He snapped his fingers in Gorham's face, giving the high silk hat, which was always precariously perched on its owner's head, a fillip that sent it rolling on the floor among the crowd.
Gorham's arrogant and peremptory manners made him a very unpopular man. Nevertheless it might have been an accident—although it looked singularly like design—that the hat was in a moment trampled into a shapeless wreck by twoscore sturdy feet.
Even when under no provocation, he showed in every gesture how vehement and impulsive was his nature. Now, insulted in his own theatre, he shook off the slight restraints which he acknowledged. It suited his humor to consider the "first player's" demonstration as a blow. He looked positively tigerish as he sprung upon the actor. The energy of his wrath gave much "power to his elbow;" the blows that fell from his clenched fist had a wonderfully resonant compact sound,—it made Ned wince to think that a man's head and face received them. The "first player" could do little to defend himself. The crowd, that always turns to the successful side, lifted not a finger to aid or protect him.
And high above all the tumult the "Player King," putting on now his robes of state, and now his tinsel crown, daubing his grave anxious face with red and white, repeated his "lines" heedless of the commotion.
In less time than it can be told, the actor, fearfully beaten, was partly dragged and partly kicked to the back window, and there was thrust bodily forth. A heavy thud outside told of a heavy fall.
Manager Gorham turned from the window, wiping the blood from his hands upon his handkerchief, and looking about in sarcastic triumph at the crowd that had trampled upon his hat. Ned was astonished to observe that these men seemed to have forgotten their share in that little transaction, for several who had been most demonstrative in that expression of contempt spoke to Gorham now with earnest respectfulness, and in grave reprehension of the poor wretch whose sore bones lay out on the flagging in the alley. The manager gave a short, fierce, snort-like response, and as he turned abruptly he almost ran over Ned.
"Get out of my way, boy, or I'll kill you!" he exclaimed irritably.
Ned, roused to a realization of the situation, shrank back among the huge flats. It was only the general excitement which prevented his discovery. Gorham must have thought him one of the call-boys. Ned stole swiftly away from shadow to shadow, from flat to flat, till he reached his old retreat. He sprang into the chair and sat there panting, feeling much like a mouse regaining its hole after a perilous but successful tour of the pantry.
The stage was again before him, all glitter and splendor. The play of Hamlet—that subtlest delineation of the subtlest character ever conceived by the mind of man—was once more in its triumphal progress. The audience hung breathless on every word. Ned cared now for none of it. He was discouraged,—cast down. He was still young and ingenuous enough to be grieved by those contemptible phases of human nature exhibited in the manager, when he so brutally proved himself the master in his own house, in the truckling spirit of the crowd, in the degradation and coarse vice of the actor, the forlorn "first player." As to himself—he too was much to blame. He was pierced with a full realization of the wickedness of his presence here.
"My mother would call it stealin', an' nothin' shorter," he said, remembering her homely, direct phrase.