"Machen, Arthur - The Shining Pyramid" - читать интересную книгу автора (Machen Arthur)

"Well, you may be right Perhaps, after all, I was wrong to speak of the peace of
the country. There, when a tragedy does occur, it is like a stone thrown into a
pond; the circles of disturbance keep on widening, and it seems as if the water
would never be still again."

"Have you ever any tragedies where you are?"

I can hardly say that. But I was a good deal disturbed about a month ago by
something that happened; it may or may not have been a tragedy in the usual
sense of the word."

"What was the occurrence?"

"Well, the fact is a girl disappeared in a way which seems highly mysterious.
Her parents, people of the name of Trevor, are well-to-do farmers, and their
eldest daughter Annie was a sort of village beauty; she was really remarkably
handsome. One afternoon she thought she would go and see her aunt, a widow who
farms her own land, and as the two houses are only about five or six miles
apart, she started off, telling her parents she would take the short cut over
the hills. She never got to her aunt's, and she never was seen again. That's
putting it in a few words."

"what an extraordinary thing! I suppose there are no disused mines, are there,
on the hills? I don't think you quite run to anything so formidable as a
precipice?"

"No; the path the girl must have taken had no pitfalls off any description; it
is just a track over wild, bare hillside, far, from a byroad. One may walk for
miles without meeting a soul, but it is all perfectly safe."

"And what do people say about it?"

"Oh, they talk nonsense--among themselves. You have no notion as to how
superstitious English cottagers are in out-of-the-way parts like mine. They are
as bad as the Irish, every whit, and even more secretive."

"But what do they say?"

"Oh, the poor girl is supposed to have 'gone with the fairies,' or to have been
'taken by the fairies.' Such stuff!" he went on, "one would laugh if it were not
for the real tragedy of the case."

"Yes," he said, "'fairies' certainly strike a little curiously on the ear in
these days. But what do the police say? I presume they do not accept the
fairy-tale hypothesis?"

"No; but they seem quite at fault. What I am afraid of is that Annie Trevor must
have fallen in with some scoundrels on her way. Castletown is a large seaport,
you know, and some of the worst of the foreign sailors occasionally desert their