Читать книгу Short Cruises - William Wymark Jacobs - Страница 3

FARMER ROSE sat in his porch smoking an evening pipe. By his side, in a comfortable Windsor chair, sat his friend the miller, also smoking, and gazing with half-closed eyes at the landscape as he listened for the thousandth time to his host’s complaints about his daughter.

“The long and the short of it is, Cray,” said the farmer, with an air of mournful pride, “she’s far too good-looking.”

Mr. Cray grunted.

“Truth is truth, though she’s my daughter,” continued Mr. Rose, vaguely. “She’s too good-looking. Sometimes when I’ve taken her up to market I’ve seen the folks fair turn their backs on the cattle and stare at her instead.”

Mr. Cray sniffed; louder, perhaps, than he had intended. “Beautiful that rose-bush smells,” he remarked, as his friend turned and eyed him.

“What is the consequence?” demanded the farmer, relaxing his gaze. “She looks in the glass and sees herself, and then she gets miserable and uppish because there ain’t nobody in these parts good enough for her to marry.”

“It’s a extraordinary thing to me where she gets them good looks from,” said the miller, deliberately.

“Ah!” said Mr. Rose, and sat trying to think of a means of enlightening his friend without undue loss of modesty.

“She ain’t a bit like her poor mother,” mused Mr. Cray.

“No, she don’t get her looks from her,” assented the other.

“It’s one o’ them things you can’t account for,” said Mr. Cray, who was very tired of the subject; “it’s just like seeing a beautiful flower blooming on an old cabbage-stump.”

The farmer knocked his pipe out noisily and began to refill it. “People have said that she takes after me a trifle,” he remarked, shortly.

“You weren’t fool enough to believe that, I know,” said the miller. “Why, she’s no more like you than you’re like a warming-pan—not so much.”

Mr. Rose regarded his friend fixedly. “You ain’t got a very nice way o’ putting things, Cray,” he said, mournfully.

“I’m no flatterer,” said the miller; “never was, and you can’t please everybody. If I said your daughter took after you I don’t s’pose she’d ever speak to me again.”

“The worst of it is,” said the farmer, disregarding his remark, “she won’t settle down. There’s young Walter Lomas after her now, and she won’t look at him. He’s a decent young fellow is Walter, and she’s been and named one o’ the pigs after him, and the way she mixes them up together is disgraceful.”