Английский для смелых. Истории о духах и привидениях / Great Ghost Stories

 It was solitary enough. At intervals the screech of an owl, and now and then the noise of a train, seemed to emphasize the solitude by drawing attention to it and then leaving it in possession of the night. Mr Batchel found himself wondering and conjecturing what Vicar Whitehead, who had acquired the close of land to secure quiet and privacy for a garden, would have thought of the railways to the west and north. He turned his face northwards, whence a whistle had just sounded, and saw a tree beautifully outlined against the sky. His breath caught at the sight. Not because the tree was unfamiliar. Mr Batchel knew all his trees. But what he had seen was ‘to the North, an Ilex.’

Mr Batchel knew not what to make of it all. He had walked into the garden hundreds of times and as often seen the Ilex, but the words out of ‘The Compleat Gard’ner’ seemed to be pursuing him in a way that made him almost afraid. His temperament, however, as has been said already, was phlegmatic. It was commonly said, and Mr Batchel approved the verdict, whilst he condemned its inexactness, that ‘his nerves were made of fiddle-string’, so he braced himself afresh and set upon his walk round the silent garden, which he was accustomed to begin in a northerly direction, and was now too proud to change. He usually passed the Ilex at the beginning of his perambulation, and so would pass it now.

He did not pass it (он его не миновал). A small discovery, as he reached it, annoyed and disturbed him (незначительная находка, когда он подошел к дереву, повергла его в раздражение и расстроила его планы; discovery – открытие; находка; to disturb – расстраивать, нарушать /планы/). His gardener, as careful and punctilious as himself (его садовник, столь же аккуратный и пунктуальный, как и он сам; careful – заботливый; старательный, аккуратный), never failed to house all his tools at the end of a day’s work (никогда не забывал убирать все свои инструменты в конце рабочего дня: «дневной работы»; to fail – зд.: не исполнить, не сделать; to house – прятать, убирать, помещать /в какое-либо вместилище, хранилище/). Yet there, under the Ilex, standing upright in moonlight brilliant enough to cast a shadow of it, was a spade (и все же здесь, под падубом, воткнутая в землю: «стоящая вертикально» в лунном свете достаточно ярком, чтобы отбрасывать тень, стояла лопата).