Дом о семи шпилях - [22]

Странно было видеть, с какой печалью женщина брала в руки детскую игрушку; удивительно, как эта игрушка не исчезала от одного ее прикосновения.
Now she places a gingerbread elephant against the window, but with so tremulous a touch that it tumbles upon the floor, with the dismemberment of three legs and its trunk; it has ceased to be an elephant, and has become a few bits of musty gingerbread.	Вот она выставляет на окне пряничного слона, но рука ее так дрожит, что слон падает на пол и теряет три ноги и хобот; теперь он уже больше не слон, а просто несколько кусков черствого пряника.
There, again, she has upset a tumbler of marbles, all of which roll different ways, and each individual marble, devil-directed, into the most difficult obscurity that it can find. Heaven help our poor old Hepzibah, and forgive us for taking a ludicrous view of her position!	Далее она опрокинула банку с мраморными шариками. Все они покатились в разные стороны, и будто враждебная сила разогнала их по самым темным углам лавочки.
As her rigid and rusty frame goes down upon its hands and knees, in quest of the absconding marbles, we positively feel so much the more inclined to shed tears of sympathy, from the very fact that we must needs turn aside and laugh at her. For here-and if we fail to impress it suitably upon the reader, it is our own fault, not that of the theme-here is one of the truest points of melancholy interest that occur in ordinary life.	Когда Г епзиба опустилась на колени, чтобы найти укатившиеся шарики, мы почувствовали, как к нашему сердцу подступили слезы сострадания.
It was the final throe of what called itself old gentility.	В ее душе происходила тяжелая борьба.
A lady-who had fed herself from childhood with the shadowy food of aristocratic reminiscences, and whose religion it was that a lady's hand soils itself irremediably by doing aught for bread-this born lady, after sixty years of narrowing means, is fain to step down from her pedestal of imaginary rank.	Леди, с колыбели воспитанная в понятиях о своей важности и богатстве, с колыбели убежденная в ложной мысли, что стыдно такой знатной особе самой зарабатывать себе на содержание, - эта леди после шестидесятилетней борьбы с оскудевающими средствами была вынуждена спуститься с пьедестала своей знатности.
Poverty treading closely at her heels for a lifetime, has come up with her at last.	Бедность, гнавшаяся за ней по пятам всю жизнь, наконец настигла ее.

She must earn her own food, or starve! And we have stolen upon Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon, too irreverently, at the instant of time when the patrician lady is to be transformed into the plebeian woman. In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social life, somebody is always at the drowning-point. The tragedy is enacted with as continual a repetition as that of a popular drama on a holiday; and, nevertheless, is felt as deeply, perhaps, as when an hereditary noble sinks below his order. More deeply; since, with us, rank is the grosser substance of wealth and a splendid establishment, and has no spiritual existence after the death of these, but dies hopelessly along with them. And, therefore, since we have been unfortunate enough to introduce our heroine at so inauspicious a juncture, we would entreat for a mood of due solemnity in the spectators of her fate. Let us behold, in poor Hepzibah, the immemorial lady-two hundred years old, on this side of the water, and thrice as many on the other-with her antique portraits, pedigrees, coats of arms, records and traditions, and her claim, as joint heiress, to that princely territory at the eastward, no longer a wilderness but a populous fertility-born, too, in Pyncheon Street, under the Pyncheon Elm, and in the Pyncheon House, where she has spent all her days-reduced now in that very house, to be the hucksteress of a cent-shop!	Она должна заработать себе на хлеб насущный или умереть!
This business of setting up a petty shop is almost the only resource of women, in circumstances at all similar to those of our unfortunate recluse.	Открыть мелочную лавочку было бы почти единственной возможностью женщины, оказавшейся в обстоятельствах нашей несчастной затворницы.
With her near-sightedness, and those tremulous fingers of hers, at once inflexible and delicate, she could not be a seamstress; although her sampler of fifty years gone by exhibited some of the most recondite specimens of ornamental needlework.	При своей близорукости и с этими дрожащими пальцами, негибкими и вместе с тем изнеженными, она не могла работать швеей, хотя ее шитье лет пятьдесят тому назад было поистине образцовым.
A school for little children had been often in her thoughts, and, at one time, she had begun a review of her early studies in the New England primer, with a view to prepare herself for the office of instructress.	Ей часто приходило в голову открыть школу для маленьких детей, и однажды она принялась было перечитывать свои давнишние уроки в "Новом английском букваре", с намерением приготовиться к работе наставницей.