Знак четырех / The Sign of the Four. Артур Конан Дойл

He pays me well to do my duty, and my duty I’ll do. I don’t know none o’ your friends.’

      ‘Oh, yes you do, McMurdo,’ cried Sherlock Holmes genially. ‘I don’t think you can have forgotten me. Don’t you remember that amateur who fought three rounds with you at Alison’s rooms on the night of your benefit four years back?’

      ‘Not Mr. Sherlock Holmes!’ roared the prize-fighter. ‘God’s truth! how could I have mistook you? If instead o’ standin’ there so quiet you had just stepped up and given me that cross-hit of yours[50] under the jaw, I’d ha’ known you without a question. Ah, you’re one that has wasted your gifts, you have! You might have aimed high, if you had joined the fancy.[51]’

      ‘You see, Watson, if all else fails me, I have still one of the scientific professions open to me,’ said Holmes, laughing. ‘Our friend won’t keep us out in the cold now, I am sure.’

      ‘In you come, sir, in you come – you and your friends,’ he answered. ‘Very sorry, Mr. Thaddeus, but orders are very strict. Had to be certain of your friends before I let them in.’

      Inside, a gravel path wound through desolate grounds to a huge clump of a house, square and prosaic, all plunged in shadow save where a moonbeam struck one corner and glimmered in a garret window. The vast size of the building, with its gloom and its deathly silence, struck a chill to the heart. Even Thaddeus Sholto seemed ill at ease, and the lantern quivered and rattled in his hand.

      ‘I cannot understand it,’ he said. ‘There must be some mistake. I distinctly told Bartholomew that we should be here, and yet there is no light in his window. I do not know what to make of it.’

      ‘Does he always guard the premises in this way?’ asked Holmes.

      ‘Yes; he has followed my father’s custom. He was the favourite son you know, and I sometimes think that my father may have told him more than he ever told me. That is Bartholomew’s window up there where the moonshine strikes. It is quite bright, but there is no light from within, I think.’

      ‘None,’ said Holmes. ‘But I see the glint of a light in that little window beside the door.’

      ‘Ah, that is the housekeeper’s room. That is where old Mrs. Bernstone sits. She can tell us all about it. But perhaps you would not mind waiting here for a minute or two, for if we all go in together, and she has had no word of our coming, she may be alarmed. But, hush! what is that?’

      He held up the lantern, and his hand shook until the circles of light flickered and wavered all round us. Miss Morstan seized my wrist, and we all stood, with thumping hearts, straining our ears. From the great black house there sounded through the silent night the saddest and most pitiful of sounds – the shrill, broken whimpering of a frightened woman.

      ‘It is Mrs. Bernstone,’ said Sholto. ‘She is the only woman in the house. Wait here. I shall be back in a moment.’

      He hurried for the door and knocked in his peculiar way. We could see a tall old woman admit him and sway with pleasure at the very sight of him.