‘Veronica, you mean,’ was his reply, ‘does not effervesce. But her silence is, perhaps, the measure of her emotion.’
‘O stop! stop! I must have some of those anemones.‘ How often a kindred need of this kind arose on the part of Lamia, it would be hard to say; but, by degrees, every part of the carriage that was not occupied by ourselves was filled with tulips, windflowers, roses, and long branches of early-flowering golden acacia.
‘You baby!’ said Veronica, ‘what are you going to do with them all?’
‘You shall see, when luncheon-hour has arrived.‘ ‘Which I think it now has,’ I ventured to suggest.
Thereupon we came to a standstill; the driver took bit and bridle off his willing little nags, and replaced them with well-filled nose-bags, while we unloaded our hampers, that were as commodiously as they were generously stocked. The unpacking of them went on under the skilful direction of Veronica, who would no more have dreamed of allowing us to lunch al fresco without spotless table-cloth, neat napkins, and all the apparatus of civilisation, than in her parlour at home. But she allowed Lamia to select the spot; and the choice, though made from romantic rather than from practical impulse, proved to be not wanting in comfort. Under a carob-tree, the first Lamia had ever seen, the cloth was spread; and then she scattered rather than arranged her lately gathered flowers, with infinite taste. A short distance away, as we looked under the olive-trees across the ruddy clods and accidental wild-flowers, were the innumerable dimples of the amiable sea; and, did we turn our heads, slopes of terraced fertility mounted gradually toward deciduous clusters of woodland, and peaks of more accentuated pine.
‘Will it be very unromantic,’ asked Lamia, ‘to seem hungry? Because if it would, as I should not like to hurt any one’s feelings, I can sate the edge of appetite with bare imagination of a feast, or, at most, with the unsubstantial pageant of a mandarin orange.‘ Veronica’s reply was to cut some solid slices of galantine of fowl, and to tell me to do the same to one of those long rolls of crisp crust which contrast so favourably with the semi-barbarous baker’s bread of our own beloved island. The Poet, as of right, withdrew the tow from the withy-bound flask of ruby wine, saying to me, and to me only, as he did so, ‘Siccis omnia nam dura deus proposuit.’ It was our first open-air meal under the southern sky; and even Veronica, who, as we all know, is rather on the side of indoor festivity at home, could not protest that, in the shelter Lamia had chosen for us, it was a touch too cold for the pleasant and perfectly safe satisfaction of our appetite.
‘Is it always like this?’ asked Lamia.
‘Far from it,’ I was going to reply; but the Poet anticipated me.
‘Yes, always, Lamia! always, always, always! No one deserves to travel who anticipates anything less agreeable than what he is enjoying at the moment. Should it ever be different, let us hope we shall know how to meet it. Meanwhile, let us think as little as possible of to-morrow.’
‘We can all see,’ said Lamia, ‘that such was the spirit in which you travelled in your youth. In your rhythmical record of the journey which you took—not with Veronica, I believe,—along this meandering coast-line, there is never a stanza, a line, even a word, to indicate that the myrtle ever ceases to bloom, or that the sun ever forgets to shine.’