Coming Through the Rye Read Online Free Page B

room, only his eyes moving in their ghastly setting. He did not seem to be aware of her presence—or—was he?
    She sprang to her feet.
    â€œFather!” and instinctively reached out her hands toward him.
    It was just at that instant that he crumpled and went down.
    You have seen a balloon that was pricked suddenly lose its inflation, or a tent, let loose from its holdings, sink slowly to the earth. It was like that. The thing that had made the man what he had always been seemed suddenly to have gone out of him. He lay on the marble floor of his entrance hall, a limp heap of cloth. A white face, from which the inhabitant seemed to have departed, and the white skin, withered and lying in loose folds as though that which had held it buoyant and plastic had been suddenly withdrawn from beneath. There was something drawn about the features, as if they had been misplaced and had nothing to give them form or continuity. The thought flashed through the girl’s consciousness as she flew toward him that that could not possibly be her father, lying there, collapsed, inanimate. She must reach him quickly. She must lift him up, as if the life and buoyancy would return to him once more if she could but lift him quickly enough.
    She was by his side, and her strong young arms about his neck, lifting, lifting with all her might. And now the thing she lifted was like lead. She could not get a hold with her trembling hands. She could scarcely breathe as she forced his head from the floor and into her lap. She lifted wild angry eyes to the face of the young man, Sherwood, who came forward now and tried to help her loosen the collar of the fallen man.
    â€œDon’t touch him!” she said in a terrible suffering young voice. “You have killed him! Oh!
Father!
”
    That one anguished cry stabbed the young man’s heart as if it had been a bayonet. He stepped back sharply.
    â€œGo for a doctor!” he said to Chris in a low tone. But the girl’s senses seemed to be abnormally alert.
    â€œNo,” she said sharply. “Don’t one of you stir from this room! You are all going to stay right where you are and answer for this. My brother will go! Lawrence! Where are you?”
    She turned her head sharply to look up and back where her brother had stood, but Lawrence had vanished. His white face had disappeared from the doorway almost as soon as it had appeared.
    Romayne lifted a proud head.
    â€œHe is going for the doctor!” she said in a clear, high voice, calm with a terrible excitement. “He will be here in a moment.”
    Sherwood motioned to Chris to go, and the boy stepped out from the curtains with a low murmured expression of horror. In order to get out he had to step over her feet as she sat huddled with what was left of her father in her arms. He went stumbling out into the darkened street with tears rolling down his nice boyish face. He had always like Romayne. He had always looked up to her. She had been the head of his class, and he the foot. He had looked upon her as a sort of angel. And now this! And he having to go against her. But he knew what to do in an emergency. He darted across a hedge and two back fences, and was soon ringing the bell of the nearest physician.
    Inside the house Sherwood had quietly organized his forces. Water was brought, and someone produced aromatic ammonia. Stern faces stooped gravely, but the girl’s slender hand took the water from them and held it to the still-ashen lips that somehow seemed like lips no longer.
    Frantically the girl applied the remedies that were brought and held in her aching, eager young arms the form that was so dear.
    â€œFather!” she called, “Father!” as if she were crying to him to return from a great distance. “It is all right, Father, you needn’t worry! They did me no harm. It was only a ridiculous mistake. They intended to go somewhere else, of course. You needn’t mind, Father! Of course,