Отрывок из книги
Walter Frith
Published by Good Press, 2021
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So June and part of July slipped away, diversified, as I have explained, by a visit to London and some melancholy pleasures sipped in Mabel Harker’s society, from which I returned to “The French Horn” in a truly desperate and pitiable frame of mind. Indeed, so low and forlorn was I at times that Mr. Thatcher, with great sympathy, once or twice fetched me out a bottle of old port (and not bad tipple, either, for a country inn), which we drank together, while he related to me at some length the misfortunes of his life.
Chief among them was the loss of his ancestral home, Wharton Park. The Thatchers had lived there since the first of them, a Lord Mayor of the time of Henry VIII., had built the house in the year 1543—of which original structure only the stables, in an extremely ramshackle condition, remained. A drunken Thatcher with a bedroom candle had burned the rest, towards the end of the last century, when the present house was built by my father-in-law’s grandfather; a bad man, apparently, since though he had a wife and children established in Portman Square, he kept a mistress in one of the wings of Wharton Park, where one night she went suddenly raving mad (treading on her long boa and believing it a serpent come from the lower regions to claim and devour her), and filled the air with her screechings till, a year later, she died.
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