The Happy Return hh-7

by Cecil Scott Forester

  “I think,” said the Spanish captain, “that you have already had the pleasure, sir, of meeting His Excellency Don Julian Maria de Jesus de Alvarado y Moctezuma, who calls himself the Almighty?”

  El Supremo showed no signs of being disconcerted by the gibe.

  “Captain Hornblower has indeed been presented to me already,” he said loftily. “He has worked for me long and devotedly. I trust you are enjoying the best of health, Captain?”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Hornblower.

  Despite his rags, and his filth, and his chains, el Supremo bore himself with the same elaborate dignity as Hornblower remembered so well those many weeks ago.

  “I too,” he said, “am as well as the world could desire. It is a source of continual satisfaction to me to see my affairs progressing so well.”

  A negro servant appeared on the deck at that moment with a tray of chocolate; another followed him with a couple of chairs. Hornblower, at the invitation of his host, sat down. He was glad to do so, as his knees seemed suddenly weak under him, but he had no desire at all for his chocolate. The Spanish captain drank noisily, and el Supremo eyed him as he did so. There came a gleam of appetite in his face. His lips moistened and smacked softly together, his eyes brightened, his hand came out, and then next moment he was calm and indifferent again.

  “I trust that the chocolate is to your liking, sirs,” he said. “I ordered it specially for you. My own appetite for chocolate has long since disappeared.”

  “That is just as well,” said the Spanish captain. He laughed loudly and drank again, smacking his lips.

  El Supremo ignored him, and turned to Hornblower.

  “You see I wear these chains,” he said. “It is a strange whim on the part of myself and my servants that I should do so. I hope you agree with me that they set off my figure quite admirably?”

  “Y-yes, sir,” stammered Hornblower.

  “We are on our way to Panama, where I shall mount the throne of the world. They talk of hanging; these fellows here say that there is a gallows awaiting us on the bastion of the Citadel. That will be the framework of my golden throne. Golden, it will be, with diamond stars and a great turquoise moon. It will be from there that I shall issue my next decrees to the world.”

  The Spanish captain guffawed again, but el Supremo still stood in quiet dignity, hugging his chains, with the sun blazing down on his tangled head.

  “He will not last long in this mood,” said the Spanish captain to Hornblower behind his hand. “I can see signs of the change coming. It gives me great felicity that you have had the opportunity of seeing him in both his moods.”

  “The sun grows in his splendour every day,” said el Supremo. “He is magnificent and terrible, as I am. He can kill—kill—kill, as he killed the men I exposed to him—when was it? And Moctezuma is dead, and all his line save me, in the hundreds of years ago. I alone remain. And Hernandez is dead, but it was not the sun that killed him. They hanged Hernandez even while the blood dripped from his wounds. They hanged him in my city of San Salvador, and as they hanged him he still called upon the name of el Supremo. They hanged the men and they hanged the women, in long rows at San Salvador. Only el Supremo is left, to govern from his golden throne. His throne! His throne!”

  El Supremo was staring about him now. There was a hint of bewildered realisation in his face as he jangled his chains. He peered at them stupidly.

  “Chains! These are chains!”

  He was bawling and shouting. He laughed madly, and then he wept and he cursed, flinging himself about on the deck, biting at his chains. His words were no longer articulate as he slobbered and writhed.

  “It is interesting, is it not?” said the Spanish captain. “He will struggle and shout sometimes for twenty-four hours without a stop.”

  “Bah!” said Hornblower, and his chair fell with a clatter to the deck as he got to his feet. He was on the verge of vomiting. The Spaniard saw his white face and trembling lips, and was faintly amused, and made no attempt to conceal it.

  But Hornblower could give no vent to the flood of protest which was welling up within him. His cautious mind told him that a madman in a ship as small as the lugger must of necessity be chained to the deck, and his conscience reminded him uneasily of the torments he had seen el Supremo inflict without expostulation. This Spanish way of making a show out of insanity and greatness was repulsive enough, but could be paralleled often enough in English history. One of the greatest writers of the English language, and a dignitary of the Church to boot, had once been shown in his dotage for a fee. There was only one line of argument which he could adopt.

  “You are going to hang him, mad as he is?” he asked. “With no chance of making his peace with God?”

  The Spaniard shrugged.

  “Mad or sane, rebels must hang. Your Excellency must know that as well as I do.”

  Hornblower did know it. He was left without any argument at all, and was reduced to stammering inarticulation, even while he boiled with contempt for himself on that account. All that was left for him to do, having lost all his dignity in his own eyes, was to try and retain some few shreds of it in the eyes of his audience. He braced himself up, conscious of the hollowness of the fraud.

  “I must thank you very much, sir,” he said, “for having given me the opportunity of witnessing a most interesting spectacle. And now, repeating my thanks, I fear that I must regretfully take my departure. There seems to be a breath of wind blowing.”

  He went down the side of the lugger as stiffly as he might, and took his seat in the sternsheets of the launch. He had to brace himself again to give the word to cast off, and then he sat silent and gloomy as he was rowed back to the Lydia. Bush and Gerard and Lady Barbara watched him as he came on deck. It was as if there was death in his face. He looked round him, unseeing and unhearing, and then hurried below to hide his misery. He even sobbed, with his face in his cot, for a second, before he was able to take hold of himself and curse himself for a weak fool. But it was days before he lost that deathly look, and during that time he kept himself solitary in his cabin, unable to bring himself to join the merry parties on the quarterdeck whose gay chatter drifted down to him through the skylight. To him it was a further proof of his weakness and folly that he should allow himself to be so upset by the sight of a criminal madman going to meet the fate he richly deserved.

  Chapter XXII

  Lady Barbara and Lieutenant Bush were sitting talking in the warm moonlight night beside the taffrail. It was the first time that Bush had happened to share a tête-à-tête with her, and he had only drifted into it by chance—presumably if he had foreseen it he would have avoided it, but now that he had drifted into conversation with her he was enjoying himself to the exclusion of any disquietude. He was sitting on a pile of the oakum-filled cushions which Harrison had had made for Lady Barbara, and he nursed his knees while Lady Barbara leaned back in her hammock chair. The Lydia was rising and falling softly to the gentle music of the waves and the harping of the rigging in the breeze. The white sails glimmered in the brilliant moon; overhead the stars shone with strange brightness. But Bush was not talking of himself, as any sensible man would do under a tropic moon with a young woman beside him.

  “Aye, ma’am,” he was saying. “He’s like Nelson. He’s nervous, just as Nelson was, and for the same reason. He’s thinking all the time—you’d be surprised, ma’am, to know how much he thinks about.”

  “I don’t think it would surprise me,” said Lady Barbara.

  “That’s because you think, too, ma’am. It’s us stupid ones who’d be surprised, I meant to say. He has more brains than all the rest of us in the ship put together, excepting you, ma’am. He’s mighty clever, I do assure you.”

  “I can well believe it.”

  “And he’s the best seaman of us all, and as for navigation—well, Crystal’s a fool compared with him, ma’am.”

  “Yes?”

  “Of course, he’s short with me sometimes, the sa
me as he is with everyone else, but bless you, ma’am, that’s only to be expected. I know how much he has to worry him, and he’s not strong, the same as Nelson wasn’t strong. I am concerned about him sometimes, ma’am.”

  “You are fond of him.”

  “Fond, ma’am?” Bush’s sturdy English mind grappled with the word and its sentimental implications, and he laughed a trifle selfconsciously. “If you say so I suppose I must be. I hadn’t ever thought of being fond of him before. I like him, ma’am, indeed I do.”

  “That is what I meant.”

  “The men worship him, ma’am. They would do anything for him. Look how much he has done this commission, and the lash not in use once in a week, ma’am. That is why he is like Nelson. They love him not for anything he does or says, but for what he is.”

  “He’s handsome, in a way,” said Barbara—she was woman enough to give that matter consideration.

  “I suppose he is, ma’am, now you come to mention it. But it wouldn’t matter if he were as ugly as sin as far as we was concerned.”

  “Of course not.”

  “But he’s shy, ma’am. He never can guess how clever he is. It’s that which always surprises me about him. You’d hardly believe it, ma’am, but he has no more faith in himself than—than I have in myself, ma’am, to put it that way. Less, ma’am, if anything.”

  “How strange!” said Lady Barbara. She was accustomed to the sturdy self-reliance of her brothers, unloved and unlovable leaders of men, but her insight made her comment only one of politeness—it was not really strange to her.

  “Look, ma’am,” said Bush, suddenly, dropping his voice.

  Hornblower had come up on deck. They could see his face, white in the moonlight, as he looked round to assure himself that all was well with his ship, and they could read in it the torment which was obsessing him. He looked like a lost soul during the few seconds he was on deck.

  “I wish to God I knew,” said Bush as Hornblower retreated again to the solitude of his cabin, “what those devils did to him or said to him when he went on board the lugger. Hooker who was in the cutter said he heard someone on board howling like a madman. The torturing devils! It was some of their beastliness, I suppose. You could see how it has upset him, ma’am.”

  “Yes,” said Lady Barbara softly.

  “I should be grateful if you could try to take him out of himself a little, ma’am, begging your pardon. He is in need of distraction, I suspicion. Perhaps you could—if you’ll forgive me, ma’am.”

  “I’ll try,” said Lady Barbara, “but I don’t think I shall succeed where you have failed. Captain Hornblower has never taken a great deal of notice of me, Mr. Bush.”

  Yet fortunately the formal invitation to dine with Lady Barbara, which Hebe conveyed to Polwheal and he to his captain, arrived at a moment when Hornblower was just trying to emerge from the black fit which had engulfed him. He read the words as carefully as Lady Barbara had written them—and she had devoted much care to the composition of the note. Hornblower read Lady Barbara’s pretty little apology for breaking in upon him at a time when he was obviously engrossed in his work, and he went on to read how Lady Barbara had been informed by Mr. Bush that the Lydia was about to cross the Equator, and that she thought such an occasion merited some mild celebration. If Captain Hornblower, therefore, would give Lady Barbara the pleasure of his company at dinner and would indicate to her which of his officers he considered should be invited at the same time, Lady Barbara would be delighted. Hornblower wrote back to say that Captain Hornblower had much pleasure in accepting Lady Barbara’s kind invitation to dinner, and hoped that Lady Barbara would invite whomever she pleased in addition.

  Yet even in the pleasure of returning to society there was some alloy. Hornblower had always been a poor man, and at the time when he commissioned the Lydia he had been at his wits’ end about where to turn for money in the need for leaving Maria comfortably provided for. In consequence he had not outfitted himself satisfactorily, and now, all these months later, his clothes were in the last stages of decay. The coats were all patched and darned; the epaulettes betrayed in their brassy sheen the fact that they had begun life merely coated with bullion; the cocked hats were all wrecks; he had neither breeches nor stockings fit to be seen; his once white scarves were all coarsened now, and could never be mistaken again for silk. Only the sword ‘of fifty guineas’ value’ retained its good appearance, and he could not wear that at a dinner party.

  He was conscious that his white duck trousers, made on board the Lydia, had none of the fashionable appearance to which Lady Barbara was accustomed. He looked shabby and he felt shabby, and as he peered at himself in his little mirror he was certain that Lady Barbara would sneer at him. There were grey hairs in his brown curls, too, and then, to his horror, as he straightened his parting, he caught a glimpse of pink scalp—his baldness had increased beyond all measure of late. He eyed himself with complete disgust, and yet he felt that he would gladly give a limb or his remaining hair in exchange for a ribbon and star with which to dazzle Lady Barbara; yet even that would be of no avail, for Lady Barbara had lived all her life in an atmosphere of Garters and Thistles, orders which he could never hope to wear.

  He was on the verge of sending a message to Lady Barbara to say that he had changed his mind and would not dine with her that evening, until he thought that if he did so, after all these preparations, Polwheal would guess that it was the result of his realisation of his shabbiness and would laugh at him (and his shabbiness) in consequence. He went into dinner and had his revenge upon the world by sitting silent and preoccupied at the head of the table, blighting with his gloomy presence all attempts at conversation, so that the function began as a frigid failure. It was a poor sort of revenge, but there was a slight gratification to be found in observing Lady Barbara looking down the table at him in concern. In the end he was deprived even of that, for Lady Barbara suddenly smiled and began talking lightly and captivatingly, and led Bush into describing his experiences at Trafalgar—a tale she had heard, to Hornblower’s certain knowledge, twice at least already.

  The conversation became general, and then animated, for Gerard could not bear to leave all the talking to Bush, and he had to break in with the story of his encounter with an Algerine corsair off Cape Spartel in his old slaving days. It was more than Hornblower’s flesh and blood could stand, to stay silent with everyone talking in this fashion. Against his will he found himself entering into the conversation, and an artless question from Lady Barbara about Sir Edward Pellew inveigled him still further in, for Hornblower had been both midshipman and lieutenant in Pellew’s ship, and was proud of it. Not until the end of dinner was he able to steady himself, and decline, after the drinking of the King’s health, Lady Barbara’s invitation to a rubber of whist. That at least, he thought, would make an impression on her—it certainly did upon his officers, for he saw Bush and Gerard exchange startled glances on hearing their captain refuse to play whist. Back in his cabin again he listened through the bulkhead to the uproarious game of vingt-et-un which Lady Barbara had suggested instead. He almost wished he was playing, too, even though in his opinion vingt-et-un was a game for the feeble-minded.

  The dinner had served its purpose, however, in making it possible to meet Lady Barbara’s eye again on deck. He could converse with her, too, discussing with her the condition of the few wounded who remained upon the sick list, and after a few morning encounters it was easy to fall into conversation with her during the breathless afternoons and the magic tropical nights as the Lydia held her course over the calm Pacific. He had grown hardened again to his shabby coats and his shapeless trousers; he was forgetting the resentful plans he had once turned over in his mind to confine Lady Barbara to her cabin; and mercifully, his memory was no longer being so acutely troubled by the pictures of el Supremo chained to the deck, of Galbraith dying, and of poor little Clay’s body sprawled headless on the bloody planks—and when those memories lapsed he could no longer accuse
himself of being a coward for being worried by them.

  Those were happy days indeed. The routine of the Lydia progressed like clockwork. Almost every hour of every day there was enough wind to give her steerage way, and sometimes it blew just hard enough to relieve the monotony. There were no storms during that endless succession of golden days, and the mind could contemplate its endlessness with tranquillity, for 50 degrees South Latitude seemed impossibly far away; they could enjoy the blissfulness of eternity, disregarding the constant warning conveyed to them as every noontide showed the sun lower in the sky and every midnight showed the South Cross higher.

  They could be friends during those heavenly nights when the ship’s wake showed as a long trail or fire on the faintly luminous water. They learned to talk together, endlessly. She could chatter about the frivolities of the Vice-Regal court at Dublin, and of the intrigues which could enmesh a Governor-General of India; of penniless French émigrés putting purse-proud northern iron-masters in their places; of Lord Byron’s extravagancies and of the Royal Dukes’ stupidities; and Hornblower learned to listen with a twinge of envy.

  He could tell, in return, of months spent on blockade, combating storms off the ironbound Biscay coast, of how Pellew took his frigates into the very surf to sing the Droits-de-l’homme with two thousand men on board, of hardship and cruelty and privation—a monotonous toilsome life as fantastic to her as hers appeared to him. He could even tell her, as his self-consciousness dwindled, of the ambitions which he knew would seem to her as trivial as those of a child yearning for a hobby horse; of the two thousand pounds in prize money which he had decided would be all that he would require to eke out his half-pay, the few acres and the cottage and the shelves and shelves of books.

  And yet she heard without a smile, with even a trace of envy in her calm face as the moon shone down on them; for her own ambitions were far more vague and far less likely to be realised. She hardly knew what it was that she wanted, and she knew that whatever it was, she could only hope to attain it by ensnaring a husband. That an earl’s daughter could envy a penniless frigate captain moved Hornblower inexpressibly, as he watched her face in the moonlight; he was glad even while he was unhappy that Lady Barbara should have to envy anything of anyone.