Deaf women -- Fiction; Father figures -- Fiction; Painters -- Fiction; Psychological fiction; Young men -- Fiction
His eyes seemed to grow clearer and softer as they still rested kindly
on her; but he made her take back the money immediately, and, holding
her hand as he did so, detained it for a moment with a curious awkward
gentleness. Then, after first pointing again to Zack’s room, he began to
search in the breast-pocket of his coat, took from it at one rough grasp
some letters tied together loosely, and a clumsy-looking rolled-up strip
of fur, put the letters aside on the table behind him, and, unrolling
the fur, showed her that there were bank-notes in it. She understood him
directly--he had money of his own for Zack’s service, and wanted none
from her.
After he had replaced the strip of fur in his pocket, he took up the
letters from the table to be put back also. As he reached them towards
him, a lock of hair, which seemed to have accidentally got between them,
fell out on the floor just at her feet. She stooped to pick it up for
him; and was surprised, as she did so, to see that it exactly resembled
in color the lock of Zack’s hair which she had taken from the old
newspaper, and had hidden in her bosom.
She was surprised at this; and she was more than surprised, when he
angrily and abruptly snatched up the lock of hair, just as she touched
it. Did he think that she wanted to take it away from him? If he did,
it was easy to show him that a lock of Zack’s hair was just now no such
rarity that people need quarrel about the possession of it. She reached
her hand to the table behind, and, taking some of the hair from the old
newspaper, held it up to him with a smile, just as he was on the point
of putting his own lock of hair back in his pocket.
For a moment he did not seem to comprehend what her action meant; then
the resemblance between the hair in her hand and the hair in his own,
struck him suddenly.
The whole expression of his face changed in an instant--changed so
darkly that she recoiled from him in terror, and put back the hair into
the newspaper. He pounced on it directly; and, crunching it up in his
hand, turned his grim threatening face and fiercely-questioning eyes on
the landlady. While she was answering his inquiry, Madonna saw him look
towards Zack’s bed; and, as he looked, another change passed over
his face--the darkness faded from it, and the red scars on his cheek
deepened in color. He moved back slowly to the further corner of the
room from the folding-doors; his restless eyes fixed in a vacant stare,
one of his hands clutched round the old newspaper, the other motioning
clumsily and impatiently to the astonished and alarmed women to leave
him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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