The Happy Return

“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 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.”