Читаем The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices полностью

Still the dead man!  The darkness forced his mind back upon itself, and set his memory at work, reviving, with a painfully-vivid distinctness the momentary impression it had received from the first sight of the corpse.  Before long the face seemed to be hovering out in the middle of the darkness, confronting him through the window, with the paleness whiter, with the dreadful dull line of light between the imperfectly-closed eyelids broader than he had seen it—with the parted lips slowly dropping farther and farther away from each other—with the features growing larger and moving closer, till they seemed to fill the window and to silence the rain, and to shut out the night.

The sound of a voice, shouting below-stairs, woke him suddenly from the dream of his own distempered fancy.  He recognised it as the voice of the landlord.  ‘Shut up at twelve, Ben,’ he heard it say.  ‘I’m off to bed.’

He wiped away the damp that had gathered on his forehead, reasoned with himself for a little while, and resolved to shake his mind free of the ghastly counterfeit which still clung to it, by forcing himself to confront, if it was only for a moment, the solemn reality.  Without allowing himself an instant to hesitate, he parted the curtains at the foot of the bed, and looked through.

There was a sad, peaceful, white face, with the awful mystery of stillness on it, laid back upon the pillow.  No stir, no change there!  He only looked at it for a moment before he closed the curtains again—but that moment steadied him, calmed him, restored him—mind and body—to himself.

He returned to his old occupation of walking up and down the room; persevering in it, this time, till the clock struck again.  Twelve.

As the sound of the clock-bell died away, it was succeeded by the confused noise, down-stairs, of the drinkers in the tap-room leaving the house.  The next sound, after an interval of silence, was caused by the barring of the door, and the closing of the shutters, at the back of the Inn.  Then the silence followed again, and was disturbed no more.

He was alone now—absolutely, utterly, alone with the dead man, till the next morning.

The wick of the candle wanted trimming again.  He took up the snuffers—but paused suddenly on the very point of using them, and looked attentively at the candle—then back, over his shoulder, at the curtained bed—then again at the candle.  It had been lighted, for the first time, to show him the way up-stairs, and three parts of it, at least, were already consumed.  In another hour it would be burnt out.  In another hour—unless he called at once to the man who had shut up the Inn, for a fresh candle—he would be left in the dark.

Strongly as his mind had been affected since he had entered his room, his unreasonable dread of encountering ridicule, and of exposing his courage to suspicion, had not altogether lost its influence over him, even yet.  He lingered irresolutely by the table, waiting till he could prevail on himself to open the door, and call, from the landing, to the man who had shut up the Inn.  In his present hesitating frame of mind, it was a kind of relief to gain a few moments only by engaging in the trifling occupation of snuffing the candle.  His hand trembled a little, and the snuffers were heavy and awkward to use.  When he closed them on the wick, he closed them a hair’s breadth too low.  In an instant the candle was out, and the room was plunged in pitch darkness.

The one impression which the absence of light immediately produced on his mind, was distrust of the curtained bed—distrust which shaped itself into no distinct idea, but which was powerful enough in its very vagueness, to bind him down to his chair, to make his heart beat fast, and to set him listening intently.  No sound stirred in the room but the familiar sound of the rain against the window, louder and sharper now than he had heard it yet.

Still the vague distrust, the inexpressible dread possessed him, and kept him to his chair.  He had put his carpet-bag on the table, when he first entered the room; and he now took the key from his pocket, reached out his hand softly, opened the bag, and groped in it for his travelling writing-case, in which he knew that there was a small store of matches.  When he had got one of the matches, he waited before he struck it on the coarse wooden table, and listened intently again, without knowing why.  Still there was no sound in the room but the steady, ceaseless, rattling sound of the rain.

He lighted the candle again, without another moment of delay and, on the instant of its burning up, the first object in the room that his eyes sought for was the curtained bed.

Just before the light had been put out, he had looked in that direction, and had seen no change, no disarrangement of any sort, in the folds of the closely-drawn curtains.

When he looked at the bed, now, he saw, hanging over the side of it, a long white hand.

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Великий французский писатель Виктор Гюго — один из самых ярких представителей прогрессивно-романтической литературы XIX века. Вот уже более ста лет во всем мире зачитываются его блестящими романами, со сцен театров не сходят его драмы. В данном томе представлен один из лучших романов Гюго — «Отверженные». Это громадная эпопея, представляющая целую энциклопедию французской жизни начала XIX века. Сюжет романа чрезвычайно увлекателен, судьбы его героев удивительно связаны между собой неожиданными и таинственными узами. Его основная идея — это путь от зла к добру, моральное совершенствование как средство преобразования жизни.Перевод под редакцией Анатолия Корнелиевича Виноградова (1931).

Виктор Гюго , Вячеслав Александрович Егоров , Джордж Оливер Смит , Лаванда Риз , Марина Колесова , Оксана Сергеевна Головина

Проза / Классическая проза / Классическая проза ХIX века / Историческая литература / Образование и наука