Cousin Rosamund Read Online Free Page A

Richard Quin were doing. But no. Of course I am being foolish. Everything in real music has something to do with Mamma and Richard Quin, and almost nothing outside it has anything to do with them. By making us play she lifted us up into their world.’
    For a time I was caught up in the memory of certain passages of music, and when my attention went back to her she was saying, ‘I love those people we knew with Mamma and Richard, I cannot care about anybody else very much. Can you?’
    ‘Yes, of course I do,’ I said. ‘I like lots of people. Don’t you really like anybody at all?’
    ‘Yes, but not much,’ she said, and pointed at the praying girl on the monument. ‘Not more than I like her. Not as much.’
    ‘Oh, I like people a great deal more than that,’ I said. ‘And I think, I think, I could like them much more still, if they would ever let us get near to them.’
    ‘I do not want them closer to me,’ said Mary. Again we were silent and then she said, ‘What a pity it is that all of the people who want to marry us do so in such an unfriendly spirit.’
    It was true that our suitors fell in love with us very quickly, before we could get to know them, and proposed to us angrily, as if we had stolen something from them and this was the only way they could get it back, and were so infuriated by our refusals that they never spoke to us again and glared at us across parties. We sometimes thought that we would not mind marrying musicians, but we could not have married anybody of our own grade as concert performers, we would never have seen them, and the people below us always thought of us as stars and were tiresomely respectful. Really we had long known that we need not think of marriage.
    ‘I wish we could have Rosamund to live with us,’ I said. ‘It would have been lovely if she could have lived with us and been our secretary instead of Miss Lupton, though she’s all right.’
    ‘I have thought of that so often lately,’ said Mary. ‘But of course it is impossible. Her nursing is as important as our playing.’
    ‘Anything she does must be more important than anything we do,’ I said. ‘I know quite well she should not come down from her level to ours. But one can’t help wishing it would happen.’
    ‘There is nothing really lovely left for us to wish for except that,’ said Mary. ‘Nothing as lovely as it all was when Mamma and Richard Quin were alive.’
    There was no point in looking any longer on the churchyard and its trees and tombstones, its kneeling stone girl. We went on our way along the empty streets, between the dark houses, from yellow street-lamp to yellow street-lamp. I said ‘Oh, Mary, tell me this. Something worried me in the plane this evening when I was flying from Paris. Richard Quin was called Richard Quin after his uncle who was called by his first and second names to distinguish him from another Richard in the family. But who was that other Richard?’
    ‘Papa told me,’ said Mary, ‘but I was quite little, I do not remember.’
    ‘Cordelia might know,’ I said.
    ‘No, she will have forgotten entirely. She wants to forget everything to do with our family. She will get flushed and look stubborn and say that she never heard that there was any reason for calling him by both names, and that she always thought it was a great pity, it must have struck people as so odd.’
    ‘Well, it does not matter,’ I said. ‘But it makes one angry that so many things happen and drift away and we cannot lay hands on them again.’
    We had turned the corner of the street in which we lived, and went along between the dark houses, kicking at the chestnut leaves that had fallen thick during the day. ‘How bright and cold the stars look,’ said Mary, ‘though it is only autumn. And how queer it is that if you or I were coming home, and the other of us were playing, the music would sound sad as we heard it in the street. Whatever the composer might have meant it to be, whatever we