The Blind Musician by Vladimir Korolenko

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.