“Look at me, a stunted man! Life in a coal-mine stunted me. I suppose I was born underground. I know that I never remember when I was not at work, either harnessed like a dog, and dragging coals through a shop where I could not stand upright, or, when I grew stronger,—bigger I was not to grow,—down in the darkest holes, beating out with a pickaxe stuff to make other men’s houses warm and cheery. If I had had air and sun and light and hope, I might have been a shapely man.
“It was in Lancashire, the coal-mine where I had been shut up, boy and man, some twenty years, as I reckon. There came one day a weakly man, who hadn’t been used to work hard, into the shaft, and they put him at drawing out the coals I dug. Hugh was the name he gave, and he hadn’t been long enough underground to get his face black, before we’d baptized him Gentleman Hugh. I had never seen a gentleman to know him, but I had a feeling of what one ought to be, and so had my mates in the pit. Gentleman Hugh seemed to us to suit the nickname we gave him. We’re roughs down in the coal-pits, and some of us are brutes enough; but Gentleman Hugh managed to get us all on his side, and there wasn’t a man of us that wouldn’t give him a lift.
“Gentleman Hugh took a fancy to me, and so did I to him. Nature had misused me, and life had misused him. We had something to pity each other for. But I had the advantage in the dark damp hole where we worked. I had lost nothing; I knew of nothing better; I was healthy and strong, if I was stunted; I could help Gentleman Hugh, and save him wearing himself out. And so I did. He was the first person or creature I had ever cared for.
“I did what I could for him in lightening his work; but he gave me back a hundred times what I could give. I was hands without head, or without any head that could make my hands of use. He had head enough, and things in his head, but his hands were never meant for tools to get a living. Gentleman Hugh waked up my brains. I knew how to pick and dig, and sometimes wondered if that was all I should ever be at. But air and daylight seemed as if they did not belong to me. I was a drudge, and never thought of anything but drudging, until Gentleman Hugh came down into my shaft and began to tell me what there was outside of coal-mines.
“He told me about himself; that he was Hugh Clitheroe, a gentleman, and how he had been ruined by factories and coal speculations. It was his losing his fortune in a coal-mine that set him on coming into ours to make his bread, and poor bread too, for a gentleman. He said he was sick of daylight. It was better to be a drudge, so he said, down in the blackest and wettest hole of any coal-pit in Lancashire, than to beg bread of men that pretended to be his friends when he was rich, and sneered at him for his folly in losing his wealth. I found out that there were wrongs and brutality above ground as well as under it.
“By and by, when Gentleman Hugh and I had got to be friends, he took me one holiday and showed me his daughter. She was a sweet little lass. He had left her with the rough women, the miners’ wives. But she had her own way with them, just as he had had with us. They called her little Lady Ellen, and would have cut up their own brats, if they hadn’t been too tough, if she had wanted such diet. Little Ellen, sweet lass! was not afraid of me, Dwarf George and Runt George as they called me. She did not run away and cry, or point and laugh at me as the other children did. She was picking daisies on the edge of an old coal-pit when we first saw her,—a little curly-haired lass of five years old. She was crowned with daisies, and she didn’t seem to me to belong to the same class of beings as the grimy things I had been among all my days. She gave me a daisy, and asked me if I knew who made it. And when I said I didn’t know, unless it came of itself, she named God to me. Nobody had named God to me before except in oaths.
“Do I tire you, sir,” said Padiham, “with this talk about myself?”
“Certainly not; you interest me greatly.”
“The old gentleman will hardly be ready to see you yet. It is almost nine, and at the stroke of nine he has his breakfast. I always go up then to give him good morning. You can go with me.”
“Meantime, tell me how you found them again.”