The Blind Mother, and The Last Confession

The Blind Mother and The Last Confession (1893) is a collection of two novellas by British master of fiction Hall Caine.

In the Lake District of northwest England, a young blind woman named Mercy lives with her son and elderly father on land passed down through generations. After failing both as a farmer and as a prospector―they live in country known for its rich veins of copper―her father gives up their rights to the land to Hugh Ritson, a local statesman’s son and mining engineer. Soon enough, Ritson strikes copper, makes a profit on the land, and becomes the father of Mercy’s child―before marrying the beautiful Greta. The Blind Mother is a tale of tragedy and the bond between women whose lives depend on men who fail them, time and again.

In The Last Confession, a physician from London seeks mercy from a Spanish priest while laying on his deathbed. At times calmly, at others filled with wild desperation, the man recounts how he was encouraged to travel to North Africa to cure, or at least alleviate, his neurasthenia. While in Morocco, he meets a man he calls the American, who navigates this foreign world with ease and soon sweeps the narrator into a world of crime. When the physician gets a letter from England informing him of his young son’s terrible illness, he decides to break from his companion, only to be followed every step of the way by a ruthless assassin.