JACK PRIOR DOES SOMETHING TO REDEEM HIS REPUTATION.

The summer was barely over. The filberts in Redcot quarry were still green to the very fringes of their husks--only the earlier varieties of the apples in the orchard were yellow. The berries in the shrubbery had as yet little chance against the flowers in the garden. The purple of the barberry, the rich black of the elder, the coral red of the mountain ash were still nodding to the golden sunflowers, the African marigolds--brown and yellow like bees’ coats, the flame colour of the gladioli, the great white heads of the giant phlox. The later roses--paler for the most part, and fainter in fragrance contrasted with their earlier, more splendidly endowed sisters--had never been in greater profusion.

But many strange experiences had come and gone before Jack Prior and Bennet Gray were at last walking together, unchallenged and unforbidden, as they had not always dared to picture themselves, among the old-fashioned labyrinths of the Redcot grounds, and by the silent mill and the empty barn, which had been as good as Robinson Crusoe’s island to Jack when he was a boy. Of all things the man and woman were quarrelling--at least, so it sounded.

‘I will not have you speak so to me, Jack. I will not listen to another word. As if I could have done less! as if it had not been my pride and consolation to do it! as if I and all I have were not yours! It is horrid to have you so much as thanking me.’

‘I think I know in a way what you mean,’ said Jack, with a short laugh to hide another feeling. ‘It is like the governor’s being so elaborately civil to me. If he would only go at my failures and deficiencies as he used to do, and not act as if he were sorry, and seeking to make up for what has happened, it would be a comfort. I can’t stand his consulting me about the pits, and wishing me to look into the leases, and seeking to make me feel like his son and heir. I could find it in my heart to ask him to let me alone.’

‘No, you mustn’t,’ said Bennet quickly. ‘Think what pleasure it gives your mother to see you and your father as son and father should be; how the recognition of your claims, to the unsaying of his own words, binds him to her more closely than when they were bride and bridegroom.’

‘I am not worthy of it,’ said Jack, with a sorrowful shrug; ‘though I have had some hard lines dealt to me. If I had been what I ought they would never have touched me. I know that, and other people know it as well, and we’ll none of us get over it. I wish I had remained in Australia. You may say what you like in your kindness and generosity--it is a case of give a dog an ill name and hang him. The only question is whether you are to be condemned with the dog that has been justly regarded as an idle ne’er-do-well till he has been branded with an accusation of theft.’

‘My dear Jack, you proposed to take me for better for worse, at least I thought so--I hope so, and I did the same by you. As we cannot undo it, there is no more to be said. As for this wretched, absurdly false mistake and its consequences, assuredly you will live them down. You do not mean that you are such a faithless pessimist as to tell me that there can be a scandal or slander which a brave and honest man cannot live down?’

Before he could answer her they were interrupted. A messenger from the house coming up the avenue had caught sight of Jack’s figure, and in the man’s haste and excitement turned aside to address the young squire. It was a collier from Kershaw, in his pit dress, to the lamp burning like a red spark in his cap in the broad day. The miner was going to his shift, and not returning from it, for his face, hands, and arms--colourless like the flowers, leaves, and stalks of a plant grown in a dark cellar--were clean and not grimy. It was a lank young face--long at all times with premature personal care, longer than usual with public trouble--the dire distress of a community. It was the face of Joe Jones, and the blinking eyes were fixed upon Jack Prior with an imperative, agonised summons. ‘Māāster Jack, there’s been an explosion in the pits.’

‘An explosion! Good heavens!’ cried Jack, instinctively freeing his arm gently but firmly from Bennet’s clasp, as she stood arrested and trembling by his side. ‘Where, Joe, where? Has my father been told?’

‘In t’ Young Squire’s workings, as was named the day you was born. It was where I took you down, and you made me come bound, if there ever came another explosion like that in ‘63, I would fetch you straight. There have come another explosion, and I’m here. It is like Māāster Willet has sent word to squire, or will send soon, but ’tis no business o’ mine.’

‘Oh, Joe, are there men in the workings?’ Bennet found voice to ask. ‘Will it be possible to save them?’ And she thought of the women belonging to these men, whose lots might be so different from what she had held hers to be only this morning.

‘Nine lads, schoolmistress, as near as we could reckon in the hurry. You must haste ye, Māāster Jack, for there be nine sure and certain, living or dead, as had gone down not a quarter of an hour before, for the next shift. There be nine among the gas and the fire--for mebbe the pit is on fire; there is smoke enow, and the roadway stopped for a wager. I should have been among them, but my little wench, as you knowed, schoolmistress’--Joe wandered into a personal digression--‘has chincough bad, and I were up with her in the night, and had to go round by the Long Row to send Joan Short to her. I heerd the roar of the explosion between the Row and the pit-mouth. I had heerd tell last night, Māāster Jack, that you were safe at Redcot again, as we all knowed you would be, and I ha’ kep’ my word, running the most of the road, though my wind is none so good, from Kershaw. You mun run too, Māāster Jack--you’re a rare good hand at the runnin’, as none can beat you at cricket--and it’s for nine men’s lives you’re runnin’, do you hear, if you’re to go down in the room o’ Bailiff as is gone to Droitwich to attend his darter’s funeral. You have the right before Māāster Willet’s son; and I’m set on being in the batch, for I would not have the lads think as were in the same shift wi’ me that I ha’ done nowt for them.’

‘No, Joe, that would never do,’ said Jack incoherently. ‘Run on to the house and see that my father is told at once. He will order what is necessary to be sent and come over himself immediately. I’m off, and you’ll follow me; and if you can catch me up we’ll go down together. Bennet,’ he turned to her for an instant, with all his heart in his voice, ‘you will not seek to stop me? You hear him? Nine lives; and if I can help to save one, nothing else signifies much.’

‘Yes, Jack, go,’ said Bennet, with trembling lips; and he did not wait to hear her speak further faltering words, of soldiers’ wives who send their husbands into the battle to take lives, and should she keep him from saving them? Only he would let her follow him as far as she could. She could not fight foul air and fire and falling rocks; but she could be near, as she had been in the court, to be the first to hear the best or the worst, to watch with those who were in similar trouble, though their sun had not gone down at noon.

Already Jack was plying the active legs which had won him such credit at cricket and football, forgetting all the tribulation and disgrace of these last doleful weeks, feeling a man again in the front rank of his fellows.

John Prior, who was not without experience in such a terrible casualty as may occur any day in a coalfield, was ready to start on the instant with all the appliances that could be wanted. When he heard that his son had gone before him fresh colour came into his cheek, and he reared his grey head and walked more erect and firmly than he had walked for many a day. He did not object to being accompanied by Bennet and Jane, particularly as Mrs. Prior, still shut up with Susie, had not heard what had happened, and it was judged best to spare her the knowledge till the danger was over, the speakers said softly, with bated breath.

The bleak, blighted, ash-strewn moor was as Bennet had pictured it would look on the occasion of one of the periodical tragedies of the mine. The machinery had been standing in lifeless stillness and dumb protest after the accident, but had been hastily repaired to admit of relays of men going down to learn the extent of the injury, and to seek to rescue the sufferers. A detachment had descended the pit under Mr. Willet before Jack Prior could arrive. He had headed another company after he had been overtaken by Joe Jones, which had followed the first down the shaft before Mr. Prior and the girls came on the ground.

Bennet and Jane were far from the only women present. Youth and age were alike represented. The old-fashioned little lass who had been accustomed to carry ‘father’s meals’ to the pit-mouth with one hand and to lug about a baby on the other arm, was there; so was the feeble grandmother, who rarely stirred from the warmest seat in the chimney corner, unless to go to church on the finest Sunday of the year. Widow Maxey had instinctively yoked her venerable horse into her cart, resumed her carter’s whip, and was seated in her place of office once more. There might be other loads than coals to cart that day, and who so fit to drive them as she, who had been about Kershaw Colliery for a good score and a half of years--who had done service on the memorable day in ’63? Every woman who was not absolutely bed-ridden had run out; whether her men folk were in the pit or out of it, she knew they would soon be in the thick of the fray at the ominous sound. They all knew it by report, if not by personal experience, and had trodden with wild, feeble feet, jostling each other, the familiar paths from the Rows to the particular pit. The first frantic rush had died out with the smoke and dust of the catastrophe. But straggling parties of people from neighbouring villages and towns continued to hurry across the moor, brought by interest and curiosity to the spot.

It was understood by those who had sufficient knowledge to form an opinion from the signs above ground that the disaster was not so bad as that of ’63. The damage done to the machinery had not been great. It could be repaired in a temporary manner without loss of time. Some parts of the roof had fallen, but, it was hoped, not where the men in the pit had been at work, and not to such an extent as to offer an insuperable barrier to reaching them in time. The great dread, after the kindling of the fire-damp, was the letting loose of the choke-damp and the closing up of the air-passages.

There was no loud lamentation, doing despite to the blue sky that lies behind even the smokiest pall which shrouds ‘a black country,’ to the dense air, still mellow in its moorland sharpness with the recent breath of summer. There was a hush of quivering expectation, women banding together with linked arms and bowed heads, men exchanging meaning looks and muttered words after peering keenly into the yawning hole in which every hope and fear were for the moment centred.

The eagerly waited for signal from below to pull up the cage broke the effort at endurance; but in answer to the many heart-throbs as of one heart, and the sudden push forward of the throng of people, the police who had arrived and the pit-head men kept order, and caused all but those actually employed to stand back. The women especially, with Bennet and Jane among them, were forced to give the pit a wide berth, for none of those above ground knew what might meet their hungry eyes when the first explorers returned with their freight and their tale.

The busy group in front closed in round the pit and obscured the view to those at a little distance, so that they could not catch a glimpse of who or what had returned to the upper world. Then the tidings were circulated that it was Mr. Willet and a collier who had been down with him, and that they brought up between them one of the men who had been in the pit at the time of the accident. The pit was not on fire, but the fall of the roof had been greater than was at first supposed, and the air was bad. The searchers had got far enough to extricate this man, who had been working nearest the roadway, and were going on with their efforts to rescue the other men. But it had been necessary for Mr. Willet, who had become affected by the foul air to which he had been exposed for some time, to come up, while young Mr. Prior had taken his place.

The news was as good as all save the most sanguine had anticipated. ‘Good news,’ Bennet Gray kept repeating to Jane, unaware that her eyes were glistening and her fingers twitching like those of some of the women who had husbands and sons in the living grave. These women were entering into a shrill contention as to which of their men worked nearest the roadway. ‘It were my māāster, I tell you.’ ‘No, it were my lad Bill, I’m sure on it; I is,’ were over-confident assertions. The dispute was ended by the spectacle of the rescued man staggering past. He was not too badly hurt to prevent his walking with a little assistance, but he was a sufficiently sorry sight, ghastly in his dirt, and dabbled with the blood flowing from a wound in his neck, tied up roughly with his cotton handkerchief, which turned him sick and giddy. He was still able to call to his wife, struggling to get to him, ‘Ay, it’s me, lass, leastways it’s all that’s left on me.’ No woman could dispute her claim any longer, though half-a-dozen there would have given the most precious things they possessed to have had their men stand in her man’s shoes. ‘Ay, it’s Luke Cocks and no mistake. Poor chap, it’s like he’s sorer floored than he lets on, and her within sight and hearing. He’ll not get over a gash like thatten the day nor the morn neither.’

Another interval as silent, as oppressive, for there had been considerable re-assurance in Mr. Willet’s announcement and in Luke Cocks’ having been brought out alive and fit to stand on his ‘pins,’ in the current phrase. The re-assurance was damped, especially to those unaccustomed to such scenes, by the condition of the next victim recovered from the mass of ruins and the stifling fumes rising from old wastes and abandoned workings. He was reduced to something carried past on a shutter, with a sheet hastily thrown over it. Bennet and Jane drew away, clenching their hands in horror, while the other women strove desperately to reach the bearers, to discover who was their burden, and if it was all over with him. The load was put down for fresh inspection by a doctor, and was not immediately taken up again. Some stir and commotion followed among the waiting assistants, a brandy flask was in the doctor’s hands; ‘He ain’t dead’ was shouted in a species of exultation. ‘Doctor says he be coming round, and may get over it.’ Bennet and Jane drew long gasping breaths, and turned and kissed each other impulsively. A few minutes afterwards one of their old pupils at the club-room was so carried out of himself as to hail them and give them the information which concerned them. The hurt man was Ben Ashe, and he would have been clean gone if Noah King, that hauled him to the pit-eye, had not treated him as ‘gin he were a drownded man,’ after the directions in the ladies’ lectures.

Bennet thanked the lad gratefully for his communication, but Jane broke into sobs.

Bennet recognised little Nancy Jones, as she executed the long whoops of her cough in the arms of a middle-aged woman, whose heart was in the pit with her two nephews still unaccounted for there. Bennet, whose own heart was in the pit, proposed to relieve the woman for a space. And the ice which had been gathering and settling in the girl’s breast, like a heavy weight at her heart, checking its flow of blood, melted for an instant when ‘the little wench’ responded to her former nurse’s greeting. ‘Your father is where Jack is,’ Bennet whispered to the unconscious child. ‘They are facing life and death together for their brothers. That should make you and me good friends, Nancy.’

‘Da-da, da-da, la-dy, la-dy,’ babbled the child.

But Jack and Joe Jones were parted. Joe had been overcome by the insidious after-damp, and Jack had ordered him up to the fresh air, refusing to return with him, though the remaining seven men had been found huddled together, all of them alive, and none so seriously hurt as Ben Ashe. There was word of a lad who had not been come upon. He had not been reckoned among the older lads and men, and formed the tenth life in the lot. Jack and two of the volunteers in the work stayed behind to make a last search for this boy. ‘But don’t take on about young māāster, schoolmistress,’ said Joe, with his blue lips, when he was so far better as to come to Bennet, which he did straightway. He had wit to read what was before his eyes, and was not troubled by any ceremonious necessity for polite fictions. ‘I ha’ got a mouthful of pure air, and my bellows is in working order again. I’m going down right off--at oncet. It were I led him into the dance, and God A’mighty will let me bring him back to you--not a hair of his head the worser, for your goodness to the motherless wench.’

After that Bennet wandered restlessly to Mr. Prior, and stole one of her hands into his. He wrung her hand, and continued to hold it, saying nothing.

Joe was gone for not longer than ten more terrible minutes before the signal vibrated anew. The first cage that came up held Jack with what was not black of the skin of his face and hands as blue as Joe’s lips had been, Joe, and a flibbertigibbet of a boy, who looked the least touched of anybody, for the very young and the very old will breathe with comparative impunity an atmosphere fatal to mature men. And this young gentleman was only cowed by various reflections. He had been in the pit out of order. The underground bailiff, when he returned from the funeral of his daughter, Mr. Willet--nay, the squire himself--might all have something to say to the youngster for his defiance of regulations. Finally, if he did not get one of the ‘hidings’ to which he was well accustomed from the authors of his being, who had only within the last hour begun to guess that their son was in a scrape as usual, he would have richly deserved it.

When Jack’s face, with a diabolic tint added to its grotesque plainness, rose above the lining of the pit, and it was seen that he had brought with him the last waif of the explosion, a cheer suddenly burst from the men around.

Bennet heard it, John Prior heard it, and it sounded still more ravishingly sweet to them than to him, whom still it soothed. It rung with a far-away murmur of ‘well done,’ in ears yet humming with the drowsy influence of the poisoned air of the pit, yet echoing with the bald ‘Not Guilty’ of the court.

As for Mrs. Prior, when the applause was retailed to her, it seemed never to cease, but to go on in a perpetual proud proclamation which announced her to be the mother of a brave and generous man.

During his watch by the pit-mouth, John Prior had made every arrangement which a considerate and humane coal-owner could accomplish for the relief of the injured men, and the assistance of the other colliers who would be subjected to enforced idleness for several weeks by the accident.

These arrangements had become known in the interval, and, following on the heels of the cheer for Jack, rose a cheer for the squire of Redcot and his lady, who had always been good friends to the mining community at Kershaw. A still more expansive soul rounded off the plaudits with the proposal of a cheer for ‘Miss and schoolmistress,’ on which John Prior made an abrupt amendment in the excitement of the moment. ‘Not schoolmistress, my men, the future wife of the young squire, the future mistress of Redcot,’ and pulling off his hat he led lustily the last ‘hurrah!’