. He was not long in forming an unqualified respect for them; it was not necessary for Joey Grinaldi to tell him over and over again that they were good women.

If Christine saw him while she was in the ring, David was never able to determine the fact for himself. He tried to catch her eye a hundred times a day; he looked for a single smile that he might have claimed for his own. Once he caught her in his arms when she stumbled after leaping from the horse at the end of her act. It was very gracefully done on his part. She whispered "Thank you," but did not smile, and therein he was exalted. There was no day in which he failed to perform some simple act of gallantry for her and Mrs. Braddock, always with an unobtrusive modesty that pleased them. Sometimes he left spring flowers for them; on other occasions he bought sweetmeats and pastry in the towns and smuggled them into their hands, not without a conscious glow of embarrassment and guilt. He was ever ready to seize upon the slightest excuse to be of service to them, despite the fact that they resolutely held aloof from him. The entire company of performers understood the situation and cultivated a rather malicious delight in abetting his clandestine courtesies.

It was no other than the queen of equestrians, Mademoiselle Denise (in reality an Irish woman with three children who attended school and a husband who never had attended one, although he was an exceptionally brilliant man when it came to head balancing)—it was Denise who, one rainy evening, brought Christine and David together between performances in a most satisfying manner by taking the former to visit a fortune-teller whose home was quite a distance from the show lot, first having sent David there on a perfectly plausible pretext. The young people met on the sidewalk in front of the house bearing the number Mademoiselle Denise had given to David. To say that he was surprised at seeing Christine under the same umbrella with the older woman would be putting it very tamely; to add that both of them were shy and uneasy is certainly superfluous. Moreover, when I say that David was obliged to inform Mademoiselle Denise that she had given him the wrong number; that a hod-carrier instead of a sorceress dwelt within,—when I say this, you may have an idea that there was no fortune-teller in the beginning. And then, when the head-balancing husband suddenly appeared and walked off with Denise, leaving the embarrassed youngsters to follow at any pace they chose, you may be quite certain that there was a conspiracy afoot.

Christine walked demurely beside David, under a rigid umbrella. They were seven blocks from the circus lot; it was quite dark and drizzly. For the first two blocks they had nothing to say to each other, except to venture the information that it was raining. In the second block, a very lonely stretch indeed, David, whose eyes had not left the backs of the wily couple ahead, regained his composure and with it his natural gallantry.

"Perhaps you had better take my arm, Miss—Miss Christine," he said stiffly.

She took it, rather awkwardly perhaps but very resolutely.

"I thought I heard something in the bushes back there," she said in extenuation.

"It was the wind," he vouchsafed, but his thoughts went at once to Blake. Involuntarily he looked over his shoulder and quickened his pace. She felt his arm stiffen.