The late caller

An original fiction passage set in the nineteenth century.

Elias had extinguished all but one of the shop lamps when somebody knocked. Beyond the glass stood a broad-shouldered man, one gloved hand pressed against the pane and the other concealed inside his coat. His hat was dripping, although the rain had stopped before dusk.

“Medicine,” he said when Elias opened the window a fraction. “For my wife.”

The explanation came too quickly. Elias imagined that a lie had been prepared on the journey and was now being delivered like a parcel. Moreover, the man’s eyes did not settle upon him; they travelled over his shoulder towards the curtain that hid the passage to the private rooms.

Yet, when Elias drew back the bolt, the stranger retreated from the door. His hidden hand emerged holding only a folded paper, its ink softened by rain. “I was told you might understand it,” he said, and his voice, no longer muffled by the glass, sounded less like a command than a request. As Elias read the physician’s untidy instructions, the coins in the man’s open palm trembled against one another. Ashamed of his suspicion, Elias fetched the required bottle.

He was tying the final knot in the wrapping when he glanced into the curved mirror above the counter. The stranger was no longer studying the curtain. He was staring at the key which Elias had carelessly left in the inner door. Between them, it shone in the lamplight.

Analyse how the writer uses language and structure to present Elias’s changing judgement of the stranger and to make the reader reconsider that judgement at the end. Support your answer with references to the passage.