The Happy Return hh-7

by Cecil Scott Forester

  Lady Barbara could still laugh and show her white teeth in her brown face, as she made this speech, and her laugh whisked away Hornblower’s passion for a space. He was in sympathy with her—months of ship’s fare set everyone literally dreaming of fresh food—but her fine naturalness acted upon Hornblower’s state of mind like an open window on a stuffy room. It was that talk about food which staved off the crisis for a few more days—golden days, during which the Lydia kept the south-east trades on her beam and reached steadily across the south Atlantic for St. Helena.

  The wind did not fail her until the very evening when the lookout at the masthead, the setting of the sun in a golden glory having enabled him to gaze ahead once more, caught sight of the tip of the mountain top just as the light was fading from the sky, and his cry of “Land ho!” told Hornblower that once more he had made a perfect landfall. All day long the wind had been dying away, and with the setting of the sun it dwindled to nothing, tantalisingly, just when a few more hours of it would have carried the Lydia to the island. From the deck there was still no sign of land, and as Gerard pointed out to Lady Barbara, she would have to take its proximity on trust until the wind condescended to blow again. Her disappointment at this postponement of her promised buttered eggs was so appealing that Crystal hastened forward and stuck his open clasp-knife in the mainmast. That was a sure way of raising a wind, he said—and if by any mishap it should fail on this occasion he would set all the snip’s boys whistling in unison and chance the tempest such imprudence might summon from the deep.

  It may have been the mere fact of this respite working on Hornblower’s subconscious mind which precipitated the crisis; for undoubtedly Hornblower had a lurking fear that the call at St. Helena might well bring about some undesired alteration in affairs on board the Lydia. On the other hand, the thing was bound to happen, and perhaps coincidence merely allotted that evening for it. It was coincidence that Hornblower should come into the main cabin in the half light at a moment when he thought Lady Barbara was on deck, and it was coincidence that his hand should brush against her bare arm as they stood cramped between the table and the locker and he apologised for his intrusion. She was in his arms then, and they kissed, and kissed again. She put one hand behind his shoulder and touched the back of his neck, and they were giddy with passion. Then a roll of the ship forced him to let her go, and she sank down upon the locker, and she smiled at him as she sat so that he came down on his knees beside her, his head on her breast, and she stroked his curls, and they kissed again as if they would never tire. She spoke to him with the endearments which her nurse had used to her when she was a child—she had never learned yet to use endearments.

  “My dear,” she whispered. “My sweet. My poppet.”

  It was hard to find words that would tell him of her love for him.

  “Your hands are beautiful,” she said, spreading one of them on her own palm, and playing with the long slender fingers. “I have loved them ever since Panama.”

  Hornblower had always thought his hands bony and ugly, and the left one bore the ingrained powder stain he had acquired at the boarding of the Castilla. He looked at her to see if she were teasing him, and when he saw that she was not he could only kiss her again—her lips were so ready for his kisses. It was like a miracle that she should want to be kissed. Passion carried them away once more.

  Hebe’s entrance made them part; at least it made Hornblower spring up, to sit bolt upright and self-conscious, while Hebe grinned at them with sly eyes. To Hornblower it was a dreadful thing for a captain to be caught toying with a woman on board his ship actually in commission. It was contrary to the Articles of War—worse, it was undignified, subversive of discipline, dangerous. Lady Barbara remained quite unruffled.

  “Go away, Hebe,” she said, calmly. “I shall not need you yet.” And she turned back to Hornblower, but the spell was broken. He had seen himself in a new light, grovelling furtively on a couch with a passenger. He was blushing hotly, angry with himself, and already wondering how much the officer of the watch and the man at the wheel had heard of their murmurings through the open skylight. “What are we to do?” he asked feebly.

  “Do?” she replied. “We are lovers, and the world is ours. We do as we will.”

  “But—,” he said, and again “but—”

  He wanted to explain to her in half a dozen words the complications he could see hedging him in. There was a cold fit on him; he wanted to tell her of how he dreaded the ill-concealed amusement of Gerard, the utterly tactless tactfulness of Bush, and how the captain of a ship was not nearly as much his own master as she apparently thought, but it was hopeless. He could only stammer, and his hands flapped feebly, and his face was averted. He had forgotten all these practical details in those mad dreams of his. She put her hand on his chin and made him turn to her.

  “Dear,” she asked. “What is troubling you? Tell me, dear.”

  “I am a married man,” he said, taking the coward’s way out.

  “I know that. Are you going to allow that to interfere with—us?”

  “Besides—,” he said, and his hands flapped again in the hopeless effort to express all the doubts which consumed him. She condescended to sink her pride a little further.

  “Hebe is safe,” she said, softly. “She worships me. Nor would she dare to be indiscreet.”

  She saw the look in his face, and rose abruptly. Her blood and lineage were outraged at this. However veiled her offer had been, it had been refused. She was in a cold rage now.

  “Please have the kindness, Captain,” she said, “to open that door for me.”

  She swept out of the cabin with all the dignity of an earl’s daughter, and if she wept when in the privacy of her own cabin, Hornblower knew nothing of it. He was pacing the deck above, up and down, up and down, endlessly. This was the end of his fine dreams. This was how he showed himself a man to whom danger and risk only made a plan more attractive. He was a fine lady-killer, a devil of a buck. He cursed himself in his shame, he jeered at himself as a man who could face the wrath of the Wellesleys in imagination and who flinched from the amusement of Gerard in practice.

  It all might have come right in the end. If the calm had persisted for two or three days, so that Lady Barbara could have forgotten her wrath and Hornblower his doubts, more might have happened. There might have been an echoing scandal in high life. But as it was, at midnight a little wind began to blow—perhaps it was Crystal’s clasp-knife which had summoned it—and Gerard came to him for orders. Again he could not flout public opinion. He could not face the thought of the suspicions which would arise and the secret questions which would be asked if he gave orders for the ship to be put about and to head away from St. Helena at a time when the wind held fair.

  Chapter XXIV

  “There’s the devil of a lot of shipping there,” said Bush, his glass to his eye, as they opened up the roadstead in the dawn. “The devil of a lot. Men o’ war, sir. No, Indiamen. Men o’ war and Indiamen, sir. There’s a three decker! It’s the old Téméraire, sir, or I’m a Dutchman, with a rear-admiral’s flag. Must be the rendezvous for the homeward bound convoy, sir.”

  “Pass the word for Mr. Marsh,” said Hornblower.

  There would be salutes to be fired, calls to be paid—he was caught up in the irresistible current of naval routine, and he would be too busy now for hours to have a word with Lady Barbara even if she condescended to allow him one. He did not know whether to be glad or sorry.

  The Lydia made her number, and the sound of the salutes began to roll slowly round the bay. Hornblower was in his shabby full dress—the faded blue coat with the brassy epaulettes, the worn white breeches, the silk stockings with the innumerable ladders which Polwheal had cobbled roughly together. The port officer came up the side to receive his certificate of the absence of infectious disease on board. A moment later the anchor roared out overside, then Hornblower called for the cutter to take him over to the Admiral. He was actually going over the side when
Lady Barbara came on deck—he saw her, just for a second, gazing with pleasure up the green mountain slopes, and looking with surprise at the massed shipping inshore. He longed to stop and speak to her, but once more the dignity expected of a captain checked him. Nor could he take her with him—no captain starting on an official round of calls could go round in his boat with a woman in the sternsheets beside him, not even when subsequent explanation would reveal her to be a Wellesley.

  The cutter pulled steadily over to the Téméraire.

  “Lydia,” shouted the coxswain in reply to the hail from her deck, and he held up four fingers which indicated the presence in the boat of a captain as a warning for them to prepare the correct ceremonial.

  Sir James Saumarez received Hornblower in the quarter gallery of his flagship. He was tall and spare, of youthful appearance until he took off his hat and revealed his snow-white hair. He listened courteously to Hornblower’s brief explanation of his presence; after forty years at sea and sixteen years of continuous warfare he could guess at the wild adventures which remained undescribed in Hornblower’s verbal report. There was a gleam of approval in his fierce blue eyes when he heard that the Lydia had sunk a fifty-gun twodecker in a ship to ship duel.

  “You can accompany me and the convoy,” he said, at the end. “I have no more than two ships of the line and not a single frigate to escort the whole East Indian convoy. One would have thought that the Government would have learnt the need of frigates since the war started in ‘ninety-three, don’t you think? I will send you written orders this morning. And now, sir, perhaps you will give me the pleasure of your company at the breakfast party at which I am about to be host?”

  Hornblower pointed out that it was his duty to call upon the governor.

  “His Excellency is breakfasting with me,” said the Admiral.

  Hornblower knew that it was ill to continue to raise a series of objections to a suggestion by an Admiral, but he had to raise a fresh one.

  “There is a lady on board the Lydia, sir,” he said, and when the Admiral’s eyebrows went up he hurriedly began to explain Lady Barbara’s presence to him.

  The Admiral whistled.

  “A Wellesley!” he said. “And you brought her round the Horn? Here, we must tell Lady Manningtree of this.”

  He led the way unceremoniously into the lofty Admiral’s cabin. There was a long table with a snowy cloth, glittering with crystal and silver, and by the table there stood chatting a little group of men and women, beautifully dressed. The Admiral made hurried introductions—His Excellency the Governor, and Her Excellency; the Earl and Countess of Manningtree, Sir Charles and Lady Wheeler.

  Lady Manningtree was a short and dumpy woman with good humour in every line of her face. She showed no sign of the dignity and reserve which might be expected of the wife of an ex-governor-general returning from his term of office.

  “Captain Hornblower has brought Lady Barbara Wellesley with him from Darien,” said Sir James, and plunged into rapid explanation. Lady Manningtree listened in perfect horror.

  “And you have left her there? On that little ship?” she said. “The poor lamb! She must not stay there another moment! I shall go and bring her away this very instant! Sir James, you must excuse me. I will not have a moment’s peace until she is comfortably in the cabin next to mine on board the Hanbury Castle. Sir James, would you be so good as to order a boat for me?”

  She left in a whirl of apologies and explanations, a fluttering of petticoats and a perfect torrent of objurgations, mainly directed at Hornblower.

  “When women take charge,” said Sir James philosophically, after she had departed, “it is best for the men to stand from under. Will you sit here, Captain?”

  Curiously, Hornblower could eat almost nothing of that delicious breakfast. There were heavenly mutton cutlets. There was coffee with fresh milk. There was new wheaten bread. There was butter, there were fruits, there were vegetables, all the things Hornblower had dreamed about when his thoughts had not been occupied with Lady Barbara, and now he could only eat a mouthful here and there. Fortunately his lack of appetite went unnoticed because he was kept so busy answering the questions which were rained on him, about Lady Barbara, about his adventures in the Pacific, about his passage round the Horn, and then back to Lady Barbara again.

  “Her brother is doing great things in Spain,” said Sir James. “Not the eldest one, the Marquis, but Arthur—the one who won the battle of Assaye. He came well out of that court of inquiry after Vimiero. Now he has bundled Soult out of Portugal, and when I left Lisbon he was in full march on Madrid. Since Moore was killed he is the most promising soldier in the army.”

  “Humph,” said Lady Wheeler. The name of Wellesley was still anathema to a certain section of Anglo-Indians. “This Lady Barbara is a good deal younger than he is, I fancy? I remember her as quite a child in Madras.”

  Eyes were turned towards Hornblower, but Lord Manningtree in the kindness of his heart spared him the embarrassment of having to explain Lady Barbara’s age.

  “She’s no child,” he said, bluffly. “She’s a very talented young woman. Declined a dozen good offers in India, too, and God knows how many since then.”

  “Humph,” said Lady Wheeler again.

  The breakfast began to seem interminable to Hornblower, and he was glad when the party showed signs of breaking up. The Governor seized the opportunity to discuss with him the matter of the stores for which the Lydia would have to indent—naval routine still claimed him for her own. There was urgent need for him to return to his ship; he made his excuses to Sir James and said good-bye to the rest of the company.

  The Admiral’s barge was still hooked on to the Lydia’s chains when he returned to her; her crew were dressed in crimson coats with gold-laced hats. Hornblower had known frigate captains who dressed their gig’s crews in fancy costumes in this fashion, too, but they were wealthy men who had been fortunate in the matter of prize money, not penniless fellows like himself. He went on board; Lady Barbara’s baggage was piled on the gangway waiting to be swung down into the barge. Down in the main cabin could be heard a continuous chatter of female voices. Lady Manningtree and Lady Barbara were sitting there deep in conversation; obviously there had been so much to say that they could not wait until they had reach the Hanbury Castle. One topic had led to another so enthralling that they had forgotten the barge, forgotten the waiting baggage, forgotten even about breakfast.

  Apparently Lady Barbara had taken the opportunity, when her baggage had been brought up from the storeroom, to unpack some new clothes. She was wearing a new gown which Hornblower had not seen before, and a new turban and veil. She was very obviously the great lady now. To Hornblower’s startled mind she seemed as she stood up to be six inches taller than when he saw her last. And clearly Hornblower’s arrival, breaking the thread of their conversation, constituted for them a signal for their departure.

  “Lady Barbara has been telling me all about your voyage,” said Lady Manningtree, buttoning her gloves. “I think you deserve a world of thanks for the care you have taken of her.”

  The kind-hearted old lady was one of those people who can never think evil. She looked round the tiny ugly cabin.

  “Nevertheless,” she went on, “I think that it is high time that she enjoyed a little more comfort than you can offer her here.”

  Hornblower managed to gulp out a few words regarding the superior arrangements for passengers on board a luxurious Indiaman.

  “I don’t mean to imply that it is your fault, Captain,” protested Lady Manningtree, hastily. “I’m sure your ship is a very beautiful ship. A frigate, isn’t it? But frigates were never made to carry females, and that’s all one can say. And now we must say good-bye, Captain. I hope we may have the pleasure of receiving you on the Hanbury Castle later. There will be sure to be opportunities during this very tedious voyage home. Good-bye, Captain.”

  Hornblower bowed and allowed her to pass before him. Lady Barbara followed.

/>   “Good-bye,” she said. Hornblower bowed again as she went down in a curtsy. He was looking straight at her, but somehow he could see no detail of her face—only a white blur.

  “Thank you for all your kindness,” said Lady Barbara.

  The barge left the ship’s side, and rowed steadily away. She was all blurred, too, a vague patch of red and gold. Hornblower found Bush beside him.

  “The victualling officer’s signalling, sir,” he said.

  Hornblower’s duties were clamouring for his attention. As he turned away from the ship’s side to plunge into them he found himself, idiotically, remembering that in two months’ time or so he would be seeing Maria again. He felt vaguely glad about that before it passed out of his mind again. He felt he would be happy with Maria. Overhead the sun was shining brightly, and before him rose the steep green slopes of St. Helena.

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