‘They that tarry long at the wine; they that go to seek mixed wine.
‘Look not thou upon the wine when it is red, when it giveth its colour in the cup, when it moveth itself aright.
‘At the last—’
But here, poor Spicer, who had risen to his feet, and stood horror-stricken at hearing himself, as he imagined, reproved and threatened for his bibbing propensities through the mouth of a fiend, or even, as his staring eyes took in Billy’s tout ensemble, it might be the Arch Enemy of mankind himself, uttered a shriek and fled, terror lending unwonted speed to his legs, down the gully; whilst Billy, with a wild whoop, descending from his perch, took the flask and what remained of the provisions to the buggy, and drove off into the Bush.
[187]
]Late that night, a weary, footsore traveller entered the principal public-house in Dingo Creek, and began to ask incoherent questions about a buggy and a black-fellow, the latter, he averred, an emissary of Satan, who had led him into the wilderness, and there deserted him—a story that the rough host and his equally rough customers could make neither head nor tail of.
‘It’s a rum go altogether,’ said the former to one of his digger friends, after poor Spicer had retired, nearly dead beat, to his rough-slabbed room, whence he could hear all that went on in the bar.
‘The rummest thing I’ve heard on for some time,’ assented the other. ‘He looks somethin’ like as a parson should look, right enough. But either he’s just off of a rather heavy spree, or else he’s more’n a shingle short. Sez he seen Ole Nick back there in the Bush, an’ the old ’un shook his buggy.’
’Bin on the bust, down at the “Jolly Bushman’s,” I ’spects,’ put in another. ‘You fellers knows as some do see the old chap arter a ’ard bust. As for me, I takes it out in snakes mostly. But there’s my mate, Bill, he allus has cats. I seen him one time a-huntin’ ’em round the tent all night long, arter bein’ on the spree for a week.’
Confidence in the Reverend Spicer was, however, a little restored, when, next morning, the buggy was found intact in the public-house yard; and his confused appearance and rambling statements of the previous night were [188] ]charitably ascribed by the majority to ‘a touch of the sun.’
During the day it was announced throughout the place that the Reverend gentleman would address the inhabitants in the ‘dance-room’ of the public-house, as being the only one available for such a purpose. Figure to yourself a long, low room, on the earthen floor of which tree stumps still stood. At the far end, behind a sort of bar formed by sheets of galvanised iron, supported on trestles, waits, manuscript in hand, still in a rather unsettled state of mind, the Reverend Spicer. The place is dimly lit by flaring candles and slush lamps, and is crowded by an assembly of as mixed nationalities, customs and creeds, as could be found out of, say, Alexandria or Singapore. A strong smell of stale spirits and tobacco smoke pervades everything. All the men, as our curate sees, are armed with a sheath-knife and revolver; and, as he looks, he trembles and handles the address as gingerly as if it were a parcel of dynamite, and liable to explode at any moment, for it is not one of his own pithless compositions, but the work of the Bishop himself, a powerful and emphatic remonstrance—penned in his quiet study at Bishopstowe—against the sinful and dissolute lives of the Dingo Creekers. But, had the frightened curate only known it, the mob, mixed and uncontrolled as it was, would have as soon thought of ill-treating a grasshopper as himself. And, all roughened and uncivilised as were the best of them, there were still men amongst them in whom the mere sight of a clergyman awoke memories long forgotten and buried [189] ]under the combats and toils of life—men who had once ‘looked on better days,’ and whom Sabbath-bells had once ‘knoll’d to church,’ and this portion it was who, after awhile, obtained silence, and set the example of doffing their hats and putting away their pipes.