Английский с Оскаром Уайльдом. Кентервильское привидение / Oscar Wilde. The Canterville Ghost

On reaching a small secret chamber in the left wing, he leaned up against a moonbeam to recover his breath, and began to try and realize his position. Never, in a brilliant and uninterrupted career of three hundred years, had he been so grossly insulted. He thought of the Dowager Duchess, whom he had frightened into a fit as she stood before the glass in her lace and diamonds; of the four housemaids, who had gone into hysterics when he merely grinned at them through the curtains on one of the spare bedrooms; of the rector of the parish, whose candle he had blown out as he was coming late one night from the library, and who had been under the care of Sir William Gull ever since, a perfect martyr to nervous disorders; and of old Madame de Tremouillac, who, having wakened up one morning early and seen a skeleton seated in an armchair by the fire reading her diary, had been confined to her bed for six weeks with an attack of brain fever, and, on her recovery, had become reconciled to the Church, and broken off her connection with that notorious sceptic, Monsieur de Voltaire.

He remembered the terrible night (он вспомнил ту ужасную ночь) when the wicked Lord Canterville was found choking in his dressing-room (когда нечестивый лорд Кентервиль был найден задыхающимся в своей комнате), with the knave of diamonds half-way down his throat (с бубновым валетом, застрявшим в его горле; half-way – на полпути), and confessed, just before he died (и который сознался перед самой своей смертью), that he had cheated Charles James Fox out of lb50,000 at Crockford’s[12] by means of that very card (что он надул Чарльза Джеймса Фокса на пятьдесят тысяч фунтов в Крокфорде с помощью этой самой карты), and swore that the ghost had made him swallow it (и поклялся, что привидение заставило его проглотить ее; to swear). All his great achievements came back to him again (все его великие достижения припомнились ему снова; to come back – вернуться: «прийти назад»), from the butler who had shot himself in the pantry (от дворецкого, который застрелился в кладовой; to shoot – стрелять) because he had seen a green hand tapping at the window-pane (потому что он увидел зеленую руку, постучавшую через оконное стекло) to the beautiful Lady Stutfield (до красавицы леди Статфильд), who was always obliged to wear a black velvet band round her throat (которой постоянно приходилось носить черную бархотку на шее) to hide the mark of five fingers burnt upon her white skin (чтобы скрыть следы пяти пальцев, оставленные на ее белой коже; to burn – гореть; жечь, обжигать), and who drowned herself at last in the carp-pond at the end of the King’s Walk (и которая в конце концов утопилась в пруду с карпами в конце Королевской аллеи).