And the letters were written with such abandonment! As a rule Marcella was a hasty or impatient correspondent. She thought letters a waste of time; life was full enough without them. But here, with Letty, she lingered, she took pains. The mistress of Les Rochers writing to her absent, her exacting Pauline, could hardly have been more eager to please. She talked—at leisure—of all that concerned her—husband, child, high politics, the persons she saw, the gaieties she bore with, the books she read, the schemes in which she was busied; then, with greater tenderness, greater minuteness, of the difficulties and tediums of Letty's life at Ferth, as they had been dismally drawn out for her in Letty's own letters. The animation, the eager kindness of it all went for much; the amazing self-surrender, self-offering, implied in every page for much more.

Strange!—as he read the letters George felt his own heart beating. Were they in some hidden way meant for him too?—he seemed to hear in them a secret message—a woman's yearning, a woman's response.

At any rate, the loving, reconciling effort had done its work. Letty could not be insensible to such a flattery, a compliment so unexpected, so bewildering—the heart of a Marcella Maxwell poured out to her for the taking. She neither felt it so profoundly, nor so delicately as hundreds of other women could have felt it. Nevertheless the excitement of it had thrilled and broken up the hardnesses of her own nature. And with each yielding on her part had come new capacity for yielding, new emotions that amazed herself; till she found herself, as it were, groping in a strange world, clinging to Marcella's hand, trying to express feelings that had never visited her before, one moment proud of her new friend with a pride half moral, half selfish, the next, ill at ease with her, and through it all catching dimly the light of new ideals.

One day, as George walked into Letty's sitting-room, to discuss some small business of the afternoon, he saw on her writing-table that same photograph of Lady Maxwell and her boy, whereof an earlier copy had come to such a tragic end in Letty's hands. He walked up to it with an exclamation; Letty was not in the room. Suddenly, however, she came in. He made no attempt whatever to disguise that he had been looking at the photograph; he bent over it indeed a moment longer, deliberately. Then, walking away to the window, he began speaking of the matter which had brought him to look for his wife. Letty answered absently. The colour had rushed to her face. Her hands fidgeted with the books and papers on her table, and her mind was full of fevered remembrance.

Presently George, having settled the little point he came to speak of, fell silent. But he still stood by the window, looking out through the rain-splashed glass to the wintry valley below with its chimneys and straggling village. Letty, who was pretending to write a note, raised her head, looked at him—the quick breath beating through the parted lips, the blue eyes half wild, half miserable. She was not nearly so pretty as she had been a year before. George had often noticed it; it made part of his remorse. But the face was more troubling, infinitely more human; and, in truth, he knew it much better, was more sensitively alive to it, so to speak, than he ever had been in the days of their courtship.

Before he left the room he came back to her, put his arm round her shoulders and kissed her hair. She did not raise her head or say anything. But when he had gone she looked up with a sudden fierce sob, took the photograph from its place, and thrust it angrily into the drawer in front of her. Afterwards she sat for some minutes, motionless, with her handkerchief at her lips, trying to choke down the tears that had seized her. And last of all, with trembling fingers, she took out the picture again, wrapped it in some soft tissue paper that lay near, as though propitiating it, and once more put it out of sight.

What had made her first ask Marcella for it, and then place it on her table where George might, nay, must see it? Some vague wish, no doubt, to "make up"; to punish herself, while touching him. But the recollection of him, bending over the picture, tortured her, gripped her at the heart for many a day afterwards. She let it be seen no more. Yet that week she wrote more fully, more incoherently, more piteously to Marcella than ever before. She talked, not without bitterness and injustice, of her bringing up, asked what she should read, spread out her puzzles with the poor, or with her household—half angrily, as though she were accusing someone. For the first time, as it were, she was seeking a teacher in the art of living. And though the tone was still querulous, she knew, and Marcella presently dared to guess, that the ugly house on the hill had in truth ceased to be in the least dull or burdensome to her. George went in and out of it. And for the woman that has come to hunger for her husband's step, there is no more ennui.

* * * * *

Letty indeed hardly knew the strength of her own position. The reading of Lady Maxwell's letters to his wife had cleared a number of relics and fragments from George's mind. The day of passion was done. Yes!—but to see her frequently, to be brought back into any of the old social or political relations to her and Maxwell, from this his pride shrank no less than his conscience. Yet there was a large party in his constituency, and belonging to it some of the men whose probity and intelligence he had come to rate most highly, who were pressing him hard not to resign in February, and, indeed, not to resign at all. The few public meetings he had so far addressed had been stormy indeed, but on the whole decidedly friendly to him, and it was urged that he must at least present himself for re-election, in which case his expenses should be borne, and he should be left as unpledged as possible. Since the passage of the Bill Fontenoy's reactionary movement had lost ground largely in the constituency; and the position of independent member with a general leaning to the Government was no doubt easily open to George Tressady.

But his whole soul shrank from such a renewal of the effort of politics—probably because of that something in him, that enfeebling, paralysing something, which in all directions made him really prefer the half to the whole, and see barriers in the way of all enthusiasms. Nevertheless, the arguments he had to meet, and the kind persuasions he had to rebut, made these weeks all the more trying to him.

The second week of December came, the beginning of the end so far as the strike was concerned. The men's resources were exhausted; the masters stood unbroken. They had met the men in a joint committee; but they had steadily refused arbitration from outside. At the beginning of this week, rioting broke out in a district where the Union had least strength, caused, no doubt, by the rage of impending failure. By the middle of the following week, men were going in here and there, and the stampede of defeat had begun.

George, passing through the pinched and lowering faces that lined the village, hated the triumph of his class. On the 21st, he rode over to a neighbouring town, where local committees, both of masters and men, were sitting, to see if there was any final news as to the pits of his own valley.

About eight o'clock in the evening Letty heard his horse's hoofs returning. She knew that he was accustomed to ride in the dark, but the rumours of violence and excitement that filled the air had unnerved her, and she had been listening to every sound for some time past.

When the door was open she ran out.

"Yes, I'm late," said George, in answer to her remonstrances; "but it is all right—it was worth waiting for. The thing's over. Some of the men go down to-morrow week, and the rest as we can find room for them."

"On the masters' terms?"

"Of course—or all but."

She clapped her hands.

"Oh, for goodness' sake, don't!" he said, as he hung up his hat, and she, supposing that he was irritable from over-fatigue, managed to overlook the sharpness of his tone.

Their Christmas passed in solitude. George, more and more painfully alive to the disadvantages of Ferth as the home of a young woman with a natural love of gaiety, had tried, in spite of their mourning, to persuade Letty to ask some friends to spend Christmas week with them. She had refused, however, and they were still alone when the end of the strike arrived.

The day before the men were to go back to work, George returned late from a last meeting of the employers. Letty had begun dinner, and when he walked into the dining-room she saw at once that some unusual excitement or strain had befallen him.

"Let me have some food!" was all he would say in answer to her first questions, and she let him alone. When the servants were gone he looked up.

"I have had a shindy with Burrows, dear—rather a bad one. But that's all. I walked down to the station with Ashton"—Ashton was a neighbouring magistrate and coal-owner—"and there we found Valentine Burrows. Two or three friends were in charge of him, and it has been given out lately that he has been suffering from nervous breakdown, owing to his exertions. All that I could see was that he was drunker than usual—no doubt to drown defeat. Anyway, directly he saw me he made a scene—foamed and shouted. According to him, I am at the bottom of the men's defeat. It is all my wild-beast delight in the sight of suffering,—my love of 'fattening on the misery of the collier,'—my charming villanies of all sorts—that are responsible for everything. Altogether he reached a fine flight! Then he got violent—tried to get at me with his knobbed stick. Ashton and I, and the men with him, succeeded in quelling him without bothering the police.—I don't think anything more will come of it."

And he stretched out his hand to some salted almonds, helping himself with particular deliberation.

After dinner, however, he lay down on a sofa in Letty's sitting-room, obliged to confess himself worn out. She made him comfortable, and after she had given him a cushion, she suddenly bent over him from behind and kissed him.

"Come here!" he said, with a smile, throwing up his hand to catch her. But with an odd blush and conscious look, she eluded him.

When, a little later, she came to sit by him with some needle-work she found him restless and inclined to talk.

"I wonder if we are always to live in this state of war for one's bread and butter!" he said, impatiently throwing down a newspaper he had been reading. "It doesn't tend to make life agreeable—does it? Yet what on earth—"

He threw back his head, with a stiff protesting air, staring across the room.

Letty had the sudden impression that he was not talking to her at all, but to some third person, unseen.

"Either capital gets its fair remuneration"—he went on in an argumentative voice—"and ability its fair wages—or the Marxian state, labour-notes, and the rest of it. There is no half-way house—absolutely none. As for me, I am not going to lend my capital for nothing—nor to give my superintendence for nothing. And I don't ask exorbitant pay for either. It is quite simple. My conscience is quite clear."

"I should think so!" said Letty, resentfully. "I wonder whether Marcella—is all for the men? She has never mentioned the strike in her letters."

As the Christian name slipped out, she flushed, and he was conscious of a curious start. But the breaking through of a long reticence was deliberate on Letty's part.

"Very likely she is all for the men," he said drily, after a pause. "She never could take a strike calmly. Her instinct always was to catch hold of any stick that could beat the employers—Watton and I used often to tease her about it."

He threw himself back against the sofa, with a little laugh that was musical in Letty's ear. It was the first time that Lady Maxwell's name had been mentioned between them in this trivial, ordinary way. The young wife sat alert and straight at her work, her cheek still pink, her eyes bright.

But after a silence, George suddenly sprang up to pace the little room, and she heard him say, under his breath, "But who am I, that I should be coercing them and trampling on them!—men old enough to be my father—driving them down to-morrow—while I sleep—for a dog's wage!"

"George, what is the matter with you?" she cried, looking at him in real anxiety.

"Nothing! nothing!—Darling, who's ill? I saw the old doctor on the road home, and he threw me a word as he passed about having been here—looked quite jolly over it. What's wrong—one of the servants?"

Letty put down her work upon her knee and her hands upon it. She grew red and pale; then she turned away from him, pressing her face into the back of her chair.

He flew to her, and she murmured in his ear.

* * * * *

What she said was by no means all sweetness. There was mingled with it much terror and some anger. Letty was not one of the women who take maternity as a matter of course.

But emotion and natural feeling had their way. George was dissolved in joy. He threw himself at her feet, resting his head against her knee.

"If he doesn't have your eyes and hair I'll disinherit him," he said, with a gaiety which seemed to have effaced all his fatigue.

"I don't want him," was her pettish reply; "but if she has your chin, I'll put her out to nurse. Oh! how I hate the thought of it!" and she shuddered.

He caught her hand, comforting her. Then, putting up both his own, he drew her down to him.

"After all, little woman, it hasn't turned out so badly?" he said in her ear, with sad appeal. Their lips met, trembling. Suddenly Letty broke into passionate weeping. George sprang up, gathered her upon his knee, and they sat for long, in silence, clinging to each other.

At last Letty drew back from him, pushing a hand against his shoulder.

"You know—you didn't care a bit for me—when you married me," she said, half bitter, half crying.

"Didn't I? And you?" he asked, raising his eyebrows.

"Oh! I don't remember!" she said hurriedly, and dropped her face on his coat again.

"Well, we are going to care for each other," he said in a low voice, after a pause. "That's what matters now, isn't it?"

She made no reply, but she put up a hand, and touched his face. He turned his lips to the hand and kissed it tenderly. There was a sore, sad spot in each heart; and neither dared to look forward. But tonight there was a sense of belonging to each other in a new and sacred way, of being drawn apart, separated from the world, husband and wife, together. Through George's mind there wandered half-astonished thoughts about this strange compelling power of marriage,—the deep grip it makes on life—the almost mechanical way in which it bears down resistance, provided only that certain compunctions, certain scruples still remain for it to work on.

George slept lightly, being over-tired. All through the night the vision of the beaten men going down sullenly to their first shift seemed to hold him as though in a nightmare.

Between seven and eight o'clock a sound startled him. He found himself standing by his bed, struggling to wake and collect himself.

A sound that had shaken the house, passing like a dull thud through the valley? A horror seized him. He looked at Letty, who was fast asleep; then he walked noiselessly into his dressing-room, and began to hurry on his clothes.

Five minutes later he was running down the hill at his full speed. It was bitterly cold and still; the first snow lay on the grass, and a raw grey veil hung over the hills. As he came in sight of the distant pit-bank he saw a crowd of women swarming up it; a confused and hideous sound of crying and shrieking came to his ears; and at the same moment a boy, panting and dead-white, ran through the lodge-gates to meet him.

"Where is it, Sprowston?"

"Oh, sir, it's No. 2 pit. The damp's comin up the upcast, and the cage is blown to pieces. But the down shaft's all right, and Mr. Madan and Mr. Macgregor were starting down as I come away. There was eighty-six men and boys went down first shift."

George groaned, and rushed on.



CHAPTER XXIV

England knows these scenes too well!

When Tressady, out of breath with running, reached the top of the bank, and threw a hurried look in front of him, his feeling was that he had seen everything before—the wintry dawn, the crowds of pale men and weeping women ranged on either hand, the police keeping the ground round the shafts clear for the mine officials—even the set white face of his manager, who, with Macgregor the fireman and two hewers, had just emerged from the cage that was waiting at the mouth of the downcast shaft.

As soon as Madan saw Tressady rounding the corner of the engine-house he hurried towards his employer.

"Have you been down yet?" Tressady cried to him.

"Just come up, sir. We got about fifty yards—air fairly good—then we found falls along the main intake. We got over three or four, till the damp rose on us too bad—we had a rough bit getting back. I thought you'd be here by now. Macgregor thinks from the direction in which things were lying that the blast had come from Holford's Heading or thereabouts."

And the manager hastily opened a map of the colliery he was carrying in his hand against the wall of the engine-house, and pointed to the spot.

"How many men there?"

"About thirty-two in the workings round about—as near as I can reckon it."

"Any sign of the rest? How many went down?"

"Eighty-six. A cageful of men and lads—just them from the shaft-bottom—got up immediately after the explosion. Since then, not a sound from anyone! The uptake shaft is chock-full of damp. Mitchell, in the fan-room, had to run for it at first, it was coming up so fast."

"Good God!" said George, under his breath; and the two men eyed each other painfully.

"Have you sent for the inspector?" said Tressady, after a moment.

"He ought to be here in five minutes now, sir."

"Got some baulks together?"

"The men are piling them by the shaft at this moment."

"Fan uninjured?"

"Yes, sir—and speed increased."

Followed by Madan, Tressady walked up to the shaft, and himself questioned Macgregor and the two hewers.

Then he beckoned to Madan, and the two walked in close converse towards the lamphouse, discussing a plan of action. As they passed slowly along the bank the eyes of the miserable terror-stricken throng to either side followed every movement. But there was not a sound from anyone. Once Tressady looked up and caught the faces of some men near him—dark faces, charged with a meaning that seemed instantly to stiffen his own nerve for what he had to do.

"I give Dixon three more minutes," he said, impatiently looking at his watch; "then we go down without him."

Dixon was the inspector. He was well known throughout the district, a plucky, wiry fellow, who was generally at the pit's mouth immediately after an accident, ready and keen to go with any rescue party on any errand, however dangerous—purely, as he himself declared, for professional and scientific reasons. In this case, he lived only a mile away, on the further side of the village, so that Madan's messenger had not far to go.

As he spoke, George felt his arm clutched from behind. He turned, and saw Mary Batchelor, who had come forward from a group of women.

"Sir George! Listen 'ere, Sir George." Her lined face and tear-blurred eyes worked with a passion of entreaty. "The boy went down at five with the rest. Don't yer bear 'im no malice. Ee's a poor sickly creetur, an the Lord an't give 'im the full use of his wits."

George smiled at the poor thing's madness, and touched her kindly on the shoulder.

"Don't you trouble yourself, Mary; all that can be done will be done—for everybody. We are only giving Mr. Dixon another minute; then we go down. Look here"—he drew her inside the door of the lamproom, which happened to be close by, for an open-mouthed group, eager to hear whatever he might be saying, had begun to press about them. "Can you take this message from me up to the house? There'll be no news here, you know, for a long time, and I left Lady Tressady asleep."

He tore a half-sheet from the letter in his pocket, scribbled a few words upon it, and put it into Mary's hand.

The woman, with her shawl over her head, ran past the lamphouse towards the entrance-gate as fast as her age would let her, while George rejoined Madan.

"Ah, there he is!"

For the small, lean figure of the inspector was already passing the gate.

Tressady hurried to meet him.

By the time the first questions and answers were over, Tressady, looking round for Madan, saw that the manager was speaking angrily to a tall man in a rough coat and corduroy trousers who had entered the pit premises in the wake of Mr. Dixon.

"You take yourself off, Mr. Burrows! You're not wanted here."

"Madan!" called Tressady, "attend to Mr. Dixon, please. I'll see to that man."

And he walked up to Burrows, while the men standing near crowded over the line they had been told to keep.

"What do you want?" he said, as he reached the newcomer.

"I have come to offer myself for the rescue party. I've been a working miner for years. I've had special experience in accidents before. I can beat anybody here in physical strength."

As he spoke the great heavily built fellow looked round him, and a murmur of assenting applause came from the bystanders.

Tressady studied him.

"Are you fit?" he said shortly.

Burrows flushed. Tressady's penetrating look forced his own to meet it.

"As fit as you are," was his haughty reply.

"Well"—said Tressady, slowly, "we don't want to be refusing strong men. If Madan'll have you, you shall come. Mind, we're all under his orders."

He went to the manager, and said a word in his ear. Madan, in response, vouchsafed neither look nor remark to the man, whom he hated apparently more bitterly than his employer did. But he made no further objection to his joining the search party.

Presently all preparations were made. Picked bands of firemen and timbermen descended first, with Madan at their head. Then George, Mr. Dixon, a couple of local doctors who had hurried up to offer their services, and Burrows.

As they shot down into the darkness George was conscious of a strange exhilaration. Working on the indications given him by the first exploring party, his mind was alive with conjectures as to the cause of the accident, and with plans for dealing with the various obstacles that might occur. Never during these weeks of struggle and noise and objurgation had he felt so fit, so strenuous. At the bottom of the shaft he had even to remind himself, with a shudder, of the dead men who must be waiting for them in these blank depths.

For some little distance from the shaft nothing was to be seen that spoke of an explosion. Some lamps in the porch of the shaft and along the main roadway were burning as usual, and the "journey" of trucks, from which the "hookers-on" and engine-men had escaped at the first sign of danger, was standing laden in the entrance of the mine. The door of the under-manager's cabin, near the base of the shaft, was open. Madan looked into the little den, where the lamp was still burning on the wall, and groaned. The young fellow who was generally to be found there was a great friend of his, and they attended the same chapel together. A little farther an open cupboard was noticed with a wisp of spun yarn hanging out from it—inflammable stuff, quite untouched. But about thirty yards farther they came upon the first signs of mischief. A heavy fall of roof had to be scrambled over, and beyond it afterdamp was clearly perceptible.

Here there was an exclamation from Burrows, who was to the front, and the first victim showed out of the dark in the pale glow-worm light of the lamps turned upon him. A man lay on his side, close against the wall, with an unlocked lamp in his hands, which were badly burnt. But no other part of him was burnt, and it was clear that he had died of afterdamp in trying to escape. He had evidently come from one of the nearer work-places, and fallen within a few yards of safety. The inspector pounced upon the lamp at once, while the doctors knelt by the body. But in itself the lamp told little. If it were the illegal unlocking of a lamp that caused the disaster, neither this lamp nor this man could be at fault; for he had died clearly on the verge of the explosion area, and from the after-effects of the calamity. But the inspector, who had barely looked at the dead man, turned the lamp round in his hands, dissatisfied.

"Bad pattern! bad pattern! If I had my way I'd fine every manager whose lamps could be unlocked," he said to himself, but quite audibly.

"The fireman may have unlocked it, sir, to re-light his own or someone else's," said Madan, stiffly, put at once on his defence.

"Oh! I know you're within your legal right, Mr. Madan," said the inspector, briskly. "I haven't the making of the laws."

And he sat down on the floor, taking the lamp to pieces, and bending his shrewd, black-eyed face over it, all the time that the doctors were examining its owner. He was, perhaps, one of the most humane men in his profession, but a long experience had led him to the conclusion that in these emergencies the fragments of a lamp, or a "tamping," or a "shot," matter more to the community than dead men.

Meanwhile George crouched beside the doctors, watching them. The owner of the lamp was a strong, fair-haired young man, without a mark on him except for the burning of the hands, the eyes quietly shut, the face at peace. One of the colliers in the search party had burst out crying when he saw him. The lad was his nephew, and had been a favourite in the pit, partly because of his prowess as a football player. But the young life had gone out irrevocably. The doctor shook his head as he lifted himself, and they left him there, in order not to waste any chance of getting out the living first.

Twenty yards farther on three more bodies were found, two oldish men and a boy, very little burnt. They also had been killed in escaping, dragged down by the inexorable afterdamp.

A little beyond this group a fall of mingled stone and coal from the roof blocked the way so heavily that the hewers and timbermen had to be set to work to open out and shore up before a passage could be made. Meanwhile the air in the haulage road was clearing fast, and George could sit on a lump of stone and watch the dim light playing on the figures of the men at work. The blows struck echoed from floor to roof; the work of the bare arms and backs, as they swayed and jerked, woke a clamour in the mine. Were there any ears still to listen for them beyond that mass? He could scarcely keep a limb quiet, as he sat looking on, for impatience and excitement. Burrows meanwhile was wielding a pick with the rest, and George envied him the bodily skill and strength that, in spite of his irregular ways of life, were still left to him.

To restore the ventilation-current was their first object, and the foremost pick had no sooner gained the roadway on the other side than a strong movement of the air was perceptible. Madan's face cleared. The ventilation circuit between the downcast and upcast shafts must be already in some sort re-established. Let them only get a few more "stoppings" and brattices put temporarily to rights, and the fan, working at its increased speed, would soon drive the renewed air-currents forward again, and make it possible to get all over the mine. The hole made was quickly enlarged, and the rescuers scrambled through.

But still fall after fall on the further side delayed their progress, and the work of repairing the blown-out stoppings by such wood brattice as could be got at, was long and tedious. The rescuers toiled and sweated, pausing every now and then to draw upon the food and drink sent up from behind; and the hours flew unheeded. At last, upon the further side of one of the worst of these falls—a loose mingled mass of rock and coal—they came on indications that showed them they had reached the centre and heart of the disaster. A door leading on the right to one of the side-roads of the pit known as Holford's Heading was blown outwards, and some trucks from the heading had been dashed across the main intake, and piled up in a huddled and broken mass against the farther wall. Just inside that door lay victim after victim, mostly on their faces, poor fellows! as they had come running out from their stalls at the noise of the explosion, only to meet the fiery blast that killed them. Two or three had been flung violently against the sides of the heading, and were left torn, with still bleeding wounds, as well as charred and blackened by the flame. Of sixteen men and boys that lay in this place of death, not one had survived to hear the stifled words—half groans, half sobs, of the comrades who had found them.

"But, thank God! no torture, no thought," said George to himself as he went from face to face; "an instant—a flash—then nothingness."

Many of the men were well known to him. He had seen them last hanging about the village street, pale with famine—the hatred in their eyes pursuing him.

He knelt down an instant beside an elderly man whom he could remember since he was quite a boy—a weak-eyed, sallow fellow, much given to preaching—much given, too, it was said, to beating his wife and children, as the waves of excitement took him. Anyway, a fellow who could feel, whose nerves stung and tormented him, even in the courses of ordinary life. He lay with his eyes half open, the face terribly scorched, the hands clenched, as though he still fought with the death that had overcome him.

George covered the man's face with a handkerchief as the doctor left the body. "He suffered," he said, under his breath. The doctor heard him, and nodded sadly.

Hark! What was that? A cry—a faint cry!

"They're some of them alive in the end workings," cried Madan, with a sob of joy. "Come on, my lads! come on!"

And the party—all but Mr. Dixon—leaving the dead, pushed on through the foul atmosphere, over heaps of fallen stone and coal, in quest of the living.

"Leave me a man," said Mr. Dixon, detaining the manager a moment. "I stay here. You have enough with you. If I judge right, it all began here."

A collier stayed with him, unwillingly, panting all the time under the emotion of the rescue the man imagined but was not to see.

For while the inspector measured and sketched, far up the heading, in some disused workings off a side-dip or roadway, Burrows was the first to come upon twenty-five men, eighteen of whom were conscious and uninjured. Two of them had strength enough, as they heard the footsteps and shouts approaching, to stagger out into the heading to meet their rescuers. One, a long, thin lad, came forward with leaps and gambols, in spite of his weakness, and fell almost at Tressady's feet. As he recognised the tall man standing above him, his bloodless mouth twitched into a broad grin.

"I say, give us a chance. Take me out—won't you?"

It was Mary Batchelor's grandson. In retribution for the assault on Letty the lad had been sentenced to three weeks' imprisonment, and George had not seen him since. He stooped now, and poured some brandy down the boy's throat. "We'll get you out directly," he said, "as soon as we've looked to the others."

"There's some on 'em not worth takin out," said the boy, clinging to George's leg. "They're dead. Take me out first." Then, with another grin, as George disengaged himself, "Some on em's prayin."

Indeed, the first sight of that little group was a strange and touching one. About a dozen men sat huddled round one of their number, a Wesleyan class-leader, who had been praying with them and reciting passages from St. John. All of them, young or old, were dazed and bent from the effects of afterdamp, and scarcely one of them had strength to rise till they were helped to their feet. Nevertheless, the cry which had been heard by their rescuers had not been a cry for help, but the voices of the little prayer-meeting raised feebly through the darkness in the Old Hundredth.

A little distance from the prayer-meeting, the sceptics of the party leant against the wall or lay along the floor, unheeding; while seven men were unconscious, and possibly dying. Two or three young fellows meanwhile, who had been least touched by the afterdamp, had "amused themselves," as they said, by riding up and down the neighbouring level on the "jummer" or coal-truck of one of them.

"Weren't you afraid?" Tressady asked one of these, turning a curious look at him, while the doctors were examining the worst cases, and rough men were sobbing and shaking each other's hands off.

"Noa," said the young hewer, his face, like something cut out in yellowish wax, returning the light from Tressady's lamp. "Noa, theer was cumpany. Old Moses, there—ee saved us."

Old Moses was the leader of the prayer-meeting. He was a fireman besides, who had been for twenty-six years in the mine. At the time of the explosion, it appeared, he had been in a working close to that door on the heading where death had done so ghastly and complete a work. But the flame in its caprice had passed him by, and he and another man had been able to struggle through the afterdamp back along the heading, just in time to stem the rush of men and boys from the workings at the farther end. These men were at the moment in a madness of terror, and ready even to plunge into the white death-mist advancing to meet them, obeying only the instinct of the trapped animal to "get out." But Moses was able to control them, to draw them back by degrees along the heading till, in the distant workings where they were found, the air was more tolerable, and they could wait for rescue.

George was the first to help the old fireman to his feet. But instead of listening to any praises of his own conduct, he was no sooner clinging to Tressady's arm than he called to Madan:

"Mr. Madan, sir!"

"Aye, Moses."

"Have ye heard aught of them in the West Heading yet?"

"No, Moses; we must get these fellows out first. We'll go there next."

"I left thirty men and boys there this morning at half-past six. It was fair thronged up with them." The old man's voice shook.

Meanwhile Madan and the doctors were busy with the transport of the seven unconscious men, some of whom were already dying. Each of them had to be carried on his back by two men, and as soon as the sick procession was organised it was seen that only three of the search party were left free—Tressady, Burrows, and the Scotch fireman, Macgregor.

Up the level and along the heading, past the point where Dixon was still at work, over the minor falls that everywhere attested the range of the explosion, and through the pools of water that here and there gathered the drippings of the mine, the seven men were tenderly dragged or carried, till at last the party regained the main intake or roadway.

George turned to Madan.

"You will have your hands full with these poor fellows. Macgregor and I—Mr. Burrows, if he likes—will push on to the West Heading."

Madan looked uneasy.

"You'd better go up, Sir George," he said, in a low voice, "and let me go on. You don't know the signs of the roof as I do. Eight or nine hours after an explosion is the worst time for falls. Send down another shift, sir, as quick as you can."

"Why should you risk more than I?" said George, quietly. "Stop! What time is it?" He looked at his watch. Five o'clock—nearly nine hours since they descended! He might have guessed it at three, if he had been asked. Time in the midst of such an experience contracts to a pin's point. But the sight of the watch stirred a pang in him.

"Send word at once to Lady Tressady," he said, in Madan's ear, drawing the manager to one side. "Tell her I have gone on a little farther, and may be another hour or two in getting back. If she is down at the bank, beg her from me to go home. Tell her the chances are that we may find the other men as safe as these."

Madan acquiesced reluctantly. George then plundered him of some dry biscuits—of some keys, moreover, that might be useful in opening one or two locked doors farther up the workings.

"Macgregor, you'll come?"

"Aye, Sir George."

"You, Mr. Burrows?"

"Of course," said Burrows, carelessly, throwing back his handsome head.

Some of the rescued men turned and looked hard at their agent and leader with their sunken eyes. Others took no notice. His prestige had been lost in defeat; and George had noticed that they avoided speech with him. No doubt this rescue party had presented itself to the agent as an opening he dare not neglect.

"Come on, then," said George; and the three men turned back towards the interior of the pit.

Old Moses, from whose clutch George had just freed himself, stopped short and looked after them. Then he raised a hoarse voice:

"Be you going to the West Heading, Sir George?"

"Yes," George flung back over his shoulder, already far away.

"The Lord go with yer, Sir George!"

No answer. The old man, breathing hard, caught hold of one of his stronger comrades and tottered on towards the shaft. Two or three of his fellows gathered round him. "Aye," said one of them, out of Madan's hearing, "ee's been a-squeezing of us through the ground, ee ave, but ee's a plucky lot, is the boss."

"They do say as Burrers slanged 'im fine at the station yesterday," said another, hoarsely. "Called 'im the devil untied, one man told me."

The first speaker, still haggard and bowed from the poison in his blood, made no reply, and the movement of old Moses' lips, as he staggered forward, helped on by the two others, his head hanging on his breast, showed that he was praying.

* * * * *

Meanwhile George and his two companions pushed cautiously on, Macgregor trying the roof with his lamp from time to time for signs of fire-damp. Two seams of coal were worked in the mine, one of which was "fiery." No naked lights, therefore, were allowed, and all "shots" or charges for loosening the coal were electrically fired.

As they walked, they spoke now and then of the possible cause of the disaster: whereof Dixon, as they passed him, had bluntly declined to say a word till his task was done. George, with the characteristic contempt of intelligence for the blunderer, threw out a few caustic remarks as to the obstinate disobedience or carelessness of a certain type of miner—disobedience which, in his own experience even, had already led to a score of fatal accidents. Burrows, irritated apparently by his tone, took up a provoking line of reply. Suppose a miner, set to choose between the risk of bringing the coal-roof down on his head for lack of a proper light to work by, and the risk of "being blown to hell" by the opening of his lamp, did a mad thing sometimes, who were other people that they should blame him? His large, ox-like eyes, clear in the light of his lamp, turned a scornful defiance on his companion. "Try it yourself, my fine gentleman"—that was what the expression of them meant.

"He doesn't only risk his own life," said George, shortly. "That's the answer.—I say, Macgregor, isn't this the door to the Meadows Pit? If anything cut us off from the shaft, and supposing we couldn't get round yet by the return, we might have to try it, mightn't we?"

Macgregor assented, and George as he passed stepped up to the heavy wooden door, and tried one of the keys he held, that he might be sure of opening it in case of need.

The door had been unopened for long, and he shook it backwards and forwards to make the key bite.

Meanwhile Macgregor had lingered a little behind, while Burrows had walked on. Suddenly, above the rattle of the door a cracking noise was heard. A voice of agony rang through the roadway.

"Run, Sir George! run!"

A rattle like thunder roared through the mine. It was heard at the pithead, and the people crowded there ran hither and thither in dismay, thinking it was another explosion.

* * * * *

Hours passed. At last in George's numbed brain there was a faint stir of consciousness. He opened his eyes slowly.

Oh, horror! oh, cruelty! to come back from merciful nothingness and peace to this burning anguish, not to be borne, of body and mind. "I had died," he thought—"it was done with," and a wild, impotent rage, as against some brutality done him, surged through him.

A little later he made a first slight movement, which was answered at once by another movement on the part of a man sitting near him. The man bent over him in the darkness and felt for his pulse.

"Burrows!" The whisper was just perceptible.

"Yes, Sir George."

"What has happened? Where is Macgregor? Give me some brandy—there, in my inner pocket."

"No; I have it. Can you swallow it? I have tried several times before, but your mouth was set—it ran down my fingers."

"Give it me."

Their fingers met, George feeling for the flask. As he moved his arm a groan of anguish broke from him.

"Drink it—if you possibly can."

George put all the power of his being into the effort to swallow a few drops. Still the anguish! "O God, my back! and the legs—paralysed!"

The words were only spoken in the brain, but it seemed to him that he cried them aloud. For a moment or two the mind swam again; then the brandy began to sting.

He slid down a hand slowly, defying the pain it caused him, to feel his right leg. The trouser round the thigh hung in ribbons, but the fragments lying on the flesh were caked and hard; and beneath him was a pool. His reason worked with difficulty, but clearly. "Some bad injury to the thigh," he thought. "Much bleeding—probably the bleeding has dulled the worst pain. The back and shoulders burnt—"

Then, in the same hesitating, difficult way he managed to lift his hand to his head, which ached intolerably. The right temple and the hair upon it were also caked and wet.

He let his hand drop. "How long have I—?" he thought. For already his revived consciousness could hardly maintain itself; something from the black tunnels of the mine seemed to be perpetually pressing out upon it, threatening to drown it like a flood.

"Burrows!"—he felt again with his hand—"where's Macgregor?"

A sob broke from the darkness beside him.

"Crushed in an instant. I heard one cry. Why not we, too?"

"It was such a bad fall?"

"The whole mine seemed to come down." George felt the shudder of the huge frame. "I escaped; you must have been caught by some of it. Macgregor was right underneath it. But there was an explosion besides."

"Macgregor's lamp? Broken?" whispered George, after a pause.

"Possibly. It couldn't have been much, or we should have been killed instantly. I was only stunned—a bit scorched, too—not badly. You're the lucky one. I shall die by inches."

"Cheer up!" said George, faintly. "I can't last—but they'll find you."

"What chance for either of us," said Burrows, groaning. "The return must be blocked, too, or they'd have got round to us by now."

"How long—"

"God knows! To judge by the time I've been sitting—since I got you here—it's night long ago."

"Since you got me here?" repeated George, with feeble interrogation.

"When I came to I was lying with my face in a dampish sort of hollow, and I suppose the afterdamp had lifted a bit, for I could raise my head. I felt you close by. Then I dragged myself on a bit, till I felt some brattice. I got past that, found a dip where the air was better, came back for you, and dragged you here. I thought you were dead at first; then I felt your heart. And since we got here I've found an air-pipe up here along the wall, and broken it."

George was silent. But the better atmosphere was affecting him somewhat, and consciousness was becoming clearer. Only, what seemed to him a loud noise disturbed him—tortured the wound in his head. Then, gradually, as he bent his mind upon it, he made out what it was—a slow drip or trickle of water from the face of the wall. The contrast between his imagination and the reality supplied him with a kind of measure of the silence that enwrapped them—silence that seemed in itself a living thing, charged with the brooding vengeance of the earth upon the creatures that had been delving at her heart.

"Burrows!—that water—maddens me." He moved his head miserably. "Could you get some? The brandy-flask has a cup."

"There is a little pool by the brattice. I put my cap in as we got there, and dashed it over you. I'll go again."

George heard the long limbs drag themselves painfully along. Then he lost count again of time, and all impressions on the ear, till he was roused by the water at his lips and a hand dashing some on his brow.

He drank greedily.

"Thanks! Put it by me—there; that's safe. Now, Burrows, I'm dying. Leave me. You can't do anything—and you—you might still try for it. There are one or two ways that might be worth trying. Take these keys. I could explain—"

But the little thread of life wavered terribly as he spoke. Burrows had to put his ear close to the scorched lips.

"No," he said gloomily, "I don't leave a man while there's any life in him. Besides, there's no chance—I don't know the mine."

Suddenly, as though answering to the other's despair, a throb of such agony rose in George it seemed to rive body and soul asunder. His poor Letty!—his child that was to be!—his own energy of life, he had been so conscious of at the very moment of descending to this hideous death—all gone, all done!—his little moment of being torn from him by the inexorable force that restores nothing and explains nothing.

A picture flashed into his mind, an etching that he had seen in Paris in a shop window—had seen and pondered over. "Entombed" was written underneath it, and it showed a solitary miner, on whom the awful trap has fallen, lifting his arms to his face in a last cry against the universe that has brought him into being, that has given him nerve and brain—for this!

Wherever he turned his eyes in the blackness he saw it—the lifted arms, the bare torso of the man, writhing under the agony of realisation—the tools, symbols of a life's toil, lying as they had dropped for ever from the hands that should work no more. It had sent a shudder through him, even amid the gaiety of a Paris street.

Then this first image was swept away by a second. It seemed to him that he was on the pit bank again. It was night, but the crowd was still there, and big fires lighted for warmth threw a glow upon the faces. There were stars, and a pale light of snow upon the hills. He looked into the engine-house. There she was—his poor Letty! O God! He tried to get through to her, to speak to her. Impossible!

A sound disturbed his dream.

His ear and brain struggled with it—trying to give it a name. A man's long, painful breaths—half sobs. Burrows, no doubt—thinking of the woman he loved—of the poor emaciated soul George had seen him tending in the cottage garden on that April day.

He put out his hand and touched his companion.

"Don't despair," he whispered; "you will see her again. How strange—we two—we enemies—but this is the end. Tell me about her."

"I took her from a ruffian who had nearly murdered her and the child," said the hoarse voice after a pause. "She was happy—in spite of the drink, in spite of everything—she would have been happy, till she died. To think of her alone is too cruel. If people turned their backs on her, I made up."

"You will see her again," George repeated, but hardly knowing what the words were he said.

When he next spoke it was with an added strength that astonished his companion.

"Burrows, promise me something. Take a message from me to my wife. Come nearer."

Then, as he felt his companion's breath on his cheek, he roused himself to speak plainly:

"Tell her—I sent her my dear love—that I thanked her with all my heart and soul for her love—that it was very hard to leave her—and our child. Write the words for her, Burrows. Tell her it was impossible for me to write, but I dictated this." He paused for a long time, then resumed: "And tell her, too—my last wish was—that she should ask Lord and Lady Maxwell—can you hear plainly?"—he repeated the names—"to be her friends and guardians. And bid her ask them—from me—not to forsake her. Have you understood? Will you repeat it?"

Burrows, in the mood of one humouring the whim of the dying, repeated what had been said to him word by word, his own sensuous nature swept the while by the terrors of a death which seemed but one little step further from himself than from Tressady. Yet he did his best to understand, and recollect; and to the message so printed on his shrinking brain a woman's misery owed its only comfort in the days that followed.

"Thank you," said Tressady, painfully listening for the last word. "Give me your hand. Good-bye. You and I—The world's a queer place—I wish I'd turned you back at the pit's mouth. I wanted to show I bore no malice. Well—at least I know—"

The words broke off incoherently. Burrows caught the word "suffering," and some phrase about "the men," then Tressady's head slipped back against the wall, and he spoke no more.

But the mind was active long afterwards. Again and again he seemed to himself standing in a bright light, alive and free. Innumerable illusions played about him. In one of the most persistent he was climbing the slope of a Swiss meadow in May. Oh! the scent of the narcissus, heavy still with the morning dew—the brush of the wet grass against his ankles—those yellow anemones shining there beneath the pines—the roar of the river in the gorge below—and beyond, far above, the grey peak, sharp and tall against that unmatched brilliance of the blue. In another he was riding alone in a gorge aflame with rhododendrons, and far down in the plain—the burnt-up Indian plain—some great fortified town, grave on its hill-top, broke the level lines—"A rose-red city, half as old as time." Or, again, it was the sea in some glow of sunset, the white reflections of the sails slipping down and down through the translucent pinks and blues, till the eye lost itself in the infinity of shades and tints, which the breeze—oh, the freshness of it!—was painting each moment anew at its caprice—painting and blotting, over and over again, as the water swung under the ship.

But all through these freaks of memory some strange thing seemed to have happened to him. He carried something in his arms—on his breast. The anguish of his inner pity for Letty, piercing through all else, expressed itself so.

But sometimes, as the brain grew momentarily clearer, he would wonder, almost in his old cynical way, at his own pity. She seemed to have come to love him. But was it not altogether for her good that his flawed, contradictory life should be cut violently from hers? Could their marriage, ill-planted, ill-grown, have come in the end to any tolerable fruit? His mind passed back, with bitterness, over the nine months of it; not bitterness towards her—he seemed to be talking to her all the time, as she lay hidden on his shoulder—bitterness towards himself, towards the futility of his own life and efforts and desires.

But why his more than any other? The futility, the insignificance of all that man desires, all that waits on him—that old self-scorn, which began with the race, tormented him none the less, in dying, for the myriads it had haunted so before. An image of human fate, which had struck him in some book, recurred to him now—an image of daisied grass, alive one moment in the evening light—a quivering world of blades and dew, insects and petals, a forest of innumerable lines, crossed by the innumerable movements of living things—the next withdrawn into the night, all silenced, all effaced.

So life. Except, perhaps, for pain! His own pain never ceased. The only eternity that seemed conceivable, therefore, was an eternity of pain. It had become to him the last reality. What a horrible quickening had come to him of that sense for misery, that intolerable compassion, which in life he had always held to be the death of a man's natural energy! Again and again, as consciousness still fought against the last surrender, it seemed to him that he heard voices and hammerings in the mine. And while he painfully listened, from the eternal darkness about him, dim tragic forms would break in a faltering procession—men or young boys, burnt and marred and slain like himself—turning to him faces he remembered. It was as though the scorn for pity he had once flung at Marcella Maxwell had been but the fruit of some obscure and shrinking foresight that he himself should die drowned and lost in pity; for as he waited for death his soul seemed to sink into the suffering of the world, as a spent swimmer sinks into the wave.

One perception, indeed, that was not a perception of pain, this piteous submission to the human lot brought with it. The accusing looks of hungry men, the puzzles of his own wavering heart, all social qualms and compunctions—these things troubled him no more. In the wanderings of death he was not without the solemn sense that, after all, he, George Tressady, a man of no professions, and no enthusiasms, had yet paid his share and done his part.

Was there something in this thought that softened the dolorous way? Once—nearly at the last—he opened his eyes with a start.

"What is it? Something watches me. There is a sense of something that supports—that reconciles. If—if—how little would it all matter! Oh! what is this that knows the road I came—the flame turned cloud, the cloud returned to flame—the lifted, shifted steeps, and all the way!" His dying thought clung to words long familiar, as that of other men might have clung to a prayer. There was a momentary sense of ecstasy, of something ineffable.

And with that sense came a rending of all barriers, a breaking of long tension, a flooding of the soul with joy. Was it a passing under new laws, into a new spiritual polity? He knew not; but as he lifted his sightless eyes he saw the dark roadway of the mine expand, and a woman, stepping with an exquisite lightness and freedom, came towards him. Neither shrank nor hesitated. She came to him, knelt by him, and took his hands. He saw the pity in her dark eyes. "Is it so bad, my friend? Have courage—the end is near." "Care for her—and keep me, too, in your heart," he cried to her, piteously. She smiled. Then light—blinding, featureless light—poured over the vision, and George Tressady had ceased to live.