David's Little Lad

by L. T. Meade

to insure the safety of thelives of those men and boys who worked in the mine, gold ought to weighvery low in the balance, and as he alone of us all knew something trulyof his brother's character, so he hesitated to accept his offer; butwhile David hesitated, mother urged. Mother was ignorant of the miner'slife; gold to mother was not valueless: she had dreams of the Morgansbeing restored to all their former riches and power, she had also,notwithstanding his one fall, still implicit faith in Owen. Owen wouldnot only win the gold but make the mine safe. It was a grief to her toleave Tynycymmer, but it was a counterbalancing delight to live on anyterms for a year with her favourite son; she urged the acceptance of hisoffer. Thus urged, David yielded.

  We moved to Ffynon. Owen arrived, eager, hopeful, enthusiastic, as ofold. Handsome and brilliant as ever he looked as gay as though he hadnever known a sorrow. So I thought for the first week after hisarrival, then I saw that his spirits were fitful, sometimes I fancied alittle forced; a bad report of the mine would depress him for the day,whereas good news would send his gay laugh echoing all over the smallhouse.

  Thus I found myself in the midst of mining life. Mother, hithertoprofoundly ignorant of such matters, now took up the popular theme withinterest and zest.

  She and I learned what _fire-damp_, _black-damp_, _after-damp_ meant.We learned the relative destructiveness of explosions by gas andinundations by water. Then we became great on the all-important subjectof ventilation. We knew what the steam jet could do, what furnaceventilation could effect. I admired the Davy lamps, learned somethingof their construction, and at last, I obtained the strongest wish I atpresent possessed, namely, a visit to this underground region of awe anddanger, myself. It is a hackneyed theme, and I need scarcely describeit at length. I remember stepping on to the cage with some of theenthusiasm which I had admired in Miles' brave hero brother, and longbefore I reached the bottom of the shaft, suffering from an intolerablesense of suffocation, and shivering and shaking with inward fear, suchas must have overtaken poor little James on that fatal day. Finally,when I got to the bottom, recovering my courage, rejoicing in the freecurrent of fresh air which was blown down from the great fan above,growing accustomed to the dim light of the Davy lamps, and thendiscovering little, by little, that the mine with its rail-roads, itslevels, its drift ways, where the loaded trams of coal ran swiftly down,impelled by their own weight, its eager, grimy workers, its patienthorses, destined many of them to live and die in this underground gloom,was very like a town, and had an order and method of its own.

  The knowledge gained by the visit, the knowledge gained by listening toOwen's and David's conversation, the knowledge perhaps greater than all,which I had won by my friendship for Miles and Nan, inspired in me thestrongest respect and admiration for the brave collier. He works in thedark, his heroic deeds are little heard of beyond his own circle, andyet he is as true a hero as the soldier in the field of battle or thesailor in the storm: his battle-field is the mine, his enemies, earth,air, fire, and water. Any moment the earth can bury him in a livingtomb, a vast quantity of that solid coal may give way, and crush himbeneath its weight; any instant, the air, in the poisoned form of black,or after-damp, may fill his lungs, take all power from his limbs, fellhim in his strength and prime to the earth, and leave him there dead; orin half an instant, through the explosion of a match, the wrongadjustment of a safety-lamp, the whole mine may from end to end become acavern of lurid fire, destroying every living thing within its reach.Or one stroke too many of the miner's pick, may let in a volume of blackand stagnant water from an unused and forgotten pit, which rising slowlyat first, then gaining, in volume, in strength, in rapidity, buries theminers in a watery grave of horrible and loathsome desolation.

  Yes, the miners are brave; for small pay they toll unremittingly,labouring in the dark, exposed to many dangers. Day by day these men godown into the mines literally with their lives in their hands. Thewives, mothers, sisters, know well what the non-arrival of a husband,father, brother means. They hope a little, fear much, weep over themangled remains when they can even have that poor source of consolation,and then the widow who has lost her husband, dries her eyes, puts hershoulder to the wheel, and like a true Spartan woman, when his turncomes, sends down her boy to follow in his father's steps, and, if Godwills it, to die bravely, as his father died before him.

  I visited the schools about Ffynon, and noticed the bright dark-eyed,Welsh children, each boy among them destined to become a collier as hegrew up. Many of these boys shrank from it, struggled against it,feared it as a coming nightmare; some few, as the dreaded time drewnear, ran away to sea, preferring the giving up of father and mother,and encountering the hardships of the sea, to the greater hardships ofthe mine, but most of them yielded to the inevitable fate.

  I found, too, on observation that the colliers of Ffynon were areligious people; the sentiments I had heard in astonishment and almostawe dropping from the lips of little Miles, I found were the sentimentsrather of the many than the few. They lived an intense life, and theyneeded, and certainly possessed, an intense faith.

  The body of them were not Church people; they had a simple andimpassioned service of their own, generally held in the Welsh tongue.At these services they prayed and sang and listened to ferventaddresses. At these services, after an accident, slight or great, themen and women often bowed their heads and wept. Their services werealive and warm, breathing the very breath of devotion, suited to theiruntrained, but strong natures. They left them with the sense of apresent God alive in each heart; a God who would go with them into themine, who would accompany them through the daily toil and danger, and,if need be, and His will called them, would carry them safely, even in achariot of fire, into the Golden City.

  To the religious miner, the descriptions of Heaven as written in theApocalypse, were the very life of his life. He loved to sit by his fireon Sunday evenings, and slowly read from the well-worn page to hislistening wife, and his lads and lasses, of the city sparkling with gemsand rich with gold. To the man who toiled in the deepest of darkness, aland without night or shadow was a theme of rapture. To the man whoknew danger and pain, who fought every day with grim death, thatpainless shore, that eternal calm, that home where father, mother,brother, sister, rudely parted and torn asunder here, should betogether, and God with them, was as an anchor to his soul. No place onearth could be more real and present than Heaven was to the religiouscollier. Take it from him, and he could do no more work in the dark anddangerous mine; leave it with him, and he was a hero. The colliers hadone proud motto, one badge of honour, which each father bequeathed ashis most precious possession to his son--this motto was "Bravery;" onestigma of everlasting disgrace which, once earned, nothing could wipeout, "Cowardice." In the collier's creed _no_ stone was too heavy toroll away to rescue a brother from danger. Into the midst of the fireand the flood, into the fatal air of the after-damp, they must gowithout shrinking to save a companion who had fallen a victim to thesedangers. Each man as he toiled to rescue his fellow man, knew well thathe in his turn, would risk life itself for him. No man reflected crediton himself for this, no man regarded it as other than his most simpleand obvious duty.

  Into the midst of this simple, brave, and in many ways noble people,came Owen with his science and his skill. He went down into the mineday after day, quickly mastered its intricacies, quickly discovered itsdefects, quickly lighted upon its still vast stores of unused treasures.At the end of a month he communicated the result to David. I wasseated by the open window, and I heard, in detached sentences, somethingof what was spoken, as the brothers paced the little plot of groundoutside, arm in arm. As I watched them, I noticed for the first timesome of the old look of confidence and passion on Owen's face. Theexpressive eyes revealed this fact to me--the full hazel irids, thepupils instinct with fire, the whole eyes brimming with a long-lostgladness, proclaimed to me that the daring, the ambition I had loved,was not dead.

  "Give me but a year, David," I heard him say in conc
lusion. "Give mebut one year, and I shall see my way to it. In a year from this time,if you but give me permission to do as I think best, the mine shallbegin to pay you back what I have lost to you!"

  David's voice, in direct contrast to Owen's, was deep and sad.

  "I don't want that," he said, laying his hand on his brother's arm, "Iwant something else."

  "What?" asked Owen.

  "I want something else," continued David. "This is it. Owen, I wantyou to help me to fulfil a duty, a much neglected duty. I take myselfto task very much for the gross way I have passed it by hitherto. Godknows it was my ignorance, not my wilful neglect, but I ought to haveknown; this is no real excuse. Owen, I have lived contented atTynycymmer, and forgotten, or almost forgotten, this old mine. I leftthings in the hands of the manager; I received the money it broughtwithout