“Yes?”
“Of course, he’s short with me sometimes, the same 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.