“God help me,” muttered Aspel, in a low husky voice, “I’ve fallen very low!”
“Ay,” responded Bones, almost savagely, “very low.”
Aspel was too much depressed to regard the tone. The waiter stood beside them, expectant. “Two pints of beer,” said Bones,—“ginger-beer,” he added, quickly.
“Yessir.”
The waiter would have said “Yessir” to an order for two pints of prussic acid, if that had been an article in his line. It was all one to him, so long as it was paid for. Men and women might drink and die; they might come and go; they might go and not come—others would come if they didn’t,—but he would go on, like the brook, “for ever,” supplying the terrible demand.
As the ginger-beer was being poured out the door opened, and a man with a pack on his back entered. Setting down the pack, he wiped his heated brow and looked round. He was a mild, benignant-looking man, with a thin face.
Opening his box, he said in a loud voice to the assembled company, “Who will buy a Bible for sixpence?”
There was an immediate hush in the room. After a few seconds a half-drunk man, with a black eye, said— “We don’t want no Bibles ’ere. We’ve got plenty of ’em at ’ome. Bibles is only for Sundays.”
“Don’t people die on Mondays and Saturdays?” said the colporteur, for such he was. “It would be a bad job if we could only have the Bible on Sundays. God’s Word says, ‘To-day if ye will hear His voice, harden not your hearts.’ ‘Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.’ ‘Now is the accepted time, now is the day of salvation.’ It says the same on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and every day of the week.”
“That’s all right enough, old fellow,” said another man, “but a public is not the right place to bring a Bible into.”