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 selfconscious, 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.