FRIENDS AND BROTHERS.
There was no necessity for Mr. Pryse to suggest 'employment' for little
William. In the last century, and far into this, children were set to
work and expected to earn their own living at a wofully early age, and
that long before machinery came into use and drove them into factories
to be the slaves of brutal overseers, who scored their six and eight
year old backs with weals from whip or stick on the slightest
provocation. William Hutton, the historian, tells how he, a small child
of seven years, was apprenticed, in 1730, to an overseer of Lombe's silk
mill, in Derby, how he had to wear high pattens to reach the machine,
had to rise at five in the depth of winter and hurry to work, slipping
down on the ice as he ran, and how he was beaten till his back was all
festering sores. And this was no uncommon case. I, who write this, can
remember when the little barefooted children went to the cotton
factories and print works at five in the morning, and worked till seven
or eight at night.
The boys and girls of this generation have no conception how children
were trained and treated a few generations back. Not the poor only. The
children of even rich parents had to endure painful punishments both at
school and at home, and were fed sparely on coarse food for their
health's sake. The late noble Lord Shaftesbury related how he and a
sister were well-nigh starved in their childhood through the negligence
of parents and servants.
History and biography teem with such instances. So that when I state
that William Edwards and Jonet were sent into their mother's fields to
weed, and pick up stones, and scare the birds away from newly-sown lands
before the boy was six years old, I cast no reflection on his mother,
who had no experience of a different state of things.
Nay, for her time, she was enlightened, and being a woman with good
natural feeling, she was careful they were not taxed beyond their
strength, as she and her husband had been; but that children should
spend their hours in play, when they were old enough to be of use, had
never dawned on her imagination. She considered she was doing her duty
by them in setting them early to work, especially as she was careful
they should be taught to read also.
Davy worked in field and farm, alongside Rhys, without a murmur of
hardship. And when Jonet was first set to feed the chickens, or to look
for the eggs of hens that laid away, to pull peas or beans, or to shell
the latter for the pot (peas were boiled in the pod), imitative William,
always at her heels, and wanting to show his own cleverness, set himself
to do likewise.
And so long as he set himself voluntarily to work to assist Jonet, he
was busy as a bee, and proud of his doings. Or when his mother or Ales
sent him hither or thither to fetch or carry, or directed him to perform
small services, he was as willing and amenable to order as most boys of
his age. But no sooner did Rhys take advantage of his precocious
industry, and exercise an assumed right to command, and bid him do this
or that, than William began to rebel.
He was docile enough to his brother as a teacher. He was more eager to
learn to read than Rhys was to instruct. Davy and Jonet took their
spelling and reading lessons as compulsory tasks--Davy placidly, and
Jonet with uneasy disfavour--but William with an absolute desire to
_know_.
He no sooner discovered that the Ten Commandments painted up in the
church, and the inscriptions on the upright gravestones in the
churchyard, were just made up of the alphabetical characters on his
painted battledore, and that the big Bible his mother read aloud to them
was all a mixture of the same letters, than a craving to penetrate the
mystery of these combinations seized him. He felt he had achieved
something when he made his first grand discovery on a headstone taller
than himself; but when, at his request, Evan read out the inscription,
his perplexity and curiosity increased.
It was singular to see the little fellow--he was short for his
age--Sunday by Sunday tracing letter or word, with tiny finger, on some
grey old slab, while his seniors were gossiping all around.
'I tell you what,' said Rhys to him one Sunday when so employed, 'you
might have been born in a stone quarry. I'm sure you ought to live in
one, you do be so fond of the dirty rubbish.'
'What's a stone quarry?' put in William, with wide-open eyes.
'Oh, bother! It's a place where stone grows,' was the impatient reply.
'Grows like trees?' and the wondering eyes of the six years old querist
opened still wider.
'Oh, what a plague you do be! No, grows like coal;' and away strode Rhys
to avoid further questioning--a common but very unsatisfactory way of
dealing with an inquiring child.
'I'll be asking Robert Jones, he will tell me,' said William to himself.
'Rhys do be caring more for Cate Griffith than for me, whatever,' his
aggrieved looks following his well-grown brother as he strode over the
grassy mound to join the weaver's wife and daughter under the
patriarchal yew-tree, with all the importance of incipient manhood.
The following day William was missing from the farm, but as this was not
uncommon, only slight uneasiness was felt until evening.
The boy had long before struck up a strange friendship with the
red-haired peat-cutter, who, in fulfilment of his early promise, had
taken him on his ass when bound to a colliery across the river for culm,
and there let him see the horse plodding round and round in a circle to
wind up coal and grimy colliers from the dark, deep pit-shaft, and let
down the empty tubs to be refilled. There the child had looked round in
wonder at the great black heaps of coal, and at the half-naked children
sent down the terrible dark hole, to work in the bowels of the mine, as
Robert Jones explained to him.
Later he had taken the little fellow to see how peat was cut with long,
narrow, flat shovels, 'shaped like a marrow-spoon,' from the boggy top
of Eglwysilan Mountain. And when his sled was loaded, he had placed the
child before him on the end of the sled, and gone sliding down the steep
mountain-side with him swiftly and securely, to the youngster's infinite
delight. He was too young to dream of danger, and to the man, long
practice had made the perilous descent safe and easy, swift as was the
downward motion, and sharp as was the jerk at the bottom. And many a
ride on the turf-cutter's sled did William have after that.
The man had no children of his own, and, perhaps, that was the reason he
took so kindly to the lad; answering his strange questions to the best
of his untutored ability, and frequently giving him a mount on one of
his patient beasts between tubs or panniers when going for loads, or
carrying them for sale not too far away. To him the child could open all
his wondering heart, fearing neither repulse nor ridicule, of which he
had too much at home; and so their friendship grew.
On that particular Monday morning, Robert Jones had started on a long
round, and nothing remained for the young inquirer, who had sought him
at his ordinary haunts, but to limp homeward in the afternoon, hungry,
footsore, and disappointed.
Cate Griffith, returning from the brook with a pitcher of water on her
head and another in her hand, caught sight of him as he was passing her
father's door.
'Name o' goodness!' she cried, 'what brings you here this time o' day?
Look you, father, here's little Willem Edwards!'
The weaver, then changing his shuttle, looked out from his casement
window, and in two minutes was at the door questioning the wanderer.
Without any shyness or reservation the boy told where he had been, and
for what; his brother's initiative remarks with the rest.
Cate, now a rosy-cheeked, buxom lass on the borderland of womanhood,
began to laugh outright, as she had often laughed before when Rhys
amused her with some story of William's out-of-the-way questions.
Her father checked her sternly. 'What do you be laughing at?'
''Deed, he do be so queer. Rhys do say he be always at play with bits of
stones. And now he asks if they do grow like trees. Oh, Willem, you are
droll!'
Again her laugh broke out. William, child though he was, crimsoned to
the roots of his brown hair. He seemed to comprehend that Rhys had made
a jest of him, and no one is more sensitive to ridicule than a child of
tender years.
'Carry your pitchers into the house, and stay there!' cried her father.
Then turning to the boy, who hesitated whether to linger or walk on, he
said kindly--
'Never mind Cate, my little man, she talks foolishness. Come and sit on
this bench beside me. I'll try to serve instead of Robert Jones.'
William's face lit up. He climbed to a seat by the weaver's side,
content to find he was no longer laughed at. And very intently he
listened to Owen's simple explanation that the mountain was nearly all
stone, and that a quarry was the place where strong men broke away the
stone for building walls and houses, and that the mountains had been
there ever since God created the world, so that he did not think stone
grew. And if Owen's was not a learned geological definition, it was all
the better adapted to juvenile comprehension. But, simple as it was, a
shower of whys and hows were rained on the exponent during its course.
Then William rose to depart, but something in his face, or in his
lagging gait, or a casual word, caused the weaver to interrogate the
boy. This elicited the admission that he had strayed away from home in
the morning, and that no one knew, and, moreover, that he was very
hungry.
Owen looked grave. He called for Cate to bring some bread and a cup of
milk, and began to read the boy a lesson on the inconsiderate wrong he
had done, and the anxiety he would cause his mother.
'You should never leave home without permission, Willem. Your poor
mother will be fretting and crying for fear lest you have fallen over
the rocks, or got into the river and been drowned, or lost your way on
the mountain as you did four years ago, when Evan found you asleep under
the Druids' rocking-stone. It is very cruel and wicked for a child to
stray from home without leave.'
William hung his head. 'I did not mean any harm,' he began; 'but,' in a
changed tone, 'what's the Druids?'--
'Oh, you're here, are you? A fine hunt you have given us all, you young
plague,' came in an angry shout from Rhys, who had crossed the brook and
was advancing at a run.
William's question died away unanswered. He got down from his stone seat
inclined to be penitent for his misbehaviour. Owen Griffith had shown
him that he had done wrong. He might have gone home and told his mother
he was sorry. But Rhys, who had been as much alarmed at his absence as
the rest, now he was found, caught him by the shoulder and shook him
roughly.
'Look you, if you do be running off again, I shall give you a good
thrashing.'
''Deed you won't,' was thrown back at him defiantly by William, whose
penitence was at an end.
'Won't I? You'll see. Sure, I've half a mind to do it now.'
'Nay, nay,' interposed Griffith. 'Willem is sorry. He did not know he
was doing wrong.'
'Then he will have to learn. It's quite time he made himself useful.
Jonet did before she was his age. And so did I. We can have no idlers
on our farm, whatever. Ah, Cate, is that you?' His voice had brought the
girl to the open window. She leaned out, blushing like a peony. He
joined her, and said something which made her giggle and provoked reply.
Then ensued some whispering and laughter. Rhys apparently forgot all
about William and his mother's anxiety whilst occupied so pleasantly,
for there was no doubt Cate had more than a third-cousinly attraction
for him, and chance opportunities for seeing her except on Sundays were
not frequent.
When his errand recurred to him, William had disappeared, and
notwithstanding Rhys' longer legs, the fatigue of the small ones, the
gathering dusk, and the steepness of the ascending path to the farm, the
truant crossed the threshold first.
At once uneasiness resolved itself into displeasure. He was scolded on
all sides, and threatened with the loss of a supper if ever he ventured
to give them such a fright again.
'I wanted Robert Jones,' was all the excuse he made. The scolding was
received with stolid silence, which was called sullenness.
Yet he had not forgotten Owen's picture of his mother's distress, or his
grave reproof for straying away, and had he been differently received,
he might have been contrite and sued for pardon.
It is a difficult matter, even in these analytic days, to search out the
inner workings of the child-mind, or to understand all that influences
wayward moods. How were those rudely-cultivated farmers to penetrate
beneath the surface, to see the undeveloped oak in the immature acorn?
'Robert Jones do be spoiling that boy,' said Mrs. Edwards, when the
child was in bed. 'I wonder what he wanted with the man?'
'Wanted? Sure, he wanted to ask if stones do grow like trees,' said
Rhys, in a tone of impatient scorn. 'It was only last week he did be
asking me if the trees made the wind, because it was always windy when
the trees tossed about.'
'Well, _don't_ they?' queried stolid Davy, amidst a roar of laughter, in
which even the mother joined.
'Now, don't you be as silly as Willem. I never before knew you ask such
a foolish question,' said Rhys dogmatically.
'No, Davy,' explained his mother, without stopping her busy wheel, 'it
is the wind that blows the trees about,'--an answer which sufficed for
him. He was not curious to learn what caused the winds, or whence they
came, as William had been. He accepted facts as they were, untroubled by
vain speculations.
Undoubtedly William--the father's namesake, her youngest born--was the
mother's darling, in spite of his odd ways. And however cross she might
have been overnight, in the morning, when the others had dispersed, she
took him to task for straying away without leave; not angrily, but
sadly, showing him the trouble he was likely to cause, and the anxiety
she had had, remembering the time when he was lost before.
It was a very effectual supplement to Owen Griffith's lecture; the
sensitive boy's feelings were touched. He threw his arms around her
neck, begged forgiveness, and promised the best of behaviour for the
future.
Alas, for a child's promises! William went to work beside Jonet like a
little man, helped in seed-time and harvest, and won commendations from
Ales and Evan. But he had his dreamy hours; he continued to pile up
stones in odd corners, and was alternately ridiculed and rebuked by
Rhys, whose interference he resented.
This went on for about two years, trying the patience of both, and then
came a more serious outbreak.