Read Online Cousin Rosamund by Rebecca West - Free Book Online

huge childish toy which said that it was no such thing. With exultation we bade each other note that there was a double arc, for everybody believes that two rainbows are better than one, and we were delighted by the scene’s abandonment of the ordinary, for the river was now bottle-green and its foam was white as snow, and the driftwood shone with iridescent lambency. Aunt Lily was saying something about the suitability of a rainbow to an occasion when a family, and a family it really was, though few of us were related by blood, but then blood was no thicker than water, there never was a sillier saying, had gathered together to celebrate a most hopeful occasion, when we became conscious that we had an odd visitor.
    A tall old man was striding down the lawn towards us. He was wearing a long black overcoat, almost as long as a dressing-gown, his silver hair was bare, and he carried a staff that might have come out of an allegory; as he drew nearer his appearance became more and more of a public performance. His black eyes flashed under prodigious silver eyebrows which it was to be supposed he would take off after the show, and his nostrils were dilated as if to store breath enough for a long passage in blank verse. ‘Len, have you anything on you if he wants a subscription?’ murmured Aunt Milly. We all saw him, except Nancy and Oswald, who were sealed in contemplation of the rainbow, and we gave him the indifferent and amiable greeting which people in an inn give to a newcomer, telling him that his body has a right to be there and he can do as he likes about asking company for his mind. That welcome was one of the reasons why we liked being at the Dog and Duck, but it seemed as if the old man were disappointed at the way we were taking him.
    Oswald turned to me, saying, ‘See what I mean? Granted I can’t see a rainbow all the time. But I can see it often enough, as often as I can reasonably want to see a rainbow. So what do I want with the picture of a rainbow?’ His eyes went past me to the stranger, and vacillated. Then he said, pluckily enough, ‘Hello, Dad.’
    All of us, even the surveyor and his wife, expressed happy surprise. Aunt Lily cried in ecstasy. ‘Now a family we really are.’ The old man answered politely; but though his face was impassive it suggested strong disapproval, as the blank sun intimates its power to burn. As he had crossed the grass he had suggested some sort of performer below the level of actual performance, like the buskers who entertain theatre queues. Now he seemed more elevated and more alarming. I recognised in Oswald the perpetual childishness of a child who has grown up in the shadow of a parent made formidable by an exceptional destiny. I had often recognised it in Mary and myself. If we had not been able to play as well as we did, our mother’s art, a fiery ball in the sky, would have consumed the marrow in our bones.
    Oswald said, ‘Oh, Dad, I wish we had known you were coming,’ very much as Nancy would have said the same thing to us. There was the same primary and sincere expression of goodwill, ‘We wish we had been able to prepare a welcome for you,’ and the same secondary and even more passionately sincere expression of fear, ‘We wish we had more time to build defences round our delicate happiness and protect it from your excessive and inconsiderate force.’
    The fear was reasonable. Mr Bates said ominously that he feared he was intruding. Uncle Len answered serenely and comprehensively, ‘That you aren’t. Any relation of young Os here is welcome, and the house is full of cold meat,’ but Mr Bates was not appeased, and looking very hard from Nancy to Mary and from Mary to me, asked coldly, ‘Son, which is your young lady?’
    ‘Why, Dad, I would have thought you could have guessed,’ said Oswald happily. ‘This is Nancy, of course.’
    Mr Bates said sadly, dipping deep into the bass, that he would have liked to embrace Nancy as a daughter, but there was an