“He, cruel to me?” cried Bertha, with an unbelieving smile.
“Not meaning to be, my child,” said Caleb, “but I have been, although I never knew it until yesterday. My dear blind daughter, forgive me. The world, dear heart, is not as you imagine it. It is not as I have represented it. The eyes you have trusted in have been false to you.”
She turned her wondering face toward him still, but drew back, and clung closer to her friend.
“Your road in life was rough, my poor one,” said Caleb, “and I meant to smooth it for you. I have pictured things to you as different from what they are. I have even changed the characters of some people, to make you happier. I have surrounded you with fancies.”
“But living people are not fancies,” she said, turning very pale. “You can’t change them.”
“I have done so, Bertha,” Caleb told her. “There is one person you know----”
“Oh, Father, why do you say I know?” she said. “I who am so miserably blind.”
She stretched out her hands as if to feel her way.
“The marriage that takes place to-day,” Caleb continued, “is with a stern, sordid, grinding man. He has been a hard master to you and me, my dear, for many years. Ugly in his looks and in his nature. Cold and callous always. Unlike what I have painted him to you in everything, my child--in everything.”
“Oh, why,” cried the blind girl, “why did you ever do this? Teach me to love a person who really never existed? It is like death!”
Her poor father hung his head and offered no reply in his penitence and sorrow. Suddenly the cricket on the hearth, unheard by all but her, began to chirp, not merrily, but so mournfully that her tears began to flow; and when the fairy spirit which had been near the carrier all night, appeared behind her, pointing toward her father, she turned to Dot.
“Mary,” she said, “tell me what my home is like--what it is truly.”
“It is a poor place, Bertha; very poor and bare indeed. The house will scarcely keep out the wind and rain another winter. It is as roughly shielded from the weather, Bertha,” Dot continued in a low voice, “as your poor father in his sackcloth coat.”
The blind girl, greatly agitated, rose and led the carrier’s wife a little aside.
“Those presents that I treasured so much; that came almost at my wish,” she said, trembling; “where did they come from? Did you send them?”