75 лучших рассказов / 75 Best Short Stories

Having done this, he turned with some asperity to the ghost, and said:

�Far be it from me to be impolite to a woman, madam, but I’m hanged if it wouldn’t please me better if you’d stop these infernal visits of yours to this house. Go sit out on the lake, if you like that sort of thing; soak the water-butt, if you wish; but do not, I implore you, come into a gentleman’s house and saturate him and his possessions in this way. It is damned disagreeable.’

�Henry Hartwick Oglethorpe,’ said the ghost, in a gurgling voice, �you don’t know what you are talking about.

’

�Madam,’ returned the unhappy householder, �I wish that remark were strictly truthful. I was talking about you. It would be shillings and pence – nay, pounds, in my pocket, madam, if I did not know you.’

�That is a bit of specious nonsense,’ returned the ghost, throwing a quart of indignation into the face of the master of Harrowby. �It may rank high as repartee, but as a comment upon my statement that you do not know what you are talking about, it savors of irrelevant impertinence.

You do not know that I am compelled to haunt this place year after year by inexorable fate. It is no pleasure to me to enter this house, and ruin and mildew everything I touch. I never aspired to be a shower-bath, but it is my doom. Do you know who I am?’

�No, I don’t,’ returned the master of Harrowby. �I should say you were the Lady of the Lake, or Little Sallie Waters.’

�You are a witty man for your years,’ said the ghost.

�Well, my humor is drier than yours ever will be,’ returned the master.

�No doubt. I’m never dry. I am the Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall, and dryness is a quality entirely beyond my wildest hope. I have been the incumbent of this highly unpleasant office for two hundred years to-night.’

�How the deuce did you ever come to get elected?’ asked the master.

�Through a suicide,’ replied the spectre. �I am the ghost of that fair maiden whose picture hangs over the mantel-piece in the drawing-room.

I should have been your great-great-great-great-great-aunt if I had lived, Henry Hartwick Oglethorpe, for I was the own sister of your great-great-great-great-grandfather.’

�But what induced you to get this house into such a predicament?’

�I was not to blame, sir,’ returned the lady. �It was my father’s fault. He it was who built Harrowby Hall, and the haunted chamber was to have been mine.