The Blind Infant. The Family.
[Illustration]
At the hour of midnight, in a wealthy family living in the southwestern
part of Russia, a child was born. As the first faint, pitiful cry of the
baby echoed through the room, the young mother, who had been lying with
closed eyes, unconscious to all appearances, stirred uneasily in the bed.
She murmured a word or two in a low whispering tone, while her pallid
face, with its sweet and almost childlike features, was disfigured by an
expression of impatience,—like that of a spoiled child, who resents the
unwonted suffering as something new to her experience. The nurse bent low
to catch the inarticulate sounds that fell from her whispering lips.
“Why, why does he—?” murmured the invalid in the same impatient whisper.
The nurse did not understand the question. Again the child cried out,
and again the same shadow of sharp pain darkened the face of the mother,
while large tears rolled down from her closed eyes.
“Why, why,” she repeated in a whisper.
At last the meaning of her question seemed to occur to the nurse, who
answered quite calmly,—
“Oh, you mean why does the child cry? Babies always do. You must not
agitate yourself.”
But the mother was not to be pacified. She started every time the little
one cried, and kept repeating in tones of angry impatience, “Why—why—so
dreadfully?”
To the nurse there seemed nothing unusual in the cries of the infant; and
supposing the mother to be either unconscious or simply delirious, she
left her, and busied herself with the child.
The young mother said no more, but from time to time an anguish too
deep for expression brought the tears to her eyes. They forced their
way through the thick black eye-lashes, and slowly rolled down her
pale marble-like cheeks. Perchance her mother’s heart was torn by a
presentiment of some dark, abiding misery hanging like a heavy cloud over
the infant’s crib, and destined to accompany him through life even unto
the grave. These signs of emotion, on the other hand, were very likely
nothing more than the wanderings of delirium. But however this may have
been, the child was indeed born blind.