"Oscar Wilde. The Canterville Ghost" - читать интересную книгу автора

tricked, foiled, and outwitted! The old Canterville look came into his eyes;
he ground his toothless gums together; and, raising his withered hands high
above his head, swore, according to the picturesque phraseology of the
antique school, that when Chantecleer had sounded twice his merry horn,
deeds of blood would be wrought, and Murder walk abroad with silent feet.
Hardly had he finished this awful oath when, from the red-tiled roof of
a distant homestead, a cock crew. He laughed a long, low, bitter laugh and
waited. Hour after hour he waited, but the cock, for some strange reason,
did not crow again. Finally, at half-past seven, the arrival of the
housemaids made him give up his fearful vigil, and he stalked back to his
room, thinking of his vain oath and baffled purpose. There he consulted
several books of ancient chivalry, of which he was exceedingly fond, and
found that, on every occasion on which this oath had been used, Chanticleer
had always crowed a second time. "Perdition seize the naughty
fowl," he muttered, "I have seen the day when, with my stout
spear, I would have run him through the gorge, and made him crow for me an
'twere in death!" He then retired to a comfortable lead coffin, and
stayed there till evening.


IV

The next day the ghost was very weak and tired. The terrible excitement
of the last four weeks was beginig to have its effect. His nerves were
completely shattered, and he started at the slightest noise. For five days
he kept his room, and at last made up his mind to give up the point of the
blood-stain on the library floor. If the Otis family did not want it, they
clearly did not deserve it. They were evidently people on a low, material
plane of existence, and quite incapable of appreciating the symbolic value
of sensuous phenomena. The question of phantasmic apparitions, and the
development of astral bodies, was of course quite a different matter, and
really not under his control. It was his solemn duty to appear in the
corridor once a week, and to gibber from the large oriel window on the first
and third Wednesday in every month, and he did not see how he could
honourably escape frim his obligations. It is quite true that his life had
been very evil, but, upon the other hand, he was most conscientious in all
things connected with the supernatural. For the next three Saturdays,
accordingly, he traversed the corridor as usual between midnight and three
o'clock taking every possible precaution against being either heard or seen.
He removed his boots, trod as lightly as possible on the old worm-eaten
boards, wore a large black velvet cloak, and was careful to use the Rising
Sun Lubricator for oiling his chains. I am bound to acknowledge that it was
with a good deal of difficulty that he brought himself to adopt this last
mode of protection. However, one night, while the family were at dinner, he
slipped into Mr.Otis's bedroom and carried off the bottle. He felt a little
humiliated at first, but afterwards was sensible enough to see that there
was a great deal to be said for the invention, and, to a certain degree, it
served his purpose.
Still, in spite of everything, he was not left unmolested. Strings were
continually being stretched across the corridor, over which he tripped in