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"Oh, for God's sake, go!" she said, brokenly, but not looking at Adrian Fellowes, and with a heart torn by misery and shame. Brengyn turned to the men behind him, the dark, determined toilers who sustained the immortal spirit of courage and humanity on thirty shillings a week and nine hours' work a day. "Who's for it, mates?" he asked, roughly. "Who's going wi' me?"
Now came forward a burly and dour-looking miner, called Brengyn, who had been down before, and had been in command. His look was forbidding, but his face was that of a man on whom you could rely; and his eyes had a dogged, indomitable expression.
"I think, alive or dead, it's all against them as goes down to bring them out. It's more lives to be wasted." Stafford heard, and he stepped forward. "If there's a chance in a thousand, it's good enough for a try," he said. "If you were there, Mr. Byng would take the chance in the thousand for you." Brengyn looked Stafford up and down slowly. "What is it you've got to say?" he asked, gloomily.
Seeing Brengyn approach Jasmine, he hurried over, recognizing in the stalwart miner a leader of men. "It's a chance in a thousand," he heard Brengyn say to Jasmine, whose white face showed no trace of tears, and who held herself with courage.
Al'mah's face flushed with anger and shame at the thing she saw, and a weakness came over her, as though the springs of life had been suddenly emptied. Brengyn once again fastened the group from Glencader with his eyes. "There's a gentleman in danger," he said, grimly, again.
A Welsh preaching hillman, carried away by the triumph of the moment, gave the great tragedy the bugle-note of human joy and pride. Ian Stafford and Brengyn and Jim Gawley had conquered. The limp bodies carried past Al'mah were not dead. They were living, breathing men whom fresh air and a surgeon's aid would soon restore.
Jasmine took a step forward with a smothered cry, but Alice Tynemouth laid a hand on her arm. "He'll bring Rudyard back, if it can be done," she whispered. Stafford did not turn round. He said something in an undertone to Tynemouth, and then, without a glance behind, strode away beside Brengyn and Jim Gawley to the pit's mouth. Adrian Fellowes stepped up to Tynemouth.
He went down to help save men of my class, and to any of us he's worth the risk. But how many of his own class is taking it on?" "I, for one," said Lord Tynemouth, stepping forward. "I I," answered three other men of the house-party. Al'mah, who was standing just below Jasmine, had her eyes fixed on Adrian Fellowes, and when Brengyn called for volunteers, her heart almost stood still in suspense.
And the women turned away to their own to their capital, which in the slump of Fate had suffered no loss. It was theirs, complete and paying large dividends. To the crowd, Brengyn, with gruff sincerity, said, loudly: "Jim Gawley, he done as I knowed he'd do. He done his best, and he done it prime. We couldn't ha' got on wi'out him. But first there was Mr.
Her husband's life was in infinite danger, had not Brengyn said that his chances were only one in a thousand? death stared her savagely in the face; yet she bore herself as calmly as those women who could not afford the luxury of tears or the self-indulgence of a despairing indolence; to whom tragedy was but a whip of scorpions to drive them into action.
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