Женщина в белом подтверждает эти сведения с улыбкой человека, которому известно все. Можно подумать, она знает мельчайшие подробности моей жизни. Я несколько раздраженно говорю ей об этом...
Затем я спросил, где дом вдовы раввина, и мне его показали. Я вошел во двор, в один из тех дворов, при виде которых у вас возникает сомнение, живет ли здесь кто-нибудь вооб..
Познакомившись со стариком, Хайме заинтересовался этими украшениями. &n..
From THE ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS CHRISTMAS NUMBER, 1892 pp. 12 - 18 by Grant Allen (1848 - 1899)
Pallinghurst Barrow
RUDOLPH REEVE sat by himself on the Old Long Barrow on Pallinghurst Common. It was a September evening, and the sun was setting. The west was all aglow with a mysterious red light, very strange and lurid — a light that reflected itself in glowing purple on the dark brown heather and the dying bracken. Rudolph Reeve was a journalist and a man of science; but he had a poet's soul for all that, in spite of his avocations, neither of which is usually thought to tend towards the spontaneous development of a poetic temperament. He sat there long, watching the livid hues that incarnadined the sky — redder and fiercer than anything he ever remembered to have seen since the famous year of the Krakatoa sunsets — though he knew it was getting late, and he ought to have gone back long since to the manor-house to dress for dinner. Mrs. Bouverie-Barton, his hostess, the famous Woman's Rights woman, was always such a stickler for punctuality and dispatch and all the other unfeminine virtues! But in spite of Mrs. Bouverie-Barton, Rudolph Reeve sat on. There was something about that sunset and the lights on the bracken — something weird and unearthly — that positively fascinated him.
The view over the Common, which stands high and exposed, a veritable waste of heath and gorse, is strikingly wide and expansive. Pallinghurst Ring, or the "Old Long Barrow," a well-known landmark familiar by that name from time immemorial to all the country-side, crowns its actual summit, and commands from its top the surrounding hills far into the shadowy heart of Hampshire. On its terraced slope Rudolph sat and gazed out, with all the artistic pleasure of a poet or a painter (for he was a little of both) in the exquisite flush of the dying reflections from the dying sun upon the dying heather. He sat and wondered to himself why death is always so much more beautiful, so much more poetical, so much calmer than life — and why you invariably enjoy things so very much better when you know you ought to be dressing for dinner.
He was just going to rise, however, dreading the lasting wrath of Mrs. Bouverie-Barton, when of a sudden a very weird yet definite feeling caused him for one moment to pause and hesitate. Why he felt it he knew not; but even as he sat there on the grassy tumulus, covered close with short sward of subterranean clover, that curious, cunning plant that buries its own seeds by automatic action, he was aware, through an external sense, but by pure internal consciousness, of something or other living and moving within the barrow. He shut his eyes and listened. No; fancy, pure fancy! Not a sound broke the stillness of early evening, save the drone of insects — those dying insects, now beginning to fail fast before the first chill breath of approaching autumn.
