He felt that he had gone far enough—he felt that it were unwise to press the question too much at first. He meant to be gently persistent; and he meant to have his own way.
He followed Allegra into the drawing-room—a room full of light and sunshine, which had been beautified and made home-like by the addition of a few Japaneseries and a little old Italian furniture which Martin Disney had picked up at a bric-à-brac shop in the Via Vittorio Emanuelo. There were flowers everywhere, in the bright Italian pottery, so artless, so cheap, so gay, in its varieties of form and colouring. To Hulbert’s fancy it was the prettiest room he had seen for an age.
“You seem to have made yourself uncommonly comfortable here,” he said, after cordial greetings, settling down into a bamboo chair near Isola’s little olive-wood table, littered with Tauchnitz novels and fancy work. “It is a pleasant sensation for a rolling stone who has hardly ever known what home means to drop into such a nest as this. You will have too much of my company, I’m afraid. You’ll be shocked to hear that I have taken rooms at the Anglais, down there,” pointing down the valley, “within a stone’s throw of you.”
“We are not shocked. We are very glad you will be near us,” said Isola, smiling at him. “It has been a dull life for Allegra, I’m afraid.”
“Dull! dull in this land of beauty!” cried Allegra. “I have never known a dull hour since I came here; though, of course,” with a shy glance at her lover, “I have naturally thought sometimes of absent friends, and wished they were with me to revel in the loveliness of these woods and hills.”
“Well, one of your friends has come to you, one who would as gladly have come had you been in regions where the sun never shines, or where his chariot wheels scorch the torrid sands.”
Captain Hulbert stayed with them all the evening, and planned a sail to Mentone for the following day, Isola again begging to be left out of their plans, as she had done at Fowey.
“You need feel no compunction about leaving me,” she paid. “I shall be perfectly happy in the woods with nurse, and baby, and my books.”
They obeyed her, and the little excursion was arranged. They were to start soon after the early breakfast, carrying what their Italian cook called a pique-nique with them, in the shape of a well-provided luncheon-basket. Isola sat in the olive wood, watching the white sails moving slowly towards Bordighera. It was an exquisite day—a day for dreaming on the water rather than for rapid progress. The yacht scarcely seemed to move as Isola watched her from the cushioned corner which Löttchen had arranged in an angle of the low stone wall—all amongst ferns and mosses, brown orchises and blue violets—an angle sheltered by a century-old olive, whose gnarled trunk sprawled along the ground, rugged and riven, but with another century’s life in it yet. Far down in the valley, below the old gateway, a company of cypresses rose dark against the blue of the sea, and Isola knew that just on that slope of the shore where the cypresses grew tallest the graves of English exiles were gathered. Many a fair hope, many a broken dream, many a disappointed ambition lay at rest under those dark spires, within the sound of that summer sea.
This was one of many days which the young mother spent in the woods or in the garden with her baby for her companion, while Allegra and the colonel sailed east or west in the Vendetta. Her doctor would have liked her to go with them, but she seemed to have an absolute aversion to the sea, and he did not press the point.