King Billy was given to strolling up and down the streets of Ballarat when that eviscerated city was merely in process of disembowelment, before alluvial mining gave way to quartz-crushing, when the individual had a chance, if a very vague one, of sudden and delightful fortune. The Ballarat blacks were a scaly lot, to talk of them like ill-fed hogs, as men were wont to do. They dwined and dwindled, as natives will before the resources of civilisation: the bloodthirsty ones got killed out; the rumthirsty ones died out; the wild corroboree was reduced to a poverty-stricken imitation of its former glory. King Billy's authority grew less with the increase of his clothes. The brass plate with his name on it was about the last relic of his precarious power, and was chiefly valued as a means of notifying the public generally that they might stand drinks to a monarch if they saw fit and were not too humble. He was not haughty, and never presumed on his plate, as parvenus will. He came of an ancient stock, and could afford to condescend, even if he could not afford to pay for drinks.
He was very kind to children,--white children, of course,--and was hale-fellow-well-met with many of them.
He was particularly fond of Annie Colborn, whose father was a magistrate and a gold commissioner, and a person of very great importance. Whether or not King Billy was wise in his generation, and out of the unwritten Scriptures of the somber bush had culled a maxim inculcating the wisdom of ****** friends of the sons of Mammon, I cannot say, but he was always good to Annie. For my own part, I do not believe the ******-hearted old king had any such notion inside his thick antipodean skull. He was good because he was not bad, which is the very best morality after all, and a great advance on much we hear of. And, besides, he was sometimes hungry, and Mr. Colborn's Chinese cook was very haughty, and not to be approached except through an intermediary. And who so capable of conciliating Wong as Annie? Wong would make her cakes even when his pigtail hung despondently from his aching head after an opium debauch, and his cheeks were shining with anything but gladness; for if you get drunk very often on opium you shine.
Old Billy was mostly to be found where there was a chance of a drink; but if the fountains were dried up, or he had been insulted by some democratic, revolutionary, king-hating miner knocking his high hat down over his eyes, he usually went up to Mr. Colborn's place, and sat on the fence, or on a log outside the gate. So he was often very melancholy when Annie came out. One day his hat was very, very badly bulged indeed.
"Your hat is very bad to-day, King Billy," said six-year-old Annie, as she stood in front of him critically, with her head on one side.
Without knowing it, the child had come to look upon the state of the poor king's hat as emblematical of his state of mind. When it shut up like a closed concertina his barometer was low.
"Yes, missy," said the king; "white man knock 'um over eyes, and"-- with a rub down his face--"skin 'um nose."
She inspected his nose carefully--though from a certain distance, because her own nose was very good, both inside and out, and she knew the king never got washed unless it rained when he was very drunk. And this was the end of summer. It had not rained since November.
"There is not very much skin off," said Annie. "You had better wash it."
The king made a wry face and changed the conversation.
"You got 'um hat, Missy Annie? One hat baal brokum, allasame white fellow hat. Bad hat, King Billy bad; black fellow, white fellow laugh."
He peered into his hat, and, trying to straighten it out, put his fist through the side. Poor Billy looked as if he could cry.
"You stop a minute," said Annie, and, flying indoors, she brought out a very good high hat indeed. "Budgeree!" thought the king, that was a good hat. He could go down the streets like a king indeed, able to hold up his head with any rich man in Ballarat. He tried it on, and though it was much too big, he knew it shone. And the glory of a hat is in its shining as much as its shape; even a black fellow knows that.
But that hat very nearly led to serious trouble. For one thing, Mr.
Colborn missed it; and never thinking Annie had given it away, when he saw the king sitting on the fence decorated with it, he stopped and interviewed him.
"Where did you get that hat, you old thief?" asked the magistrate, without any politeness to him who ruled the land before white men broke into the country. Some in authority are polite to those they dispossess; the Prussians, for instance, to the miserable King Billys who strut about the empire. But the Anglo-Saxon only respects himself, and even that to a limited extent, in new conquests.
The question troubled King Billy greatly. He did not know that Mr.
Colborn would as soon have thought of murdering Annie as of bullying her; so he lied promptly: "Me buy 'um, Mistah Cobon!"
Mr. Colborn took it off of his head, and saw that it was his, as he had thought. What he would have said I do not know, for just then he heard a voice behind him:
"Papa, it is my fault; I gave it to King Billy."
Colborn turned round and took her up, letting fall the hat as he did so. Billy made a jump, picked it up, and, in his agitation, brushed it carefully the wrong way.
"My dear, if you gave it to him it's all right. But why didn't the old fool tell me?"
"He's not an old fool, papa, and you must not say so. He's a good man, and I think he thought you would be angry with me. Didn't you, King Billy?" And the king, with a smile of conscious rectitude, admitted it was so.
