Page:Famous Single Poems (1924).djvu/182

 his cups, he had doted on “Ben Bolt,” and often sang it to the delight of his only child.

“Do you know ‘Ben Bolt?’” asks Trilby of the Three Musketeers of the Brush, after listening without enthusiasm to the “Rosemonde” of Schubert, as beautifully played by Svengali.

“Oh, yes, I know it well,” answers Little Billee. “It’s a very pretty song.”

“I can sing it,” announces Miss O’Ferrall with pride. “Shall I?”

“Oh, certainly, if you will be so kind,” says Little Billee in his best drawing-room manner.

So, gazing up at the ceiling with a sentimental smile, Trilby sings it with an utter absence of tune which stupefies her audience.

“It’s the only song I know,” she explains. “My father used to sing it just like that, when he felt jolly after hot rum and water. It used to make people cry; he used to cry over it himself. I never do.”

And when she has taken herself off, Little Billee sings the song in “his pleasant little throaty English barytone;” and then Svengali and Gecko play it as only those two great artists could, until “their susceptible audience of three was all but crazed with delight and wonder; and the masterful Ben Bolt, and his over-tender Alice, and his too submissive friend, and the old schoolmaster so kind and so true, and the rustic porch and the mill, and the slab of granite so