David's Little Lad

by L. T. Meade

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

I found, too, on observation that the colliers of Ffynon were a religious people; the sentiments I had heard in astonishment and almost awe dropping from the lips of little Miles, I found were the sentiments rather of the many than the few. They lived an intense life, and they needed, and certainly possessed, an intense faith.

The body of them were not Church people; they had a simple and impassioned service of their own, generally held in the Welsh tongue. At these services they prayed and sang and listened to fervent addresses. At these services, after an accident, slight or great, the men and women often bowed their heads and wept. Their services were alive and warm, breathing the very breath of devotion, suited to their untrained, but strong natures. They left them with the sense of a present God alive in each heart; a God who would go with them into the mine, 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 a chariot of fire, into the Golden City.

To the religious miner, the descriptions of Heaven as written in the Apocalypse, were the very life of his life. He loved to sit by his fire on Sunday evenings, and slowly read from the well-worn page to his listening wife, and his lads and lasses, of the city sparkling with gems and rich with gold. To the man who toiled in the deepest of darkness, a land without night or shadow was a theme of rapture. To the man who knew danger and pain, who fought every day with grim death, that painless shore, that eternal calm, that home where father, mother, brother, sister, rudely parted and torn asunder here, should be together, and God with them, was as an anchor to his soul. No place on earth could be more real and present than Heaven was to the religious collier. Take it from him, and he could do no more work in the dark and dangerous mine; leave it with him, and he was a hero. The colliers had one proud motto, one badge of honour, which each father bequeathed as his most precious possession to his son—this motto was “Bravery;” one stigma of everlasting disgrace which, once earned, nothing could wipe out, “Cowardice.” In the collier’s creed no stone was too heavy to roll away to rescue a brother from danger. Into the midst of the fire and the flood, into the fatal air of the after-damp, they must go without shrinking to save a companion who had fallen a victim to these dangers. Each man as he toiled to rescue his fellow man, knew well that he in his turn, would risk life itself for him. No man reflected credit on himself for this, no man regarded it as other than his most simple and 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 mine day after day, quickly mastered its intricacies, quickly discovered its defects, quickly lighted upon its still vast stores of unused treasures. At the end of a month he communicated the result to David. I was seated by the open window, and I heard, in detached sentences, something of what was spoken, as the brothers paced the little plot of ground outside, arm in arm. As I watched them, I noticed for the first time some of the old look of confidence and passion on Owen’s face. The expressive eyes revealed this fact to me—the full hazel irids, the pupils instinct with fire, the whole eyes brimming with a long-lost gladness, 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 conclusion. “Give me but 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 shall begin 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, “I want something else.”

“What?” asked Owen.

“I want something else,” continued David. “This is it. Owen, I want you to help me to fulfil a duty, a much neglected duty. I take myself to task very much for the gross way I have passed it by hitherto. God knows it was my ignorance, not my wilful neglect, but I ought to have known; this is no real excuse. Owen, I have lived contented at Tynycymmer, and forgotten, or almost forgotten, this old mine. I left things in the hands of the manager; I received the money it brought without either thought or comment. And all the time, God help me, the place was behind its neighbours. I had not much money to expend on it, and I was content it should be worked on the old system, never thinking, never calculating, that the old system involved danger and loss of life. The mine is not ventilated as the other mines are; in no mine in the neighbourhood do so many deaths occur. You yourself have discovered it to be full of many dangers. So, Owen, what I ask of you is this, help me to lift this sin of my neglect off my soul. I don’t want the money, Owen; it is enough for me, it is more than enough, to see you as you now are; the money, I repeat, is a thing to me of no value, but the people’s lives are of much. I can and will raise the sum you require to put the mine into a state of safety, to perfect the ventilation, to do all that can be done to lessen the danger for the colliers. Do your part in this as quickly as possible, Owen, and let us think nothing of money gains for the present.”