Читать книгу Look Homeward, Angel. A Story of the Buried Life онлайн

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"Hello, son," said Gant casually, entering the room; his heart shrivelled as he saw the boy.

Eliza pursed her lips more and more thoughtfully after each visit the doctor made; she seized every spare crumb of encouragement and magnified it, but her heart was sick. Then one night, tearing away the mask suddenly, she came swiftly from the boy's room.

"Mr. Gant," she said in a whisper, pursing her lips. She shook her white face at him silently as if unable to speak. Then, rapidly, she concluded: "He's gone, he's gone, he's gone!"

Eugene was deep in midnight slumber. Someone shook him, loosening him slowly from his drowsiness. Presently he found himself in the arms of Helen, who sat on the bed holding him, her morbid, stricken little face fastened on him. She spoke to him distinctly and slowly in a subdued voice, charged somehow with a terrible eagerness:

"Do you want to see Grover?" she whispered. "He's on the cooling board."

He wondered what a cooling board was; the house was full of menace. She bore him out into the dimly lighted hall, and carried him to the room at the front of the house. Behind the door he heard low voices. Quietly she opened it; the light blazed brightly on the bed. Eugene looked, horror swarmed like poison through his blood. Behind the little wasted shell that lay there he remembered suddenly the warm brown face, the soft eyes, that once had peered down at him: like one who has been mad, and suddenly recovers reason, he remembered that forgotten face he had not seen in weeks, that strange bright loneliness that would not return. O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.