Kidnapped / Похищенный. Книга для чтения на английском языке

It was drawing on to sundown when I met a stout, dark, sour-looking woman coming trudging down a hill; and she, when I had put my usual question, turned sharp about, accompanied me back to the summit she had just left, and pointed to a great bulk of building standing very bare upon a green in the bottom of the next valley. The country was pleasant round about, running in low hills, pleasantly watered and wooded, and the crops, to my eyes, wonderfully good; but the house itself appeared to be a kind of ruin; no road led up to it; no smoke arose from any of the chimneys; nor was there any semblance of a garden.

My heart sank.

�That!’ I cried.

The woman’s face lit up with a malignant anger. �That is the house of Shaws!’ she cried. �Blood built it; blood stopped the building of it; blood shall bring it down. See here!’ she cried again – �I spit upon the ground, and crack my thumb at it! Black be its fall!’

And the woman, whose voice had risen to a kind of eldritch sing-song, turned with a skip, and was gone.

I stood where she left me, with my hair on end. In those days folk still believed in witches and trembled at a curse; and this one took the pith out of my legs.

I sat me down and stared at the house of Shaws. The more I looked, the pleasanter that countryside appeared; and yet the barrack in the midst of it went sore against my fancy.

At last the sun went down, and then, right up against the yellow sky, I saw a scroll of smoke go mounting; there it was, and meant a fire, and warmth, and cookery, and some living inhabitant that must have lit it; and this comforted my heart.

So I set forward by a little faint track in the grass that led in my direction.

The nearer I got to the house, the drearier it appeared. It seemed like the one wing of a house that had never been finished. What should have been the inner end stood open on the upper floors, and showed against the sky with steps and stairs of uncompleted masonry. Many of the windows were unglazed, and bats flew in and out like doves out of a dove-cote.

The night had begun to fall as I got close; and in three of the lower windows, which were very high up and narrow, and well-barred, the changing light of a little fire began to glimmer. I came forward cautiously, and giving ear as I came, heard someone rattling with dishes, and a little dry, eager cough that came in fits; but there was no sound of speech, and not a dog barked.