Isola answered never a word, until Captain Hulbert addressed her pointedly for the second time.
“Will you go, Mrs. Disney—may we make up the party?”
“I would rather not,” she answered, without looking at him.
“But why not? Are you such a bad sailor—in spite of all Miss Leland says of you?”
“I am a pretty good sailor in a row-boat—but not in a yacht. And I hate fishing—such a slow weary business. I would rather not go.”
“I am so sorry; but you must not be worried about it,” said Hulbert, kindly, seeing the growing distress in her countenance. “We will not go in for fishing—or excursions—but you and Miss Leland will at least come to afternoon tea on the Vendetta—to afternoon tea in the harbour. There used to be a comic song when I was a boy—’Come and drink tea in the arbour.’ You must come to the arbour with an aspirate. It is not so rustic or sentimental—but there will be no earwigs or creeping things to drop into your tea-cup. Mr. Colfox, you will come, won’t you?”
“I shall be delighted,” answered the curate. “I have a sneaking kindness for all yachts.”
The conversation drifted back to Lostwithiel and his works and ways, presently.
“When he went home two years ago he gave me to understand he was going to settle down at the Mount, and spend the rest of his days in peace and respectability,” said Captain Hulbert. “Yet, very soon afterwards, he and his yacht were off again like the Flying Dutchman, and the next I heard of him was at Leghorn, and six months later he was coasting off Algiers; and the following spring he was in South America; and the Vendetta was laid up at Marseilles, where he begged me to go and look after her, and take her to myself until such time as he should want her again. I was with him for a few days at Leghorn, where he seemed ill and out of spirits. I don’t think you can have used him over well in this part of the world, Mrs. Disney,” he added, half in jest. “I fancy some of you must have snubbed him severely, or his tenants must have worried him by their complaints and exactions. I could not get him to talk about his life at the Mount. He seemed to have taken a disgust for the old home.”
“You must put that down to his roving temper,” said Disney, “for although I was away at the time, I can answer for it there was no such thing as snubbing in the case. Your brother is the only peer in these parts, and from the way people talk about him he might be the only peer in Great Britain—the Alpha and Omega of Debrett. Our parvenu neighbour, Mr. Crowther, talked of him one night with a slavish rapture which made me sick. I am a Tory by association and instinct, but I can’t stand the vulgarian’s worship of a lord.”