Three Cousins Performed at the Pianoforte for the Duke — He Asked for the Girl Turning the Pages
Chapter 3
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She stood in the doorway until Cecily stopped, and then she said, "How pretty. Though I do think, Cecily, that the girls should not hear too much of that. It is discouraging for them when they are working so hard."Discouraging for them.Cecily was twenty-one. She said, "Of course, Aunt," and closed the instrument and went upstairs. From that day, she played before 11:00, and in the eight years since, she has never once played in that room while anybody could hear her.She was not forbidden. It was simply made clear that the doing of it would be a kind of unkindness to somebody else. After a while, you stop, and afterwards nobody can point to the moment you were stopped.The three Sowerby daughters were Arabella, Lavinia, and Georgiana, and they were twenty-three, twenty-one, and nineteen. Their mother had spent eleven years assembling them, and each of them had been given an accomplishment, which is to say each of them had been given a prop.Arabella had the harp and had abandoned it at seventeen, so Arabella had Italian. She had a red Morocco volume of Metastasio that lived on the table beside her chair, and she could pronounce Italian beautifully, and she could not read it. She had learned four arias by sound, the way you learn a tune from a bird.Lavinia had watercolors. There was a portfolio, and there were eleven finished landscapes in it, and seven of them had been finished by Mr. Prentice of Bury St. Edmunds, who came on Tuesdays and who charged by the visit. Lavinia's own contribution to those seven was, in each case, the sky.Georgiana, who was nineteen and the only one of the three whom Cecily genuinely liked, had the pianoforte. Georgiana practiced. Not enough, but she practiced, and she had a real ear. If she had been born to different people, she might have been quite good. She could play the Clementi she had been given from beginning to end at about two-thirds the proper tempo with her tongue between her teeth, and she knew perfectly well that it was not good enough, which was more than either of her sisters knew about anything.The girls' music master was Mr. Krause, who had come from Hanover twenty years before and who came out from Cambridge on alternate Fridays. Mr. Krause was sixty-one. He had, in his own country, been a working musician of a serious kind. He was now paid four guineas a quarter to sit in a warm drawing room and tell three young women that they were ready. He said it every fortnight. He said it because he needed the four guineas, and because he had learned over twenty years in England exactly how much truth a country house will purchase.But he was not a liar all the way through, and this matters later. Twice, in the third week, Cecily heard him at the instrument alone after the lesson, playing about eight bars of the slow movement of the Clementi to himself very slowly, the way a man tests a thing he has not been allowed to say out loud.She had one conversation with him that spring that was not about the weather. It was in the hall in April while he was waiting for his hat. He had come out of the lesson looking tired in a way that had nothing to do with sixty-one years, and he stopped in front of her and said, without preamble:"The corrections in the Clementi—they are yours."