At the Sign of the Silver Flagon. Farjeon Benjamin Leopold

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СКАЧАТЬ twice, thrice, and would have insisted on it again, but that the poor girl stood before them with panting bosom, like a deer at its last gasp, and appealed to them as prettily as her exhaustion would allow her to do. The gold-diggers stood up, waved their billycock hats, and cheered her as she had never been cheered before; and one threw a crown-piece on the stage, and another cried, "I can beat that, mate!" and threw a sovereign. Then it commenced to rain silver and gold, and the girl stood aside at the wings, half frightened at the shower. It amounted to no less than eleven pounds, which she gathered up in her gauze dress and walked off with, kissing her hand and smiling bewitchingly on the generous givers, who felt themselves well paid for their liberality.

      (Before the week was out this dancing and singing Chambermaid had forty-two distinct offers of marriage, and the other two ladies of the company each about half as many.)

      Then came the Tragedian's chance in the melodrama, and good use did he make of it. He emulated Bottom in his roaring, and the louder he roared the louder the audience cheered. But decidedly the greatest success of the night was achieved by the smallest member of the company, and in an unexpected way. If any person was to be thanked for it, it was the Acting-manager, Mr. Hart.

      It occurred in this wise: The Leading Lady dropped a few words, which were construed into an objection to the baby receiving its one-thirty-sixth share of the receipts. The mother (who was the First Old Woman of the company) heard them, and spoke to Mr. Hart with tears in her eyes. The singing Chambermaid stood near.

      "The spiteful thing!" she exclaimed.

      "Never mind," said Mr. Hart, "we will get over the difficulty; the baby shall appear in the last piece."

      The mother in astonishment said that was impossible.

      "It is quite possible," answered Mr. Hart, "and shall be done."

      "But she'll be asleep, the darling!" exclaimed the mother.

      "All the better," was the answer. "She'll have nothing to say. You play in the piece. Now attend to my instructions;" and he forthwith gave them to her.

      In the drama, the mother, who really played the part of a mother, had to sit at a table for five or six minutes sewing, and speaking perhaps a dozen words, while the action of the piece was being carried on by two characters who occupied the front of the stage. Mr. Hart, in this scene, placed the cradle on the stage, with the baby in it. When the mother went to her seat at the table, she took the baby from the cradle on to her lap.

      "Why, it's a real baby!" cried the gold-diggers, and a buzz of delight ran through the house.

      Suddenly the baby awoke, opened her eyes and stared with all her might at the audience, whose attention was now entirely fixed upon the movements of the pretty little thing. The mother raised her to her feet on her lap, and the child, pleased with the light and glitter of the scene, clapped her little hands-one of her pretty tricks-while her face broke out into smiles and dimples. This was enough for the gold-diggers; they laughed, they clapped their hands, they applauded, they cried:

      "Bravo, young un! Bravo!"

      As though the baby had performed the most marvellous feats; and when the mother, carried away by her feelings, tossed her baby in the air, who fell into her arms crowing and laughing, this little touch of nature roused the audience to a pitch of the wildest enthusiasm. They called for three cheers for the baby, and three for the mother, and three more on the top of those, and some of the men left money at the bars of the Rose, Shamrock, and Thistle, to buy sweets and cakes for the youngster.

      "A great success," remarked Mr. Hart; "no one can say now that she is not entitled to her share. It will be as well to repeat baby every evening until further notice. We will make a feature of baby. She will draw."

      Baby did "draw," and the performances went on bravely. Full houses every night. At the end of the week, after paying expenses, there were nearly six hundred pounds to divide. The money was shared on the Saturday night, after the performance. Mr. Hart, with his share tightly clasped in his hand walked into his bedroom and locked the door. Then he lit a candle, and out of a small trunk took a little packet of letters and a portrait. He knelt by the bed, and read the letters with slow delight; they were short, and the earlier ones were written in a large straggling hand. He opened the portrait-case, and gazed lovingly on the picture of a beautiful girl; a child, with laughing hazel eyes and light curls. He kissed it again and again; and taking from his share of the money he had received a sum barely sufficient for his necessities, he deposited the balance in a safe corner of the trunk.

      "For you, my darling, for you," he murmured, speaking to the pretty picture before him. "God preserve and bless you, and make your life happy!"

      Tears came into his eyes, and rolled down his cheeks; and sweet remembrance brought his darling into his arms, where she lay as she had lain on the last day he saw her, seven years ago.

      "My darling must be almost a woman now," he mused, with a yearning heart.

      And so he knelt and dreamed, and garlanded his heart's treasure with loving thoughts. Many a rough hard life is in this way sweetened and purified.

      CHAPTER IV

      MR. HART SEARCHES FOR A GOLDEN REEF

      Gold was first discovered in the alluvial soil in the gullies, a few feet beneath the surface. In some cases the metal was picked up on the surface, and tracked into the bowels of the earth. Sometimes the gold gutter ran across great plains, which soon were riddled with holes, and covered with hillocks of pipe-clay soil; sometimes it ran into hillsides, where the miners tracked it, until the sinking became too deep for profitable labour, or until the "lead," as it is called, was lost. Some of the richest patches of gold that had been found in the colony were found here and there in Silver Creek. In Sailors' Gully, for instance, there was a famous claim, where one gold lead crossed another; the fortunate men who happened to light on this rare junction were runaway sailors, and they made no secret of the fact that they washed fourteen hundred ounces of gold out of twelve buckets of earth in one day. In the same week, the man who was working at the windlass (there were only two partners in this concern) began to turn the handle, and found that the weight at the other end of the rope was greater than he anticipated. He knew that it was only a bucket of earth he was winding up, for he heard it bump against the sides of the shaft. When he caught sight of the bucket he almost let the handle of the windlass slip from him in his excitement. It was not earth he was hauling up, it was gold; and it proved to be the richest bucket of earth that was ever found in Silver Creek. It yielded thirteen hundred ounces of the precious metal; no less. The fortunate sailors celebrated the occasion, decorated the shaft with as many flags as they could get together, fired off their revolvers for an hour as rapidly as they could load them, bought up all the grog in the gully, and invited all the diggers round about to join them in drinking it. That bucket of gold and dirt was almost the death of them, for the carouse was a wild one; but they recovered themselves in a day or two, and set to work again soberly and sensibly, and retired, after ten weeks' labour, with a fortune of seventeen thousand pounds between them.

      After a time men began to look for gold in the hills. It was settled years ago by the miners that all the gold that was found in the gullies was washed down from the ranges. Before many days had passed, quartz reefs were found with great lumps of gold in the stone; and one Saturday the principal gold-broker in Silver Creek displayed in his window a mass of quartz which could not have weighed less than two hundred pounds, and which was literally studded and veined with gold. It was labelled "From Pegleg Reef," so named because it was discovered by a man with a wooden leg. Then commenced a craze, and everybody went mad on quartz. This brings us to a day when Mr. Hart, who, with his company, had now been in Silver Creek for three weeks, winning money and laurels, was walking over the ranges, at some distance from the township, with a short-handled pick over his shoulder, СКАЧАТЬ