The crowd was buzzing. It was half-past three. Father Prendy, the old mission priest, who looked like a dusty old piece of furniture from a loft, was peering up the road. The black wicker buggy still made no appearance with the bride.
"Two o'clock's the legal limit for marriages," said Father Prendy. "But praise God, we've half an hour yet."
And he showed his huge watch, which said half-past one, since he had slipped away for a moment to put back the fingers.
The slab-building—hall, school, and church—was now a church, though the oleographs of the Queen and the Prince Consort in Robes still glowed on the walls, and a blackboard stood with its face to the wall, and one of those wire things with coloured beads poked out from behind, and the globe of the world could not be hidden entirely by the eucalyptus boughs.
But it was a church. A table with a white cloth and a crucifix was the altar. Crimson-flowering gum-blossom embowered the walls, the blackboard, the windows, but left the Queen and Prince Consort in full isolation. Forms were ranked on the mud floor, and these forms were densely packed with settlers dressed in all kinds of clothes. It was not only a church, it was a wedding. Just inside the door, like a figure at Madame Tussaud's, sat an elderly creature in greenish evening suit with white waistcoat, and copper-toed boots, waiting apparently for the Last Trump. On the other side was a brown-whiskered man in frock-coat, a grey bell-topper in his hand, leaning balanced on a stick. He was shod in white socks and carpet slippers. Later on this gentleman explained to Jack: "I suffer from corns, and shouldn't be happy in boots."
There was a great murmuring and staring, and shuffling and shifting as Jack and Tom came up, as though one of them was the bride in disguise. The wooden church buzzed like a cocoanut shell. A red-faced man seized Tom's arm as if Tom were a long-lost brother, and Jack was being introduced, shaking the damp, hot, trembling hand of the red-faced man, who was called Paddy.
"It's fair come over me, so ut has!—praise be to the saints an' may the devil run away with them two young termagants! Father Prendy makin' them come to this pass all at onst! For mark my words, in his own mind he's thinkin' the wrong they've done, neither of them speakin' to confess, till he was driven to remark on the girl's unnatural figure. And not a soul in the world, mark you, has seen 'em speak a word to one another for the last year in or out. But she says it's he, an' Denny Mackinnon, he payin', I'll be bound, that black priest of a Father Prendy to come over me an' make me render up my poor innocent Pat to the hussy, in holy matrimony. May the saints fly away with 'em."
He wiped away his sweat, speechless. And Denny Mackinnon, the hussy's father—it could be no other than he—in moth-eaten scarlet coat and overall trousers, and top-boots slashed for his bunions, and forage-cap slashed for his increased head, stood bulging on the other side of the door, compressed in his youthful uniform, and scarlet in the face with the compression. He was a stout man with a black beard and a fixed, fierce, solemn expression. Creator of this agitated occasion, he was almost bursting with wrathful agitation as that hussy of a daughter of his still failed to appear. By his side stood an ancient man, with a long grey beard, anciently clad.
Patrick, the bridegroom to be, lurked near his father. He was a thin, pale, freckled, small-faced youth with broad, brittle shoulders and brittle limbs, who would no doubt, in time, fill out into a burly fellow. As it was, he was agitated and unlovely in a new ready-made suit and a black bomb of a hard hat that wouldn't stay on, and new boots that stank to heaven of improperly dressed kangaroo hide: one of the filthiest of stinks.
Poor Paddy, the father of the bridegroom, was a tall, thin, well set-up man with trembling hands and a face like beetroot, garbed in a blue coat with brass buttons, mole trousers, leggings, and a sideways-leaning top hat. His tie was a flowing red with white spots. His eyes were light blue and wickedly twinkling behind their slight wateriness.