Then there came another change: fever set in in their neighbourhood, and the brave strong mother was the first to fall a victim to it. Caleb was dazed with grief. Mattie wept her heart out, then set to work again, but this time with less of spirit and courage. From house to house Caleb groped his way, begging for work—he would do what he could for a sixpence a day; he was, so he said, “a giant in strength.” “True,” said the people; “but a blind giant is of no use to us, and we are too poor to pay sixpence a day for nothing.”
“I will go into the workhouse,” said Caleb; “no man shall say I live idle upon my little girl’s earnings.”
Then Mattie clung about his knees and besought him not to leave her, telling him a secret she had meant to tell the dead mother, how that she had married secretly a fine-looking young fellow who had made love to her, how that where he had gone she knew not, nor even whether the name in which he had married her were his own.
Caleb lifted up his voice and cursed the day wherein he had lost his eyesight. “If I had but the glimmer of daylight wherewith to guide my steps, I would search the world through to find the false-hearted coward who has brought this shame to our door. Lord, Thou hast dealt hardly with me indeed!” he said, with his sightless eyeballs lifted heavenwards.
Mattie drooped day by day, but still she managed to keep her customers together, and sent home smart dresses for gay young shopgirls to wear in the summer evenings when they went walking out with their sweethearts. By-and-by a second Mattie came—a little fair-haired, blue-eyed thing, like Mattie the first; and though Caleb cursed again the false-hearted man who had left his Mattie to struggle through her troubles alone, the little creature came like a gleam of sunshine into his dark life, and no one thought more of her baby comforts, or took more tender care of the tiny fragile thing, than the old blind grandfather.
For Caleb was fast becoming a prematurely old man now. He lacked the first of youth’s greatest preservers—honest, steady, constant work; and he lacked also the second—good, plain, wholesome food. What wonder if his back were bent, his brow wrinkled, and his hair thin and grey!
How they managed to struggle through another five years he did not know, no one quite knew. The furniture in their little room (they had only one room now) grew less and less; also their bread was often eaten without butter; also, when the winter came round, Mattie began to have a cough and complain of a pain at her chest. Then Caleb whispered something in little Mattie’s ear, and the child led him down the stairs and along the streets to a bright sunshiny wall in the big city, where people were passing backwards and forwards all day long, and where, if the old blind man held out his hat, there might be a chance of finding a few stray pence in it at the end of the day.
The poor people in the house where they lived felt their hearts touched when they saw the old man and the small white child creeping down the stairs together, and heard the poor suffering daughter coughing as she stooped over her dresses and shirts. They shook their heads at each other: “It can’t go on much longer,” said one to the other; “and what they’ll do without her, God only knows.” So they would give little Mattie a cup of tea or a bit of cheese to take to her mother, and the mother would drink the tea, and give the cheese to the little one, and smile and shake her head, and say she couldn’t eat.
And one day a small rough boy in the house brought to little Mattie a white terrier pup. “Father was going to drown it,” he said, “but I told him I thought you would like it, and maybe by-and-by ’twill help to lead the old man along.” Little Mattie took the puppy gratefully, and called him Jack, after her boy friend. They knotted a piece of cord together and put it round Jack’s neck, and every day the old man, the child, and the terrier pup were to be seen finding their way along the streets to the bright sunshiny wall.
Once, as they stood thus in the bleak March weather, with a northeast wind sweeping the streets and drifting the dust into clouds that shut out the spring sunbeams, a poor woman came hurriedly up to them. “You’d best make haste home, Caleb,” she said, “if you want to see your daughter again alive.” She forgot, poor soul, for the moment, that Caleb hadn’t seen his daughter for ten years or more, and never could—in this life, at any rate—see her again. But poor people, you know, haven’t much time to spend in choosing their words, and they don’t expect other people to be very nice in the matter either.
So Mattie and Jack and the grandfather trudged through the streets, and for once in a way got home by daylight, to find Mattie the elder (poor child, she wasn’t five-and-twenty then) lying on the bed, the sheet stained with blood, and her feet and hands growing damp and cold.
“She’s goin’ fast,” said one of the women about the bedside.
“O God,” cried Caleb, kneeling down on the bare boards, “if only for one moment I might see
