But those who were nearer to him had but a vague notion of the problems that perplexed and absorbed Uncle Maxim’s mind at this time. They only knew that he would sit motionless for hours at a time, enveloped in a cloud of blue smoke, with knitted eye-brows and a far-away look in his eyes. Meanwhile this crippled warrior was pondering upon the battle of life, and feeling that there was no room in it for invalids. He pictured himself as having left the ranks forever, and he felt like a man encumbering the hospital ambulance. He was like a knight, unseated and overthrown in the conflict of life. Did it not show a lack of courage to crawl in the dust like a crushed worm? Would it not be a coward’s part to grasp the stirrup of the conqueror, and beg for the sorry remnant of his own life?
While Uncle Maxim was calmly considering this vital question with all its pros and cons, a new being appeared before his eyes, whose fate it was to enter life an invalid from his very birth. At first Maxim paid but little heed to the blind child, but as time went on, the singular likeness between the boy’s fate and his own interested him. “Hm! Hm!” he thoughtfully muttered to himself as he looked at the child from the corner of his eyes, “this chap is also an invalid. If we two could be put together, one useful man might be made of us.” And after that he gazed at the child more and more frequently.
IV.
The child was born blind. Who was to blame for this misfortune? No one. There was no slightest shade of the “evil eye;” the very cause of the misfortune itself was hidden somewhere in the depths of the mysterious and complex processes of life. Anguish pierced the mother’s heart as she gazed on her blind boy. She suffered not alone as a mother, in her sympathy with her son’s affliction, together with a sad prescience of the painful future awaiting her child; but added to these feelings there dwelt within the depths of the young mother’s heart a consciousness that the cause of this misfortune may have been latent, as a dreaded possibility, in those who gave him life. This in itself sufficed to make the little creature, with his beautiful sightless eyes, the central figure of the family and its unconscious despot. Every member of the household strove to gratify his lightest fancy.
What would in time have become of this boy, unconsciously predisposed as he was to resent his misfortune, and whose egotism was fostered by all those who surrounded him, had not a strange fatality combined with the Austrian sabres to compel Uncle Maxim to settle down in the country in his sister’s family,—no one can tell. By the presence of the blind boy in the house, the active mind of the crippled soldier was gradually and imperceptibly directed into a new channel. He would still smoke his pipe hour after hour, but the old expression of pain and dejection had given place to one of interest. Yet the more Uncle Maxim pondered, the more he wrinkled his thick brows, and more and more heavy grew the volumes of smoke. Finally one day he made up his mind to interfere.
“That youngster,” he said, puffing out ring after ring of smoke, “will be much more unhappy than I am. Far better had he never been born.”
An expression of acute suffering saddened the mother’s face as she gave her brother a reproachful glance. “It is cruel to remind me of this, Max,” she said gently, “and to do it wantonly!”
“I am simply telling you the truth,” replied Maxim. “I have lost a hand and a foot, but I have eyes. This youngster has no eyes, and in time will have neither hands nor feet nor will.”
“What do you mean?”