“I am a savage!” he exclaimed. “I have frightened you. Let me at least hold your hands; I will not hurt them. I will hold them like this!”
He relaxed the grasp in which he had held her fingers, and she let her hands lie lightly in his as he went on:
“You must civilise me. And don’t be afraid. The block is very rough, but your skill is very great.”
As he bent his head to kiss her hands very gently, Chris felt that he was trembling.
“I want to ask you something,” said Chris timidly. “Those cries, those strange cries you gave—that evening in the barn! And your strange silence, too! I don’t understand. Why didn’t you speak to me!”
“I was stone deaf, you know; I had been so ever since I was a small child, when I had scarlet fever badly. It left me absolutely without hearing, so that I could not hear the sound of my own voice.”
“Yes, yes, but you could speak?”
“I had learnt to talk when I was a child, but under the treatment of the brute who calls himself my guardian, I had forgotten how. I had got into the way of making cries and noises like a person deaf and dumb from birth.”
“But you could speak, for you spoke to me on Christmas Day?”
“Yes; but that is a long story. It was Stelfox who found out, four or five years ago, that I was neither dumb nor insane, and with great patience he taught me what I had almost forgotten, how to speak again. But I did not dare to speak to you, because, as I told you, I could not hear myself; I had only spoken to Stelfox for years; I distrusted my own powers. When I made the strange cries which frightened you, I was not conscious of it myself. You see, it is true that I am a savage.”