FAIRDEW'S GIFT.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1746, 23 August 1905, Page 7

FAIRDEW'S GIFT.

(By David Christie Murray.)

He was a lop-sided, ungainly fellow, with one leg apparently shorter than the other, a shrunken arm, and a face hideously scarred on one side. He was a middle-aged man now, but in his heart he was just as bitter at the thought of his deformities as he had been when he had first realised them in his early manhood. The disaster which had transformed him from a handsome and active lad of four-and-twenty into as ugly a cripple as might be found in England had happened in a second. He had been by trade a puddler, and. the explosion of a blast furnace had splashed him from head to foot with burning metal. His comrades took him up for dead, but Nature was strong in him, and he survived. He came out of hospital a total wreck, with a ringed patten fixed on the boot of his left foot to make up as well as it might for the withered! sinews of his leg, and with a face so wnthen and distorted from its original manly comeliness that little children ran away from him in terror. Since he was by nature a ten-der-hearted, sentimental sort of fellow, with a great liking for children, their horror-stricken avoidance of 'him cut him to the quick. The very first time the thing happened was when he was limping home out of hospital, leaving a record of “discharged, cured,” on the books. A fat baby of some three years of age, gravely dragging a broken box behind her at the end of a frayed cord, made so pretty a picture to his fancy that he could not resist the impulse to chuck her under the dimpled chin. The child looked solemnly up at him with big, wide, blue eyes, and at the first glimpse of his disfigured face sent out shriek on shriek of terror. These cries brought out the mother, fresh ' from the family wash-tub, with her arms in suds to the elbow. She was a woman of Fairdew’s own class, which is sometimes very direct in speech, and is sometimes too stupid to have a ,ready instinct for pity. She called him by all the opprobrious names she could lay her tongue to, and they were many; and she wound up by telling him in good broad Staffordshire to “goo an’ frighten the dogs, an’ not come a turryfyin’ the life out of little children wi* that ugly mug.” Fairdew listened to the tirade, until the woman had ceased to “thunder and lighten” at him and had turned away with the child in her soapy arms. Then, with a sort of a choke in. his voice, he said, “God forgive thee, missus. It’s none my fau’t as I’m s’ugly.” The woman made no answer. Perhaps she had not heard, or perhaps she had not understood, for since his accident Faii-dew’s speech had been indistinct, because of his mis-shaped mouth. He stood looking after her and the crying child, whilst a great hot lump rose in his throat, and his eyes filled and flowed over. Then he limped on, sobbing broken-heartedly. “Eh, dear!” The inoffensive, softhearted fellow i bleated like a sheep; but, luckily, the road was lonely, and there was nobody to deride him or to insult him with pity. “I wished I wos dead i’ th’ ’ospital maney an’ raaney a time, but I niver wished it like I do this minute. Eh, dear; a dear I” But his manhood shamed him in a little while, and he controlled himself, and rubbed the tears from his eyes with hands which had grown strangely soft in a six months’ absence from labour. “ ‘Discharged, cured,’ they said at th’ ’ospital,” he mused, sadly, as he hobbled towards his home. “They seemed to ha’ dropped out a letter to my tihinlrin’. ‘Discharged, cursed,’ ’ud be a bit nearer the mark. Eh, hut it’s hard lines as a little bit of a kidlim’ ’ll niver be able to look at me ’ithout being scared. It’s for life,' ’Zekiel. It’s for now an’ always. For iver, an’ iver, an’ iver! Eh. but. it,’« hard 1”

Hie had no folks of his own to go home to, but tbe people he had lodged with for a year or two had received him kindly, and had a sympathy which was not the less real because it did not knowhow to express itself in pretty phrases. And the neighbours were neighbourly, and old companions were generous. Fairdew was kept out of the Bastille, as they call the workhouse in those parts, and a friendly little jobbing tailor taught the disabled man his own trade, and made a good workmen of him, and when he died left him bis small business connection, so that life on the mere material side became tolerable enough. But Fairdew was such a hobbling monstrosity to Look at that he frightened all the little chTdren; andi the hobbledehoys of the place felt imperatively called upon to stone him, and to gather about his door and shout insults to the harmless creature. He lived a great deal alone, doing his own household work, and rarely speaking to anybody except on business: but as time went on the solid honesty of his work and his own good character for punctuality grew almost a byword, and his custom increased, so that he took an apprentice or two and became prosperous. It was about this time that a great and blissful astonishment fell upon him, for he made the discovery of his “gift.” He found out that he was a poet, and the fact made itself known to him in this wise. He was digging in his own soft heart for comfort, seated on the floor, and stitching away at a waistcoat which was in demand for Shnday. It was a heavenly summer day, and a lazy wind fed full with sweetness just fanned itself through the open window, and the birds were singing. It was so still that he could hear the pig-iron being clanked into the canal boats nearly a mile away, and the boys were playing cricket in the ragged field near by, with a rounded peddle for a ball, and a tattered coat for a wicket. Fairdew said to himself: “Why should I moan and pine and sigh?” He knew he had reason enough for despondency, but he turned the words over and over in his mind in a sort of chastened sadness, as if they made a kind of music for him. “Why should I moan and pine and sigh?” And all on a sudden, without any will or effort of his own, these words added themselves: “When o’er me hangs the shining sky.” He sate in a sort of delicious stupor, gloating over this astonishment of his own making. He whispered the lines to himself again and again, and at last they grew to this:—

Why should I moan and pine and sigh, When o’er me hangs the shining sky. And birds sit singing in the shade,

Which God for their delight has made.

Never mother loved a. firstborn child more than Fairdew loved these simple verses. They were his very earliest and his very own. He seemed to himself to have found an El Dorado of delight, a new land which was full of pleasures, and whose pleasures could never pall. It is just a literal fact that from the hour of this sublime discovery the crippled tailor with that gargoyle face whidh frightened little children lived to music, woke to music, went to sleep to music. The “gift”—it was always “the gift” to Fairdew —might seem a light and a little thing to other men, but to him it was an atonement for that he had suffered, and it filled his life with a holy joy. It took a year or two to do it, but at length he had amassed verses enough to make a modest volume,- and he could afford to have it printed. If there is one other joy in life which rivals Love's Young Dream it is the joy of type to the hitherto unprinted rhymester, and 1 that joy was Fairdew’s. When the proof-sheets of the title-page reached him he felt a terror cf self-grat illation. There .it stood in print, “Grod’s Goodness to-Man and Other Poems. By Ezekiel Fairdew. Price O'ne Shilling.” And the booklet sold. The local gentry bought copies of it. It did what many more pret««-

tious volumes failed to do. It paid expenses. . A London paper named it, professing to find K a certain homely bvo eetness in the artless art of Mr FairThus, like Ulysses, of whom he had never heard, Faindew had become a name, and, for onoe in a way, a prophet had honour -in his own country. ■Hiiq unpretentious volume was read in many homes in that neighbourhood, and one night a strange speaker at a temperance meeting elicited loud apa' se by a quotation “from your own bard. Ezekiel Fairdew.” Now it befell that one tranquil autumn evening, when the skies were splendid with the murky glory which is known at times even in the Black Country, the poet was hobbling along the spoil-bank of the local canal at a very favourite spot of his, where Nature seemed l to have made a pact' of peace with the handiwork of man. Trees grew there, amidst a tangle of blackberry vines, and sheep nibbled at the grasses, following idly the cracked tinkle of the bell on the neck of the bell-wether. As a rule the place was as solitary as a desert at this hour, and that was one of the reasons why Fairdew loved to stroll there, but to-night there was an intruder on the scene. Fairdew gave little heed to her at first, but by-and-hy his attention was attracted to her by the curious way in which she walked. **She’s like a body in a trance,” he said to himself, for the girl, with wide open eyes looking straight before her, was setting one foot before the other with a long, groping pause, and then advancing its fellow in a similar way, and her hands were stretched out straight before her.

“Begosh, hen’s blind!!” said Fairdew. He called out in that mumbling voice of his/ “Don’t be frightened, my wench. But stop! Thou’rt within a foot o’ the out, and thou’lt be in it . in another minute. Wait till I can soromble down the bonk.” For Ezekiel Fairdew wrote his artless rhymes in plain English, but spoke the South Staffordshire version of that great tongue, and would have beep ashamed to have spoken any other. The girl stood waiting patiently until he had climbed down to her. “Oossent tha see, my pretty?” asked Fairdew. “Nay,” she answered, turning her glowless eyes upon him, guilded by his voice. “I’ve never seen.” “Can I gi’e thee a hond to guide thee ? I*ll not harm thee, lass. Now tell me where thou wants to goo. The Shepherd’s Walk ? Ay, ay. It’s a thing to be thankful for as theer was somebody nigh at hand to warn thee.” ‘Tm very thankful,” the girl answersi. tc l don’t know how it happened. I never lost my way before. But I lost my stick, and then I fell down the bank by the roadside as I was looking for it.” . _ . “Never fear,” said Fairdew. “I’ll guide thee home.” “Nay,” she answered. “I mean’t drag thee so far. I can tell as thou gopt lame.” “Ay,” he said, ‘Tm a cripple, and a main ugly ’un. But I can guide thee home.” The soft little hand rested in Ms confidingly. jBDe had never held a woman’s hand for twenty years and more, and its touch thrilled him. “We’re at the high, road, now,” she said a minute later. “Let me feel the Wall, and -I can find my way quite easy.” “Nay, nay,” he answered. ‘Til make » job on it while I’m about it. I’ll see thee home.” “Oh!” she cried quite suddenly, drawing her hand from him, and turning on him with a blush and a beaming ■mile, “I do believe as I can guess who thee be.” “Ay ?” he answered', “"who be' I, then ?” She was smiling and blushing and enraptured. She stood with clasped hands, and her blind eyes looked into his as if she saw him. “Why, I do believe thou’st Mr Ezekiel Fairdew, the Bank side Bard.” “That be my name,” he said, “sure enough. What made thee guess, my pretty ?” “Why thee voice and thee—thee being lame. Why, I’ve cried to think the •man as wrote those lovely verses should ha’ suffered so. I know ’em all. I can tell ’em all by heart.” Fairdew could not speak. The blind •yes which seemed to look into his own so. calmly held Mm like a spell. He found his voice at length, but it was husky with emotion. • “Eh, my pretty lass,” he said. “I niver thought to see a woman lookin’ as if her was lookin’ at me with a smilin’ face like that o’ thine.” ’ “Dost think,” she asked him with a cMldlike- wistfulness, “I shouldn’t like thee if. I could see. thee?” “I know it, lass,” he answered, sadly. ‘Tm ugly enough to set the dogs balkin’.” “Well,” she said, “when a girl’s blind she’s got to judge folks by what’s inside ’em.” .They wer® married that day six months. “I could almost thank God for. thy affliction, sweetheart,” Fairdew said. “A blind wife is the only wife for ’Zekiel Fairdew. Nature’s kind, my pretty. Thou doesn’t miss what thou’st niver known.” ~/*! miss‘ H naught now I’ve thee, dear,”

said Ms wife, folding her fond arms about Ms neck. “What’s thy scarred face to me, my darling love, when I can read thy soul!’’