Flying Colours

Chapter Eight

Felix entered the next morning bearing a breakfast tray, and he opened the bed curtains while Hornblower lay dazed in his bed. Brown followed Felix, and while the latter arranged the tray on the bedside table he applied himself to the task of gathering together the clothes which Hornblower had flung down the night before, trying hard to assume the unobtrusive deference of a gentleman’s servant. Hornblower sipped gratefully at the steaming coffee, and bit into the bread; Brown recollected another duty and hurried across to open the bedroom curtains.

“Gale’s pretty nigh dropped, sir,” he said. “I think what wind there’s left is backing southerly, and we might have a thaw.”

Through the deep windows of the bedroom Hornblower could see from his bed a wide landscape of dazzling white, falling steeply away down to the river which was black by contrast, appearing like a black crayon mark on white paper. Trees stood out starkly through the snow where the gale had blown their branches bare; down beside the river the willows there—some of them stood in the flood, with white foam at their feet—were still domed with white. Hornblower fancied he could hear the rushing of water, and was certain that he could hear the regular droning of the fall, the tumbling water at whose foot was just visible over the shoulder of the bank. Far beyond the river could be seen the snow-covered roofs of a few small houses.

“I’ve been in to Mr. Bush already, sir,” said Brown—Hornblower felt a twinge of remorse at being too interested in the landscape to have a thought to spare for his lieutenant—“and he’s all right an’ sends you his best respects, sir. I’m goin’ to help him shave after I’ve attended to you, sir.”

“Yes,” said Hornblower.

He felt deliciously languorous. He wanted to be idle and lazy. The present was a moment of transition between the miseries and dangers of yesterday and the unknown activities of to-day, and he wanted that moment to be prolonged on and on indefinitely; he wanted time to stand still, the pursuers who were seeking him on the other side of Nevers to be stilled into an enchanted rigidity while he lay here free from danger and responsibility. The very coffee he had drunk contributed to his ease by relieving his thirst without stimulating him to activity. He sank imperceptibly and delightfully into a vague day-dream; it was hateful of Brown to recall him to wakefulness again by a respectful shuffling of his feet,

“Right,” said Hornblower resigning himself to the inevitable.

He kicked off the bedclothes and rose to his feet, the hard world of the matter-of-fact closing round him, and his daydreams vanishing like the cloud-colours of a tropical sunrise. As he shaved and washed in the absurdly small basin in the corner, he contemplated grimly the prospect of prolonged conversation in French with his hosts. He grudged the effort it would involve, and he envied Bush his complete inability to speak any other tongue than English. Having to exert himself to-day loomed as large to his selfwilled mind as the fact that he was doomed to death if he were caught again. He listened absentmindedly to Bush’s garrulity when he went in to visit him, and did nothing at all to satisfy his curiosity regarding the house in which they had found shelter, and the intentions of their hosts. Nor was his mood relieved by his pitying contempt for himself at thus working off his ill temper on his unoffending lieutenant. He deserted Bush as soon as he decently could and went off in search of his hosts in the drawing room.

The Vicomtesse alone was there, and she made him welcome with a smile.

“M. de Graçay is at work in his study,” she explained. “You must be content with my entertaining you this morning.”

To say even the obvious in French was an effort for Hornblower, but he managed to make the suitable reply, which the lady received with a smile. But conversation did not proceed smoothly, with Hornblower having laboriously to build up his sentences beforehand and to avoid the easy descent into Spanish which was liable to entrap him whenever he began to think in a foreign tongue. Nevertheless, the opening sentences regarding the storm last night, the snow in the fields, and the flood, elicited for Hornblower one interesting fact—that the river whose roar they could hear was the Loire, four hundred miles or more from its mouth in the Bay of Biscay. A few miles upstream lay the town of Nevers; a little way downstream the large tributary, the Allier, joined the Loire, but there was hardly a house and no village on the river in that direction for twenty miles as far as Pouilly—from whose vineyards had come the wine they had drunk last night.

“The river is only as big as this in winter,” said the Vicomtesse. “In summer it dwindles away to almost nothing. There are places where one can walk across it, from one bank to the other. Then it is blue, and its banks are golden, but now it is black and ugly.”

“Yes,” said Hornblower.

He felt a peculiar tingling sensation down his thighs and calves as the words recalled his experience of the night before, the swoop over the fall and the mad battle in the flood. He and Bush and Brown might easily all be sodden corpses now, rolling among the rocks at the bottom of the river until the process of corruption should bring them to the surface.

“I have not thanked you and M. de Graçay for your hospitality,” he said, picking his words with care. “It is very kind of the Count.”

“Kind? He is the kindest man in the whole world. I can’t tell you how good he is.”

There was no doubting the sincerity of the Count’s daughter-in-law as she made this speech; her wide humorous mouth parted and her dark eyes glowed.

“Really?” said Hornblower—the word ‘vraiment’ slipped naturally from his lips now that some animation had come into the conversation.

“Yes, really. He is good all the way through. He is sweet and kind, by nature and not—not as a result of experience. He has never said a word to me, not once, not a word, about the disappointment I have caused him.”

“You, madame?”

“Yes. Oh, isn’t it obvious? I am not a great lady—Marcel should not have married me. My father is a Normandy peasant, on his own land, but a peasant all the same, while the Ladons, Counts of Graçay, go back to—to Saint Louis, or before that. Marcel told me how disappointed was the Count at our marriage, but I should never have known of it otherwise—not by word or by action. Marcel was the eldest son then, because Antoine had been killed at Austerlitz. And Marcel is dead, too—he was wounded at Aspern—and I have no son, no child at all, and the Count has never reproached me, never.”

Hornblower tried to make some kind of sympathetic noise.

“And Louis-Marie is dead as well now. He died of fever in Spain. He was the third son, and M. de Graçay is the last of the Ladons. I think it broke his heart, but he has never said a bitter word.”

“The three sons are all dead?” said Hornblower.

“Yes, as I told you. M. de Graçay was an émigré—he lived in your town of London with his children for years after the Revolution. And then the boys grew up and they heard of the fame of the Emperor—he was First Consul then—and they all wanted to share in the glory of France. It was to please them that the Count took advantage of the amnesty and returned here—this is all that the Revolution has left of his estates. He never went to Paris. What would he have in common with the Emperor? But he allowed his sons to join the army, and now they are all dead, Antoine and Marcel and Louis-Marie. Marcel married me when his regiment was billeted in our village, but the others never married. Louis-Marie was only eighteen when he died.”

“Terrible!” said Hornblower.

The banal words did not express his sense of the pathos of the story, but it was all he could think of. He understood now the Count’s statement of the night before that the authorities would be willing to accept his bare word that he had seen nothing of any escaped prisoners. A great gentleman whose three sons had died in the Imperial service would never be suspected of harbouring fugitives.