The Happy Return

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 gri

“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 i

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 Ma