City and town life -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction
The stranger's money had been safely deposited in a bank, and the
stranger himself still occupied Tembarom's bedroom. He slept a great
deal and was very quiet. With great difficulty Little Ann had persuaded
him to let a doctor see him, and the doctor had been much interested
in his case. He had expected to find some signs of his having received
accidentally or otherwise a blow upon the head, but on examination
he found no scar or wound. The condition he was in was frequently the
result of concussion of the brain, sometimes of prolonged nervous strain
or harrowing mental shock. Such cases occurred not infrequently. Quiet
and entire freedom from excitement would do more for such a condition
than anything else. If he was afraid of strangers, by all means keep
them from him. Tembarom had been quite right in letting him think he
would help him to remember, and that somehow he would in the end reach
the place he had evidently set out to go to. Nothing must be allowed to
excite him. It was well he had had money on his person and that he had
fallen into friendly hands. A city hospital would not have been likely
to help him greatly. The restraint of its necessary discipline might
have alarmed him.
So long as he was persuaded that Tembarom was not going to desert
him, he was comparatively calm, though sunk in a piteous and tormented
melancholy. His worst hours were when he sat alone in the hall bedroom,
with his face buried in his hands. He would so sit without moving or
speaking, and Little Ann discovered that at these times he was trying
to remember. Sometimes he would suddenly rise and walk about the little
room, muttering, with woe in his eyes. Ann, who saw how hard this was
for him, found also that to attempt to check or distract him was even
worse. When, sitting in her father's room, which was on the other side
of the wall, she heard his fretted, hurried pacing feet, her face lost
its dimpled cheerfulness. She wondered if her mother would not have
discovered some way of clearing the black cloud distracting his brain.
Nothing would induce him to go down to the boarders' dining-room for
his meals, and the sight of a servant alarmed him so that it was Ann
who took him the scant food he would eat. As the time of her return to
England with her father drew near, she wondered what Mr. Tembarom would
do without her services. It was she who suggested that they must have
a name for him, and the name of a part of Manchester had provided one.
There was a place called Strangeways, and one night when, in talking
to her father, she referred to it in Tembarom's presence, he suddenly
seized upon it.
“Strangeways,” he said. “That'd make a good-enough name for him. Let's
call him Mr. Strangeways. I don't like the way the fellows have of
calling him 'the Freak.'”
So the name had been adopted, and soon became an established fact.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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