"STAR" TALES.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 7731, 15 June 1903, Page 4

"STAR" TALES.

THE ELDEST-BORN.

(By OUIDA.)

Author of "Under Two Flags," "Two Little Wooden Shoes," "Ruffino," "A House Party." etc.,. etc.

" Manesco !" they shouted, to him across te fields. He hated the name, but they Wer gavo him any other. Ah nicknames ffttimes do, it wholly supplanted and replaced his own namo received' at baptism. '♦Manesco!" moans' handy, capable, adroit in the. use of the fingers ; and the sting of jt lay for him in the fact that he was not «nd tiever could be this, because he had . only one hand. It was a cruel nickname, given in the merciless mocking sport of children ; and it clung to him as unkindness always does, like a horsefly on a wound. He ehould have been used to it, if time makes usage, but though .«>o familial 1 , it was always hateful to him. What had he done that ho should have been born without his right hand? There are people who aro very able m the use of their left hand, but he had never become so ; he was always awkward at his work. Some one told him that if he went to a great city, surgeons would fit on to him a. mechanical' hand, which would be almost as- good as a real one. But he had never been to any city, and he did not know ■where to go, and ho supposed that such a thing would undoubtedly be dear and cost much money, and so he never gave it any serious thought. Nature had made him •with one hand, or God, or the Maidonna, or somebody had done so. He might have been born blind; that would have been worse. Yes, he thought it would be worse if he were unable to see what he did, and •what was around him ; he would be more helpless, and he would never have the pleasure of looking on a pretty girl's face; there were very pretty girls in this valley. He was twenty years of age, the eldest Ron of his father and another, poor peasants, never likely to better their condition in. ibis world, dwelling in a vale of the Veneto, in a tangled greeriery^f mulberry vine, walnut, pumpkin audipoplar, a conical thatched roof over thdf- heads, and a glimpse of Adrian Sea between' two hills * few miles to the east. It was a hard fate that had made their eldest son one-handed. An accident in his infancy had maimed him, and rendered him in a great measure useless. He was well-made, well-grown, good-look-inc with auburn hair, dark eyes and a classic profile ; he woulcThave been the incarnation of health and strength, but he was mutilated; a one-handed labourer is like a lame horse, a hamstrung mule. Few are th* labours of "the field that can. be done with one hand. Even if it had been^the left hand which had been lost he might have done better, but with the right one gone, how could he reap or mow, or bind sheaves, or'tie up vines, or string up maize, or chop wood? All he could do was to tend the cattle and draw and carry water, and give Imp brethren a sorry lame assistance ±Le was a strong, proud, virile youth, and his inferiority hurt him at every hour, and when the people shouted to him that mcklime of ManLo his blood 'boiled » hi veins. When the bop and men used it he ran into them, battering like a ram but when the girls and children shouted it, whoteouWhedo? The insults of the weak mnS t be endured. The worst of it was that this name had so displaced hie own, which was Übaido, that even his pothers used if , his parents alone never wounded his ear by its irony. itHis mother often tried to console him, but with little effect. "Think, dear eh e said often, "misfortune it is, no^ doubt «wCuld. nave, been fine.flesh for powaT* And the 'horrible brutality of the Spressi™ never struck Mm ; was ab3£fcia W» observation of a band o[conscripts who had that day passed the medical Slnd reeled half-drunk down the wide Bteep street, arm in arm, some ■hoatang, Borne singing, some sobbing. Why could! he not have the privilege of being food) for powdfcr? The only privilege to which the poor are entitled 1 " What maimed you?" asked the sergeant, looking at the stump which nothing was ever done to conceal; a healed bone fully displayed by the loose hempen sleeve of the " Mi accident -when I was little,," ihe replied. „ , ' " But what kind of an accident? " I never asked," he answered.

The sergeant laughed. " What dolts they are, these country™ 611 - Tho will of God, eh?" he said aloud, with a Inug-h, for he waa no' believer in those superstitions, and he had taken a. gl^ss or two of' fiery liquor at the drinking shops before which the cart of Übaldo was standing. "No doubt,"' said Übaldo;, humbly and sadly, as he crossed himself. Then 'he gotj up on shaft of his cart, gave a ehout to his bullocks which they understood ; the ponderous wheels turned, the wood creaked, the yoke groaned, amd the

waggon went slowly on up the street, the youth holding the guiding ropei in his left hand. He ha-d to call at a stable and have a load' of manure piled up on his waggon, which was done by the ostler and' took some time ; it would be thought by peasants to be great waste of an occasion to let an oxcart return empty. It was early evening when ho went back along cross-roads with deep wheel-ruts in themj, which were overhung by pollarded 1 oaks and nut tree® covered with wild clematis and convolvulus, and choked by myrtle and barberry and bay. The road was beautiful, but he had no sense of that. He was only conscious of the •horseflies stinging his throat and eyelids, and the mosquitoes with which the air was thick. They covered the hides of the poor oxen and buzzed in their dilated nostrils, and on their lolling tongues and their parched mouths; but 'he did not think of them ; they were mo more to him than the wood) and iron of the waggon. It was late when 'he reached 'his home; one of his young brothers took the wearied animals to their wretched stalls, and Übaido sat down on the stone bench outside the door to eat the mess of beans and oil which had been saved for him as ihis portion of the family supper. He ate 'hungrily and drank thirstily of the spring water ■which was bitter from the roots of trees over which it passed, and full of small flies ; but the was not difficult about such little things as these. When the poor meal was over, he went outside the porch, and 1 sat down on a bench fading the distant sea. ■■»■■■

The moon rose «arly, being near its full. It shone large and! golden between the branches of the poplar trees. He sat still in its light, thinking, thinking of what the sergeant in the town bad said. He- looked at bis wrist in the moonlight. '"Mother!" he called aloud. " Aye?" she answered from the kitchen, where she wag putting freshly-cut vegetables in baskets to be taken in, to the town at dawn ; the others 'had gone to their beds, Her husband 1 only being still at work in the potato-patch. " How did) I lose my hand?" he cried to •her. "You must know." < j " Lord, bdy, why go back on that misfortune?" she answered, her head and shoulders bent over the skips of vegetables ."Why -was it?" he asked. '

" What makes you think of it now?" "A man aaked me. I felt a fool not to know. He said it? was a rare pity that I was no good for the army." "Then he was an army man himself, I warrant." '

"Well, he was; and he said I should nave made fine food for powder." He repeated this with pride t holding it) to be an admiring compliment. "The brute-bejist !" cried his mother from the interior.

"Nay, he thought well of me," said Übaido, "and he was a fine fellow who knows j he had medals 'on; and they, said he had been in the war with the blacks.. Mother, tell me, how did I lose my hand?" "An accident when you were little." "What accident?"

She did not reply. " Come here, mother," he cried to her. She came slowly and stood leaning against, the door ; she was a woman of middle age, still handsome, though brown and lined, and growing grey from the heaviness of continued toil and the privation of goodfood. She had a fine, fierce face, with eyes like a hawk's ; the moon shone on the pale yellow kerchief bound about her head. "What did it?" he asked again. " Why vex your soul about a thing long, past and gone? Well, if you must know, it was a sickle as did it, your father's sickle; you would play with it." "Is that the truth?" "Why should I tell you aught but the ! truth?" "How old was I?" "Two years and a bit." "I could not cut off my hand at that age?" " You hurt yourself so badly that your hand was taken off down in the town ; you were near your death." He was silent ; he could not doubt this simple and probable story j yet, somehow, he was not satisfied. •• Why did not you nor anybody tell me?" he asked. "What is the use of dwelling on cad things? You never asked us." "I did not think about the cause till that fine man in the town spoke to me about myself:" , . " Oursehim for a loose-tpngued chatterer ! Cannot he be content with being food for powder himself? 'Tis a grand lot, surely:" She spoke in ironical contempt, but her son. answered seriously : • " 'Tis a grand lot ; to have all the men in the market place make way for you, and all the women run out to you with stoup£ of wine, and the conscripts all tumble together, in a panic if you look at them. I might have Deem such, a one myself, if I had gone in the army and stayed in it long enough," ' ■ . ■ " And you might have been shot by the blacks, or killed by the stroke of th© sun in a march." • .

" One cm , but die onoe." '' Sha -was silent^ so was he; the moon

sliono down through the poplars and across tlio threshold ; its lighb made the 'brown face of his mother look pale. "Where is that sickle?" he asked, sud-

denly. " The Lord knows ! It must be rusty old iron many a year. Why do you afck?" "Because if it be above ground I would break it up into bits and beat them in the fire and curse them one by one !" " What good) would that do?" "No good; but it would be a pleasure. Rage burns me like the thirst, and I can do nothing." His mother was silent. At the opposite doorway the figure of his father showed black against the white light shining in the back garden where the potatoes gi-ew ! " Woman !" he called to her, " get your packing done and go to bed. You must be up before daylight to send off the cart." f She obeyed in silejice. " Get to bed, you 'Baldo," said the man, as he climbed the stairs with all the mould of the coil on his bare feet and ankles and the sweat on his bare arms and tlrroat. Übaido did not immediately obey; he sat on the stone bench with his elbows on his knees, and his head on his hand, thinking, all to no pur.pose. Then he got up, and slammed the house door in the moon's face, and went upstairs, ho also with all the dirt and dust of the day's work upon him. He stretched himself on a pallet stuffed; with grass, beside two of his brothers, under the unceiled rafters of the roof and slept heavily and without dreams. A white owl made a loud sobbing .screeching noise on the roofs, but it had no power to awaken him.

His mother did not sleep; she was afraid of that devil which had spoken in him when he had said that he would like to burii up the sickle in the fire. It was not rue sickle's fault that it had maimed him.

"Manesco!" cried a young girl to him on the morrow. She was "a handsome maiden, fair as a wheat ear, 'with quani tities of yellow hair piled up on her head, and run through with a. big silver pin two centuries old, her scarlet bodice showed glimpses of her white fckin ; her feet and her legs were bar*? ; she worked chiefly in the flax fields. She was the daughter of poor labourers ; they might have married in a year or two had their respective employers consented ; but she would never say either yes or no, decidedly ; she amused herself with his passion, which was ardent, but she was afraid of the poverty which would be their lot, and she was afraid of other girls' ridicule if she accepted a one-handed suitor. Where the ha-nds are the only means of maintenance the loss of one is beggary ; and where the, only dower is' industrial force the cripple is at a discount. Moral defects are sooner* looked over amongst a peasantry than physical ones ; they matter less, count for less. " Manesco !" she cried to him, and lajighed, the clear merry laughter of her eighteen years. She was going along a field in which he was minding a mixed flock of sheep and pigs, letting them crop the worthless grass grown up in the reaped furrows and preventing them from straying into the crops on either side ; this was a work he could do, carrying a long rod in his left hand ; but he hated) it, for it was work for children or aged people, not for men. "Do not call me that name or I shall do you a mischief," he said, fiercely. The girl laughed again, a laugh gay as a bird's carol. " I thought you loved me !" she cried ;' she had a big drip on her shoulders full of roots; her upraised hands clasped it ; her form was seen in all its lithe young beauty. "Do not play with me, Tema" he said in his teeth. "You know — you knowbut you will never answer me." She laughed again. He strode across the rough grassland to her side. " I am sick of your iaughter. You have laughed too long. Will you be serious? Will you take me, maimed beast that I am? You know — you. know " " The pigs are gone into the maize," cried Tema, and she pointed to them. He let them go. " Answer me once for all. You are like a cat with a mouse. I suffer — oh, God, how I suffer! I burn for you night and •day." . " Pooh ! Who can think of a one-handed man?" said the girl with disdain. "You would starve me ; and how the girls would laugh ! No— no— no ! I shall take a whole man and a Bmart soldier when I go before the priest." Then she ran away on her naked brown feet, faster than the young: pigs were running into the sprouting maize. His face grew dark; his lips grew livid; he cursed her and his fate, and the sickle which had wounded him in his infancy. She looked back at him when she was at a distance, but he did not see her; he was lost in the bitterness of a helpless rage against his lot. "A whole man and a smart soldier!" Would he not 'have been both but for that accursed accident in hia infancy? Then he remembered the young swine, and ran in after them, and thrashed them brutally with his rod. The sunshine, so hot and yellow, swam round him ; his eyes were red with heat and burning tears ; who could help him, what could help him? Nothing could give him back his hand. He should live on, there, on this land where he had been born, and would see her give herself to some other, to some gay, sound, stalwart fellow, who would jeer at him as the nuptial troop went by him through the

fields. He seized his maimed right wrist in his teeth and bib it till the blood flowed. " Accursedl flesh and bone!" he cried to it where he stood alone in the rough young grass in the stillness of the summer noon. Teina looked back at him from a safe distance behind some clifinps of cane which screened her from hiss view, saw his mad gestures, and thought to herself, her little selfish self, "It is well that I broke with him ; he is a lunatic ; he might have killed me, as like as not." The pain in his wrist where he had bitten it, and the blood which flowed from it, recalled him in a measure to his senses. He knew that ho was going mad, and yet he did. not feel the strength in him to thrust aside this possession, to persuade his sober reason to accept his misfortune and have courage to bear it. If he had onlyhad his right hand he would have joined the colours, he would have carried the knapsack, he would have jingled his sabre, he would have swaggered down the country roads, the village streets, with the best of them. Tema would have been proud of him, he- would have come back into his land and lived content. " Oh, cursed fate ! Oh cursed fate!" ! he said between his teeth, and he watthed the drops of red blood ooze from the marks his teeth had left, and fall on the hot grass; and all at once he knew not why, a sudden light broke in on him, and he cried to the peaceful fields, "Mother lied tome! „,.,, Why did he think his mother had lied/ Ho did not know. His mind wa* working by mere rude, rough instinct. Why should she ha.v-5 lied? He could lint toll;, but he felt sure that she had done so. He drove the sheep and pigs indoors, for it was a hot forenoon ; then he went and found his father, who was just leaving off work to go into his noonday meal. "Father, how did I lose my hand?" he asked. " Yes, the stump has been bleeding. I hurt it with a billhook. How did I lose it? Say." His father >tared. "When you were little you played with my sickle. Your mother ran to you too late." "Is that God's truth?" "It is more- like the devil's ; but it is the truth, of course. What craze have you got on your brain? It was a v bad job for you. It is a bad 1 job for me. For you can only do a poor sort of work, not worth, your bread." Übaldo did not reply. He saw that his father believed what he said. "By the way," said his father, "I saw you with Tema ; she is a slippery young jade. Don't hang about her. She will throw you over.". " Where is the sickle?" " What sickle?" " The one that wounded me." The elder man laughed outright. " A bit of iron twenty years old? You might as well ask what has become of an old broomstick. Are you going out of your mind, you gaby?" Then he went into the house to eat. Übtfldo was silent.

He did not join the midday meal. Ho felt as if a swarm of wild' bees waa buzzing in his head. 1

Mother lied," he said to himself ; his father only kneAV Avhat she had told him at the time. Why had she lied? He did nob know, nor could he conjecture, but he Avas certain that she had lied. He Avent and sat under an ilex tree which stood on the confines of a, Avood above his glebe. It Avas a huge and aged tree ; its shade Avas Avide and cool even at that hour. He laid his head on his hand and the veins of Iris temples beat like hammers. Every Avord his father had said' stung him like a hornet. His Avork Avas poor, not Avorth his bread! Well, that he kneAV already; but to hear ifc said was Avorse. She avos a slippery young jade; yes, that, too, he knew, bub to hear that othera kneAV and Eaw it Avas worse. His father had not meant to be cruel; he had only said what he thought, said things so obvious that he had felt the utterance of them to be no unkindness. But they were bad Avords to hear; they hurt like a brood of vipers, biting naked 1 flesh in summer grass. If he had been a, soldier Avith a right hand on the hilt of his sabre no- one would have been able to say such, words to him. It Avas this accursed mutilation Avhich made him of no account. He was the eldestborn, but what good Avas that to him? Ha had l a lower place an. the family than his youngest ten-year-old brother; he Avas of less A'alue. He sat still in the drowsy torpid heat of the noon, and turned his thoughts over and over again, but never changed them or made them clearer. He felt the smart of the stump he had wounded, but did not even coA r er it from the sun, or drive the flies off. What did it matter? The hours passed; the sun left the zenith ; from Avhere foe sat he saAV the house door of his home some way doAvn beyond the maze of greenery ; he caw his people come out to their afternoon labours after their sleep, one going one way, another, another j each having his appointed work. His mother only he did not see. He