On the 24th of December, therefore, late in the afternoon, which is the regulation hour for calling in Australian country society, the visitor being aware that he is expected to stay all night, and not desiring, unless he is very young, to have more than an hour to dispose of before dinner, the gentlemen aforesaid rode up. They had met by appointment and made the expedition together.
‘Fancy this being Christmas Day!’ exclaimed Annabel, as—the time-honoured greetings being uttered—the whole party disposed themselves comfortably around the breakfast-table. ‘And what a lovely fresh morning! Not a hot-wind day, as old Dick said it would be. It makes me shiver when I think of how we were wrapped up this time last year.’
‘Are you certain it is Christmas, Miss Annabel?’ said Fred Churbett; ‘I doubt it, because of the absence of holly and snow, and old women and school children, and waits and the parish beadle—all the belongings of our forefathers. There must be some mistake. The sun is too fast, depend upon it. I must write to the Times.’
‘Old Dick brought a load of scarlet-flowering bushes from the hills yesterday,’ said Rosamond, ‘with which he solemnly decorated his hut and our verandah pillars. He wished to make Andrew a present of a few branches as a peace-offering, but he declined, making some indignant remark about Prelatism or Erastianism, which Dick did not understand.’
At eleven o’clock A.M. a parade of the ‘full strength of the regiment,’ as Effingham phrased it, was ordered. Chairs, with all things proper, and a reading-desk, had been arranged on the south side of the wide verandah.
To this gathering-point the different members of the establishment had been gradually converging, arrayed in garments, which, if varying from the fashion-plates of the day, were neat, suitable, and of perfect cleanliness. Mrs. Evans’s skill as a laundress, which was in the inverse ratio to her mildness of disposition, enabled Dick to appear in white duck trousers and a shirt-front which distanced all rivalry. They contrasted strongly with the unbroken tint of brick-dust red presented by his face and throat, the latter encircled by an ancient military stock. Mrs. Evans was attired with such splendour that it was manifest she had sacrificed comfort to fashion.
‘Old Tom’ had donned, as suitable for the grandeur and solemnity of the occasion, a well-worn pair of cord breeches, the gift of some employer of sporting tendencies, which, ‘a world too wide for his shrunk shanks,’ were met at the knee by carefully polished boots, the long-vanished tops being replaced by moleskin caps. A drill overshirt, fastened at the waist with a broad leather belt, from which depended a tobacco-pouch, completed this effective costume. The iron-grey hair was carefully combed back from his withered countenance; his keen eyes gleamed from their hollow orbits, imparting an appearance of mysterious vitality to the ancient stock-rider.
Andrew and Jeanie, of course, attended, the latter dressed with the good taste which always characterised her, and the former having in charge the sturdy silent Duncan, with their younger offspring. Of these, Jessie bade fair to furnish a favourable type of the ‘fair-haired lassie’ so frequently met with in the ballads of her native land, while Colin, the second boy, was a clever, confident youngster, in whose intelligence Andrew secretly felt pride, though he repressed with outward sternness all manifestations of the same.
Andrew himself, it must be stated, appeared under protest, holding that ‘thae Yerastian, prelatic festivals,’ in his opinion, ‘were no warranted by the General Assembly o’ the Kirk o’ Scotland, natheless, being little mair than dwellers in the wilderness, it behoved a’ Christians, though they should be but a scattered remnant in the clefts o’ the rocks, to agree in bearing testimony to the Word.’