Making a vague movement of his skinny hand, he walked feebly but quickly
to the door. When he stood but half-way within the room, he made his
final effort.
"I'm not a-goin' to say nothing," he said; "that'd be superlative! I
wish you a good-morning."
Outside he waited a second, then grasped the banister.
'For all he sets so quiet, they've done him no good in that place,' he
thought. 'Them eyes of his!' And slowly he descended, full of a sort of
very deep surprise. 'I misjudged of him,' he was thinking; 'he never
was nothing but a 'armless human being. We all has our predijuices--I
misjudged of him. They've broke his 'eart between 'em--that they have.'
The silence in the room continued after his departure. But when the
little boy had gone to school, Hughs rose and lay down on the bed. He
rested there, unmoving, with his face towards the wall, his arms
clasped round his head to comfort it. The seamstress, stealing about her
avocations, paused now and then to look at him. If he had raged at her,
if he had raged at everything, it would not have been so terrifying as
this utter silence, which passed her comprehension--this silence as of
a man flung by the sea against a rock, and pinned there with the life
crushed out of him. All her inarticulate longing, now that her baby
was gone, to be close to something in her grey life, to pass the
unfranchisable barrier dividing her from the world, seemed to well up,
to flow against this wall of silence and to recoil.
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