Любовник леди Чаттерлей / Lady Chatterley's Lover

A faint smile like a sneer came on the man’s face. “Nay, yo mun ax “er,” he replied callously, in broad vernacular.[44 - Broad vernacular – шотландский просторечный диалект.]

Connie felt as if he had hit her in the face, and she changed colour. Then she gathered her defiance, and looked at him, her dark blue eyes blazing rather vaguely.

“I asked you,” she panted.

He gave a queer little bow, lifting his hat. “You did, your Ladyship,” he said; then, with a return to the vernacular: “but I canna tell yer.

Connie turned to the child, a ruddy, black-haired thing of nine or ten. “What is it, dear? Tell me why you’re crying!” she said, with the conventionalized sweetness suitable. More violent sobs, self-conscious. Still more sweetness on Connie’s part.

“There, there, don’t you cry! Tell me what they’ve done to you!’… an intense tenderness of tone.

“Don’t you cry then!” she said, bending in front of the child. “See what I’ve got for you!”

Sobs, snuffles, a fist taken from a blubbered face, and a black shrewd eye cast for a second on the sixpence. Then more sobs, but subduing. “There, tell me what’s the matter, tell me!” said Connie, putting the coin into the child’s chubby hand, which closed over it.

“It’s the… it’s the… pussy!”

Shudders of subsiding sobs.

“What pussy, dear?”

After a silence the shy fist, clenching on sixpence, pointed into the bramble brake.

“There!”

Connie looked, and there, sure enough, was a big black cat, stretched out grimly, with a bit of blood on it.

“Oh!” she said in repulsion.

“A poacher, your Ladyship,” said the man satirically.

She glanced at him angrily. “No wonder the child cried,” she said, “if you shot it when she was there. No wonder she cried!”

He looked into Connie’s eyes, laconic, contemptuous, not hiding his feelings. And again Connie flushed; she felt she had been making a scene, the man did not respect her.

“What is your name?” she said playfully to the child.