Cousin Rosamund Read Online Free

fasteners under her arms were undone; and when we spoke her name and she turned round her face was not varnished with the imperturbability which a woman of her kind normally assumes at a party. She looked wretched; and she did not look less wretched when she saw us, but slowly said something approving about us, as if she were telling us not to misunderstand her inability to be as we had known her. Then she paused and became wooden. To break the silence, we spoke of the picture at which she had been staring. ‘Is it a Poussin?’ asked Mary. ‘We heard they had a Poussin.’
    ‘Is it a landscape?’ asked Lady Tredinnick. She turned round and looked at it as if she had never seen it before. ‘Yes. That is their Poussin. There is one very like it at Chatsworth, but that is far finer.’ Again she ceased to speak, and under her tiara, between her ear-rings, over her necklace, the face of an ageing proconsul brooded in despairing meditation, in which we could have no part. At that moment a young man came up to her and said, ‘Do you remember me, Lady Tredinnick? I know your sons very well,’ and we were made still more aware that our old friend had changed. She greeted him politely, but what she was saying could hardly be heard, and she looked like an angry and important old man, offended by the violation of some principle he had defended in Parliament and tested by huge administrative practice. For a second or two we stood suspended, while she inaudibly followed a gracious routine from which her face dissented. Then her voice entirely failed her. She tried to force some sound through her lips, and when it would not come she made a disclaiming gesture and strode away.
    I said to the young man, ‘Lady Tredinnick must be ill,’ and was astonished to find that he was not merely disconcerted, he was so horrified that the sweat was standing on his brow.
    Mary said, ‘If we go downstairs, could you get us a drink?’ He took the chance to recover, and as we stood at the buffet he told us in a pleasant and even tone, though his eyes searched our faces in incomprehensible anxiety, of a journey he had recently made in Italy. It was time for us to go home, and he saw us politely to our car, but as he turned away in the darkness we saw him take out his handkerchief and draw it across his brow.
    ‘What do you think was the matter with her?’ I asked.
    ‘She was not ill,’ said Mary, ‘she was full of vigour. She was unhappy.’ We were silent for a moment, then Mary cried out, ‘But where was Nancy? She should have been at the concert. She told me she was in London. She always loves to hear me playing the Emperor Concerto, but she did not come and see me afterwards. She always comes and sees me afterwards.’
    I said, ‘I hope she was not too upset when she went to see her mother with Mr Morpurgo last week.’
    ‘Oh, poor Nancy,’ murmured Mary, and, a few minutes later, she said, ‘Look, we are nearly at the church, let us stop the car and walk home. I know it is late, but I cannot bear being in the car.’
    After the chauffeur put us down at the corner opposite Lord’s we stood for a time looking through the railings at the Grecian church, the dark tilted tombstones under the trees, and the girl kneeling in prayer on the monument. Mary said, ‘We are so helpless without Mamma. Nancy was safe while Mamma lived, and Aunt Lily too, and Queenie. And Mamma would have known what was the matter with Lady Tredinnick. But we can do nothing for them.’ She pressed her forehead against the cold iron and was silent for a while, then burst out, ‘What good are we?’
    ‘We are quite good pianists,’ I said.
    ‘And what good is that?’ she asked. ‘What good is that to Nancy? Or to Aunt Lily? Or to Queenie?’
    ‘Don’t be an ass,’ I said. ‘Mamma wanted us to be pianists, so it must be some good.’
    ‘She may have wanted that just out of pity,’ she said, ‘to keep us busy because we were not able to do what she and