Array Коллектив авторов - 20 лучших повестей на английском / 20 Best Short Novels

‘If you can wait half a minute,’ I said, getting out of bed, ‘I’ll go a bit of the way with you.’

‘It’s very good of you,’ he rejoined, pausing, ‘but it seems unkind to drag you out.’

‘Not at all,’ I replied; ‘I shall like a walk.’ And I partially dressed myself, and took my umbrella; and he put his arm through mine, and we went out together.

Just by the gate we met Jones, one of the local constables [381].

‘Good-night, Jones,’ I said (I always feel affable at Christmas-time).

‘Good-night, sir,’ answered the man a little gruffly, I thought. ‘May I ask what you’re a-doing of?’

‘Oh, it’s all right,’ I responded, with a wave of my umbrella; ‘I’m just seeing my friend part of the way home.’

He said, ‘What friend?’

‘Oh, ah, of course,’ I laughed; ‘I forgot. He’s invisible to you. He is the ghost of the gentleman that killed the wait. I’m just going to the corner with him.’

‘Ah, I don’t think I would, if I was you, sir,’ said Jones severely. ‘If you take my advice, you’ll say good-bye to your friend here, and go back indoors. Perhaps you are not aware that you are walking about with nothing on but a night-shirt and a pair of boots and an opera-hat. Where’s your trousers?’

I did not like the man’s manner at all. I said, ‘Jones! I don’t wish to have to report you, but it seems to me you’ve been drinking. My trousers are where a man’s trousers ought to be – on his legs. I distinctly remember putting them on.’

‘Well, you haven’t got them on now,’ he retorted.

‘I beg your pardon,’ I replied. ‘I tell you I have; I think I ought to know.’

‘I think so, too,’ he answered, ‘but you evidently don’t. Now you come along indoors with me, and don’t let’s have any more of it.’

Uncle John came to the door at this point, having been awaked, I suppose, by the altercation; and, at the same moment, Aunt Maria appeared at the window in her nightcap.

I explained the constable’s mistake to them, treating the matter as lightly as I could, so as not to get the man into trouble, and I turned for confirmation to the ghost.

He was gone! He had left me without a word – without even saying good-bye!

It struck me as so unkind, his having gone off in that way, that I burst into tears; and Uncle John came out, and led me back into the house.

On reaching my room, I discovered that Jones was right. I had not put on my trousers, after all. They were still hanging over the bed-rail. I suppose, in my anxiety not to keep the ghost waiting, I must have forgotten them.

Such are the plain facts of the case, out of which it must, doubtless, to the healthy, charitable mind appear impossible that calumny could spring.

But it has.

Persons – I say ‘persons’ – have professed themselves unable to understand the simple circumstances herein narrated, except in the light of explanations at once misleading and insulting. Slurs have been cast and aspersions made on me by those of my own flesh and blood.

But I bear no ill-feeling. I merely, as I have said, set forth this statement for the purpose of clearing my character from injurious suspicion.

Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet. Hardly had she brought one gentleman into the little pantry behind the office on the ground floor and helped him off with his overcoat than the wheezy hall-door bell clanged again and she had to scamper along the bare hallway to let in another guest. It was well for her she had not to attend to the ladies also. But Miss Kate and Miss Julia had thought of that and had converted the bathroom upstairs into a ladies’ dressing-room. Miss Kate and Miss Julia were there, gossiping and laughing and fussing, walking after each other to the head of the stairs, peering down over the banisters and calling down to Lily to ask her who had come.

It was always a great affair, the Misses Morkan’s annual dance. Everybody who knew them came to it, members of the family, old friends of the family, the members of Julia’s choir, any of Kate’s pupils that were grown up enough, and even some of Mary Jane’s pupils too. Never once had it fallen flat. For years and years it had gone off in splendid style, as long as anyone could remember; ever since Kate and Julia, after the death of their brother Pat, had left the house in Stoney Batter and taken Mary Jane, their only niece, to live with them in the dark, gaunt house on Usher’s Island, the upper part of which they had rented from Mr. Fulham, the corn-factor on the ground floor. That was a good thirty years ago if it was a day. Mary Jane, who was then a little girl in short clothes, was now the main prop of the household, for she had the organ in Haddington Road. She had been through the Academy and gave a pupils’ concert every year in the upper room of the Antient Concert Rooms. Many of her pupils belonged to the better-class families on the Kingstown and Dalkey line. Old as they were, her aunts also did their share. Julia, though she was quite grey, was still the leading soprano [382]in Adam and Eve’s [383], and Kate, being too feeble to go about much, gave music lessons to beginners on the old square piano in the back room. Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, did housemaid’s work for them. Though their life was modest, they believed in eating well; the best of everything: diamond-bone sirloins, three-shilling tea and the best bottled stout. But Lily seldom made a mistake in the orders, so that she got on well with her three mistresses. They were fussy, that was all. But the only thing they would not stand was back answers.

Of course, they had good reason to be fussy on such a night. And then it was long after ten o’clock and yet there was no sign of Gabriel and his wife. Besides they were dreadfully afraid that Freddy Malins might turn up screwed. They would not wish for worlds that any of Mary Jane’s pupils should see him under the influence; and when he was like that it was sometimes very hard to manage him. Freddy Malins always came late, but they wondered what could be keeping Gabriel: and that was what brought them every two minutes to the banisters to ask Lily had Gabriel or Freddy come.

‘O, Mr. Conroy,’ said Lily to Gabriel when she opened the door for him, ‘Miss Kate and Miss Julia thought you were never coming. Good-night, Mrs. Conroy.’

‘I’ll engage they did,’ said Gabriel, ‘but they forget that my wife here takes three mortal hours to dress herself.’

He stood on the mat, scraping the snow from his goloshes, while Lily led his wife to the foot of the stairs and called out:

‘Miss Kate, here’s Mrs. Conroy.’

Kate and Julia came toddling down the dark stairs at once. Both of them kissed Gabriel’s wife, said she must be perished alive, and asked was Gabriel with her.

‘Here I am as right as the mail, Aunt Kate! Go on up. I’ll follow,’ called out Gabriel from the dark.

He continued scraping his feet vigorously while the three women went upstairs, laughing, to the ladies’ dressing-room. A light fringe of snow lay like a cape on the shoulders of his overcoat and like toecaps on the toes of his goloshes; and, as the buttons of his overcoat slipped with a squeaking noise through the snow-stiffened frieze, a cold, fragrant air from out-of-doors escaped from crevices and folds.

‘Is it snowing again, Mr. Conroy?’ asked Lily.

She had preceded him into the pantry to help him off with his overcoat. Gabriel smiled at the three syllables she had given his surname and glanced at her. She was a slim; growing girl, pale in complexion and with hay-coloured hair. The gas in the pantry made her look still paler. Gabriel had known her when she was a child and used to sit on the lowest step nursing a rag doll.